Joe Bob's America: Look, ma! I'm embedded!

NEW YORK, March 27 (UPI) -- This is gonna go down in history as the first Touchy-Feely Sensitive-Guy War.

All those correspondents with helmets and gas masks, standing next to the tanks and planes, speaking to us in grave lowered voices about the mood of the troops, are like myopic midgets reporting on a chess game by following the progress of a single rook as it moves around the board. Since nothing that happens to them is likely to have any strategic importance, they talk instead about loved ones back home, their own nervousness, what tracer bullets look like, and how news -- good and bad -- moves through the camp.

It's the equivalent of the 6 O'Clock Eyewitness News Report, with its steady stream of high-speed car chases, murder scenes, celebrity sightings, and featurettes on the neighborhood children who have set up a lemonade stand. In other words, it ranks as news somewhere on the level of a high school newspaper censored by a faculty adviser whose name is Miriam.

Hey, look, here's a burst of machine-gun fire!

Hey, over here, a wounded soldier on a stretcher!

Wanna see where I put my sleeping bag every night!

I don't know how many features were done on the five captured soldiers from the Fort Bliss maintenance company. Let me sum it up for you: Their vehicle took a wrong turn, and they were captured. That's the WHOLE story. Can you imagined a captured patrol in World War II getting four days of continuous coverage?

News alert: It won't affect the outcome of the war!

There's a surreal quality to what's coming from these embedded reporters. (Isn't the word "embedded" normally used at crime scenes to describe murder weapons that can't be extracted from the body? "A six-inch hatchet was found embedded in the man's skull.") They seem obsessed with the purely psychological aspects of battle. "How is everyone feeling?" seems to be their primary question of every day.

We pretty much KNOW how everyone's feeling: NERVOUS.

Then there's always the smug conspiratorial hint that they know LOTS more than what they're saying. "Well, without giving anything away . . ." is the disclaimer on every report, as though they've just been in a parley with Tommy Franks but have decided to ensure the survival of the country by keeping his military secrets. If you're not going to tell us what you know, then don't bother to MENTION THAT YOU KNOW IT. It's sort of a way to create false drama.

What the embeds are really giving us is an ongoing series of "COPS" episodes. And once you've caught the burglar on "COPS," you can't go back to the same criminal. No one wants to see him booked into jail, treated for injuries, arraigned or tried. He had his purpose, and that was to be wrestled onto the ground in his spaghetti-strip T-shirt while flinging a few profane epithets. Segment over -- pack up the cameras and move on. The war version of this is the interview with the machine-gunner who came under fire and then "lit up a building." It's a good story - with virtually no relevance to the overall war.

What this reminds me of is the last two summer Olympics. The networks were concerned with who won the race, of course, but they were MORE concerned if the winner was an American. If, say, a Lithuanian won the race, then the reporter focused on the third-place American finisher who reminisced about all his years of hard work and what the Olympics mean to him. This is war as a series of personal experiences, as though we're assessing careers here, as though every reporter worked for "Entertainment Tonight."

The hardest thing to take is the constant references of the embeds and the anchors to their own personal feelings. "If you haven't been there, you have no idea of what it feels like when one of those fighters takes off."

"You stay safe, Ted, I know that the rest of us can't possibly imagine what that's like." "Jim, I can just imagine what you must be feeling now that you

know your wife is a POW." (Notice they don't ASK. They immediately imply empathy through their own rarefied sense of feeling another's pain. When reporting on 300 enemy dead, on the other hand, they feel absolutely no pain at all. It's a specialized and localized pain, marinated in patriotism.)

Among other things, it's RUDE to tell a widow or a frightened love one that you're feeling his or her pain. If you do it at all, it should be in the form of, "Please pardon me for intruding during your time of grief." Co-opting the grief as your own is bad manners in every funeral parlor in America. Most people don't WANT strangers walking up to them and telling them how their heart bleeds for a person they never knew. I've interviewed plenty of bereaved people. Believe me, they'd rather focus on their own problems, not thinking about the right thing to say to someone proffering shallow sympathy.

But since the anchors keep saying it -- "the rest of us can't really imagine what it's like" -- someone should ask them why, if we can't imagine what it's like, they keep trying to tell us? In fact, we CAN imagine what it's like. We're the only species endowed with the ability to imagine what it's like. That's sort of what the word empathy means. But I think that right now, at this crucial point in the conflict, we're not that interested in what one guy from Kansas thinks it's like. I for one would rather know the answer to "Are we winning?" and "How are we winning?"

What we really need is for some of the old Saigon hands to come out of retirement and report this war -- really report it. They would be questioning the tactics of every engagement, challenging every official government body count, and they would wait a LONG time before they reported any so-called "popular uprising" in Basra. And since they loved their independence, they would never allow themselves to be "embedded," which is another way of saying buried.

The guilty secret of this unholy arrangement between the media and the Pentagon is that we're getting exactly what the government wants us to get -- human interest stories, told from the American point of view, that take attention away from the more important policy issues and military concerns. The Pentagon information officer who came up with this is a genius in his way.

"We'll turn every reporter into a feature writer," he decided one day, in an inspired vision. We'll treat them, in other words, as morale support personnel. Sort of like the USO. I wonder if any of them can tap-dance.

Joe Bob Briggs writes a number of columns for UPI and may be contacted at [email protected] or through his Web site at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, Texas, 75221.