Cherry Picking from the Miller Memoir

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I wrote last week about one passage from Judith Miller's memoir, THE STORY (2015). Here's another.

Early on in her chapter 15, Miller, writing about being embedded with a team that was assigned to look for Saddam's supposedly hidden cache of weapons of mass destruction during the Iraq War in 2003, tells us:

"Col. Richard R. McPhee, forty-seven, who commanded the eight-hundred-person XTF, had insisted I wear a uniform if I wanted to travel with his METs."

Jargon translation there. The XTF was the "Exploration Task Force." It was made up of Mobile Exploration Teams (METs, but not a New York baseball franchise.) So, the Colonel in charge wanted her to wear a uniform. Why?

"A reporter in civilian clothes was a natural target, he said He was not going to be the first commander in Iraq to get his embed killed."

I'm curious why this is? An Iraqi sniper would aim for the civilian? Why? Or just because it would make her conspicuous? Well, wearing something bright and red, with a frilly hat on top, would be conspicuous, but that probably wasn't what Miller ever had in mind. Apparently the Colonel's reasoning wasn't self-evidently powerful to Miller either, who argued.

"Eventually we compromised. Wearing my own beige cargo pants and white t-shirt, I borrowed desert boots and an army jacket..." The jacket was valuable, because it was COLD out in the desert through much of this search. Miller wistfully wonders "Where was the weather that the military had warned would be too hot to fight in?"

Why does this passage draw my attention? Because it shows how Miller constructs her stories: with herself as protagonist, and with great care as to pacing and framing. The dispute over clothes is a nice piece of scene setting for a story of frustrations -- storage dumps searched to no effect, barrels dug out of the sand that turn out to be filled with nothing more dramatic than gasoline. No wonder they were unbothered by snipers aiming for 'the civilian.' On such a fruitless task they weren't worth sniping at.

That rhetorical question of hers I quoted above, though, bugs me. And it is not followed up. The military (who precisely?) warned whom about the weather? It is obvious enough (if you've ever been to such domestic locales as, say, New Mexico) that deserts can get cold.

But the reference here seems to suggest there was a warning, "we can't fight and win this war, it's a really hot desert," issued by some military source to some civilian authority. Although I have heard some of the 'brass' was quite wary of the war, it surely had better reasons than that! It appears that Miller is using the simple fact that she wore an army jacket, as part of her couture 'compromise,' to cast aspersions on opposition to the war in general.

I think several things are going on in this passage. Miller later received some criticism for wearing that jacket. It was taken as evidence that she had crossed a line from reporting on the work of the XTF to actually taking part in it. She wants to reply to that line of criticism in several ways: (1) the army required me because the Colonel didn't want me to die, (2) but I resisted the idea, and (3) although I ended up wearing an army jacket anyway, it was as a sensible response to the weather conditions, and while we're on the subject (4) let's imply that opposition to the war was expressive of ignorance of the fact that it can get cold in the Middle East.

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