The War Horse: Malcolm W. Browne and the Gulf War

“My God, we’re going to die and I must pray!”
 

The Saudi taxi driver floored the accelerator and started chanting in Arabic as air-raid sirens wailed to mark the appearance of Iraqi Scud-B missiles, looking like “fireballs from Roman candles,” streaking over Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The taxi careened past a half-dozen wrecked cars, including a police vehicle, on its way to deliver its passenger, Malcolm W. Browne of the New York Times, to an air-raid shelter at the Dhahran International Hotel.
 
Arriving at the hotel, Browne discovered that its lobby, one of the few places open during such raids, was jammed with Saudis, “some wearing gas masks but most huddling in corners with their red and white head cloths tied over their noses and mouths” to ward off an expected poison-gas attack. The threat of Scuds armed with gas warheads alarmed everyone. “You can kill me with a knife or gun or bomb, and I won’t care, but I don’t want to die of gas,” a Saudi soldier, his voice muted by a bulky respirator, told the reporter.
 
Although Browne was close to turning sixty at the time, the Times sent the veteran war correspondent to the Persian Gulf in the winter of 1991. President George H. W. Bush had assembled an international coalition of approximately forty countries to face off against Iraqi forces, who had invaded and taken over the oil-rich nation of Kuwait in August 1990. The rules imposed by U.S. military authorities made the Gulf War “more difficult to cover” than anything Browne had experienced before, except for the Indian-Pakistan conflict in 1971.
 

During the month he spent in Saudi Arabia, Browne could not escape the feeling that the military had learned all the wrong lessons from its 1983 invasion of Grenada, a smashing triumph for American troops, all without the bothersome presence of civilian journalists. “It was impossible to altogether bar the Persian Gulf to the thousands of correspondents from many countries who poured in,” Browne noted, “but by confining newsmen to officially licensed tour groups called pools, the U.S. commanders achieved much the same thing.”
 
U.S. Defense Department officials also seemed fixated on avoiding the mistakes with the press they believed had contributed to the country’s ignominious defeat in Vietnam. Browne believed that an “anti-press cant” had been prevalent in American military journals and pronouncements since the war in Southeast Asia ended. Influential military officials, he noted, had “implied a causal relationship between two facts: that reporters were barred from on-the-ground coverage of the Grenada war in October 1983, and that Grenada has been America’s only unequivocal military victory since World War II.”
 
Shortly before the United Nations deadline of January 15, 1991, for Iraq’s forces to withdraw from Kuwait, Browne arrived in Saudi Arabia to join the approximately 1,200 correspondents and technicians covering Operation Desert Shield, the buildup of Allied troops in the Persian Gulf. He described the newsmen working in Dhahran and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as “by far the largest concentration of journalists assembled to cover any American conflict since World War II.”
 
Browne became one of the lucky few reporters (initially only 130; later raised to 192) to be part of the official pool system, whereby representatives from wire services, newspapers, magazines, television, and radio were assigned to ground, air, naval, and rapid-reaction units. All media members covering units in the field had to be escorted by a public affairs officer, who was present for all interviews. Reporters’ dispatches, videos, and photographs were available to all the media organizations accredited by the military. “In effect, each pool member is an unpaid employee of the Department of Defense,” reflected Browne, “on whose behalf he or she prepares the news of the war for the outer world.” Some of the journalists began to “feel more like draftees than civilians,” he recalled.
 
Assistant Secretary of Defense Pete Williams announced that news media not part of the official pools would be banned from forward areas and U.S. military commanders would “maintain extremely tight security throughout the operational area and will exclude from the area of operations all unauthorized individuals.” Browne said he had never witnessed such an attempt at controlling the press. He pointed out that in Vietnam, military authorities often concealed information “for reasons other than security, but correspondents were free to move about Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in private cars, commercial and chartered aircraft, and even by train. More than 40 correspondents were killed, but they succeeded in covering most of the major military developments fully.”
 
Browne had to fill out a detailed questionnaire asking for his blood type, religion (“important to the Saudis”), and his next of kin. He also had to sign a two-page agreement promising not to reveal military secrets and to submit everything he reported for a “security review.” While the agreement tried to reassure reporters that any “material will be examined solely for its conformance to the attached ground rules, not for its potential to express criticism or cause embarrassment,” Browne had his doubts.
 
Officials photographed and fingerprinted Browne and issued “a Saudi press badge, a Geneva convention card identifying me as a noncombatant accompanying United States forces and a steel dog tag embossed with the kind of information . . . useful to medics and graves-registration teams.” Unlike his early days in Vietnam, when he had to prowl the black market to outfit himself for combat, Browne noted that the U.S. military provided him with everything he needed, including a field jacket and pants, a sleeping bag, a canteen with a chemical-warfare cap, a durable backpack, gas mask with antidotes for nerve gas, and a chemical warfare suit with boots, goggles, and a helmet.
 
Being outfitted for the coming fray caused Browne’s blood to stir with the “heady prospect” of once again being near the front lines. “Recidivist war correspondents have difficulty explaining the thrill of anticipation of combat,” he mused. “We scarcely understand the feeling ourselves, or why it is that we are so powerfully drawn to combat, even against the revulsion most of us feel for the sights, sounds and smells of death.” 

Browne's zeal lessened, however, when he and other journalists assigned to his pool were taken by bus to an auditorium. While there, a U.S. Air Force “operational commander” gave a briefing. Before his talk, he informed the newsmen he wanted to let them know where they stood with each other. “Let me say up front that I don’t like the press,” the officer said. “Your presence here can’t possibly do me any good, and it can hurt me and my people.”
 
