In the Field with Ben Arnoldy
by James Norton

As US forces hurtle north toward Baghdad, the media world is riding shotgun. Unlike the antiseptic conditions of the first Gulf war, today's conflict is being documented by hundreds of reporters who have "embedded" with US troops to tell the story amid the action, sadness and horror of war. One embedded US journalist, columnist and editor Michael Kelly, has already died on the job; others will undoubtedly see close calls if the occupation of Baghdad becomes a free-for-all.

Among the reporters near the front is Benjamin Arnoldy, a news producer for Csmonitor.com, the online edition of The Christian Science Monitor. Arnoldy, who also contributes to Flak, was working on an airbase in Kuwait, covering the 332nd Air Expeditionary Group until early last week; he has now moved to a forward airbase in southern Iraq. His dispatches for the Monitor track life with the troops. He has talked to ordinary airmen about preparing for war, living life on a claustrophobia-inducing desert airbase — and taking the plunge into combat.

Arnoldy, who arrived in Kuwait last month, says the experience has been intense, and somewhat exhausting. "I'm rapidly approaching the point at which my staying longer becomes more of an endurance challenge than an editorial challenge," he says. A 26-year-old graduate of Georgetown University who has worked at the Monitor for more than three years, he's one of the youngest reporters in the mix. Flak interviewed him via e-mail about the war, his part of the story and the men and women he covers on the front lines.

On what date did your embed officially begin?

Ha! I don't even know the day of the week anymore. Wednesday March 12, my notes say. "Every day is Groundhog Day here," I've heard several people say.

What are your official duties for the paper?

Usually I try to supplement the print Monitor's daily coverage with extra material or off-cycle coverage [— coverage outside the newspaper's normal deadline schedule]. For this assignment I am filing daily dispatches about military life on-base, as well as occasional news reports on the Air Force side of this war. I also answer reader questions via e-mail.

How did the mood on the base shift when the war began?

There have been three significant mood shifts since I have been here. When I first arrived, about a week before the war, everybody was anxious for the war to begin. Each twist and turn of the diplomatic standoff aggravated the troops who felt that the desert was only going to get hotter.

When President Bush issued his 48-hour ultimatum, the mood shifted. I expected that the soldiers and airmen would be more on edge or at least a little nervous knowing that war was imminent. Instead, the base completely relaxed. There were beach volleyball games and a talent show. The dining hall had a "country-club atmosphere," as one serviceman described it. My explanation for the phenomenon is this: the troops here were incredibly confident and they figured that the sooner the war started, the sooner they could go home.

When bombs started to drop, the calm remained, but the beach volleyball was replaced by 12-hour work schedules. A lot of people worked every waking moment for the first week.

At the end of the first week, the mood shifted again. Those who had not paced themselves well began to crash physically. But more importantly, the war started to look like it would last a lot longer than many anticipated. Now I am starting to hear the same complaints from people about not knowing when they will go home. So the mood on base has come full circle.

Who in your family (including your wife Jacqueline) has taken this the hardest? How do they feel about it? Who has taken it the best?

Jacqueline has taken it the hardest, followed by my parents and one of my older sisters. When Jacqueline and I were dating, we spent nearly two years apart. But I don't think that trained us at all for this — I think it just left us with less patience for being apart yet again. Jacqueline is a high school foreign language teacher and she has been able to use some of my material in her classes as part of her effort to get kids interested in current events. The more kids get interested in the wider world, the more foreign languages seem relevant. So, she totally shares my feelings about the importance of journalism and the importance of this assignment.

My journalist friends certainly reacted the most enthusiastically when I told them about my assignment. They could appreciate best what a great opportunity this is. Among my family, I've been surprised at the level of interest from my brother Chris. We communicate several times a week, where we used to communicate just around the holidays.

How often do you feel conflicted between "protecting the soldiers" — either in a personal "I don't want to offend these guys" type way, or an official "can't release this info because it's not military-approved" type way — and getting the story out?

I'll tackle the "military-approval" aspect first. Some classified information is classified for very good reasons — and that's usually material that would be too detailed or granular to truly be interesting to the average reader anyway. For instance, the Air Force is touchy about revealing the altitudes that certain planes fly at — it helps their opponent set their anti-aircraft guns. Now, does the average reader really care about exact altitudes? Not really.

