Attitude Adjustments

Although many Americans don’t seem to know it, there are foreign journalists embedded with American troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these reporters come from countries where strong anti-American sentiment is the norm, and suspicion of the motives and actions of the U.S. military rampant.

Jeff Emmanuel, writing for the American Thinker, thought to look at these reporters and their reactions to being embedded. He discovered that many of these reporters emerge from their “embed” experience with far different attitudes than they held previously. Do go read the whole thing, but here’s a sample:

The most spectacular recent case of a journalist with an anti-war mindset being completely overwhelmed into a change of heart by American soldiers, according to the PAO, was a Greek public television reporter who had been embedded with an infantry unit that became entrenched in a 45-minute firefight with insurgents. Yanked out of the line of fire by a soldier who put the journalist’s life above his own, he waited under cover and in fear of his life for the almost hour-long duration of the battle, with the best view possible of American soldiers in action against an armed and murderous enemy. He credits his having lived to tell the tale directly to those young troops.

"He had tears in his eyes as he talked about it,” said the PAO. “He just kept saying, ‘they saved my life, they saved my life…these are great men; they are heroes.' Even after telling it several times, he couldn’t get through the story without choking up - and this was a man who had arrived here with all of the disdain for the Iraq mission and for the American soldiers who he [like seemingly most Europeans] had seen as the bad guys in this fight."

While it may be decried by some for causing journalists, who claim to be “objective” and “neutral” in their reporting, to lose their cold detachment and actually begin to see the soldiers they live alongside as humans, it is that very fact that makes the practice of embedding reporters with military units so beneficial to both parties. Rather than observing events from a safely detached distance - and thus being able to remove the human element from the equation - embedded reporters are forced to face up to the humanity of their subjects, and to share common experiences - often of the life-and-death variety - with those who they are covering.

Our soldiers are doing us proud over there…