The First Casualties

pjdillon@attglobal.net
The sickening feeling started late Saturday evening as the first details started to march across the distracting red info ribbon that are so popular in the networks’ split screen universe.
Australian journalist believed killed by car bomb in Northern Iraq. Details to follow. Hours later: British authorities report ITN crew missing following incident outside Iraqi city of Basra. Details to follow.
And inevitably we share info amongst ourselves. I’m sending SMSs (Short Message Service, text messages keyed in and sent through the cellphone network for the uninitiated) to my friends, many of whom are at a birthday party at H2O, a Blok M bar, letting them know.
Over the next few hours, info starts to trickle back via telephone, e-mail and SMSs as we scour networks public and personal for names, agencies anything that will allow us to knock people off the mental casualty lists we’ve created.
I know several Ozy journos working along the Iran/Iraq border, part of the international media posse several dozen strong who’ve been chomping at the bit for the past six weeks. They’re the kind of hardnosed first responders who I’m sure were planning their routes to the town of Khormal the moment they heard the first Tomahawks had been fired into suspected paramilitary bases there, home to the hardline Islamist guerrillas of the Iranian-backed Asram al-Islam, who are the laughable best connection Bush Jr and the boys in the war room have been able to make between Saddam and bin-Laden.
I don’t believe I ever met Paul Moran. As it turns out, few of us here in Jakarta did because, though many ABC correspondents have rolled through Jakarta over the years, he was based in the Gulf. From what I understand he was 39 and, like the correspondent he was traveling with, has a six-month-old baby girl.
I’ve met numerous ITN crews over the past few years and the CNN interview with Daniel, a cameraman I crossed paths with in Quetta, Pakistan in the weeks after 9-11 was shocking. The full story has yet to be told but 24 hours later it sure does sound like they were killed by either British or American forces. Veteran reporter Terry Lloyd, his cameraman Fred Nerac and their companion Hussein Othman are missing and I’d be terribly surprised if they were not killed in the terrible salvo that tore through the thin skins of their Land Cruisers Saturday afternoon.
A friend told me he spent a great month shooting and smoking dope with Fred in some hostile environment a few years back and described Terry as the kind of journalist I admire most: keeps his ego under wraps and never forgets the kindness of strangers, repaying them a hundredfold. Othman is an unknown but obviously a brave, clever fellow to have secured the respect of journalists of their caliber.
It’s all very distressing, these deaths. The death of our friend Reuter’s cameraman Harry Burton on the Jalalabad Road in Nov 2001 is still a raw wound for many, the roads many of us have traveled are littered with dead and maimed colleagues and friends.
And of course there’s another round of wrestling with the fact that yes in fact, if the call came tomorrow and someone said they had a secure route into Baghdad, and the wallet was open and they wanted me to go, needed me to go, that my kit is ready and just give me 90 minutes and I’m at the airport.
The final unfortunate fucked up coincidence is the tale of the mission Tornado. Yeah, seems there’s a friend of mine – a bunch of us did the dim sum thing this afternoon – who has a friend who’s brother rides the beast outta some base in the UK. This evening, as the group of us sat watching the American death toll mount pondered how exactly a Patriot missile might be fired at a British attack jet, or what was going on in the mind of that fellow who tossed the grenades into the command tent of the 101st Airborne Regiment, my friend made a call to London.
What are the chances that out of all the thousands of Tornado flyboys piloting any of the thousands of aircraft involved in this war, that the only personal contact my Jakarta friend has in the British military is the father of three shot down and now missing somewhere in the desert border between Kuwait and Iraq? How fucked up is that? Here we have the missing man’s entire family sitting around their suburban London living room for hours after the man from the Royal Air Force knocked on their door with the message “be hopeful but prepare for the worst”, holding hands and waiting for the phone to ring.
Unlike the journalists, he was out there, ordered to 35,000 feet day after day, because of events far beyond his scope or ability to control. He was following orders. But, it is easy to forget that he made decisions in his life to train up as a killer, to enter into a relationship that to truly be consummated involved a flight crew attaching bombs and missiles to the belly of his aircraft and sending him out to kill and maim other men and women. It’s kinda hard-ass but if you’ve seen the amount of damage one of those bombs do, if you’ve heard their stories told during visits to the graves of the innocent or God forbid, watched broken bodies being separated from the remains of their homes and business, it becomes very hard to work up a lot of sweat over these kinds of combat deaths.
But it is early days in this campaign and the death toll among all involved is going to climb. I think there’s gonna be a lot of dead journos by the end of this campaign particularly among those like the first casualties not ‘embedded’ with the US or Brits, and by the sounds of it soldiers on both sides are giving it up for the home team. In both cases we’re talking about people paid to do what they do.
I doubt civilian dead directly attributable to bombing will hit the estimated 3,000 from the first round a dozen years ago (or similar number buried in Afghanistan), but if the US shows the kind of leadership and long term vision it has in Central Asia (sweet deals with a multiplicity of brutal, repressive military regimes; NO money in 2004 budget for Hamid Karzai and his Tajik buddies in Kabul) then we can wait for the newly free press in a post-Saddam Iraq to broadcast into our living rooms the images of famine wrought by tribal warfare and conflict between Shiite and Sunni.
We’ve got months more to sit and watch Rumsfeld and Bush (who said moments ago that he’s “Praying for God’s comfort and healing powers”) and Blair and Howard and the rest of the raptors tear-up for the cameras and talk about sacrifice and duty and honor and commitment to task and patriotism and dedication to higher ideals and all kinds of expensive words.
But it’s all worthwhile though because once the Iraqis are freed, Dubya tells us he’s got a secret plan to Solve The Israeli/Palestinian Troubles! Excellent! This guy and his friends Sharon, Bibi Netanyahu and the bright lights at the Heritage Foundation are going to solve the most intractable conflict in modern history. Cool. It’s a secret though so we’re gonna have to be patient.
I can’t wait to hear what’s next.