One of the first films I made for BBC TV was shot in Cambodia with the US army in the spring of 1970, during the American drive to clear the North Vietnamese sanctuaries. In one of these, I was interviewing a US colonel beside a captured rice cache when suddenly a few incoming shots were fired over out heads. All of us took cover with speed, and after a few seconds of confusion, the Americans returned fire. Peace soon broke out again, and we all clambered to our feet. “How much of that did you get on film?”, demanded our producer. “Not much”, said the cameraman, “because we were all under that truck”. The producer brooded for a moment, then turned to the US colonel: “Tell me”, he asked, “do you think you could do that again? You know, get somebody to fire a few shots, everybody take cover and return the fire, and so on …” Now, that colonel and even my innocent self were fairly appalled by this exchange. Yet to that producer, a fine television professional, the proposal merely reflected the normality of what is done daily in peacetime documentary film making – the attempt to recreate for the camera the resemblance of what has taken place. Again and again all over the world, I have seen artillery or automatic weapons asked to open fire at the behest of television crews. Indeed, after the 1972 Indo-Pakistan war, it emerged that the CBS crew with the Indians had nearly destroyed their colleagues filming with the Pakistanis at the same time, while playing this game. The pressure upon TV crews to produce for New York – or, happily in lesser measure, London or Toronto – the nightly dose of “bang bang”, the only footage editors really want from a war zone such as Lebanon, has often cost mens’ lives, and represents the lowest denominator of media activity in modern conflict. The US networks’ cynicism in this was highlighted in the latter days in Vietnam, when it became common practise to employ so-called TCNs – Third Country Nationals such as Koreans – to film the most dangerous battles, because their deaths were so much less expensive for their employers. Television, that marvellous medium of impression, and fatally flawed medium of analysis, has exercised a baleful influence upon modern war corresponding. It has brought unforgettable, terrible images into hundreds of millions of homes. It has exercised an overwhelming influence upon political attitudes to some conflicts, above all Vietnam. I do not believe that it has contributed much, if anything, to real understanding of the conflicts upon which its lenses have fallen. Television can convey only what stands before the camera’s eye: nothing else, not the atrocities of the enemy, the successes or failure outside the cameraman’s focus, the night battles or the feel of the theatre of war. I remember the dismay I felt, on first viewing films I had made in Cambodia in the air-conditioned comfort of a viewing theatre in London months later. I saw nothing there of the heat, the dirt, the incessant physical discomfort under which we had laboured. Today from Afghanistan, even with v.brave cameramen, few shots of the real action, because its so hard for TV crews physically to get there.
Yet television will stay with us, and we must live with its shortcomings. The only course open to military commands and government is to ensure that they understand its nature and limitations as they watch its troubled meandering across the battlefield. We can no more disinvent or even banish it than we can the atomic bomb.
In the 1970s, an Australian journalist named Philip Knightley wrote a history of war corresponding entitled The First Casualty. It was his thesis that war correspondents, and especially British ones, have persistently let down their societies through the ages, by failing to tell the truth from the battlefield, for reasons of either incompetence or political corruption. Knightley cited among his own credentials the fact that he had never reported a war himself. His book sold very well, and achieved a cult following at that period when anti-institutionalism in the West generally, and Britain in particular, was at its height. I disagreed profoundly with the book, and find it reads as absurdly today as it did when I first reviewed it. First, in his contempt for the worst sort of war correspondents, of whom we have all seen plenty in bars from Saigon to Kabul, Knightley ignores the long roll call of great reporters. In writing my own books on World War II, I have often looked back with immense admiration on the writings of Drew Middleton, Alan Moorehead, Alexander Clifford and others, men of the greatest gifts, who have exercised them to the highest purpose on the battlefield.