Of Journals and Journalists

Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Bateman is currently stationed in Washington, D.C. He was a Military Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and has authored two books: "Digital War, A View from the Front Lines" [1] (Presidio: 1999) and "No Gun Ri, A Military History of the Korean War Incident" [2] (Stackpole, 2002). These opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Government or the Armed Forces.

Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a Private in the United States Army. Beauchamp is an Infantryman who, even before he enlisted, expressed aspirations to be a professional writer. He is assigned to Alpha Company, First Battalion, Sixteenth Infantry. In military shorthand that would be “A/1-16 INF.” The battalion is part of the First Infantry Division, and it is currently conducting combat operations in the Doura section of Baghdad, Iraq. Beginning in January of this year, young Beauchamp appeared ready to grab the brass ring, at least in the writing department. He was still in Baghdad, but his writing was published by no less an outlet than The New Republic [3]. Under the heading of “Baghdad Diary,” Beauchamp was given a pen-name by the magazine so that, in the words of the editors, “he could write honestly and candidly about his emotions and experiences, even as he continued to serve in the armed forces and participate in combat operations.”

I am an infantryman, and like Beauchamp, I write. In my own case things started off much more humbly, with a great number of rejections, and finally a few articles in print within the small outlets of professional military journals. Over time my writing style matured, and I saw publication in commercial magazines, academic journals, and eventually edited an anthology and later wrote a book on my own. The process, before my de facto hobby started to pay for more than paper and ink cartridges, took about eight years. By the time I found myself in a one-man feud with the Associated Press over a Pulitzer story [4], I had already established a fairly complete track record. In all of those years I wrote “honestly and candidly.” Curiously, never once did I feel the need for a pen-name to conceal my identity.

Indeed, when I myself deployed to Iraq (and coincidentally worked some of the same ground now patrolled by Private Beauchamp) I too wrote about my experiences. And, like young Beauchamp, my materials were available on an almost exclusively left-wing outlet, though in my case it was the political web-log by Nation columnist Eric Alterman, the eponymous site “Altercation [5],” then on MSNBC.COM. (Now on Media Matters for America.)

Beauchamp wrote three essays for The New Republic, the first appearing near the beginning of this year. To my eyes none of these columns contained anything particularly unusual. But that may be because I have lived the life of an infantryman since Beauchamp was five years old, and I know what our soldiers are like. In addition to being noble, thoughtful, open-minded and warm, American soldiers can be crass, racist, misogynist, and obscene. In other words, they are just like any large cross-section of the culture from which they sprang. The editors of The New Republic, however, apparently thought that they were on to something new, something unique, a voice which had to be heard. But one which was so endangered (gasp, a liberal soldier?!) it had to be protected.

Beauchamp’s final essay, entitled, “Shock Troops,” did just that. Published by Franklin Foer in the pages of The New Republic and online, the essay appeared with the pen named byline “Scott Thomas.” (Not exactly deep cover, but cover nonetheless.) Beauchamp, as “Thomas,” talked about soldiers abusing corpses, being rude to a disfigured woman at their chow-hall in Iraq, and hitting dogs with Bradley fighting vehicles. When bloggers from the Right end of the political spectrum picked up on it, they went ballistic, and The New Republic went into full-court defense mode.

Now they have published a statement about L’affair du Beauchamp [6], and it is a doozy. For my own part I particularly found the following passage amazing.

“All of Beauchamp's essays were fact-checked before publication. We checked the plausibility of details with experts, contacted a corroborating witness, and pressed the author for further details. But publishing a first-person essay from a war zone requires a measure of faith in the writer.”

“Faith”? Hello? Is that what they teach in journalism school nowadays?

In preparing this essay I myself went to the great and extreme effort of walking across a few halls here in the Pentagon, where I now work, to talk to some professionals. I asked four nationally known reporters, career journalists used to dealing with issues of national security and defense, about their opinion on the fact checking allegedly done before publication of Beauchamp’s essays by The New Republic. Every single one of them used variations of the word “bullshit.” Two noted that despite the journalistic ideal of “transparency,” The New Republic still did not say who the “experts” consulted were, who the corroborating witness might have been, or any other of the details which would help readers determine the credibility of this latest pronouncement.

(On a sidebar, this infantryman finds it the very height of irony that none, absolutely none, of the journalists I interviewed about this case, who literally spend their days seeking out military officers to spill the beans about classified documents and discussions, could speak to me on the record about the process of journalism. Indeed two of them were reluctant to talk at all. It seems that all of them are barred, in one way or another, from giving unauthorized interviews. But that is a tale for another day.)

One example of the failures of the anti-mea culpa will have to suffice for now: In recounting his tale of being cruel to a woman with a facial disfiguration, Beauchamp said this, “I saw her nearly every time I went to dinner in the chow hall at my base in Iraq.” This is a very specific statement. It sets the scene: A chow hall in a combat zone. Specifically one in Baghdad itself. Unfortunately, at least for the hapless fact-checkers at The New Republic, that was not a fact at all.

The anti-mea culpa addresses this by citing how thorough the magazine’s follow-up reporting with other soldiers in Beauchamp’s unit was, stating, “The recollections of these three soldiers differ from Beauchamp's on one significant detail (the only fact in the piece that we have determined to be inaccurate): They say the conversation occurred at Camp Buehring, in Kuwait, prior to the unit's arrival in Iraq. When presented with this important discrepancy, Beauchamp acknowledged his error. We sincerely regret this mistake.”

“Mistake,” huh?

Calling a 300-mile, multinational, half-year temporal shift a “mistake” is just frankly shameful. It is not a “mistake” to place events that occurred in one country, into another country in your narrative. It is not just a “mistake” to take an event that occurred months and months earlier, during a temporary stay in a base outside of the combat zone, and transpose that into the present day and place the events in Iraq, just because it sounds better that way. “Artistic License” is not a concept that journalists are supposed to utilize.

The New Republic has enough problems with that particular phenomena, and as one of the Pentagon correspondents noted, there is a good reason for the truism, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Journalism, after all, is not supposed to be about Left and Right, it is not supposed to be about what sounds best, it is not supposed to be about telling a good tale. It is supposed to be about telling the facts in a way that readers can understand. Perhaps Mr. Foer might want to sign up for some remedial classes at Columbia until he gets that right.

You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com [7].

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