The Spirit of Stars and Stripes

The Stars and Stripes newspaper, it was once said, was the unit to which the Army assigned those GIs who, if left to the regular army, would contribute to the Allied defeat. I once called that a “wry libel.” It wasn’t meant to be a knock on Stripes’ patriotism, as I take it, but more an appreciation of its newspapermanly spirit.That’s the context in which to take the latest fracas, which has seen, sadly, the firing of the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes and of several members of the staff. They are now in court, hoping to get their jobs back with a lawsuit against the secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, and several of his colleagues.Good luck, I say. I’m an ardent admirer of Stripes, to which I was assigned as a combat correspondent in Vietnam. Our duty was to find combat and be there when it happened. That was not so easy in a country of 67,000 square miles in which combat often broke out at unpredictable locations and lasted but an hour or so. We all scrambled.I met all kinds of GIs and came to admire them — and the Army — greatly. We frequently feuded with the brass over various matters. Stripes reporters, though, carried the same Department of Defense press card as civilian reporters. We had a civilian bureau chief. For the most part the bureau was run by enlisted men.That custom dates back to Harold Wallace Ross in World War I. The famous future founder of the New Yorker was running the Stripes newsroom when, supposedly in a dispute over a comma, Ross, a private, got arrested by the officer who supervised the paper, James Thurber relates in “The Years With Ross.” Absent Ross, the hapless officer couldn’t get the paper out. So Ross was un-arrested, bolstering the tradition of enlisted men editing the paper.In World War II, the trouble between Stripes and the command centered on Bill Mauldin. He was the paper’s cartoonist. He created the immortal characters “Willie and Joe,” rumpled GIs who levied the war. One cartoon showed a USO movie theater with the marquee “Girls Girls Girls.” The GIs were waiting in line to get in, while the officers were escorting the girls out the side door.The cartoon infuriated General Patton, who ordered Mauldin to report to him at his headquarters in a palace at Luxembourg. Mauldin’s cronies borrowed a C47 and flew Mauldin — and his Jeep — to the meeting. When Mauldin sat down, as the story is related in Mauldin’s memoir,* Patton opened his desk drawer and pulled out the cartoon of the USO theater and demanded an explanation. When Mauldin explained, Patton declared, “You can’t run an army like a mob.” In Vietnam, we had our issues with the brass — and vice versa. Some of it was about coverage and some about administration. Stripes reporters, who wore uniforms without rank, wanted — but, in my day, never got — access to officers’ clubs, where so much talk about the war took place.Stripes has long been a lively, general interest paper. In Vietnam it was read — and quoted — by, among others, the 200 or so members of the press corps. The glory of Stripes was the vigor of its coverage of our GIs in the field. We worked out our issues with the brass, and I can’t recall anyone getting fired.In the current crisis at Stripes, it strikes me that the courts will have a hard time denying the Pentagon the power to set the strategy for the newspaper it funds. Or choose the staff to run it. It would, though, be a tragedy if the current crisis at Stripes isn’t resolved in a way that great journalists will still want to write for it.I often tell the story of the invasion of Cambodia, when two Stripes reporters — Specialist 4 Jack Fuller and Specialist 5 Phil McCombs — commandeered a Stripes station wagon and raced toward the front. They found the highway into the Parrot’s Beak of Cambodia deserted, a sign of danger. Eventually they spotted an officer with a field radio and pulled over.The officer would say nothing until McCombs asked, “How far can we go until someone kills us?” The officer thought. “Eight klicks,” he said, finally, using slang for kilometers. The reporters jumped back into their station wagon and drove another 12 klicks before they caught up with a column of American armor. What a tragedy it would be were Stripes to lose that spirit.________* “The Brass Ring,” by Bill Mauldin. W.W. Norton, 1971.

The Spirit of Stars and Stripes

The Spirit of Stars and Stripes

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