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Embedded in the desert |
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| By Walt Torbert |
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Four sharp explosions jerk me from my sleep—incoming mortar rounds cracking the pre-dawn peace of our tent camp. We are being gassed. My eyes and throat begin to burn as I scramble beneath my cot, feeling for my gas mask with shaking hands. Seconds are ticking. I try to not to breathe while I panic. A minute later I would have been dead—except that the U.S. Army doesn’t use nerve gas during training. It uses CS gas, or pepper spray. Trust me though—it burns. I was a University of Georgia student spending six weeks at Fort Irwin, the Army’s National Training Center in California’s Mojave Desert. With me were three other students from UGA’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication: Harry Sawyers of Marietta, Ryan Sieveking of Cumming and Scott Trubey of Athens. Armored units train for Iraq in the Mojave, and we four, sponsored by Grady College’s James M. Cox Jr. Institute for Newspaper Management Studies, arrived in the desert with big ideas about war but no military experience. The institute’s director, journalism professor Conrad Fink, a former foreign correspondent and Marine, warned us, “Unfortunately, covering war will be a major responsibility for your generation of journalists, as it was for mine, so you better get a taste of it.” A taste, indeed. For six weeks we were immersed in the hardships of war without going to one. We looked into the minds and mission of the Army and its soldiers—soldiers who had been to Iraq and were going back. They viewed their time at Fort Irwin as I did. It may not have been the real thing, but it sure burned. Lesson No. 1 for aspiring war correspondents: “Life be hard in the desert,” as the soldiers say. Temperatures soared above 100 degrees during the day, as we traveled with units battling the climate and each other across 100,000 acres of desert wasteland. When we four students ventured every day into “the box,” as the huge training area is called, we became reporters—our role in the giant war game—for the make-believe International News Network, based in Los Angeles. As INN reporters, we demanded information about the U.S. military’s presence in the mock country it occupied. When Arab Americans hired by the army to live in desert towns rallied for or against the American presence, we were there to get the story. If a terrorist’s truck bomb detonated, our coverage would appear in television newscasts and a newspaper we produced at INN. Our stories looked like those from Iraq we read in the Los Angeles Times and saw on CNN every morning. Our desert scenarios mirrored those in Iraq. We watched as the Army attempted to stabilize the region for its first-ever democratic elections. A group of “insurgents” operating at hazy distances from law-abiding citizens wanted the Americans out, or dead—and, meanwhile, we read about journalists captured and killed in Iraq. Like so many real journalists who have lost their lives in Iraq, two of us—Harry Sawyers and Scott Trubey—met their doom in the Mojave, kidnapped by terrorists and then gunned down by American soldiers raiding our captors. At INN, we wrote a touching piece on our fallen comrades, and the soldiers who pulled the triggers were held accountable. The bullets were blanks in our desert, of course, but the situations we saw and the attitudes of the soldiers we reported on were as real as they come. It was tremendous training for us aspiring journalists to see young men and women soldiers pouring energy into rebuilding a hospital or working to register voters or clearing a cave of possible chemical agents. None of us intends to join the military. Maybe one day though, readers will see one of our names attached to an article or photograph from some future war. |
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