Pat Dollard: Young Americans (again)

Pat Dollard's outstanding documentary as he travels with the Marines in Iraq.


This is what he has to say at this point in the docu, although it's an ongoing project from what I can tell:

**Rolling With the Suicide Squad** says Pat Dollard
"Dressed in civies and running around with a video camera, I stuck out. And the soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines had far more important matters on their minds than entertaining outsiders. One of my first interviews, a Cpl. Gilbert Jensen, summed it up: "Don't talk to me. I have nothing good to say." Still, they let me tag along. When I wasn't filming a patrol in the Triangle from the back of a Humvee, I went along on IED-hunting missions with the Suicide Squad in a convoy of LAV-25s. That's short for light armored vehicle, but the marines just called them pigs"
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Few of the troops understand that the news business is driven by dramatic events, not the tedious kind of process the troops go through every day to defeat the terrorists. To the troops, the war is being won. They see bad guys killed in large numbers, and few Americans getting hurt. The troops see tangible evidence, every day, of Iraqis having a better life. The troops cannot understand why that is not news, and why journalists always seem to be looking for a negative angle. To the average G.I., the attitude is, "what are these reporters looking for?" They are looking for a story, and bad news is a story. Good news is not. As a result of this clash of cultures, reporters are increasingly seen as a potentially dangerous enemy. For the troops, this is already accepted as true for many Arab journalists. Some of those have been arrested for hostile activity, or later revealed as al Qaeda agents. European journalists are seen as particularly clueless, so wrapped up in their anti-American fantasies, that communication is nearly impossible. But after watching a CNN clip on the net, or viewing an online story from the New York Times or Washington Post, it's hard to view U.S. journalists as fellow Americans.

God Bless Pat and our boys.
h/t: Dollard