Thirty-five years later, the Pentagon wouldn’t have dared consider implementing a similarly discriminatory policy during the war on Iraq. Embedded with units in all branches of the military, reporters of both genders were granted nearly the same amount of access to troops and the front lines that the media had in Vietnam (in Vietnam reporters were allowed to leave their units and even cross enemy lines). The program received warm reviews by media critics and embedded reporters alike. But some female reporters, like CNN’s Lisa Rose Weaver, complain that they weren’t being assigned to units the Pentagon knew would be on the front lines. “All the women embeds, and there weren’t very many of them, were with things like helicopter units and air units,” says Weaver. And Fawcett, who is now in her 60s and a political reporter for an ABC affiliate in Hawaii, asks, “Why did so few of them seem to be embedded with front-line combat troops in direct fighting?”
Maybe that’s because so few female reporters embedded in the first place. According to Maj. Tim Blair, who managed the Pentagon’s embedding program, the military didn’t ask volunteering reporters to state their gender on their paperwork. “We never had that as a criteria one way or another on where the embed was positioned,” he says. Some 775 names were provided by news organizations when the Pentagon offered them the slots. There is no definite count of how many reporters actually embedded with units, but Blair estimates there were only around 85 women who at least had the option. News agencies chose the reporters they wanted to embed, and those reporters tended to be male. It’s possible that fewer women were interested in embedding, but, says Fawcett, “it just baffles me that there weren’t more” of them out there.
Much has been said on the relative merits of the embedding policy. But what was it like to have been a woman living among, traveling with and reporting on a male-dominated military in the testosterone-soaked environment of desert combat? Apparently not all that different from being a male reporter, say many of the returning female embedded journalists. The consensus among returning female embeds–fembeds, if you will–is that even it if may have affected where they were sent, their gender was never a factor when it came time for them to do their jobs. The fact that it was no big deal for female reporters to ably cover desert warfare is perhaps in itself a big deal. “It’s not a headline that women are embedded,” says Pam Johnson, a faculty member at the Poynter Institute, a journalism-research center, and the former executive editor of the Arizona Republic. “The headline is that they were embedded and it worked just like it did for their male counterparts. And that’s probably good news.”
That’s true for some of the fembeds, like CNN’s Weaver. “I think, initially, male soldiers are more comfortable with male reporters. Because it is a man’s world out there–who are we kidding?” says Weaver, who in addition to her work for CNN also filed stories to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It’s war. It is. It doesn’t matter how much sexual harassment and sensitivity training the Army has, and they’ve had it.” Embedded with the Fifth Army Corps, 52nd Brigade of the air-defense artillery, Weaver says it took about a week, but “once I got to know people and they got to know me as an easy-going person, which I am–I don’t care, you can crack sexist jokes in front of me and I just roll my eyes–their guard went down and I just don’t think it was really an issue.”
But most fembeds noted that, in Weaver’s words, “there was the ‘ma’am factor’.” Male soldiers would go to extremes to show respect and courtesy to female civilians, calling them “ma’am” instead of by their names–so much so that, for some, it actually became an annoying indication that the soldiers might never make decent sources. But Ann Scott Tyson, who says she encountered “a lot of fighting” while reporting for the Christian Science Monitor from the Third Infantry Division, thinks the ma’am factor may have actually helped her do her job. “People aren’t going to maybe put on the same sort of tough veneer or the sort of more macho side that they may feel they have to hold up to another man,” she says. “It could help being a woman–as long as you’re not a wimp. As long as you go with the flow, you don’t ask for special treatment.” When you’ve spent more than a week with these soldiers, rolling around in the sand, under a lot of stress and occasionally bumping up against hostile fire, she says, the ma’am factor is the first thing to go. “The swearing, the lewd remarks, it was just constant. If they were uncomfortable around me, I think they would have held some of that in.”
