Wartime footing includes many missteps
06/29/07 10:34 AM
By ED BARK
What really matters has been a bit obscured in recent days.
But it's hardly fair for TV critics to decry all the Paris Hilton slop while then ignoring this serious and very sobering one-hour report from CNN's investigative unit.
Battlefield Breakdown, airing Saturday and Sunday at 7 p.m. (central), is a topflight effort from CNN's other King. He's former White House reporter John King, who's now the network's chief national correspondent.
King, starting his second decade at CNN, has a crisp, to-the-point style that every electronic journalist would do well to study if not flat-out copy. He's also studiously fair, another reportorial trait that should be standard operating procedure but often isn't any more.
Battlefield Breakdown makes its points by accentuating the facts, not the guy giving them to you. This isn't Michael Moore. Instead it's a reporter who understands that less can be more.
King makes it unassailably clear that the U.S. planned poorly for the invasion of Iraq, ill-equipping its soldiers and sending too few of them. His reporting touches many bases, most notably in retelling the story of deceased Wisconsin National Guardsman Stephen Castner. He died on July 24, 2006 after an improvised explosive device (IED) tore into his Humvee. It was just his third day of service in Iraq.
Castner's parents, Stephen and Kay, firmly believe that their son and his unit were rushed to Iraq without anything near adequate training.
"I don't feel that somebody calling my son a hero answers my questions for me," Mrs. Castner says. "I want the Army to tell us what happened."
King also interviews Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, a commander in the National Guard. It's not a combative confrontation, just a reporter doing his job by asking pertinent questions.
Blum, both stoic and compassionate, says the "fog of war" took Stephen Castner's life, and that no amount of training could have prevented this. But he acknowledges that the proper armoring of Humvees was accelerated after Castner's parents raised their voices.
"Stephen may have saved other people's lives," says Blum. But he's quick to note that this is at best cold comfort for the parents of any dead soldier.
Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld and his successor, Robert Gates, declined to be interviewed for Battlefield Breakdown. That's so typical it's sickening. Still, King clearly strives to get both sides. His documentary makes its telling points without the told-you-so voice inflections of many a lesser reporter.
He also interviews Ret. U.S. Army Captain Allen Vaught of Dallas, whose back was broken during a roadside bombing in Iraq. Vaught, now an elected state representative, says his Guard unit also was inadequately trained for combat.
"The price of the lack of planning? Dead Americans, crippled Americans . . . That's a big price," he says.
Staff Sgt. Chris Tucker is still standing, but uncertainly. Deaf in one ear and with both feet needing surgery, he's being sent back to Iraq for his third tour in four years. Tucker also is psychically wounded by nightmares and bouts with depression. But a new group of raw recruits needs him, so that's life in today's military.
King ends the report by describing Tucker as "tired, stressed and hurting -- like the Army he proudly serves."
Those words are right on target. King's painstaking reporting has made certain of that.
Grade: A
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