Search Results for: Army

Freelancing in War Zones: Serious Journalists Left with Little Protection

Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. In the last three years at least 60 of them have been killed while covering the conflict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Missing from the statistics is anything about the kind of journalist who goes to Syria and why. After the death of Marie Colvin, in a blizzard of Syrian Army shells in Homs in February 2012, much of the Western media drew back from covering the country. Meanwhile, a lightly resourced, laughably paid, almost wholly uninsured cadre of freelancers, often armed with little more than a notebook and a mobile phone, infiltrated Syria anyway. A few were crazy narcissists or war-zone tourists, but most were serious reporters. Four-fifths of all journalists working in Syria, according to one estimate, are freelance and answering to no one but themselves.

-James Harkin, in May’s Vanity Fair, on the disappearance of journalists Austin Tice and Jim Foley, and the dangers that freelance reporters face. A video surfaced Tuesday in which Foley allegedly was killed by members of the militant group ISIS.

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Photo: Nicole Tung, freejamesfoley.org

Journalist Austin Tice Is Still Missing Two Years After Being Kidnapped

Syria is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. In the last three years at least 60 of them have been killed while covering the conflict there, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Missing from the statistics is anything about the kind of journalist who goes to Syria and why. After the death of Marie Colvin, in a blizzard of Syrian Army shells in Homs in February 2012, much of the Western media drew back from covering the country. Meanwhile, a lightly resourced, laughably paid, almost wholly uninsured cadre of freelancers, often armed with little more than a notebook and a mobile phone, infiltrated Syria anyway. A few were crazy narcissists or war-zone tourists, but most were serious reporters. Four-fifths of all journalists working in Syria, according to one estimate, are freelance and answering to no one but themselves.

Austin Tice was one of these. So was I. Our paths had even crossed. Three weeks before he disappeared, while cooling my heels in the Turkish border town of Antakya, waiting for someone to take me into Syria, I’d asked my hosts at a Free Syrian Army safe house whether any Western journalists had passed this way before. Just one, they said—an American named Austin who had stayed with them for a week. They kept in touch with him on Facebook—he was still inside.

— From a Vanity Fair story on journalists who’ve gone missing in Syria. Reporter Austin Tice, a former U.S. marine who was writing for The Washington Post and other publications, went missing in Syria two years ago today. Tice’s parents write: “Austin, please know that we love and miss you more than words can say.”

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— Watch a documentary on Tice produced and released by McClatchy Newspapers on the anniversary of his kidnapping:

Photo:

Why Do So Many People Pretend to Be Native American?

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Russell Cobb | This Land Press | August 2014 | 16 minutes (3,976 words)

This Land PressFor this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we are thrilled to share a brand new essay from Oklahoma’s This Land Press, just published in their August 2014 issue. This Land has been featured on Longreads often in the past—you can support them here.
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The Skies Belong to Us: How Hijackers Created an Airline Crisis in the 1970s

Brendan I. Koerner | The Skies Belong to Us | 2013 | 25 minutes (6,186 words)

 

‘There Is No Way to Tell a Hijacker by Looking At Him’

When the FAA’s antihijacking task force first convened in February 1969, its ten members knew they faced a daunting challenge—not only because of the severity of the crisis, but also due to the airlines’ intransigence. Having spent vast sums on Beltway lobbyists, the airlines had the political clout to nix any security measure that might inconvenience their customers. So whatever solutions the FAA proposed would have to be imperceptible to the vast majority of travelers. Read more…

First Chapter: Dave Eggers’ Novel, ‘Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?’

Dave Eggers | Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? | June 2014 | 23 minutes (5,800 words)

 

BUILDING 52

—I did it. You’re really here. An astronaut. Jesus.
—Who’s that?
—You probably have a headache. From the chloroform.
—What? Where am I? Where is this place? Who the fuck are you?
—You don’t recognize me?
—What? No. What is this? Read more…

The Pros and Cons of Praising Children

At Aeon, Carlin Flora looks at the pros and cons of praising children and what psychologists say to avoid:

Over-praising children (You’re amazing!) can make them feel your standards are very high, causing the fear that they won’t be able to keep living up to them, say the psychologists Jennifer Henderlong Corpus of Reed College and Mark Lepper of Stanford. Praising them for easy tasks can make children suspect that you are dumb (don’t you know how easy this is?) or that you think they are dumb. Here’s an especially tricky finding: praising them for things they naturally enjoy can backfire if you do it too much, sapping motivation instead of urging the child on.

Doing it all wrong, I was a worthy recipient of this self-professed rant by the University of San Francisco psychologist Jim Taylor: ‘Good job? Well, it’s lazy praise, it’s worthless praise, it’s harmful praise… If you’re going to be lazy with your praise, at least say Good effort! because it focuses them on what they did to do a good job… The reality is that children don’t need to be told Good job! when they have done something well; it’s self-evident… Particularly with young children, you don’t need to praise them at all.’

