Alissa Krinsky
TVNewser Contributor
Five years ago today, CNN’s Kyra Phillips was on board the USS Abraham Lincoln as the opening salvos in the Iraq War were launched. “As a journalist, I knew I was witnessing history,” she tells TVNewser. “Personally, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the lives that were at stake, whether it was the Iraqi people, or the U.S. military.”
Or the journalists. Fox News Channel’s Greg Kelly was also in Iraq at the start, and he, too, clearly remembers the danger. Kelly was on the ground, embedded with the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, 2nd Brigade. “I thought we’d be kept on the sidelines…[that the military was] not actually going to have us with them on the frontlines,” he says. But Kelly and colleagues from other networks got extraordinary upfront access. Four journalists did not survive the assignment, including NBC’s David Bloom.
Kelly, a former Marine Corps fighter jet pilot, flew over Iraq in Operation Southern Watch in the late 1990’s. He made it through those missions just fine. But as an embedded reporter he suffered minor facial injuries from a mortar explosion. It didn’t change his outlook. “I could not go to the gates of Baghdad and decide to take the day off because it was getting too dangerous. It was my obligation to go, really, no matter what happened.” Kelly wants to return to Iraq.
The desire to cover the war is shared by Iraq freshman Bill Weir of ABC News, who’s in Baghdad this week after asking to go for three years. “I did everything but set my desk on fire,” he jokes.
Covering the war at this point, Weir feels, should be seen in light of what he calls a fall-off in coverage over the past months. It’s “easy to keep things fresh”, he says, because during those months “everything has changed. The mission, the strategy, the allies, the enemies, the budgets. Everything.”
Weir describes his assignment as “exhilarating”. Kelly ranks going to Iraq as his “career highlight.” Phillips, currently on her fourth reporting assignment to the country, calls the work “really rewarding.”
Worthwhile, she says, because five years on, she hopes the public, and her fellow journalists, do “not lose interest in this war, [and] stay up on it from every level.”
FNC’s Kelly concurs. “We have an obligation to cover it. And I would actually think that viewers have an obligation to watch and read about it because this is the most important issue we’re dealing with as a country right now.”