Despite his unfriendly beginning, the commander went on to give what Browne, always a fan of aircraft, called “one of the most lucid and informative briefings on fighter tactics” he had ever heard. He wondered if the officer’s frostiness might have been a way to establish his credentials as a “bluff but honest leader of men, rather than as a Pentagon publicity seeker.”
 
In the years since he had reported from Vietnam, Browne noticed numerous changes in the methods by which his profession communicated from the field. Once used to waiting for hours to use a staticky radio phone line or bribing an official to use a slow telex machine, he viewed the technology available to him in 1991 as “simply amazing.” 

For example, reporters from the Times had in their hotel room in Dhahran a dish antenna a little larger than a toilet seat and a Honda generator in case the power went out. “It would have been just great,” he remembered, “except that we all were under the thumb of US censors, so nifty communications were largely canceled out.” He ended up writing his dispatches on a typewriter not much different than those used by reporters in World War II. It might have been for the best. As Browne noted, electronic emissions from a dish antenna could attract the deadly attention of air-to-surface high-speed anti-radiation missiles, if any were in the area.
 

On January 17, with Iraqi troops still in Kuwait, coalition forces launched Operation Desert Storm, an air campaign against targets in Iraq, including its capital, Baghdad. For the opening of the air war, Browne had been assigned by the U.S. Armed Forces Joint Information Bureau to a desert air base from which F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters from the Thirty-Seventh Tactical Fighter Wing operated. Two squadrons from the unit flew thirty sorties against sixty Iraqi targets.
 
The wing’s commander, Colonel Alton C. Whitley, showed Browne and other reporters, including Frank Bruni of the Detroit Free Press, videotapes in which the F-117A’s had hit underground bunkers, command stations, microwave communication links, and other “high-value” sites. “The opening shot of the war against Iraq was a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb dropped into the AT&T Building in Baghdad near the bank of the Tigris River,” Browne reported. “The tape showed the bomb hitting the building squarely in the center, probably demolishing its communications nerve centers.”
 
The Stealth fighters also attacked one of the “presidential facilities” supposed to be used by Hussein. “The video tape shows the bomb flying right into a rooftop skylight and demolishing the structure,” Browne wrote. Returning from their missions, pilots at the base talked to the Times newsman about the stress they felt flying in combat: “Your heart beats faster, your mouth goes dry, and when you depart the target area you take a big gulp from your water bottle. Of course, you still have to find the refueling tanker on the way home, but the hardest part is over.”
 
As per regulations, a U.S. Army public information officer had cleared articles from Browne and Bruni and sent them on for transmission to pool headquarters in Dhahran. Three hours later, however, Colonel Whitley had second thoughts about the stories, changing some words and deleting others. “None of them appear to have anything to do with security,” Browne noted. “In Frank’s copy, the adjective ‘giddy’ used to describe the pilots, has been changed to ‘proud,’ and in my story, the words ‘fighter-bomber’ have been changed to ‘fighter.’”
 
Browne guessed that the air force had changed his description to fighter because it had been waging a battle with Congressional critics about its B-2 Stealth bomber and feared they might use such a description to scuttle the program. To meet their deadlines, both reporters agreed to the proposed changes if their copy was transmitted to pool headquarters via a fax machine. “This proves a forlorn hope,” Browne noted. He learned the next day that their stories had instead been sent to the home base of the Stealth fighters, the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada, “where everything we wrote has been deemed a breach of security.” The pieces were finally cleared by the military twenty-four hours after they were written, making their “perishable” news “hopelessly stale,” he said. Browne considered it quite ironic because the dispatches portrayed the missions as brilliant successes.
 
As a print journalist, Browne faced another frustration during the conflict. He had to deal, as he had never had before, with the “overwhelming prestige” television enjoyed, especially the powerful live coverage provided from Baghdad by CNN reporters Bernard Shaw, John Holliman, and Browne’s former Associated Press colleague Peter Arnett. “These reports rivet the attention of American servicemen,” Browne remembered. The ground crews at the airbase he visited eagerly watched the CNN reports.
 
Field commanders appeared to be bending the rules for television crews, Browne noted, and treated print reporters “as also-rans.” Censorship guidelines also worked against print journalists, who had to submit typewritten texts of their dispatches to field information officers and commanders for a security review, while television and radio reporters “could broadcast live without prepared texts, permitting them greater latitude,” said Browne.
 
Upon his return to the United States in early February, Browne, invited by U.S. Senators John Glenn and Herb Kohl, was one of the journalists who testified at a February 20 hearing held by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee on “Pentagon Rules Governing Press Access to the Persian Gulf War.” Browne expressed his concerns about the pool system, as well as the lack of direct access to American soldiers and to front-line areas. Newsmen, he pointed out, wanted to spend time with soldiers and marines, not to “spy on American military intentions, but to see how the troops are getting on in difficult circumstances. Today’s correspondents identify ourselves with the soldiers of our generation as strongly as Ernie Pyle did with the soldiers of his.”

Browne’s testimony, combined with articles he wrote and television appearances he made repeating his complaints, unleashed on him what he called “an avalanche of angry letters” that accused him and other journalists of undermining both the security and morale of soldiers in the field. One letter went as far as to describe the press as “not only anti-American but pro-Communist,” and suggested that the “so-called Fourth Estate should more properly be called the Fifth Column.”
 
Browne believed it was probably futile for him to remind those who wrote such angry letters that democracy itself depended “on a free people informed by honest journalists.” It dawned on him, Browne recalled, that honest reporting was “the last thing most people want when the subject is war.” And while Benjamin Franklin had observed that “there never was a good war or a bad peace,” his experience had taught Browne that in the eyes of many people, “there may never have been a bad war. War is thundering good theater, in which cheering the home team is half the fun.”