Like many Vietnam veterans, Providence Journal columnist Bob Kerr had long hoped to return to the Southeast Asian country where he took part in a war more than three decades ago. The result of Kerr's two-week trip, a lengthy takeout published Sunday, March 16, wasn't planned to coincide with the eve of war in Iraq, and the journey didn't yield the epiphany he was looking for. But Kerr's collection of vignettes -- describing a country where Agent Orange and leftover landmines still exact a harsh toll, a place "that we had made no attempt to understand when we went there to save it" -- nonetheless offered a valuable cautionary tale about the limits and consequences of American military power.

Even though the depth of the Journal's staff has been winnowed by buyouts in recent years, it's a sign of the paper's ambition that reporter Michael Corkery was assigned to cover the conflict in Iraq, and his dispatches and audio clips on www.projo.com have offered a sense of what it's like to be traveling with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division. Since the war began, however, Kerr has remained the ProJo's most penetrating observer.

Using the latitude of his column, Kerr nailed the packaged and sanitized coverage typical of television, acidly noting that Matt Lauer "didn't get his ticket to Qatar by being a doom and gloom wack job." Pulling no punches in a separate piece, Kerr expressed pessimism about the direction of the US, and he skewered the false notion that critics can't express their views without somehow being unpatriotic: "I hate this war because it makes the country I love look stupid and scared . . . Pretty soon, somebody is going to to bring back that old '60s and '70s gem of national paranoia: "Love it or leave it." Maybe somebody already has."

Many of the younger anti-war critics strike Kerr as being strident for the sake of it, and he doesn't dismiss the possibility that Saddam could pass chemical or biological weapons to terrorists. But the columnist, who served as a combat correspondent with the Third Marine Division in 1968 and 1969, says he didn't anticipate being as bothered by the war in Iraq as he has been. "We just don't seem to have learned from Vietnam at all," Kerr says in an interview, citing a number of parallels between that war and our current moment, from shifting justifications to the administration's indication of surprise that the enemy is using irregular troops and tactics. "I think it's tragic that we haven't gone back 35 years and said, `What can we learn from that?' "

Kerr represents one of the few explicitly skeptical voices in the Rhode Island media regarding the war. ProJo political columnist M. Charles Bakst, for one, has backed the Bush administration line that Saddam is responsible, writing on March 20, "Today, as sad as it may sound, we have to give war a chance." (Apparently uneasy about using a real image of battlefield carnage, the ProJo included a disclaimer beneath a March 27 New York Times photo of a Marine walking past an Iraqi soldier killed a day earlier in a firefight north of An Nasiriyah. Even so, reader Alice DeRise of Narragansett was troubled to find too much news in her newspaper. Publication of the photo was "totally uncalled for," she wrote in a letter to the editor. "If we are asking the Iraqis to be humane to our people, how can you justify such a photo of theirs?")

Elsewhere, the war has intensified some of the worst excesses of talk radio. WHJJ-AM talk-show host John DePetro, for example, deserves credit for occasionally including anti-war activists, such as Anna Galland of the American Friends Service Committee, among his guests. Still, DePetro's frequent use of a favorite audio clip -- in which an activist states the opposition to the war of gays, lesbians, and transsexuals -- seems like an attempt to caricature the anti-war movement. And it does nothing to enhance the credibility of talk radio when hosts like DePetro take seriously those callers who advocate leveling Iraq to the ground.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: April 4 - 10, 2003