Embedded Conversions

In today’s Opinion Journal, Jeff Emmanuel reports on the powerful impact that embedding has had on journalists predisposed to look down on the war and the American soldiers fighting it.

The most spectacular recent case of a journalist with an antiwar mindset being completely overwhelmed into a change of heart by American soldiers, according to the public affairs officer, was a Greek public television reporter who had been embedded with an infantry unit that became entrenched in a 45-minute firefight with insurgents. Yanked out of the line of fire by a soldier who put the journalist’s life above his own, he waited under cover and in fear of his life for the almost hourlong duration of the battle, with the best view possible of American soldiers in action against an armed and murderous enemy. He credits his having lived to tell the tale directly to those young troops.

“He had tears in his eyes as he talked about it,” said the public affairs officer. “He just kept saying, ‘They saved my life, they saved my life. .Â .Â . These are great men; they are heroes.’ Even after telling it several times, he couldn’t get through the story without choking up–and this was a man who had arrived here with all of the disdain for the Iraq mission and for the American soldiers who he [like seemingly most Europeans] had seen as the bad guys in this fight.”