War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

The Six-Day War

THE SIX-DAY WAR IT'S NOT SAD to say that there never will be another war like the one commencing that bright June morning, a clash without the use of nuclear weapons, open to all newsmen wishing to witness battle firsthand, and one with tactics from the now obsolescent playbooks of George Patton, Heinz Guderian, Erwin Rommel, and the daddy of them all, Nathan Bedford Forrest. Its technology was from World War II, not Star Wars. It was mercifully short, and surprisingly onesided , a regional conflict with enduring global implications, probably the hottest spot in the 4o-year Cold War, "the cockpit of World War III," said one editorialist without exaggeration. Ifnews of "Desert Storm," our high-tech annihilation of Iraq's intrusion on Kuwaiti oil, was stage-managed by the military much like the introduction of a new software by Bill Gates, the six-day battle was as wide open. Come see, come report. The reporter needed only good nerves and a good car. There was a price for this, however: three newsmen killed, five badly wounded, while covering the action. This made it the most casualty intense war of modern times for journalists, given their few numbers-less than 50-and the war's short duration. For other reasons, we have escaped much notice of the vicious wars between local guerrillas and u.S.-trained soldiers defending Central American dictators in the name of anticommunism. My colleague Mike Layton risked life and job security by reporting warfare in Central America. Not many Americans wished to be bothered, I23 124 / THE SIX-DAY WAR least of all the administrations of Reagan and Bush, whose propagandists told a different story from that of an honest reporter. Unknown to most of us, a deadly jungle war engaged Cambodian guerrillas against Vietnamese troops occupying that benighted Southeast Asian nation. The Vietnamese lost 55,000 troops in the 1980s to the underpowered guerrillas, a death sum equal to U.S. losses in Vietnam. Anyone of Liz Taylor's frequent weddings got more play in the press. The war was almost totally out of sight, but it did not carry the potential of an Armageddon between the superpowers as did the one I went out to cover on June 5, 1967. I went directly from the Dan Hotel to the government press office, a twenty-minute walk away, in a group of one-story buildings on Bet Sokolow. The Israeli Defense Ministry compound, swathed by a razor wire fence, covered the block across the street. One wing of the press office· featured a canteen, serving cheese sandwiches, beer, and erak, a Mideast liquor with a taste like licorice and a kick like Tennessee white lightning. A few slit trenches had been dug across the lawn for what we considered to be inevitable: an air raid. They would have been overflowing given the number of newsmen. For one day I took the military handouts-"communiques" is the euphemism-and filed a running report to New York, one studded with local color about the reaction of ordinary citizens, mostly calm, to the anticipated horror of bombardment. At midmorning the senior Hearstling, Serge Fliegers, bounded in to the maze of reporters and typewriters working in the pressroom, bearing the smile of a man reunited with an old love. Fliegers, a veteran of the 1956 war which took Israelis to the Suez Canal, gave orders to his underling : "Stay here and file to New York everything you get from the military spokesmen and everything you can steal from other reporters ." Then he left for the Gaza front with an Israeli newsman and a cameraman for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). As Gene Autry would have sung it, Fliegers was back in the saddle again, and delighted. I would not see him again for ten days. Tel Aviv was pitch dark, blacked out in anticipation of an air raid, by the time I broke away for the walk back to the Dan and food in the bomb shelter. Aircraft would not attack the city, but the THE SIX-DAY WAR I I25 explosion of several heavy artillery shells in a suburb announced the proximity of Jordanian guns to a large urban population. The shelling also announced jordan's unwise decision to join the war. The respite from work was brief. Around midnight all reporters in Tel Aviv were assembled in the auditorium on Bet Sokolow for...