Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
Erich Maria RemarqueRead
To be a good reporter, writing about war, you have to write about the people. It's not about the tanks or the RPGs or military strategy. It's always about the effect war has on civilians, on society, and how it disrupts and destroys lives.
Interpretation
Good reporting on war focuses on human stories rather than military details.
Janine Di Giovanni emphasizes that effective war reporting should center on the experiences and struggles of civilians. The impact of war is felt most deeply by the people affected, and understanding their narratives is essential to grasping the true cost of conflict.
In practice
During a journalism seminar discussing the human impact of conflict.
Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other possibilities.
In Vietnam, our soldiers came back and they were reviled as baby killers, in shame and humiliation. It isn't happening now, but I will tell you, there has never been an American army as violent and murderous as our army has been in Iraq.
The object of defense is preservation; and since it is easier to hold ground than to take it, defense is easier than attack. But defense has a passive purpose: preservation; and attack a positive one: conquest.... If defense is the stronger form of war, yet has a negative object, it follows that it should be used only so long as weakness compels, and be abandoned as soon as we are strong enough to pursue a positive object.
War's dirty little secret is that some men love it.
We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side. Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction.
The enemy is still proud and powerful. He is hard to get at. He still possesses enormous armies, vast resources, and invaluable strategic territories...No one can tell what new complications and perils might arise in four or five more years of war. And it is in the dragging-out of the war at enormous expense, until the democracies are tired or bored or split that the main hopes of Germany and Japan must reside.
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