They Will Have to Die: Verini’s reporting straddles the polarities of war with evolution of technology

As Phillip Knightley wrote in The First Casualty, his excellent 1975 history of war reporting, before the Crimean War of the 1850s, British newspapers cribbed news of military conflicts from foreign newspapers or relied on junior officers to send them dispatches. These reports either never came or were next-to-useless since the officers would never criticize their own military and didn’t understand how “news” was defined.

Two decades later, during the Second World War, radio reporters like U.S. star Edward R. Murrow and Canadian Matthew Halton produced reports from the field using the latest audio recorders and transmitters, while photographs could be transmitted via telephone lines for use the same day. By the late 1960s, the conflict in Vietnam became the first “living room war,” with nightly newscasts bringing horrific battleground scenes into North American homes.

Some of these, like Evan Wright’s Generation Kill, try to out-gonzo Herr with first-person adrenalin. Others, like David Finkel’s The Good Soldier, calmly record events like a camera, adopting a detached, third-person stance. Another such character is the commander of the Counter Terrorism Service, General Adbulwahab al-Saadi. With a sniper firing from somewhere inside a mosque, he stood in the open, without a flak jacket or helmet, casually chatting to a family cowering inside their home as a bullet tore up a chunk of pavement at his feet.

“Experientially, war is mainly sound,” Verini writes. “In the news, in a movie, you see a war, but once amid a war, you mostly hear it. You listen to projectiles all day and night, but only rarely do you watch them leave a muzzle and even more rarely do you see impact. You’re usually sitting in some house or truck or squatting behind some berm, listening to the destruction. War is loud. Loud and listless. Quite dull, in fact.

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