CNN's Prisoner of War

228420 Resource 102972 2154 21 1236784855928 1237994272240 Controlled War Correspondents' Sacrifice Equal to that of our Troops

The Forever War is a fascinating account of the chaos facing American troops in the middle east that leaves the reader keenly aware of the extraordinary demands placed on the journalists seeking to bring us a true picture of the conflict.

I recently read Dexter Filkins' book <a title="The Forever War" href="http://www.dexterfilkins.net/" target="_blank">The Forever War</a>. While I'm a pretty avid news gatherer and have followed the war closely, the book gave me a different level of understanding of what has transpired. Here we sit in the U.S. occasionally taking time to learn about the latest suicide bomber, or the troops that were lost in the last month, the state of Al Qaeda's forces, the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite, the growing strength of Iran. We gather a vague picture of what things might be like in the middle east and then quickly move on to our sheltered lives (and I do mean sheltered, even with the economy in the state it's in.) All the while, the journalists that bring us these stories are living amidst non-stop turmoil, desperately trying to sort things out and deliver information to tell us what's really going on. I was completely against the war before it started, afraid that we would do more damage than good. I've watched Frontline and other documentaries that have dealt with the harsh realities of the situation. So, I've long been aware that things are messed up but Filkins' book took my understanding to a different level. It is jammed packed with short anecdotes that describe his direct experiences. It doesn't contain much opinion, just multitudes of descriptions of situations that Filkins experienced first hand—most of them dangerous, many of them nearly life-ending, all of them unlike life in the states. Reading page after page of Filkins' stories—he's embedded with troops, surrounded by snipers; he's meeting with the head of a Sunni insurgent group; he's walking into neighborhoods prohibited to Americans to enjoy some kebab; he's trying to hunt down the kidnappers of a fellow colleague; the list of fantastic situations is vast and astounding—I felt as if I were reading Tolkien or something. We just don't see this kind of wild adventure in real life. But unlike Tolkien, as I read I knew the situations were real. Peoples lives were so deeply scarred, they would never recover and more scarring was going on at a rapid pace. Also haunting the pages was my concern for the author and our troops, an understanding that witnessing such utter chaos inevitably takes a bitter toll on one's life. I've long heard the sociologists and returning soldiers talk about the difficulty of assimilating back into civilian life but again this book gave me a deeper insight. <a title="Michael Ware" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ware" target="_blank"><img height="115" alt="Michael Ware" src="http://www.mickware.info/Bio/files/page10_1.jpg" width="115" align="left" border="0" style="border-top-width: 0px; display: inline; border-left-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; margin: 0px 10px 5px 0px; border-right-width: 0px" /></a> Several years ago, I first saw <a title="Wikipedia biography" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ware" target="_blank">Michael Ware</a>, now a CNN war correspondent, being interviewed on TV. Like Filkins, he was in Afghanistan after 9/11 but switched over to Iraq when the war started. I always appreciated his reports. He was sharp and articulate and seemed to embed himself in situations where few dared to venture. He dished up a viewpoint that was from the man on the street only it was more like the terrified fanatic on the bombed-out boulevard. Sometime in the last year, I was watching CNN and there was Ware, seemingly drunk on the air. CNN aired Ware's report twice that night and I watched both times because I wanted to analyze if he was actually drunk—not just tired. Of course, my assessment could be wrong but I think he was definitely under the influence and it saddened me to see him like that. He fell off the pedestal on which I had placed him that night, or at least stood on a significantly lower platform. Now, after reading Filkins book, I regret passing any such judgment on Ware. We are so very lucky that there are people on this earth willing to seek out every angle of a story even when their pursuits constantly put them in harms way. I don't want to underrate the sacrifice of our troops but some of the war correspondents, the ones that stay in for years like Ware and Filkins, are perhaps more courageous. These guys can leave at any time but choose to stay. They don't carry weapons and are often unprotected. Like our soldiers they also witness an untold number of horrors. They become sleepless and disturbed and entrenched in their missions. I can't thank them enough for doing what they do and feel we owe them an immeasurable debt. 9 application/xml false Afghanistan CNN Dexter Filkins Iraq War Michael Ware New York Times sacrifice US Troops war correspondents CNN's Prisoner of War He had been hunted, kidnapped, and told he was filming his own execution. But CNN correspondent Michael Ware had no plans to leave Iraq. http://www.mensjournal.com/cnns-prisoner-of-war The Forever War Time Magazine Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year; New York Times Best Book of 2008 http://www.dexterfilkins.net/index.html Los Angeles Times Book Review [The Forever War] is likely to be regarded as the definitive account of how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were experienced by those who actually waged them. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-rutten1-2008oct01,0,586471.story Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; GTB5; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 173251 false false true false false false true 102972 blog blogsite/Seidl/web