The
Star was the only local media organization to let its reporters jump embed with the U.S. military for Operation Iraqi Freedom. We're not entirely sure how much better this made the
Star's coverage; days and pages all seemed to blur together in one big fog of war. But every once in a while, one of the four
Star staffers in the Persian Gulf would send home a diarylike story the paper called a "Gulf Dispatch." Our favorite was Scott Canon's item from March 26, which ran under the headline "Not all attacks in war are aimed at the enemy." This was, really, a shocking little story about a soldier nicknamed "Idiot" by his squadmates. At the same time most mainstream media were feeding us Kodak images of soldiers heroically prevailing against unfair Iraqis, sandstorms, heat, dehydration and lack of sleep, Canon told us the story of ten soldiers ridiculing their comrade like he was the junior high nerd -- it was, he wrote, "
Lord of the Flies in Kevlar." In Canon's dispatch, U.S. soldiers berate Idiot on the helicopter flight into Iraq. When he gets airsick, they shout at him, shove him and tell him to quit drinking water and stop puking. By the time the chopper lands, Idiot's face is "pasty and wet with tears." The soldiers pile out at an air base that had recently been attacked, and a commander tells them to "take positions with rifles trained on the horizon." But soon, Canon writes, "this became too tedious, and one by one they rolled onto their backs, leaned into their rucksacks and rested. All but one. Idiot, his face streaked with dust and tears, kept his post."
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