palewire

This Memorial Day weekend marked the formal launch of California’s War Dead, our database of the state’s casualties from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s the result of a lot of hard work by many people at the paper, a large share of which had already been carried through the years by our many obituary writers.

The site intends to allow users to explore the data using a variety of criteria (for example, you can quickly look up fallen troops by hometown, high school or marital status). And to learn more about individuals by reading their obituaries from our back archives. Choice quotes have been selected to “pop” out of the individual profile pages and visitors are encouraged to leave memories and thoughts as comments.

Besides all my coworkers who pitched in to make this happen on a tight deadline, thank yous should be extended to all the great developers in the Django community. They not only provided the Web programming tools that made this idea possible, but also the leadership that showed me how the tools can be used to make journalism for the Web, not just on the Web. The same goes for all the people in the NICAR community who, by leading by example, have pushed me to keep learning new things and have the courage to take chances outside of journalism’s well worn comfort zones. Personally, I just hope that first group can forgive me for ripping off their ideas and that the second group doesn’t resent my getting the opportunity to do things like this without having to put in the once requisite 5 to 10 years on the cops-and-courts beat.

If you’re stretched for time, or maybe doubting there’s anything new to be learned about the war, let me promote a couple spots that might interest you.

• Over the course of assembling the data, I was surprised to learn how many immigrants to California have died. It’s more than fifty, from Mexico and the Phillipines and South Korea and a number of other places. Check out the lists here. A fascinating story is of Sgt. Rafael Peralta of San Diego, who enlisted the same day he received his Green Card and died in Fallouja, Iraq, when he sacrificed himself to save his compatriots from a grenade attack. His profile is here and the story of his heroic death is here.

• The most rewarding part of the project for me has been to see how quickly we’re getting great, thoughtful comments submitted by friends and family members of the deceased. One of my goals in the design was to give their writing equal footing with our previous reporting. It can be heartbreaking to read, but I’m proud to have helped make something that people think is worthy of such sensitive information. Examples I find particularly moving are the memories shared by the family of Sgt. Jason J. Buzzard of Ukiah and Corporal Christopher D. Leon of Lancaster, who I’m honored to know better now than I did before our commentors contributed.

• It seems natural to expect that spending so much time with casualty data would have a numbing effect. But I think that’s only the case when we let the very real people we’ve lost remain numbers in a casualty count or unknown names on a page. It’s the stories that bring them to life, and my experience has been that the more stories you hear, the less numb you feel. The pain is in the details. A moving example is Teresa Watanabe’s obituary of Lt. Mark J. Daily of Irvine, who was inspired to join the war by the political writing of war advocate Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens has since gone to write a moving response to learning of Daily’s readership, and sacrifice, that you can find here.

• Finally, I’d suggest checking out the video of California’s Riverside Cemetery by the LAT’s Saatchi Cunningham. Riverside is home to dozens of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the top resting place in the state.

Here’s a word cloud I cooked up real quick over at Many Eyes comparing today’s opening statement from Iraq commander General David Petraeus to his previous Congressional visit last September. As Dana Milbank has noted, you’ll find less focus on Al Qaeda this time around, and more mentions for Iran.

Note that this isn’t his entire testimony. Just the opening statements. So, it doesn’t include the many questions he’s fielded.

I walked down near Ford’s Theater this afternoon to catch The War Tapes at E Street Cinema. The concept is simple. Along with the rifle, assault pack, body armor and other gear issued to the typical American soldier, five members of a National Guard unit from New Hampshire set for deployment to Iraq were equipped with a less conventional tool: the hand-held video camera.

The embedded journalist is one of the American military’s notable, if not altogether significant, innovations of the Iraq War. The unkempt scribe in khakis and shades, mail-order helmet askance, packing his bags and enlisting to travel with an individual unit, ceding independence in return for access. If softening coverage was, as many allege, the Pentagon’s intent, then this film should theoretically be an even greater realization of its mission. The bothersome vulture is disposed with entirely. Where the embedment program would cast the journalist as soldier, The War Tapes casts the soldier as journalist.

But the result isn’t the upbeat infomercial we’ve come to expect from the White House and the Pentagon’s civilian leadership. It’s a ground-level chronicle of the frustrations, dashed hopes and anxieties that have, unfortunately, come to characterize the occupation. Arriving for their tour well after the fall of Baghdad, our guides aren’t witness to much in the way of valor, or even combat. Instead it would seem that they spend most of their days sheparding contractors and support staff through a minefield of improvised explosives amid the palpable unease of the natives. Measuring success proves as elusive as understanding the enemy, whose appearances are limited to a few gruesome bodies strewn by the side of the road after a frenetic spasm of automatic gunfire.

