LET ME HEAP MULTIMEDIA SCORN. There's a dude--let's call him Hampton Sides--who is a journalist. His shtick these days--journalists can't just report any longer, now they need a shtick--is that he was going to be "embedded" with a group of Marines in Iraq. Wait, saith the blog reader, that's the shtick of lots of people. But the little nuance that separates Hampton Sides from the rest, o reader, is that Hampton Sides chickened out. He got to the point where they were hearing about precautions they would take in the event of a chemical weapons attack, and decided that "I couldn't do this." He just didn't get on the bus that would have taken him to his assigned Marines.

No problem. I would not want to be in Iraq, I think the war is wrong for a whole host of reasons, I've averse to the thought of being killed or maimed, sure. I buy the decision, and wouldn't criticize him for it. But this dude, this "Hampton Sides," has turned his rationale cowardice into a hook upon which to hang his journalistic hat. He had a piece in the March 20 New Yorker, narrating (what else) his decision to chicken out. He was even on fucking FRESH AIR, being interviewed for a goddamn HOUR talking about (what else) his decision to chicken out! I don't like Terri Gross, but even I pitied her, trying to fill an hour of interview time with some dude--let's call him Hampton Sides, just for kicks--talking about his chickenshit behavior. She even got on a tangent about what he's doing instead of being embedded with Marines in harm's way--he's safely esconced in the Marriott in downtown Kuwait City, describing how the teeming Pakistani "guest workers" are so diligent in their pampering of the foreign journalists who are themselves teeming in the Marriott, waiting for their next spoonfeeding of "news" from Supreme Allied Command, that an aforementioned teeming journalist cannot so much as put a spent banana peel on a plate before it is [whoosh!] whisked away.

Did I mention that I would have made the same choice? Or alternatively, that I never would have volunteered to be "embedded" in the first place? The issue here is that we have human beings in the armed forces who never had the option of choosing not to get on the bus to their "embed" location. These folks--folks with small lives, small-town lives, folks who would never write for the New Yorker or be intereviewed by the liks of Terri Gross--who joined the Army Reserves because it promised money for college for two weeks a year and one weekend a month, and find themselves today in a sandy muddy abyss, with bullets whizzing around and oily smoke clouding their vision, hearing nightmares about a bunch of mechanics who took a wrong turn going through a town and found themselves roughed up on Iraqi TV, paralyzed with terror because they just watched Baathist paramilitaries pop caps in the heads of their platoonmates.

So, that dude? Hampton Sides, let's call him? Fuck Hampton Sides.
- posted by thegusdad @ 3/27/2003 08:25:00 PM