But, what readers do care about are stories about what past missions accomplished. Some pilots simply won't give any details, saying they have to wait for higher command to declassify their missions. And that does not happen on a news schedule. One pilot told me that none of his combat missions have been declassified yet. Interestingly, I find that the older pilots recognize the absurdity of this and simply tell you everything when they get back.

As for not wanting to offend the guys — this has entered my mind when writing some of the stories. But, two things have helped me: the Monitor's mission is to "injure no man," so the home office doesn't want material that trashes somebody, and the negative details are generally countered by positive ones.

Have you gotten feedback from the troops or their families about your work? Have readers seemed engaged by it?

Yes. Word reaches back to the wives' circles at home and spreads quickly. So I will usually hear from several relatives each time a new person is profiled heavily. Somehow, having a story mention their loved one seems to put them at ease, as if it is some talisman.

I feel like I'm engaging a broad community, but it's hard to really gauge that accurately from here.

What's been the hardest thing about your assignment?

The fact that I needed to learn a year's worth of knowledge in a week. Ideally, I would have had several more weeks in Boston to practice with the satellite phone, fiddle with the camera and its beastly software, read up on the Air Force, sketch out story ideas in advance, etc. Instead, all of the technical, journalistic and emotional challenges hit me all at once and I didn't get a lot of sleep for the first two weeks.

As a Monitor journalist, are there stories or angles you look for that your colleagues aren't as concerned with?

The only people to show any interest in the chaplains here are the photographers. And all they are looking for are priests in vestments and born-agains in rapture. For me, as a Monitor journalist, it seemed important to engage with these folks a little more deeply. I'm pretty happy with the dispatch that resulted.

Aside from that, I think the reader e-mails have sent me down paths that my colleagues haven't bothered with. One thing that I find interesting is that my colleagues have spent the vast majority of their time interviewing pilots. I don't think I've gotten a single reader question about pilots, however. In fact, many of them seem to want to hear from the guys lower on the totem pole, the average GI Joes.

What are the most jarring/noticeable differences between living on an Air Force base in Kuwait and your life back in Boston?

There's no color here. Everything is shades of beige. It sounds trivial, but after awhile it saps your energy to be walking around in bright light bouncing off bright paint.

I went through severe Internet withdrawal. When you suddenly lose the main instrument of procrastination, it's equivalent to not getting enough REM sleep I think.

Also, everyone is from the Carolinas. I hardly ever meet people in Boston from the Carolinas. It's like at college when everyone is from New Jersey.

You don't bump into a lot of introspective people here. The level of discourse is considerably more matter-of-fact, conservative and pack-driven. Again, sort of the polar opposite of college.

How do you file? How difficult is it placing a phone call? Sending an e-mail?

Excruciating.

However, I have the process as streamlined as possible now. I grab my gas mask, laptop and satellite phone and walk to a blast barrier about 30 feet from the press center building. I turn my laptop on first, since it takes several minutes to boot. Then I open up the satellite antenna, which looks like an airplane food tray that folds open along two hinges. I place it on the top of the barrier in the direction of 10 o'clock. Then I uncoil the coaxial cable and connect it from the antenna to the main phone pod. Then I take another set of cables and connect the laptop to the pod. Next I turn on the pod and wait for it to find the satellite over the Indian Ocean. When it finds the satellite, I press "OK" and finish waiting for the laptop to boot.

When the laptop boots, I click on dial-up networking and waiting for it to give me an Internet connection. Often the computer the satellite is talking to can't handle any more traffic and it boots me off automatically.

Once all this is done, I check my e-mail on Yahoo! This turned out to be a huge mistake, because Yahoo! e-mail requires me to download a login screen, a welcome screen, and an inbox screen, before I can even download a message. Each page takes about several minutes. Don't even talk to me about attachments, which I have to do to file photos. It's miserable, and terribly expensive. I'm looking into setting up Outlook.

In this respect, I have come to understand the soldier psychology a little better. When I came out here, I didn't know how long I'd be gone. And after a few weeks, that not knowing weighed on me heavily. Once my editor set a departure date, I found that I gained incredible focus and revived spirits. In fact, I've gotten in such a groove lately, I almost wish I were staying longer. Almost.

James Norton is an assistant editor at The Christian Science Monitor. You can read Ben's dispatches at Csmonitor.com.

E-mail James Norton at jim@flakmag.com.