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Memo to the class:
This letter is about children and war. It is also about journalism.
When I wore the Air Force uniform many years ago, I did not come under
enemy fire.
I was just a medical corpsman and I flew around the country in airplanes
with a big red cross on the tail. We took care of a few wounded servicemen
from Vietnam, but this was before the big American build-up there.
But many years earlier, as a small boy, I lived in a city where bombs
fell and where war was part of everyday life. I must confess that the
experience was often exhilarating. I did not know any better. I have tried
to remember my reactions to the noise and the sights of war and I have
tried to imagine what the children of Afghanistan are living through.
It is difficult to know the extent to which children are suffering from
the attacks upon Afghanistan. The Taliban says civilian casualties number
200 or 300. If true, that is a fraction of the number of the people killed
in the terrorism against the United States, so we need also to think of
the effect of the war on American children who have suffered unimaginable
losses of their own.
As to the bombing of Afghanistan, the United States declares that it is
exercising extreme caution to avoid civilian casualties. I have no reason
whatsoever to doubt this. Even so, people are dying.
The New York Times reported today on the death and destruction that a
credible journalist had seen in a town called Karam, which was destroyed
by bombing. What is certain is that over the years, the children of Afghanistan
have been profoundly affected by war. Human Rights Watch declares that
in the past 20 years, some 1.5 millions Afghans have died as a result
of fighting in that country.
As we consider children and war, we need first to distinguish among three
kinds of them. They have different experiences, but all are affected by
media. What we do as journalists matters to them all.
First, there are the children in war zones for whom the action is essentially
theater. These are the children who see war first-hand but from a distance,
from safe ground.
Once, I was one of them. Yet the fact that these more fortunate children
may escape the immediate ravages of war does not mean that the violence
leaves no mark upon them, that scar tissue does not form upon their souls.
Though these children are on the sidelines of war, they are touched daily
by media -- what the radio is saying or what appears in the newspapers
or on television.
Are terrifying rumors being spread? What is the depiction of the enemy?
Are these children being taught to hate where yesterday they had no such
feelings? Almost certainly, the answer is, Yes. And almost certainly,
too, we the media are among the most effective propagators of these terrible
lessons.
The second kind of children are those who are personally scorched by war.
In the most immediate, unmistakable sense, these are victims. Within my
lifetime, there have been two searing media images of such children.
One was a photograph of a baby, a refugee, sitting all alone and crying
in the bombed ruins of the north railroad station in Shanghai. This was
in 1937. The photographer had the improbable name of Newsreel Wong and
is a legend in Chinese photojournalism. Wong's picture went all around
the world and many people for the first time understood the effect of
that war on civilians.
The other was a picture of a naked young girl running hysterically down
a road in South Vietnam, her clothing burned off by napalm. Perhaps you
have seen this one.
The photograph was among those images which were instrumental in creating
the public indignation that ultimately forced the war to be stopped. These
were pictures taken by journalists recording the war, and the government
readily understood their effect on public opinion. Many generals and politicians
considered the press disloyal.
Through the images of their misery, these children attained a kind of
immortality; and through journalism, they touched the conscience of the
world. That was something no government could stop.
For children of this second kind, war is never an excitement or a glory.
Orphaned, maimed, disfigured, traumatized, they carry with them all their
lives the effects of war. They are the flesh and blood representations
of the abstractions of politicians and generals and terrorists, the results
of the surgical bombing, precision anti-aircraft suppression or strikes
against civilians in retaliation for this or that past injustice. And
since no neighborhood anywhere is without children, inevitably there already
are some of these children in Afghanistan.
The third kind of children are those touched most of all by media. Many
of them live today in the United States but they can be found elsewhere
as well. For these boys and girls, the threat of war or violence by bombs,
sabotage and the rest have suddenly become real because of what they have
seen and read in the media. They will remember Sept. 11, 2001, as long
as they live.
They bear no physical signs of war or terrorism and most are likely to
go on to lead the outward lives of normal men and women. But inside, in
places they may never realize, these children have been touched by the
violence, and something has happened to the world as they imagined or
understood it to be.
One crucial condition, however, binds all three kinds of children. That
is their utter helplessness. From the perspective of the child in war,
every event lies far beyond his or her powers of influence. The child
lives in ignorance, unaware or uncomprehending of the reasons for the
surrounding violence. And, hence, the child is both constantly surprised
by what is taking place and constantly apprehensive of what may suddenly
happen.
For even the fortunate child in war, there can be no security, no stability,
no sense of assurance that the small part of the world that is his or
hers is under control. The child may thrill, as I did, to distant smoke
columns and the sight of airplanes wheeling in the sky, but long afterward
the sound of a siren in the night will produce a terror that the child
may never fully understand or escape.
For the child in war, the sense of powerlessness is crushing and enduring.
For the child in war, the world very early on becomes a place that can
never be fully trusted. An acute awareness of vulnerability is a condition
of life: better, for such a child, not to give too much of one's self.
Like the children of Afghanistan, the boys and girls of America are also
experiencing a war. We should be grateful that the vast majority of them
will remain witnesses from a great distance, although some children already
are suffering the incurable grief that follows the death of a parent or
relative -- in New York or Washington or in a field in Pennsylvania. Like
their unfortunate counterparts in loss in Afghanistan, an effect of war
will always be part of them.
If we are not careful, however, a subtler part of war will be left upon
the children for whom the battle is no closer than the television. There
are honorable arguments for and against this war that the United States
is now prosecuting. So as the conflict proceeds, it is profoundly important,
I think, for the media to present events with proportionality, neither
exaggerating nor trivializing them or the political forces that brought
them about.
We journalists instruct the children’s most important teachers, who
are their parents. This is not the World Series or a video game or a fight
over a parking space. We are not protecting our children's sensibilities
if we allow them to regard war in this way, which they will surely do
if that is how we in the media present what is happening.
We do our children no favor by encouraging in them an indifference to
sacrifice and suffering. We do them no favor by encouraging them to view
people in distant lands -- or their neighbors -- with suspicion or hostility.
And if we the media do those things, we also do no favor to America, which
has suffered in a way that it has never suffered before.
Regards, Bill Woo
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