Sep182015
NYT Plays Up Risks to Bomber Pilots, Downplays the Civilians They Kill
New York Times photo of Navy pilots returning
from bombing Iraq. (photo: Adam Ferguson/NYT)
Trying to
wring some melodrama out of the not particularly dangerous lives of US bomber
pilots, the New York
Times‘ Helene Cooper starts off an article with an anecdote
about two US Navy jets taking off from an aircraft carrier on a bombing mission
in Iraq:
In one of the
fighter jets was Navy Lt. Michael Smallwood, 28, call sign Bones, and in the
other was his friend and roommate, Navy Lt. Nick Smith, also 28, call sign Yip
Yip.
For a minute
or two that day in May, the Hornets were right next to each other in the sky,
but then Lieutenant Smith’s plane had engine trouble and began to lose
altitude. Over the radio, Lieutenant Smallwood could hear his friend turn
around, try to land back on the carrier and then eject into the Persian Gulf.
The $60 million Hornet crashed into the sea.
Lieutenant
Smallwood found himself fighting to keep his mind off the fate of his friend,
but his orders were to continue climbing and fly on to Iraq.
Midway through
the article–whose main point, according to the headline, is that “For US
Pilots, the Real War on ISIS Is a Far Cry From Top Gun“–Cooper teases readers again:
As Lieutenant
Smallwood’s plane flew toward Iraq in May after his friend had ejected from his
own jet, he could hear from the chatter on the radio that a recovery effort was
underway. But Lieutenant
Smallwood knew
better than to clog up the frequency asking if Lieutenant Smith and his weapons
officer on the plane had been found alive.
Five more
hours to go. Arriving in the skies over Iraq, Lieutenant Smallwood’s Super
Hornet connected with a refueling tanker to get gas, then continued with the
task at hand. But whenever there was a lull in the flight, “all I could think
about was my roommate and his W.S.O.,” Lieutenant Smallwood said, using the
military term for weapons officer.
At the end of
the article, Cooper finally reveals the information withheld from her initial
anecdote: Spoiler alert! The pilot who ejected was fine. She ends with a quote
from his roommate:
“But I still
had to run down to the room to see for myself,” Lieutenant Smallwood recalled.
“First thing I did was hug him.”
This cozy
ending to Cooper’s drawn-out tale was not altogether surprising, given the low
casualty rate for US military personnel in what the Pentagon refers to as
Operation Inherent Resolve: The Navy has lost only two people in a year of
combat, both in non-combat related injuries, one of which involved falling off
a balcony while on leave (Air
Force Times, 8/24/15)
The Times article
is accompanied by a photo gallery of bomber flyers, including Lt. Michael
“Bones” Smallwood, whose tale of a time he was worried dominates the piece.
(photo: Adam Ferguson/NYT)
Cooper does
her best nevertheless to make the reader empathize with the risks faced by
bomber pilots, despite a former flyer’s admission that “if you stay above
10,000 feet, you’re not going to be hit.” Though the mechanical difficulties
faced by Yip Yip dominate the story, Cooper asserts that “engine troubles are
not the only risk at 25,000 feet.” What else is there? Well, there’s
acceleration: “The F/A-18s today require more G-forces than the planes of
the Top Gun era,
and pilots today pull nine Gs instead of four and five Gs”—so pilots have to
make sure they are “not dehydrated or hungover from drinking and crooning the
Righteous Brothers to Kelly McGillis at a bar the night before.”
For comparison
purposes, riders on the Shock Wave roller coaster at Six Flags Over Texas
experience 6Gs six Gs–placing the
amusement park-goers somewhere between Maverick and Bones on the toughness
scale.
There’s one
other risk “beyond that” that Cooper presents the bomber pilots as facing, though
they’re not actually the ones facing it:
Despite the
precautions the pilots say they take, there are civilian casualties from
airstrikes, although the number is in deep dispute. Officials with United
States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the
Middle East, recently said that they had received reports of 31 episodes
involving civilian casualties since the airstrikes began, and had dismissed 17
as not credible, with six still under investigation. One report, investigated for
more than six months, led Centcom officials to conclude that two children were
probably killed by a coalition airstrike.
That paragraph
is followed by a one-sentence paragraph: “Monitoring groups say the command’s
figures are a gross understatement.” But that’s the last we hear from these
monitoring groups; instead Cooper goes back to a Navy officer, who assures us
that “in the war against the Islamic State, bombs hit their intended targets
almost all of the time,” because “world opinion swings very violently against
you when you start killing the wrong people.”
Cooper also
tells us that flyers “spend a lot of their time in the air watching patterns of
civilian life, to determine whether a movement on a road just outside of Ramadi
is a truck full of Islamic State fighters or a pickup with civilians,” and that
“they very often return to the Roosevelt [aircraft
carrier] with all of their bombs still strapped to the planes.”
If
she had talked to some of those monitoring groups, readers would have gotten a
very different picture. The monitoring project Airwars, for example, says that
at least 575 civilians have been killed in well-reported incidents connected to
confirmed US or US-allied airstrikes from August 2014 through August 2015.
With nearly 5,000 airstrikes conducted by the US and its allies in the
first 11 months of the bombing campaign, this suggests that for every 10 air
raids Yip Yip and Bones carry out, roughly one civilian is killed.
Cooper is
right about one thing: That sure doesn’t sound like Top Gun.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com,
or write to public editor Margaret Sullivan at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes
or @Sulliview).
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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