Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter Offers Voice of Truth in Iraq
Knight Ridder's Tom Lasseter Offers Voice of Truth in Iraq
Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader/KRT
By Barbara Bedway
Published: November 02, 2005 1:05 PM ET
NEW YORK
"Soldiers are constantly surprising me," says Tom Lasseter, 29, the longtime Baghdad correspondent for Knight Ridder. Lasseter spoke to E&P in early October, shortly after getting off a helicopter and a five-day embed with a 3rd Infantry Division sniper team. Their mission was to hunt for insurgents on the back roads and in the palm groves of Muqdadiyah, a city in Diyala province. On the way out he passed a soldier reading a book by Noam Chomsky.
"That's a little seditious, isn't it, reading Chomsky here?" Lasseter jokingly asked the soldier.
"I'll tell you what's f---ing seditious," the soldier replied. "That I've been deployed here for three years."
Soldiers tend to tell Lasseter exactly what they think -- and his ability to convey their emotions and experience in battle as well as to aggressively report the shifting facts on the ground has made his reporting among the most incisive to come out of Iraq. In October he won the Knight Ridder Excellence Award, with the judges noting he has "a history of outstanding investigative work." That history began at the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader in 1999, where among other issues he covered drug trafficking and corruption. It was preparation of a sort for covering war. "If you want to go looking for danger in Eastern Kentucky," says Lasseter, "you can find it."
Turned down as an embed to cover Afghanistan -- Knight Ridder wanted only reporters with combat experience -- he volunteered to go to Iraq, and was part of a team embedded with the 101st Airborne during the initial invasion. He returned to Iraq three times, before joining the Baghdad bureau full time as a correspondent in October 2004.
His initial decision to embed at the company level instead of battalion and brigade turned out to be a fortuitous one. "I rode around in Humvees with sergeants, and it helped me out a lot later getting a sense of military rank and file," he notes. "You go out with them whenever they go out. You don't ask for special concessions. It's only human that after a period of time you learn what's going on inside of them." But he is judicious about using what he hears: "If someone said something once, and it seems out of character, I don't use it. What I use is part of an ongoing conversation, no 'gotcha' quotes."
In an interview, Lasseter can't help but note the surreal aspect of war, recalling how, during the fighting in Fallujah, soldiers hunkered down and had a cracker-eating contest in the midst of fierce urban combat. Then there was the naked man he and his driver encountered running down the road as they entered Najaf. "I'm sure the guy was mentally ill," Lasseter explains, "but he looked like he was a streaker."
Lasseter's groundbreaking reporting has gotten wide play in other publications. A story in which he managed to get two generals in Iraq, who had spoken to him on background, to acknowledge on the record that a military victory over the insurgency was not in the offing, generated front page headlines in Knight Ridder newspapers and dozens of others nationwide.
Last November, Lasseter reported from Fallujah on one of the most hellacious battles of the war while embedded with Alpha Company of the 1st Infantry Division's Task Force. He filed every day of the six-day battle that took the unit into the most intense urban combat since the 1968 battle for Hue in Vietnam. At its end he wrote an indelible account of the unit's house-to-house battles, and the loss of both its commanding and executive officers. The series concluded with one soldier saying he'd been thinking about his son: "I don't want my boy to know his daddy's a killer."
In early October, Lasseter became perhaps the first American reporter to embed with an Iraqi unit on a mission wholly independent of the U.S. military. This enabled a chillingly frank report, in which he suggested that the Iraqi unit was more akin to a Shiite militia. It featured quotes by several Shiite soldiers vowing bloody vengeance against the Sunnis.
But as vivid as his reporting has been, Lasseter still feels that "in a lot of ways, Iraq is a magazine story. You need space to convey nuance, to get what 'Sunni' and 'Shiite' means for people, how that divide is wider now and how it's affecting the fabric of society, where you had and have a lot of intermarriage."
He wryly notes that the best piece of advice he got about Iraq came from a man he met at a hotel in Amman, who told him: "No matter what you write about Iraq, the opposite will also be true."
The abysmal state of security in Iraq has made calibrating risk an oppressive if crucial part of the job. "Having been here when it wasn't nearly as difficult to report in, it's frustrating," he admits. "I spent a lot of time in Fallujah and Ramadi in the summer of '03. You could just knock on doors and interview people. It certainly wasn't the safest place in the world then, but it was a risk you could negotiate. Now you can't."
He makes a point of leaving his hotel at least once a day if he's not on an embed, covering a military press conference, or interviewing Iraqi political or military leaders. The spontaneous, man-in-the-street interviews are primarily done by Knight Ridder's Iraqi reporters. "You lose that firsthand perspective," he says, "but that's just the way it is. To push it too far is foolish and dangerous."
The danger faced daily by ordinary Iraqi citizens was tragically manifest when Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi physician working as a translator for KR who had become a good friend of Lasseter, was shot last June by an American soldier at a Baghdad intersection known as an insurgent hotspot. The night before, Salihee had stayed overnight in the KR office, working late, and had dinner with Lasseter.
Three months later, Lasseter wrote the story summarizing the U.S. military's finding that the shooting -- by a soldier in the Third Infantry -- had been within the Army's rules of engagement. The report did note that the troops' decision to leave Salihee's body "in plain view and leaving the area ... could not have had a positive impact on the local populace."
"War is such a foggy thing," Lasseter says ruefully. "It was just an example of how complicated it can be, reporting over here. But there was absolutely no connection between the sniper who killed Yasser and the guys I was with in Muqdadiyah."
In late January, Lasseter will be moving to Washington, D.C., to cover security-related issues, but will likely be back to Iraq for shorter trips. When asked if he had any plans to write a book of his time in Iraq, like so many other reporters have done, he gave an adamant, "No ... I'm concentrating on doing the next best story that I can. I feel a lot of pressure when I go out to record as much as I can.
"One thing I like about being here: I never feel I'm doing a story that's forced on me. They all feel important and immediate."
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Barbara Bedway (
[email protected]) is a contributor to E&P.
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