About the Job

Scott Waldman is 31 years old. He has been working as a journalist for two years. A little more than a month ago, he was on a military base outside Baghdad, clad in a Kevlar helmet and body armor, reporting on the war.

In my last column, I described my effort to answer a question: How might a young journalist prepare to report from Iraq?

Stay home, I was told. Iraq, I learned, is a place in which it has become nearly impossible to do journalism. The risk of being kidnapped or killed, Wall Street Journal reporter Farnaz Fassihi told me, has begun to outweigh the benefits of reporting the story.

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The evening I posted that column, I received an e-mail from Waldman, a reporter at The Erie (Pa.) Times-News. He told me he had recently returned from an embed in Iraq. "There's a lot I wish I knew going into this," he wrote, "but it's not an impossible task to pull off."

Waldman's e-mail reminded me of something Reuters editor Paul Holmes had told me the day before. As an embed, he said, "you are actually able to function pretty well as a reporter." The assignment limits a reporter's work, but keeps him comparatively safe.

I called Waldman to ask him about his recent trip to Iraq.

It was August, Waldman told me, when he asked his editor if he could go to Iraq. The editor showed interest but wanted details. For the next two weeks, Waldman did research.

During an embed, he learned, the military provides everything you need to survive -- food, shelter, transportation and, of course, protection. There is no fee. But other expenses, Waldman found, would be plentiful.

By Nov. 1, Waldman was on a plane to Kuwait City. His destination: the 329th Medical Company, a U.S. Army Reserve unit spread across several bases in the area surrounding Baghdad. Of the 70 soldiers in the unit, roughly 40 of them were from the Erie area.

By Nov. 3, Waldman was in Baghdad. The round-trip flight to Kuwait cost the newspaper $1,200. Renting a satellite phone was another $400. He borrowed a Level 4 Kevlar helmet and bulletproof vest -- a set he said was worth upwards of $2,000 -- from the local SWAT team. The paper supplied him with a Dell laptop, an Olympus digital-audio recorder, a Nikon D200 SLR digital camera and a Sony Handycam.

In all, Waldman estimates the trip cost nearly $3,000.

By the standards of this war, his trip was cheap, and his mission was simple.

As a reporter for a local newspaper, his focus was on Erie's soldiers. He wrote about their lives. He wrote about the things they saw, the things they heard about and the things they did.

"The things The L.A. Times and The New York Times are doing are important, but there are all these other little stories, too," Waldman said. "The focus really was, 'Here's what Erie folks are doing in this war.' ... And, to me, I haven't seen a lot of that coverage."

Waldman kept a grueling schedule, generally reporting two stories and a blog entry each day. He made pictures, edited them and wrote cutlines. He recorded audio and video, as well.

"You have to learn to have the endurance not to sleep," Waldman said. "I had to drink a lot of coffee and stagger my caffeine intake strategically throughout the day."

It was exhausting work. Waldman rarely showered or changed his clothes. But he was safe.

"When you're in the bases, you feel pretty secure," Waldman said. "They lob mortars in all the time. ... But the bases are so huge. ... It's like throwing pennies into a cornfield."

RELATED RESOURCES

Check out Erie (Pa.) Times-News reporter Scott Waldman's Iraq project here. Read over the rules on embedding the military provides to its Public Affairs Officers here. See some of Leistner's pictures and learn more about the book, "Unembedded," here. And if you still haven't seen it, spend some time with CJR's oral history of journalism in Iraq here. Poynter's Aly Colon wrote about embedding in 2003. Read his work here and here. Sign up to receive About the Job by e-mail: Click here (sent Mondays and Wednesdays at 9 a.m.)

Most embeds, even those with combat units, are relatively safe assignments, Holmes told me.  Soldiers protect the reporter and, if needed, provide medical attention. But in exchange for safety, what does a reporter give up?

To answer this question, I found Canadian freelance photojournalist Rita Leistner. In 2003 she embedded with an American cavalry unit in Baghdad. In 2004 she returned to Iraq and worked independently.

An embed, she told me, provides safety but presents serious limitations.

Leistner said her embed was informal. In 2003, she entered the country alone, crossing the Turkish border illegally with the help of a smuggler. Before long, she was spending the afternoons with an American cavalry unit. And, eventually, she said, the soldiers invited her to live with them at their base. She spent three months with those men, composing a photo essay about the unit. Leistner said their story was important, but it was not the only one she would tell.

When Leistner returned to Iraq in March of 2004, she did so alone, again. But this time, she said, she continued to work independently. She was unembedded.

Leistner photographed a face of the war that she said often goes undocumented. Her pictures illustrate the destruction and death of the war, at close range. Some of them show the war as it was seen by the insurgents.

Leistner and three other independent photojournalists recently published some of their work from Iraq in a book called "Unembedded: Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq." The pictures in the book are striking. Check it out here.

Making those pictures was extremely dangerous. But, to Leistner, telling the stories was worth the risk. They were pictures she could not have made if she had been embedded.

"You can get a great close-up of a soldier firing a missile off of a tank, but the missile is going to land a mile or two away," Leistner said, describing the work she and her colleagues did as the city of Najef was being attacked by coalition forces. "Who's going to take a picture of where that missile lands?

"Whoever you're with," Leistner said, "that's who you're taking pictures of."

Leistner's work highlights the limitations of embedding reporters with military units. But they are limitations about which Waldman did not have to worry. He was sent to write about American soldiers; and that's what he did.

The embed, then, as a reporting tactic, did little to hamper Waldman's objective. He told me he was given 24/7 access to the soldiers. He ate, worked out, slept and traveled with the soldiers he was reporting on.

But that, it turns out, can present another set of challenges.

"It's really difficult to be living with the people you're covering," Waldman said. "I mean, everyday these guys would be reading these things as soon as I posted them online."

Sometimes, he said, the military reviewed his copy before he posted it, a sacrifice military rules required Waldman to make.

Waldman often received letters from readers back in Erie, parents of the men and women about whom he was writing. They were happy with his work. And that worried him.

"You have to ask yourself, as a journalist," Waldman said," 'Just because the families are writing and are pleased, does that mean I'm doing my best job?' "

The potential for a reporter to be influenced by his relationship with the soldiers he is reporting on is great during an embed. It is a concern, Holmes said, that every embedded reporter must deal with. It's something editors should look out for, too.

"If you're living in difficult situations with people, and they're getting shot at, and you're getting shot at, it creates a bond," Holmes told me. "And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. ... But [sometimes] you can't see the woods for the trees. Your field of vision in a military unit is really limited to your immediate surroundings. ... I think it's important to realize that when you go into an embed."

There's a trade-off, then, I think, between journalistic independence and safety. Leistner said she was spied on, harrassed and shot at when she was working independently in Iraq. Her life was constantly at risk.

Waldman, on the other hand, said he felt safe.

Leistner told me she has not been back to Iraq since 2004. It is too dangerous, she said, a statement that sounds strange coming from a woman who has endured such terrifying danger. She plans to spend the winter in Syria, learning Arabic.

Waldman's work shows that, under certain circumstances, a young journalist can report safely from Iraq.

He knows the pieces he wrote do not tell the whole story of Iraq.

But does the public? As more and more journalists are forced off the streets of Baghdad into bureaus and American military units, I wonder how it is affecting our understanding of this war. It scares me to think that, at some point, stories from embeds like Waldman might be all we have left.