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" (Presidio: 1999) and "No Gun Ri, A Military History of the Korean War Incident" (Stackpole, 2002). These opinions are his own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Government or the Armed Forces.
Teaching cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point is a unique experience.  For starters, West Point is first and foremost an engineering school. Every single student there will graduate with a Bachelors of Science.  This presents challenges when you are a member of the history department. Our advantage is that at the core, history is about stories. So it was that every semester, when the time was right, I would tell my cadets one particular story.
My tale for the cadets was one of an economic giant of a nation which, despite a proud martial heritage, had recently been defeated in war. During the closing years of that painful conflict, there had been considerable social unrest at home.  Indeed, the domestic situation became so bad that, coupled with several strategic setbacks, the leaders of the nation conceded that the war could not go on under these double pressures. They tossed in the towel.
A few years later in that same country, during the perpetual political struggle twixt Right and Left, the conservatives latched upon a new meme, one which originated within the military: “We were not defeated upon the battlefield!” they cried. “It was the defeatists at home who fell for enemy propaganda about the war and who forced our heroic and patriotic army to give up – even though we were in a strong position on the battlefield! They stabbed our heroes in the back!”  These same conservatives also painted a picture of a nearly mythological pastoral past, one where small-town values ruled and everyone knew their neighbors. They hammered on these points and eventually won political power with their charismatic artist-leader.
At this point, I would pause. Waiting a few moments for the story to sink in, I allowed the cadets time to ponder. Then I would ask a simple question. “For five points, when is this, where is this, what war was I describing, and who is the leader?”
The cadets I was teaching were “Cows” and “Firsties.” In English that means they were juniors and seniors. Given that I was teaching at West Point in the late 1990s, this meant that the overwhelming majority of the cadets came into this world somewhere between 1975 and 1979. Their responses, therefore, were fairly predictable.
“Sir, the years are the 1970s, and you’re talking about the United States. The domestic unrest came because of the way the media reported Vietnam, and the leader was President Reagan.”
 “Uh, no, not at all. Not even the right continent. Sorry.”
It was really only at this point that I actually had all of their attention.
“What I just described to you was the end of the First World War, and the country was Germany.  Though German troops were, in fact, still in Belgium and France at the moment of the Armistice, had the war continued that would not have been the case for even another month. On top of that, the German military had so mismanaged the domestic economy that widespread starvation occurred at home.  It was so bad that the winter of 1917-1918 went down in German history as ‘The Turnip Winter’ since that was the only food many people could get.  Starvation soared and morale at home plummeted, and that led to social unrest. The conservatives talked about the military being ‘stabbed in the back’ by the liberals and the Left, despite the reality that it had been the military mismanagement of the war that had resulted in both battlefield defeats and domestic starvation. The political party that rode this story line, called in German the Dolchstoss Legend, were the National Socialists. You know them better as the Nazis. Their leader was a failed artist named Adolph Hitler.”
Stunned silence almost always followed at this point.  From a professor’s point of view, that is not always a bad thing.  Usually it means that you have touched your audience. (Sometimes it means they are asleep, but that is another matter.)
Now I have assaulted such misperceptions from within the military for the majority of my professional career because there are an awful lot of military officers and men who actually believe that the media lost the Vietnam War, no matter how stupid that idea is when examined. But I am only one man, and the fact remains that I have the advantage that I am inside the institution.  This gives me some degree of immunity. (It is, after all, fairly difficult to cogently argue that a regular Army infantry officer is somehow anti-American/anti-military.) You journalists, on the other hand, have a more difficult row to hoe. So how do you deal with this institutional mistrust?  As a partial solution, I offer four, somewhat heretical, recommendations.  These recommendations are simple and are intended to allay fears, one experience at a time.  Take them or leave them, but I do believe they will work to at least retard the resurrection. Moreover, if you do not do something, it seems certain that a new Dolchstoss Legend will arise, and that is not good for anyone, soldier or scribbler.
1. If you interview somebody and plan to use their quotes, use larger block quotes.  My culture, or at least my primary culture, is paranoid in the extreme about their words being taken out of context.  One partial solution is for reporters to stop thinking in terms of quotes being single lines of text.  Even two sentences are not enough.  Yes, I know that this runs head-on into many style guides.  Yes, I know that space is at a premium. But desperate times call for desperate measures.  To reduce fear, journalists need to give full voice to the men and women they interview.  There is nothing holy or sacred within journalism that prevents this.  What we are living with today is only the style of written journalism that has developed over the past 80 years. This, of course, really must start with the editors.
2.  E-mail is now ubiquitous, but somehow an obvious link is being missed with regards to its use among most journalists.  That connection is the one between you and the people you interview.  Again, it is crucial to address the deep-seated fear of being misquoted that pervades the military.  Letting them see what you think they said is just common sense. Moreover, there is nothing in the world that says you cannot show a person their own quote, and now there is no physical reason why you should not.
Twenty years ago, or even 10 years ago, e-mail was anomalous in many cases.  The drain in time and effort to mail to a person (or find/call and show him or her) the text of their quotes was prohibitive. Not so anymore. Now the only thing holding anyone back is journalistic tradition and an irrational fear that somehow this would result in a loss of journalistic control and/or integrity.  How? 
I must note that having been on the receiving end of interviews, I can understand to some degree my military peers’ fears.  I have been misquoted myself.  And in all of the interviews I have given over the years, only two journalists ever read back to me what they had for my words, or sent me an e-mail to confirm what I had said. On the other hand, you might want to consider the fact that one of those who did read my words back to me was David Halberstam. 
3.  Go low.  By this I mean talk to the lowest level of public affairs officer you can find. Yes, they might technically be considered “flacks,” but that is not how they want to see themselves, and not all PAOs are equal. As a general rule of thumb, the higher up the chain of command you go, the more careful and jealous of information you will find the PAO. This, by the way, is not their fault. Imagine asking the public relations office at General Motors’ global headquarters for the current production line statistics at a particular plant. You are not likely to get immediate or helpful statistics from him, are you? But by calling the press office at the plant itself, you are likely to learn all you need in a moment.  Why? Because the latter is right there, at the source. He is less leery of your question because he probably understands what prompted your query, while the fellow at the national headquarters would immediately want to know why you want to know something. See? The same social and human dynamic applies to the military.
4. Finally, if you demonstrate a sincere effort in getting the details right, you will win over countless soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.  There are roughly 24 million veterans in the United States. When you write about the “3rd Battalion, First Cavalry Division,” every single one of those veterans and all of the active military will consider you sloppy, and that will feed into their biases.  So for units and equipment, follow the technique I recommend with interviews. E-mail some of the details to those lower level PAOs (or higher ones if you like), or the people that you interviewed, asking, “What is this weapon? How do you abbreviate this rank, or this type of unit?” Give them the context of the sentence if you must. Hell, show them the whole paragraph. Again, you are not “spilling the beans.” Indeed, by doing so you are vastly reducing the fear of “gotcha journalism” that exists. Yes, I know, every special field complains that journalists do not get the details right. But on the other hand, no other specialized field (scientists, physicians, etc.) deals in life and death so directly, so often, or so publicly. 
If you make a mistake in reporting a new gall-bladder operation technique, nobody will die. If you screw up reporting on the military, it is possible.    
You can write to LTC Bob at R_Bateman_LTC@hotmail.com.
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