Cynicism pervades the barracks, eventually afflicting even the once idealistic Michael Moriarty, a husband and father who rushed to New York after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and who, like many Americans, earnestly viewed the invasion as an unavoidable challenge imposed by the destruction of that day. He was so inspired by what he saw at Ground Zero, he says, that he was moved to leave his family behind and follow the president’s call to action. By the end of their tour, the common sentiment among the soldiers treats the war not as a benevolent, if flawed, liberation, but instead a brutish power grab in the war of all against all. Power and money is what war has always been about, Stephen Pink says after he’s returned home to Cape Cod, and his hope is that at least some regular Americans get to taste the profits from this one.

The majority of the venom we hear from the soldier’s lips isn’t directed at insurgents or Iraqis, but instead the American contractors Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton that has been outsourced billions of dollars worth of logistics work. The most frequent target is vice president and former Halliburton executive, Dick Cheney, who the soldiers routinely lampoon as a war profiteer.

And after the relief and joy of their safe homecoming fades away, the story turns grim again, as the soldiers struggle to overcome physical and psychological infirmities and grapple with the challenge of reconnecting with family and friends who are largely unable to relate to their distant experiences.

The recipient of nearly universal critical praise, having scored points for “not being preachy” and offering an “unvarnished” view of the war, it’s worth remembering that, as the Village Voice’s Michael Atkinson emphasizes in the lone dissent I could find among major critics, there’s one very important point of view that’s been left out of this and most other visual depictions of the war, the Iraqi perspective. Indeed, as Atkinson observes, although I will add the exception of a Lebanese soldier who speaks Arabic and strives to connect with the natives, the voices in the film almost exclusively “disdainfully observe the indigenous populace from a distance as if they were hyenas on the veld.”

While the American psyche may yearn to withdraw and nurse its wounds after the shock of the Iraq experience, can this country truly understand the global challenge issued on Sept. 11 or the responsibilities it accepted when it invaded Iraq simply by looking in the mirror?

Time’s Web site has a follow-up story with the Iraqi journalism student who broke the Haditha story (link). You’ll note that Taher doesn’t respond to attention with the appeals to professionalism and objective detachment favored by most American journalists.

“These are people who didn’t just kill individuals, they destroyed entire families,” he says. “In Islam, the punishment for such a crime is death.”

You’ll also note that Time’s coverage, once so humble and unassuming (One Morning in Haditha, March 27, 2006), has become much bolder now that leaks from the military investigation have backed up their story (The Shame of Kilo Company, May 28, 2006).

Somewhere in between coughing up Matt Cooper’s emails and canning one of the best investigative teams in the history of American journalism, Time magazine managed to do at least one thing it can brag about. Reporter Tim McGurk and Aparisim Ghosh filed a report on the magazine’s Web site on March 19 questioning the U.S. military’s official story on what happened after Lance Corporal Miguel Terrazas was killed when his Humvee struck a roadside bomb outside the Iraqi city of Haditha on Nov. 19, 2005. The official military version back then was that the bomb attack also killed 15 civilians and was followed by an ambush of the U.S. convoy by insurgent gunmen. After engaging in battle, the U.S. forces claimed they killed eight insurgents. As we’ve learned in the papers these last few days, U.S. forces no longer make those claims.

McGurk and Ghosh’s reporting, based on a videotape provided by an activist group and interviews with residents and officials in Haditha, gave voice to witnesses and survivors there who say that innocent civilians, including a number of women and young children, were massacred in their homes by rampaging American soldiers. The Time story led to an internal military investigation, the results of which are now leaking out through the newspapers. Three battalion leaders have already been sacked and the more we learn the uglier it gets. The body count has risen. The military is backing away from previous statements. And it looks like we may see a splash in the next few weeks when it all comes out. Who knows where this one ends up, but right now it looks like it has the potential to hit like another Abu Ghraib. Unfortunately, as it still appears to have been the case with Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, the military’s media machine seems to have been caught twisting the truth, this time covering up for what Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), an initial supporter of the war who has transformed into a vocal critic, is already denouncing as cold-blooded murder.

As constructive as the American reporting has been, it deserves to be mentioned that it might not have happened without a videotape shot the day after the attacks and publicized by an Iraqi branch of Human Rights Watch. I’ve yet to read any reporting on the cameraman, but it’s being credited to an unnamed Iraqi journalism student. After all this reporting, I still don’t know who it was. Has anyone printed the name? I’d think he or she deserves a little attention, at least within the journalism community. Somebody should skype ‘em.

You can watch an edited version of the video at ABCnews.com.