Perception is reality was a valuable lesson the Air Force taught me in Officer Training School. It seems like a long time ago, but we now live full time in that world. I learned that perception was reality as an object lesson in integrity and how our perceived actions would impact our ability to lead. It was a constant reminder that the world would view our efforts through many different lenses.
War is never clean. It’s terrifying what it takes, it leaves scars you can’t always see, and our masters are often ungrateful. Even if we did everything right, our integrity and actions would be our only shield against opinion.
People have grown increasingly sequestered, and reality’s become the news and social media that people choose to see. And those realities blur even more when influencers are monetized to give the people only the most sensational and polarizing things.
Not long ago I was interviewed by the Military Writers Society of America. One of the questions I was asked reminded me of a media experience I had in Iraq. I thought it was timely, and this is the unabridged version of that interview question. You can read the whole interview at billrileyauthor.com. Let me know what you think:
MWSA: Baghdaddy provides a firsthand view of war; what are the most common misconceptions held by many Americans?
Bill Riley: We see war mostly in snapshots, and not everything gets the coverage or the attention or focus it deserves. There’s been a terrible war in Yemen for years, but the media barely covers it. The same was true of the atrocities of Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait and the campaign of rape and terror employed by Slobodan Milošević during the Bosnian War. Few were interested in investigating and reporting until the world couldn’t continue to look away.
The first time I was in Iraq was just after President Bush declared victory. We absolutely met and exceeded the first phase objectives of the war, but even at the highest levels of power, there were misconceptions over what “victory” meant, and unfortunately, an agenda often drives what gets reported and what the public sees.
I was with an army signals unit on the outskirts of Karbala, about fifty-five miles southwest of Baghdad. There was a friendly village just off the major supply route, and we encountered a news crew at the burnt and twisted remains of a blown-up semi-tractor-trailer. People from the village were rummaging through the blast field, looking for salvageable spoils. We waved, the Iraqis waved back, and the reporters were busy setting up their shot.
We pulled over, and I went to touch base with the news crew just as they were assembling a group of men and boys with slung Kalashnikov rifles in front of the still-smoking vehicle for a picture. Back then, if a supply truck fell out of a convoy along the route, the driver detonated the vehicle and cargo so it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands. The vehicle in front of me, and the reporters, was one of those. We knew it, they knew it.
The title that ran on the picture, in a scathing news story was, ‘Insurgents Destroy Military Supplies.’ It was a good picture, and insurgents did destroy military supplies, just not that time. If you look closely at the picture, you can see all the boys smiling for the camera.
Don’t get me wrong, there is still great reporting. Unfortunately, we’ve also reached the point where we’re saturated in manufactured and skewed news. Where opinion is reported as fact, and where “likes” and outrage drive how events and topics are spun. The difficulty in separating the truth from the lies has more than anything else, led to many misconceptions.