Page 400 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Pres dent al Stagecraft and M l ta nment |

resisting Pentagon inFluenCe
The first significant film to be set in the Persian Gulf depicting Desert Storm was Edward
Zwick’s Courage Under Fire (1996). The film features Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Sterling
(Denzel Washington), the leader of a tank battalion, who during the war had directed fire
at a suspected enemy vehicle, only to find that he had destroyed one of his own. After the
war he struggles to come to terms with this incident of friendly fire that bears an uncomfort-
ably close resemblance to actual conduct in the war. Sterling is dispatched to investigate
events surrounding the death of Captain Karen Walden (Meg Ryan), a Medivac helicopter
pilot killed in action. The film’s dark cast of the military goes further than friendly fire and
portrays the mutiny, cowardliness, and incompetence of the soldiers Captain Walden helped
save. Unable to accept orders from a woman, one soldier under her command leaves her
wounded in the desert, telling the rescue pilot that she is already dead. The U.S. Army re-
fused to supply equipment for the film unless Zwick changed the script. Refusing to depict
the military and the war in a better light, Zwick made the film without assistance from the
Pentagon.

When the United States began a bombing campaign over Afghanistan, press
requests for access to the war were refused, but working for ABC’s entertain-
ment division, Jerry Bruckheimer shot Profiles from the Front Line with full
cooperation from the U.S. military. The series from Afghanistan aired on ABC
during the buildup to war in Iraq, and Profiles was the first program to present
a war through the same visual and narrative style used in reality television. Tele-
vision news would later take its cues from movie producer Bruckheimer when
the war on Iraq began.
This first “reality show” treatment of the war on terror made no attempt to
cover civilians killed in the bombing of Afghanistan, and certainly offered no
pictures of that reality. Much of the media coverage of the invasion of Iraq was
foreshadowed by Profiles from the Front Line, and Iraq became the first war to be
televised in real time with embedded journalists providing videophone pictures
live from the desert battlefield. These compelling images featured brave soldiers
fighting, but almost no images of death or suffering. Some alternative Internet
sources showed the casualties of war, some of which were shut down by the
Pentagon.

ThE sTory oF saving PrivaTE LynCh
At one point, the initial invasion of Iraq was stalled by sandstorms and
heavy resistance around the capital of Baghdad. At that point, in the early
morning hours of April 2, 2003, the military announced to reporters at Central
Command in Qatar that a crack commando unit had rescued a young female
private named Jessica Lynch. Commandos had stormed a Nasiriyah hospital
and carried her to safety in a waiting Black Hawk helicopter. The gripping story
was ubiquitously described in the mainstream media as a daring raid. Time