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Rory Mulholland: Camp Britney, Tikrit.
By Pól Ó Conghaile
BORED IN BRITNEY
Pól Ó Conghaile hears about a different
side of war from an Irish journalist
who was embedded in Iraq.
On December 13, 2003 US soldiers fished Saddam Hussein out of a bunker
near Tikrit, northwest of Baghdad. The next day, the world's
media rushed to hear how the Ace of Spades was captured. Then, just as
hurriedly, they left.
Or rather, most of them did. The dictator's home turf would
subsequently prove a news vacuum, but its sexy dateline (and poor
phone links with
Baghdad) led press agencies to keep Tikrit a going concern. For a
small cabal of reporters, Saddam's palace became an outpost.
Rory Mulholland was one. An Irish journalist working for
Agence
France-Presse (AFP), Mulholland was embedded with the US Army's
4th Infantry Division at the end of 2003. His book of the events
- Camp Britney, Tikrit - makes for surreal reading, to say the least.
"They say war for most soldiers is 99% boredom and
1%
craziness," Mulholland says, speaking by phone from his home in
Paris. "That was pretty much my experience in Tikrit it
was a bit like a theatre of war, but you were in the wings."
Camp Britney is a record of its author's attempts to pluck
stories from the post-Saddam limbo. It opens, for instance, with an
image that wouldn't be out of place in Three Kings or Jarhead: a
soldier dribbling his basketball on the despot's marble floor.
This is war's downtime: tedium tempered by the knowledge
that
something could happen at any moment. Only that moment rarely comes.
In the midst of his generation's Vietnam, an embedded Mulholland
soon finds himself bored witless.
It is a weird read. Between driving Humvees and watching
DVDs,
cooped-up reporters scrape the barrel for news ("Palace living
no substitute for Christmas at home for US troops" and
"Baby wipes are US soldier's best friend in Iraq" emerge as
story titles).
A trip to Saddam's bunker evokes a stag night,
"particularly when we took turns posing in the hole and
brandishing a homemade plaque with a picture of Britney Spears showing
a lot of glistening buttock," Mulholland writes.
Occasional raids and patrols throw up little. When soldiers
are killed
by a roadside bomb nearby, colleagues in Baghdad hear about it first,
reinforcing Tikrit's irrelevance.
Despite the stultifying environment, however, Mulholland
turns a
talent for observation to good use, foraging for angles and human
interest amidst the torpor. Stories on R&R activities and the
soldiers' use of digital technologies are two examples.
In Tikrit, we learn, R&R facilities include a massage
parlour, movie
theatre, pool tables, internet cafe, burger bar and a shop where a
tailored suit can be had for US$80.
"All they need here is alcohol," deadpans a 22-year-old soldier.
Camp Britney's cumulative effect, it dawns as the anecdotes
and
dispatches pile up, is to paint a useful picture of agency reporting
in a war zone.
"My role was one part of the whole AFP operation in
Iraq,"
the author explains. Together with the Baghdad bureau and scattered
local correspondents, he believes the embedded reporter provides a
valuable piece of the media puzzle.
"Obviously you're writing from the perspective of the
American troops. There's no doubt about that but as part
of the bigger picture it's entirely legitimate."
Interspersing his diary with stories filed from Tikrit,
Mulholland
gives a visceral sense of copy whizzing to Baghdad, Dubai and
AFP's Middle Eastern HQ in Cyprus, from where final validation
is granted before news hits the wires.
Competition between agencies is cut-throat. Where paragraphs
are
marked urgent, "it should take no more than a few minutes before
the news I phone in hits the wire."
Nevertheless, given the extent to which embeds are insulated
in Iraq,
the book will do little to challenge a widespread public perception of
journalism in the conflict as either owned by US soldiers, or
trumpeted blindly from hotel balconies.
"There is a lot of hotel journalism," he concedes.
"But what can you do? No story is worth getting killed
for I take my hat off to the journalists who are hanging in
there."
Since Tikrit, it transpires, Mulholland has twice returned
to Iraq,
spending time in the Baghdad bureau and embedded with troops in the
Triangle of Death and Baquba.
The former, ensconced with US marines in a chicken factory
outside
Baghdad, "was a totally different ballgame [to Tikrit]. Things happened.
We went on dawn raids up the Euphrates River, got bombed a couple of
times, stuff like that."
Close shaves ("you're cowering down in the back of
the
truck, wondering whether the armour plate is going to be thick enough
for the next bomb") and the kidnap of Guardian journalist Rory
Carroll in 2005 do not seem to have fazed him.
"I've been pretty fortunate; I've never been in a
situation in Iraq where I felt I was going to be kidnapped. I was
pretty close to a few bombs, but I was never going to be shot by
anybody the worst thing is before you go, the thought of going
there."
Precautions are a fact of life, he says. Trips outside the
hotel are
made only when necessary and, even then, one shouldn't stay in
the same place for more than half-an-hour. "There's no
point planking about what might happen."
Mulholland, educated at Dublin's Belvedere College and UCD,
lived the first 10 years of his life in Belfast. And interestingly, he
finds in Ardoyne and Iraq some room for comparison.
"The soldiers would put up their big, transparent shields,
wait
for the kids to get bored and carry on," he says, describing
schoolchildren stoning British troops in 1970s Northern Ireland.
"It was probably one of the worst periods."
On patrol with British soldiers in Basra, he experienced
something
similar:
"The adults were pretty friendly... but the kids would
just get
excited, each trying to be braver than the other. I just kept smiling
to myself thinking here we are 30 years later, I'm with the
soldiers, only now I appear one of them."
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he sees little hope for Iraq. Despite
progress with elections, insurgencies of this scale have historically
proven to last a decade and this one - with its unlimited supply of
weapons and volunteers, would appear no different.
"I think the Americans did a good thing for all the
wrong
reasons in getting rid of Saddam," he says. "Ironically,
now what you've got is one terror replaced by another."
© Pól Ó Conghaile, 2006