"This is Ashleigh Banfield reporting...from The Rhumba Room at the Kuwait Hilton"

Look's like a good time to stock up on bush jacket futures and world-weary expressions. The journalists are coming...the journalists are coming....:

For the first time since World War II and on a scale never before seen in the American military, journalists covering any United States attack on Iraq will have assigned slots with combat and support units and accompany them throughout the conflict

[snip...]

According to a Pentagon document outlining some of the rules of journalistic engagement, reports of live, continuing action cannot be released without the permission of the commanding officer.

There will be strict prohibitions on any reporting of future operations or postponed or canceled operations, the document further states. The date, time and place of military action, as well as the outcomes of mission results, can be described only in general terms. Other ground rules remain to be spelled out.

Yet both the Pentagon and news executives welcomed the initiative. It is a sharp about-face from the restrictive news policies the Pentagon has maintained since the Vietnam War, which to many commanders showed the psychological perils of broadcasting a war into the nation's living rooms. In the Persian Gulf war, for example, only pool reporters were given regular front-line access.

"Psychological perils"....Americans dying, civilians dying, destruction, horror...You know. War stuff. Reality.

Only, to the XBox generation, you can't hit restart on your controller, and a dead child or woman is neither "collateral damage" nor free. They're just dead.

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A good resource for excellent war reportage from that era of "psychological perils" is Library of America's Reporting Vietnam vols. I & II. Among other pieces it contains Michael Herr's complete Dispatches.