Embed with the Pentagon

Now, our government is embedding journalists.

If that sounds like some kind of illicit romance, well, in a way, it is.

The United States government has announced that it will "embed" up to 500 journalists — at least 20 percent of them from other countries — with United States Forces in an Iraq war. It’s an improvement, I suppose. At least the government will be allowing reporters to go along with the troops to the front — something American presidents have been terrified of doing since Vietnam.

But first, the reporters have to go through a mini-boot camp, under the guidance of drill sergeants and training officers. In theory, the pseudo-basic training will get them in physical shape to slog through desert sands. In fact, it will acclimatize them to the military mindset and make them think that they’re part of the team. Instead of objective reporters, they’ll be participants.

Until Vietnam, reporters always went under fire with the troops. In World War II, they were even awarded the honorary rank of major (I’m an honorary Lieutenant Colonel, which means I have a shinier oak leaf.) But that didn't mean that Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite and Martha Gellhorn didn't tell the truth. Even enlisted men like Bill Mauldin and Andy Rooney jumped in their jeeps, unsheperded by minders, and went to the front to bring the real story back. The American people expected it, and they got it.

Then, truth got too hard to take. After Vietnam, the military did everything it could not just to limit the access of the press, but to discourage, mislead and even humiliate us. A Vice-Admiral once stuck me in the bed of a garbage truck in Grenada on the way to a battle site. I went because I was determined to get the story. He had the cojones later to ask for the original of the photograph of him I took from the truck.

Let me tell you about embedding: It isn’t necessary, and it isn’t helpful, if a journalist has a whit of common sense. Any decent reporter or photographer has a nose that takes her or him where the story is.

Along with a Life magazine correspondent and the celebrated Magnum photographer Phillip Jones Griffiths, I once took a small plane to the remote island of Union to charter a boat and get past the U.S. blockade of Grenada. We failed, but we got the Navy to let us in when they saw we were serious.

The Life magazine photographer Harry Benson and I took the advice of a junior officer and went on patrol in Panama City with a squad commanded by a woman lieutenant — technically a no-no (her running a combat mission, not our covering it).

I drove all night through a killer sandstorm in Saudi Arabia to reach a troop deployment. I went in a low-flying helicopter, coughing and gagging and itching from the fumes until one eye swelled shut, over the "Highway of Death" in Kuwait, and ended up getting three private hours with Norman Schwarzkopf — who, by the way, is not this new war's biggest fan.

This is our job as journalists. We don't need the government to take us to day camp; we take the risks willingly, and, as a rule we're smart enough to handle them. I've come under small arms fire in Belfast and Panama, mortar fire in Cambodia and Grenada, and been next door to a SCUD missile hit in Riyadh. The U.S. government didn't have to train me how to handle it. I reported, you decided.

Embedding is not journalism. If you want to know why your sons and daughters, wives and husbands, lovers, companions, brothers and sisters are dying in the Iraq war, forget about embedding. From Herodotos and Thucydides up to this moment, the only way for a journalist or anybody else to discern the facts about war has always been to go off on your own and find truth, then speak it to power.