Slandering Private Shlomo

BATON ROUGE, La., May 5 (UPI) -- I am teaching a class this semester on the history of war images and my students and I are often struck by how unreal the reality of war often seems.

Take a famous scene from "Saving Private Ryan." At Normandy beach American troops knock out one bunker with a flamethrower and Germans tumbled out on fire, screaming in agony. "Let 'em burn," responds one GI.

Now, in the comfort of the living room, theater or classroom it is a shocking statement. But in the context of the film and of war it is understandable.

That context is missing from the images we are seeing of the Israeli-Palestinian war, especially the aftermath of the battle of Jenin.

Example: a writer told me about a very troubling photo in his morning paper: an old Palestinian woman, crying, at her doorway. Spray-painted nearby was a Star of David and military unit number. The writer was "deeply shaken" by this scene, which reminded him of the terror attacks on Jews of "Kristallnacht" in Hitler's Germany. To him the scene was a "crystal clear" act of terrorism of Jews against Palestinians.

Several of my students who had seen this picture made the same comments.

Yet, the "crystal" clear meaning was very different to me. I saw a universal tactic of combat in heavily defended, urban areas.

"The U.S. Army trains for city fighting (called MOUT-Method of Operating in Urban Terrain) using the same techniques," points out Scott Belgarde, a former Army armor officer who led a platoon of tanks in the Gulf War and now is a military analyst. When engaging in "block clearing," that is, going house to house to check for any enemy soldiers, units will typically leave some marker behind; a flag and the unit designation are standard. They mark a site as "all clear." American soldiers did the same when fighting their way through Italy and Germany and Pacific cities in World War II.

Private Shlomo is following in Private Ryan's and bootsteps.

So why did no journalist offer viewers and readers the more prosaic explanation as even a possibility?

The reasons are many.

Israel has a confused, clumsy, over-bureaucratic system of media relations. No journalist I have spoken with thinks the Jewish state is doing a good job of telling or showing its point of view. Also, to save money and out of fear, most television news organizations hire "local" (read: Arab) stringers and crews to cover the news in the Palestinian areas. No surprise at the slant of the interviews, translations and sights they turn in.

This last bias was inadvertently revealed when one television reporter recently commented that his tech crew "gave a thumb's up" when they saw images of the carnage of the latest "homicide" bomber in Israel. Apparently his network does not consider it a problem to have sympathizers controlling the sights and sounds America witnesses.

But the basic problem is that no one is putting the war into a context of military procedures and history.

For example, another correspondent, while walking down a narrow West Bank street, found a car, obviously crushed by a tank. She intoned on the air that the destruction seemed "gratuitous" to her.

My reaction was: "How do you get a tank down a narrow Middle Eastern street when there's a car blocking it? Do you honk your horn and ask the owner to move? Or leave a ticket? Was Gen. George S. Patton, rolling through Germany with his Third U.S. Army, careful not to ding every parked Volkswagen he passed?" Even today, when American tanks train in Germany they will, as Captain Belgarde recalls, "inevitably mess up a few German cars, houses, and other infrastructure, despite our best efforts to avoid such 'maneuver damage'. . . and nobody was shooting at us, either."

Years ago the legendary columnist Mike Royko noted, "In the '50s, when I started, most (reporters) were World War II (and Korean war) veterans. so there was a different kind of sophistication. (These) guys had maybe spent their summers in a foxhole killing people."

In contrast, in 10 years of studying journalism, I have never met a modern combat journalist who had even been in the Army. We might ask why sports journalists are held to a higher experiential standard than war journalists?

When combat veterans and students of warfare look at Jenin and see Okinawa, or Salerno, or Caen -- or for that matter Hue and Panama City -- they appreciate that avoiding the loss of innocent life and the destruction of property is impossible given the fact that enemy forces position fighters, ammo dumps, mines, booby-traps, and command headquarters behind and among civilians. The American battle to retake Manila in 1945, for example, turned the city into a moonscape and took 100,000 civilian lives -- 100,000. And the entire world is screaming about the possibility that dozens of civilians died in Jenin.

Jenin, of course, was heavily booby-trapped. Almost all the Israeli combat deaths were from trip-wire bombs and suicide bombers. The Guardian newspaper, normally wildly anti-Israel, revealed that "Palestinians admit the camp was liberally mined two or three days before the assault."

Of course, American forces in World War II did not have thousands of "activists," outside politicians, and journalists critiquing their every move. Nor were outsiders demanding that GI Joe and Private Ryan "show restraint" or "not use excessive force."

Two solutions are possible to get more military context into military stories. First, recruit wartime journalists from the ranks of retiring U.S. military personnel. Second, assign "field consultants" (also retired military personnel) to reporter teams heading for war zones. Let them explain on-site what we are seeing and hearing; we, and journalists, need their voices and wisdom.

This is not to question the integrity or bravery of many battlefield reporters. But as a politician once said "war is too important to be left to the generals." We might add, in this mass mediated age, that war coverage is too important to be left solely to the civilian journalists.

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David D. Perlmutter is an associate professor of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University and a senior fellow at the Reilly Center for Media & Public Affairs. He is the author of "Visions of War," St. Martin's, 1999.