This American Life - 235: The Balloon Goes Up

Broadcast on: 21 Mar 2003

Anthony Swofford was an infantryman in Marines back during the 1991 Gulf War, and we asked him to watch the television coverage for us once this war got underway, and tell us his impressions. Oh, I'm thinking it's strange to be in my living room this time, and you know, this morning there was the first scenes of the oil wildfires burning as some Marines are up near them, and that brought the whole scene pretty pretty close to me. You know, for civilian watching this coverage, I got to say, like, I feel like, "Oh, I'm right there. It feels so real." For you watching this coverage, does it all seem fantastically fake? Yeah, it does. It feels, you know, made up and scripted. They read on or recording of some of the things you taped off TV. Let's just play one of those. There's this one great scene of the wild men on CNN who he's moving with the seventh cavalry, and he's talking about great waves of steel crushing the Iraqis. You don't sleep. You really don't sleep out here. Of course, you're on an adrenaline eye, but racing across the desert. You know that you're traveling toward the jaws of what could be a major military battleist. You know, he's dramatically narrating what currently from the video is totally undramatic and incredibly common event, which is vehicles moving across the desert, but he's projecting this romantic vision of what the battle will be. Then the army is going to kill them. Their goal is to find the enemy, grab him by the nose, they say, and this is according to one senior officer. After grabbing him by the nose, we don't let the Iraqis go anywhere. The seventh cavalry's mission is to find the Iraqis and to persuade them to give up, and if they don't give up, then they will be pounded. Just because the tanks are barely across the desert on the way to Baghdad, that doesn't mean that they're going to roll over and grab the enemy by the nose. This would be an example of one of those moments that that you find to be completely fake. Yeah, completely fake. By the way, this is this American life from W.B. E.C. Chicago distributed by Public Radio International. This guy Anthony Swafford has been on our program before reading from his memoir of fighting in the Persian Gulf War, which is called Jarhead. He says he finds it hard to watch the coverage of this war now. He thinks it's fine for camera crews to go out with the soldiers and all, but he says it to him, it just seems voyeuristic in this way that just gives him the creeps. In battle, he says you're completely naked in this way. It's so extreme. And he says the cameras can't really capture what it's like to be there anyway. The missing element thus far is fear and the unknown. Everything seems certain when there's a camera filming this. You've written about how you and the other Marines during the Persian Gulf War who you were with were told to say pretty much next to nothing to reporters. Keep everything positive. Just you were sort of giving like little scripts to say. When you watch the interviews that are now being broadcast on TV, do you feel like you're seeing soldiers spinning the way that you were trained to? I'm certain of it. What's coming out of their mouth is scripted and it's what they're asked to say. And it's also part of what they're asked to believe and they believe some of it. But can you think of any particular moment where you've seen somebody talking and you're just like, yep, that's right. That's just the line we give them. Yeah, well this morning there was an embed sitting with a Marine and they were a forward force that had had nine gas calls over the evening and having nine false gas calls is incredibly frustrating and it pisses you off and, you know, you're cussing, you're saying, who's the idiot? He called gas again. I'm tired of putting this thing on. Kind gas, meaning somebody said there's, you know, gas is incoming and so putting gas is incoming. Yeah. So the reporter asked the young

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