Seeing the Elephant

Michael Yon has a close encounter with the Talented Mr. Beauchamp. Yon's politely asks the detractors to back off:

Beauchamp is young; under pressure he made a dumb mistake. In fact, he has not always been an ideal soldier. But to his credit, the young soldier decided to stay, and he is serving tonight in a dangerous part of Baghdad. He might well be seriously injured or killed here, and he knows it. He could have quit, but he did not. He faced his peers. I can only imagine the cold shoulders, and worse, he must have gotten. He could have left the unit, but LTC Glaze told me that Beauchamp wanted to stay and make it right. Whatever price he has to pay, he is paying it.

The commander said I was welcome to talk with Beauchamp, but clearly he did not want anyone else coming at his soldier. LTC Glaze told me that at least one blog had even called for Beauchamp to be killed, which seems rather extreme even on a very bad day. LTC Glaze wants to keep Beauchamp, and hopes folks will let it rest. I’m with LTC Glaze on this: it’s time to let Beauchamp get back to the war. The young soldier learned his lessons. He paid enough to earn his second chance that he must know he will never get a third.

All of which manages to inspire this odd sort of response:

There's a lesson to be learned here alright but it's for the armchair warriors who think they had any right to judge Beauchamp in the first place. The humiliation belongs to those who mercilessly attacked an active duty soldier for telling a war story -- and it makes no difference whether it was true or not. Even if he made the whole thing up, he earned that right by being there and fighting for his country.

Emphasis added. It reminds me of the story of my friend's divorce, where the judge asked the poetess wife why she could not reconcile with the journalist husband. Caught off-guard by the question, she floundered a bit, then blurted out, "because he believes in an ultimate reality, and I don't."

Nowadays, I suppose, they'd have stayed married, since reality doesn't matter to journalism, either. As long as you've satisfied some faction that you've earned the right to lie indiscriminately.

Meanwhile, on the anti-war side, it really is that ugly.

Quickies

[Posted by reader_iam]

It's amazing to me how unbloggable I've found even major news stories, recently. Perhaps I'm suffering from some sort of hype-fatigue. Who knows? In any case, here's a partial list of my reactions to some stuff, big and small, that's been in the headlines:

1) Rove's departure. "Anti-climactic."

2) Chavez's move to consolidate power over the longer term. "Satisfyingly, though distressingly, predictable. People who didn't think this would happen right on schedule are the same sort who think George Bush won't leave office as scheduled--in short, fools."

3) Petraeus' report to be written by White House! "What's shocking or even surprising about this? Among other things, the Commander in Chief lives and works there, for good or for ill. In any case, I don't remember certain members of our Congress being so all-fire eager to get information from the horse's mouth when they boycotted a briefing with Petraeus a few months back. Political hay, plain and simple. The report is and was going to be criticized--or embraced, depending--regardless of its technical author."

4) AT&T issues book-length iPhone bills. "It figures, knowing what I know about that culture (based on some consulting experience years ago). And isn't it a charming touch to have text messages compiled and printed out? I've come to the conclusion that Icepick is right, and these "bills" are a good and healthy reminder: Any privacy we think we have is an illusion; corporate America has pretty much our entire lives in databases and, our protests to the contrary notwithstanding, most of us do and will continue to willingly and eagerly enable that, mostly for convenience."

5) Scott Thomas Beachamp: "The triumph of truthiness. And where did anybody get the idea that major fact-checking takes place anywhere in newspapers and magazines anymore? The very idea that departments of fact-checking still meaningfully exist is a quaint anachronism. I mean, what the heck--are we confusing TNR with the New Yorker circa 1955, or what? Make no mistake, I believe fervently in the importance of fact-checking. I just don't believe it takes place particularly rigorously anywhere anymore, for most part."

6) Campaign 2008: "Nails, meet chalkboard. Does anyone truly like picturing any of the candidates as president, much less find them inspiring? And whose idea was it to turn our traditionally already too-long campaign season into a freakin' marathon? I can't decide whether they're trying to irritate or numb us into submission, but in either case, it's darn near a criminal offense, and I resent it. So there."

Enough for now.

Journalism and Fiction

[posted by Callimachus]

I wouldn't make too much of this.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has learned from a military source close to the investigation that Pvt. Scott Thomas Beauchamp--author of the much-disputed "Shock Troops" article in the New Republic's July 23 issue as well as two previous "Baghdad Diarist" columns--signed a sworn statement admitting that all three articles he published in the New Republic were exaggerations and falsehoods--fabrications containing only "a smidgen of truth," in the words of our source.

Thanks to his own foolishness in publishing as he did while still on duty, Pvt. Beauchamp finds himself firmly in the grip of institutions that thrive on making other people miserable. They likely made him an offer he couldn't refuse, and as we already know by his own writings he lacks the firmness of will and sense of honor to endure the consequences. No doubt, after his discharge, he'll have a career recounting his horror stories of being threatened with Gitmo unless he signed, in a set speech made to anti-war and anti-military groups for as long as he can still fit in the old uniform.

Even if he later recants his alleged recantation, he's already admitted a huge error -- I can't believe it's not a fudge -- which points out what I think is the main problem with this young man's journalism:

The magazine's editors admitted on August 2 that one of the anecdotes Beauchamp stood by in its entirety--meant to illustrate the "morally and emotionally distorting effects of war"--took place (if at all) in Kuwait, before his tour of duty in Iraq began, and not, as he had claimed, in his mess hall in Iraq. That event was the public humiliation by Beauchamp and a comrade of a woman whose face had been "melted" by an IED.

Forgetting when and where a major scene in your story took place is not a common error. But rearranging reality to make it flow better into the constructive paths of narrative fiction is something done all the time. Pvt. Beauchamp was a creative writer. He treated his material as something that could be shaped and twisted to make the point. His article was no more "true" to his experience than "For Whom the Bell Tolls" or "A Farewell to Arms" was true to Hemigway's. It was. And it wasn't.

And it was untrue in just the ways journalistic writing demands veracity.

The puzzle of it is, Beauchamp's theme, the "morally and emotionally distorting effects of war," is such an old and easy one it's hard to believe he was too lazy to go and find authentic examples of it. Every army, whether it lures men with dreams of glory or booty, or drives them in at bayonet point with drafts and levies, includes some criminals and weak minds. Every experience of battle unhinges some otherwise decent men and allows their inner monsters to emerge. We've seen it in this war in Abu Ghraib and a few other places.

What's so infuriating to many who support the military and its work in Iraq is that some group of people here at home would go out of their way to disseminate false stories to compound the true ones. What good could that do? What higher motive could there be for that?

But what's surprising is that there haven't been more cases. Certainly the world is watching as it has never watched another army in action. And after more than four years of fighting such a brutalizing war, against such a ghastly enemy, amid a neutral-to-hostile population, perhaps the revelation in Pvt. Beauchamp is that a man who goes there to see what ought to be prevalent has to invent it to see it. Perhaps our troops really are that disciplined and that good. The professional armies of France and Germany in their glory never could have endured it so long without "going native."

Rick Moran has a typically read-worthy take on the whole thing.