War Profiles: Julian E. Barnes '92, embedded journalist

It was the 101st Airborne’s second day of fighting in Karbala, Iraq.

A group of American soldiers lined up, one squad behind the other, ready to attack.

But while most men held their rifles at the ready, one man—buried within one of the trailing units—marched with his weapon of choice, a laptop, slung over his shoulder.

Suddenly, the troops came under fire.

Over the crash of artillery shells came the command, “Hit the wall!” Several soldiers ducked into a small, protected courtyard. But the man without a gun couldn’t quite fit—his laptop was in the way.

He turned around, surveying his escape options and locked his eyes on a small doorway. With a powerful shove, he forced himself inside the sealed doorway and joined the other soldiers.

“See that reporter,” the commander exclaimed, apparently shocked by the strength and resourcefulness of the man with the computer, “Put him with the lead element.”

The reporter was Julian E. Barnes ’92, and his experience put him on the front line—if not of the war, then of a new kind of combat journalism.

Known as embedded reporting, the practice first emerged in Kosovo and Afghanistan, but saw its first large-scale implementation in Iraq—where roughly 600 reporters were embedded in coalition units.

Embedded reporting has introduced an unparalleled level of detail into the way journalists cover war.

Barnes, along with his fellow embedded journalists, was prepared for the experience during a week-long media boot camp run by the military that covered topics from personal hygiene to how to march in formation with the soldiers. Barnes said he was at first a little unsure of how helpful the lectures would be.

“We spent a whole half day on hygiene—learning how to change our socks,” he said.

But once he began marching alongside the soldiers, he said he realized how important hygiene could be. “My feet got really disgusting,” he said. “I was definitely glad we had the whole lecture on keeping feet dry.”

After mastering the basics of military life, the journalists were deployed alongside combat units, allowing them to report directly from the battlefront, focus attention on individualized stories of combat and dissect the war from the battlefield up.

“Embedded reporting let us convey to our readers what was happening on a closer level,” said Barnes. “I heard the general confer with the colonel, the colonel with the lieutenant colonel, the lieutenant colonel with the major, all the way down to the soldier. I watched it trickle down. It allowed me to see how a battle is put together.”

But Barnes also said that embedded reporting raises a number of worries, prime among them the need to balance the relatively narrow perspective of the individual reporter on the front line with the big picture.

“There’s some debate about what kind of coverage came out of it,” he said. “One person cannot tell the story of an entire war.”

While Barnes became familiar with the sights and sounds of battle, he said his experience still left him “unsure of how the average person experienced the war.”

Barnes said he also found it troublesome to gauge Iraqi reactions to the war. “When I was embedded, it was difficult to know what the perspective of the Iraqis was,” he said.

Barnes said that placing journalists on the front line “brings us closer to the ideal access we are always striving after.”

“In a way it helps to learn how the military works, including what went wrong,” he said.

He related one troublesome but interesting story that he said he would never have gotten if he had not been allowed access to the 101st.

Barnes said that he watched a soldier kill an Iraqi child.

Although such an action would normally garner harsh criticism, Barnes said that he saw the event unfold and recognized that the soldier had no other choice but to act.

The child was attempting to recover a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher from a fallen Iraqi, but the soldier’s instructions were to prevent any opposition forces from taking back the weapon.

Barnes said that only after trying to stop the child and firing warning shots did the soldier take aim and fire.

“The soldier was obviously hurting,” he said, describing how difficult it was for the soldier to decide in less than a second whether to take the life of a child or ignore his orders.

“It’s a story that you could get only because you were embedded,” he said, adding that it was great to “be in a position where you could tell his story.”

Barnes also recounted lighter incidents from his time in Iraq, including the sense of camaraderie that developed between reporters and soldiers both on and off the battlefield.

Barnes recalled one incident in which the 101st was poised to take an airfield outside of the city of Najaf. “I was in the planning session the night before,” he said. “The soldiers were discussing the airfield and the possibility of some weapon caches.”

The next morning, Barnes rode in an Avenger truck, a Humvee mounted with a .50 caliber machine gun, behind a line of tanks and trucks, and surrounded by rows of infantry.

As the soldiers approached, they realized that the airfield was really an onion field.

“We thought one building was a weapon cache, but turns out it was a farmhouse,” he said. “What was funny by the end of the day had been nerve-wracking in the beginning.”

According to Barnes, the soldiers named this blunder “The Invasion of the Onion Field.”

The soldiers also devised a nickname for Barnes, “Harvard Hippie,” referring to his Crimson heritage and his hair, which was slightly longer than the average soldier’s crew cut.

—Staff writer Wendy D. Widman can be reached at widman@fas.harvard.edu.