But the discussion about overpraising our children is drawing away from the real problem, says a child psychologist from Cornell, which is the way we criticize them:

‘I have met many discouraged, angry, and unhappy children. I have met demoralised kids who were unable to sustain effort when they encountered even mild frustration or disappointment, and others who had developed attitudes of entitlement. And the culprit is not praise, but criticism. Most of these children were over-criticised; very few were overpraised.’

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Photo: U.S. Army

Calling Their Mothers From the Front Lines

And in the middle of this tumult, I came back to the relative calm of my hotel room in the Hotel Palestine. There was no electricity. Sunlight slanted horizontally into the dusty, dim corridors and I saw at the end of the passage, outside my room, two figures silhouetted against the white glare of the sun. As I approached I saw that they were soldiers, their uniforms stained with the mud of the Tigris valley, Americans, for they were cradling US Army assault rifles in their arms.

They were an intimidating presence. Until they spoke. “Sir,” one of them said, and there was a quiet, shy deference in his voice. I saw that they were young, achingly young, perhaps 19 years old, lettuce-fresh faces above long, lean, loose-limbed frames – no more than boys in the grown-up garb of desert camouflage. “Sir,” he went on, “we heard that there was a satellite phone in this room. We haven’t been able to call home in four months.”

They were the first in a little trickle of young US servicemen who would come to my room for this purpose in the weeks that lay ahead. What struck me with great poignancy was this – that almost always they phoned their mothers. From the other side of the room you would hear the phone sound in some far place in Kentucky or Idaho. The boy would say “Hi Mom!” and then you would hear the excited, disbelieving scream of delight echoing down the line.

BBC correspondent Allan Little recalls a memory from the spring of 2003, during his time covering the war in Iraq. Little’s essay explores the role of civilian correspondents from the battle front, as well as the “magnetic pull that war has on the young male imagination.”

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Image: “Paths of Glory” by Christopher Nevinson, via Wikimedia Commons. The painting, which depicts a World War I battlefield, was deemed bad for morale and immediately censored. 

Love and War

Longreads Pick

A legendary Special Forces commander was quietly forced to leave the U.S. Army after he admitted to a love affair with a Washington Post war correspondent, who quit her job to secretly live with him for almost a year in one of the most dangerous combat outposts in Afghanistan.

Tyson knew most of the visiting VIPs well from her long stint at the Washington Post, a job she quit to join Gant and write the book, and said she had to keep her presence in Gant’s combat “qalat” secret. News media “embeds” in Afghanistan with Special Operations forces rarely exceed a few days and she was not authorized by any task force to be in the Mangwel operation – much less for nine months.

“I stayed out of the picture,” she said in the ABC News interview with Gant in Seattle. “We didn’t want my presence there to be widely known, but at the same time a lot of people knew about it… I was glad for the opportunity to help the man I had fallen in love with, as well as to write about a potential solution to the incredible suffering I had witnessed over a decade almost.”

Source: ABC News
Published: Jun 24, 2014
Length: 17 minutes (4,286 words)

Greet the Enemy

Longreads Pick

The writer on his experience with night terrors, which he associates with his love of horror films and the work of Tom Savini, a special-effects artist known for working with director George Romero on zombie films:

Savini joined the Army rather than wait to get drafted because enlisted men got to pick their jobs. He served as a combat photographer in Vietnam. After the war, he moved to North Carolina and started acting in a repertory theater. He was still playing around with makeups, still using them to scare the holy shit out of people. (In Vietnam, he had been all, “Mama-san, take . . . a . . . look . . . at . . . THIS!”) In fact, that’s what earned him his early notoriety, the verisimilitude of his wounds. “There’s something about seeing the real thing that sets me apart from, let’s say, some other makeup artists who have never experienced that,” he said in a post-Vietnam interview. “When I’m creating an effect, if it doesn’t look good to me—real—doesn’t give me that feeling I used to get when I’d see the real stuff, then it’s just not real enough for me.”

Source: Tin House
Published: Jun 1, 2014
Length: 21 minutes (5,453 words)

Without Chief or Tribe: An Expat’s Guide to Having a Baby in Saudi Arabia

Nathan Deuel | Friday Was the Bomb | May 2014 | 21 minutes (5,178 words)

 

For our latest Longreads Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share a full chapter from Friday Was the Bomb, the new book by Nathan Deuel about moving to the Middle East with his wife in 2008. Deuel has been featured on Longreads in the past, and we’d like to thank him and Dzanc Books for sharing this chapter with the Longreads community. 

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