Seeing Is Believing
by James Stegall

The flash-to-bang time lag on information coming out of Iraq is nearly zero — witness the near-live footage in recent weeks of firefights in Fallujah. But now the war of information has another participant: the soldiers themselves, armed with the digital cameras they carry and use every day.

Take Abu Ghraib, a scandal broken thanks not so much to skillful reporting or courageous whistle-blowing, but the widespread use of digital cameras. It's proof that, quite literally, A CD-R full of digital images can be more powerful than a thousand Red Cross inquiries.

But while Abu Ghraib is the most obvious testament to the power of the pixel, there is much more prevalent, if mundane, proof flowing across the Web every day. Of course, the misery of war is in the details — the monotony, the fatigue, the continuous fear of death. The life of the average soldier in combat is the most compelling argument against war and the systems that perpetuate it.

Historically, the methods to communicate that experience haven't been immediate or visceral enough to last as real warnings. Photojournalists try to capture what matters, but they are at best secondhand sources. There has never been media that truly captured war in all its banal cruelty. Until now.

The pictures sent home by troops have already been circulating within families and the military community, usually in PowerPoint presentations, accompanied by lines of description and sometimes music. More rarely, though, whole folders appear, attached to anonymous blogs and servers, containing hundreds of images of daily life or significant events the photographer wanted to share.

And because e-mail and PowerPoint presentations have evolved into the Army's medium of choice, it's nearly impossible for military telecommunications networks to censor the products leaving the country. Indeed, the Army is so dependent on e-mail and PowerPoint for official uses that a ban on Internet access in Iraq is almost laughable. How the military functioned before automation is a mystery to the modern soldier, who hardly ever handles a paper memo.

The pictures are giving a firsthand look into the lives of people forced to live in hostile territory for a year or more. Troops on the ground must live without alcohol, pornography or sex, which can be stressful enough on someone not facing death every day. The images show just how life breaks down for most soldiers in Iraq — some are living through daily monotony, locked away on seized compounds, while others are out among the locals every day. Such events as the August UN headquarters bombing seem even more surreal from the viewpoint of a soldier's camera, which shows his buddies securing a pile of rubble and bodies or faces in a crowd pressing in on the camera. Shots of soldiers posing in Saddam's many thrones are almost cliché. Gruesome images of insurgents blown apart while attempting to assemble explosives are increasingly common.

But shots of our soldiers' living conditions are some of the most telling images. Some soldiers have little more than two duffel bags, a cot and a few pictures taped to plywood walls, while others have managed to construct whole entertainment systems. (Most soldiers rely on portable DVD players and laptops, which have done more to alleviate boredom for the common soldier than the USO and Morale, Welfare, and Education [MWR] combined.) Other pictures show buddies with arms around each other's shoulders, soldiers reading in bunks, typing on laptops, walking around the de facto communities sprung alive in the "Green Zone" compounds.

In the coming years, more information about the true military experience is going to hit the cultural consciousness than any other time in history. The volume of e-mails, digital movies, pictures and eventual memoirs is going to be staggering. Today's soldiers are better educated, more analytical and more self-searching than their predecessors. They are also under a greater microscope than ever before, and everything they do is being recorded, either by personal camcorder and camera or by military drone and satellite. It's not unlikely that a perfect 3-D image of Baghdad exists right now, forever preserving the time and place in which they are fighting and dying.

While the immediate effect of this information is undeniable, the future impact of such data is invaluable. The operational, or "hard," data — the trajectories of mortar rounds, the flight paths of Predator drones, the OPORD briefings, CASEVAC procedures — and the streamlining of massive logistical pipelines will find counterbalance in the equal volume of personal information, the "soft" data that could hold the secret to maintaining morale and mission effectiveness in the absence of the common stress relievers of sex, alcohol and family.

And perhaps, thanks to this new mode of connectivity, soldiers will return home without divorce, family violence, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or alcoholism awaiting them. Not to mention a desire to stay in the military.

That's invaluable data to the modern US Army. The personal problems of its soldiers are the Army's only real Achilles' heel, influencing its effectiveness more than planners would like to admit. They're a cancer that continues to fester as the occupation stretches on, the same factors that many say wrecked the Army in Vietnam.

Collecting this information is going to be a monumental task. The Army is already collecting hundreds of PowerPoint presentations through its Center for Army Lessons Learned, but that's a tiny percentage of the recordable information being produced per day, both professional and personal. The collected digital trail of an army at war is waiting for whatever historian has the connections and tenacity to track it all down. There is a much deeper, richer picture forming than the arm-sweep cinematics of such productions as 21 Days to Baghdad. Like a shoebox full of pictures found in the attic showing grandpa's experience in World War II, the experience in Iraq will be sifted from flash memory sticks and CD-Rs, and the amount of it will seem incomprehensible to whoever tries to make sense of it. It will be a thousand times more powerful.

E-mail James Stegall at james@sonewmedia.com.