A Brief Word From Christian Bauman [Apr 3, 2003]

While I gallivant around Georgia, some thoughts from a frequent visitor to this site, Christian Bauman, author of the Somalia war novel The Ice Beneath You.

NP

A very well-intentioned NPR journalist raised the question recently of the effects of embedding; namely, the live and up-close combat scenes being played out on American TVs. In the same context, she brought up those poor souls from the captured army maintenance company, and the tape of them – alive and dead – being broadcast.

She was asking the question: is this right? Is it right to show this on television?

“We feel awkward,” she said, “we feel dirty and voyeuristic, sitting in our comfortable living rooms, while right in front of us on the TV we can see American soldiers in obvious pain.”

Yes, I’m sure you do feel uncomfortable, and you should. But as a former soldier, I can tell you there's a worse thing: you sitting in your comfortable living room with no camera shots of what’s going on, and no idea of the pain being suffered by those who fight in your country’s name, and both those who die in your country’s name and those who die by your country’s hand.

There are so many things wrong with in-your-face combat footage: it is voyeuristic, it is inherently sensational. Sometimes, in the case of POWs, it may be illegal, or closely treading that line. For the families of the soldiers involved, it is most certainly exquisitely painful.

But the alternative…ah, that is so much worse. The alternative is a country, a superpower, so big it knows not what it does. Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your country is doing.

Those of us in Somalia in 1993 watched the cameras drift away, disinterested. We knew it: we had CNN, and watched it. We weren’t on it. When 18 American soldiers died in the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, it was a big surprise to many Americans that our country had troops there at all.

One of the major factors in ending the Vietnam War was the introduction of regular combat footage into the evening newscasts.

It goes beyond a question of whether a war is just or not. War, even just war, tends to become self-perpetuating, a living, breathing thing snarling in its corner of the globe, drawing all the oxygen from around it, wanting to continue, wanting to advance and burn, consuming the lives and souls of those who fight it, and the politicians who wage it, and the innocents whose claws it rests upon.

War, even just war, must be documented. And you, whether you want the war or don’t want the war, must watch. Because if you don’t watch, then that soldier stands alone, and fights alone, and dies alone. If it is awkward and uncomfortable for you to watch then all the better. Because it is axiomatic that the more uncomfortable you get, the more truth you know, the quicker that soldier can come home.

Watch this. Keep watching. Don’t turn your head. For the sake of the soldiers, for the sake of yourself, and certainly for the sake of your country. Don’t look away. Watch, watch it all, be the witness. If it is true that democracy dies behind closed doors – and I believe it is true – then it is an equal truth that war thrives and builds behind closed doors. The cameras are rolling tonight. Open your eyes.