July 15, 2008
Gentile teaches backpack journalism from Afghanistan
(Photos courtesy of Bill Gentile)
The deep lines on the Afghan farmer’s leathered face and the hardened look in his black eyes convey part of his story before he even speaks. His 38 years have not been easy ones.
“Americans came here telling us they’re going to help us, build things, but these are all tricks, the same tricks Russians played,” he tells the interpreter with SOC professor Bill Gentile, who is aiming a camera at him and his young son. “They came as a friend but then they start killing us. We don’t trust them anymore. What we do is, today’s life, we just try to follow the religion of Islam and live our life, and whoever wants to come and rule this area, we have nothing against them, whether it’s Taliban or Americans.”
The man is resigned to a future in which he has no say. Days earlier, he tells Gentile, the Americans bombed his compound. He and his family now sleep under trees.
“He’s a complete victim of circumstance,” says Gentile, who spent late May and early June in Afghanistan filming a documentary report that will air July 18 on PBS’s NOW. “How his situation plays out I think will be a microcosm of how the whole thing plays out.”
NOW’s national television audience won’t be the only people to benefit from Gentile’s frontline reporting. While in Afghanistan, he taught Special Topics in News Media: Backpack Journalism Abroad, a SOC summer distance learning course.
“The idea was to have my students learn through my experience out in the field. I set up the course knowing that I was going to be very possibly out of contact with the university for a while. A couple of times I had to use the satellite phones that the military intelligence people had, to call the Center for Teaching Excellence and leave messages with instructions for my students on how to proceed with the course,” says Gentile.
Gentile embodies the very definition of a backpack journalist. Carrying a seven-pound Sony EX-1 high definition video camera, memory cards on which to store the 20 hours of footage he shot, and a MacBook Pro laptop, he was able to gain unfettered access to the front lines of America’s overshadowed war.
“The whole backpack journalism thing is about one guy with one camera on one story going out there and getting a more intimate and more immediate form of visual communication than can a team of people with a camera person and sound person and producer and correspondent. That’s the old model,” he says. “This way, backpack journalism, is perfect for this kind of coverage, because the military has enough on their hands to get just one person around, to find one extra space in the helicopter, on the truck, in the convoy, to deal with one person who’s not one of their guys. To deal with four people is four times the muscle that they have to put into it, and something they’re reluctant to do.”
The five students in the course were transfixed by Gentile’s experiences halfway around the world. Each is working on a project in which they pick a target country and explore how to become a foreign correspondent there.
“The way professor Gentile has set up the course allows students to create a map of resources for the country they wish to cover,” says Maura Ugarte. “I’m hoping to make a documentary film about immigration in Spain, and I was having a hard time figuring out how to start the project. At the end of this course, I will have a proposal with an accurate budget, a clear story line, contacts that I’ve made abroad, and a well-rounded compilation of research on the history and current context of the issue. I think that many of the research skills journalists are taught can be really useful for documentary filmmakers; it’s great that SOC facilitates this kind of interdisciplinary class.”
Gentile was first drawn to the Afghanistan story last year, when the U.S. Army published its counterinsurgency field manual, which he downloaded from Amazon.com.
“It’s the most important articulation of U.S. military doctrine since the Vietnam War,” he says. “When I saw the Marines being called into Afghanistan to do counterinsurgency, it really ignited my interest. I think most Americans think of the Marines as doing the tip-of-the-spear kind of operation. Go in, kick butt, take names, and pull out. They’re there to do something quite different. This whole idea of clear, hold, and build. They’re really good at doing the clearing, but the holding and the building are something we’re not accustomed to seeing them do.”
So Gentile embedded with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit—the same group he traveled with in Iraq three years ago—as they set out to continue the increasingly difficult fight against the Taliban. May marked the first month that more coalition troops were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq.
“I saw the tail end of a really important mission that the 24th was involved in,” he says. “Although they’re based in Kandahar province, they’re operating along the Pakistan border, where they have really severe problems. The Helmand River goes through Afghanistan into Pakistan, and it’s a thoroughfare of weapons and fighters and support systems and opium. Helmand province is the capital for opium production on the planet. The Taliban allows the farmers to grow the stuff, and it charges them taxes. It feeds the insurgency.”
The 24th was successful in disrupting the Taliban’s activity, Gentile says. But the region they cleared is only about six-square-miles in a country unfathomably vast. The United States continues to face quite a dilemma. Opium is responsible for a staggering 50 percent of Afghanistan’s gross national product, Gentile says, so if the U.S. simply destroys the fields it will cripple many people’s ability to survive. That’s certainly no way to win their hearts and minds.
“What impacted me most was the level of sacrifice that our servicemen and women are offering up to our nation every day,” Gentile says of his reporting. “Patrolling in temperatures above 120 degrees. Eating meals from plastic bags. Sleeping on the ground. Washing with cold water from a well. I believe that our nation, unfortunately, is largely unaware of that sacrifice. And that, in itself, is good reason for a journalist like me to go to a place like that.”
And a great reason for students to learn from such a journalist.
