War Reporting for Cowards
Steve Mumford
WAR REPORTING FOR COWARDS | Chris Ayres
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Ayres is at his best once he gets to Iraq, hyperalert, borderline hysterical, and evisceratingly self-aware. He’s said in interviews that more than anything he wanted to convey the day-to-day life of the troops on the ground–the shitty food, the smelly underpants, the hours of mind-numbing tedium relieved by terrifying bursts of violence. But Cowards is also an excellent primer on the peculiar pathology of journalism. It’s Ayres’s ego–his fear of being scooped–that gets him into this mess in the first place and, recognizing that, he goes on to lampoon the macho mythology of war correspondence, particularly with one running gag concerning the exploits of a dashing fellow embed who’s always two steps closer to the front line and a day earlier to the punch.
These skills serve him well in the book’s final section, in Iraq, where the monastic benevolence of the grunts proves no match for the asymmetric violence of a region where “tribal reality” makes civil war inevitable. As Kaplan notes, disgruntled Iraqi civilians risk their lives merely by meeting with the marines. Kaplan himself has a close call with a 122-millimeter rocket during the 2004 attempt to “pacify” Fallujah. While the beleaguered marines had been frequently occupied with policing disputes, providing seed to farmers, landscaping soccer fields, and other assorted tasks of “nation building,” the assault on Fallujah allowed them to engage in close-quarter battle (CQB, or “killing shitheads”), until political pressure ended the operation, attributed by Kaplan to “the fecklessness and incoherence of the Bush administration.” Despite such occasional moments of spleen, Kaplan generally mirrors the grunts’ stoic compliance with the grandiose schemes of their leaders, lending a muffled, apolitical tone to his otherwise worthwhile project. –Mike Newirth