This is precisely not what Anthony Swofford, author of “Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles,” predicted in a New York Times Magazine piece back in March. “This is a grunt game–spin the reporter. Tell him lies about your history and your future,” he wrote, adding that, “I can’t imagine a reporter joining my unit on our first live patrol.” Lucky for Swofford, the press pool system of the 1991 gulf war is generally considered an abortion of press freedom. He never had to worry about having to baby-sit a reporter of any gender, and he never got to spin anyone.
“I stand by the article I wrote. I think the real essence of what occurred will come out in the future when the people who fought write those stories,” he tells NEWSWEEK. When told that most fembeds report not having had any problem getting soldiers to relax around them, he says, “I’m not surprised. As a Marine, if I had been over there now with a female journalist, I don’t think she would have been treated any different than a male.” But he believes any reporter–male or female–is too foreign to a military unit to ever be fully trusted. They just wouldn’t get anything useful out of soldiers, period.
The experiences of many female reporters run directly counter to that, though. “Yes, you do bond with them,” says Weaver. “When they figured out I was going to stay–especially when they saw a CBS crew of three men drop out when things were getting kind of weird and I stayed–that definitely boosted my ratings with them … And once they figured out I wasn’t into doing stories that just made them look bad and that I wasn’t just digging into people’s personal lives, then they were OK with it.” They were so comfortable with her, she says, that they hardly blinked when she reported on a friendly fire incident in which her unit shot down a U.S. jet.
Obviously for many of the female reporters traveling in tight quarters with soldiers of both sexes, there were awkward moments resulting from the total lack of privacy. “I often was traveling just with men,” says Tyson. “Mostly I traveled in Humvees, either regular or armored. There’s no privacy on the roads in terms of being able to go to the bathroom. So after having been through a couple of days of that. I would just basically get out and loudly say ‘don’t look,’ and do what I had to do.”
Stephanie Sy, who traveled to Kuwait as a unilateral with a Virginia CBS affiliate, ended up embedding with the Army’s Newport News-based Seventh Transportation Group as the convoy moved into Iraq because she felt she was “getting the leftovers” in terms of stories. “The issue of being a woman was not a problem at all. I’ve reported from submarines where that was a problem,” says Sy. “The only time that it was a little bit weird was that when we were at Camp Arifjan with thousands of U.S. servicepeople, and on the door of the female head, the shower, there was a notice that said PLEASE DON’T GO TO THE BATHROOM ALONE because there had been like two separate attacks on females.” Going into combat is one thing, but having to anticipate danger from the soldiers you’re living with is something else entirely. To be sure, camps like Arifjan, with enormous numbers of soldiers, are little microcosms of society–they are like small cities complete with crime and good people and not-so-good people. But it’s a shame that Sy should feel “a bit sketchy” only after leaving the supposedly more-dangerous life as a unilateral.
Others, like the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton, never encountered combat, or even really bonded with troops. Far from rolling across the desert in a Humvee, she was embedded on the USS Abraham Lincoln, sharing a private room with fembeds from other media outlets. Not only was there no combat and no news to break on her ship, she says, the carrier initially assigned all reporters onboard–male and female–with a Navy “minder” to escort them to interviews. “It was frustrating.” Layton also notes that in a war where 10 percent of the embedded reporters were women, a full third of the embeds on the carrier carried an extra X-chromosome. “Someone told me that aircraft carriers were for girls and fat people, which made me kind of mad,” she says.
It’s anecdotes like these that stick in Denby Fawcett’s craw. Sure, she says women reporters have come a long way since she started as the women’s pages reporter in Honolulu. Female war reporters of her generation who slogged through the Vietnamese jungle helped pave the way for the crop of fembeds who just returned from Iraq. But for all their good work, she says, “my feeling is that this wasn’t really a war for women in terms of getting out and being at the heart of the matter. It wasn’t a great war in terms of women really proving themselves.” Women reporters may indeed still have some progress to make on the battlefield, but it’s yesterday’s news that they’ve proved themselves up to it.
