In 1975, nearly a half-century ago, the Johns-Hopkins University Press published The First Casualty by Australian author Philip Knightly (1929–2016), a widely praised history of war reporting through the Crimean War. Two best-selling successor editions (2002 and 2004) updated his narrative to include the now-nearly forgotten war in Kosovo and the earliest years of the seemingly never-ending war in Iraq.
The war in 1853–56 on the Crimean Peninsula (in the Black Sea; about the size of Maryland) was a natural focal point for Knightly. It was the first war that saw European correspondents deployed on the battlefield reporting back to their newspapers and home readers in near-real time. Their reporting, especially that of The New York Times’ William Russell, might have been heightened by photographer Roger Fenton’s pictures, but Fenton deliberately censored himself, avoiding honest, critical imagery.
Knightly’s wry title is usually credited to Senator Hiram Johnson, Republican of California, who in 1918 is supposed to have said “the first casualty when war comes is truth,” but people who hunt for such things have found plausible citations going back as far as mid-18th century. The point, of course, is that under the political pressures that attend mortal combat, the incentives for both sides to define what “truth” is—to their home audience, their forces in the field, to outsiders, and, of course, to their enemy—are irresistible.
The same idea is captured in Neil Sheehan’s 1988 Pulitzer-Prize winning book about the war in Vietnam, A Bright Shining Lie. That war is closer to my experience than the ones cited by Knightly. In 1969–70, assigned to the Psychological Operations Directorate of the senior joint U.S. military staff in Vietnam, I slowly learned that it is hard to persuade people to quit what when they think they are winning, and impossible to do so when they know they are.
As the world has somewhat belatedly discovered, we are, all of us, at war now, in mortal combat with COVID-19, a coronavirus, which as I write this (in early April) has sickened more than 300,000 Americans and killed more than 14,000. Plotted on a CDC graph, the upward slope of the number of American cases since March 10th is terrifying. Equally frightening is the fact that world-wide figures since the outbreak began in China approach 1.5 million infected and more than 60 thousand killed. It is a disease for which we do not yet have either a vaccine to prevent nor a cure to restore its victims to health.
While the world has suffered pandemics many times before (think of the bubonic plague, cholera, small pox, and the 1918 misnamed Spanish Flu), none has occurred in an era of such global interconnectedness as characterizes today. People, things, and money whiz around the world as never before. Now infectious disease does, too.
COVID-19 threatens to become what AIDS, MERS, TERS, Zika and Ebola have not: a global pandemic that burrows deep into populations and changes the character of human life and society on earth. It will take a long while to sort out the economic impacts of shutting down much of the world’s production and distribution, of rapidly rising unemployment, of isolating most people in our homes (those who have them), and casting many out onto the streets or open spaces of the Third World. It will take a long while to heal patients and deal with the dead because even in those countries where they are most robust, hospital systems are sized to care for the usual small numbers of unwell, not potentially nearly everybody.
Like the wars that Knightly and Sheehan wrote about, this global “war” against the COVID-19 virus has prompted the same kind of government story-telling and myth-making as did the ones on the Crimean Peninsula and in Vietnam. What is new is that today state and local officials feel compelled to take a part; previous wars were spun almost exclusively by national figures. Impelled by different motives, government leaders and their spokespeople have taken three different approaches to this challenge, sometimes sequentially.
Some nations (such as North Korea and Russia) have elected to say nothing about the presence of COVID-19 in their countries, and apparently have insisted that their underlings say nothing, too, as if speaking would conjure up a dreadful reality. (The expression used to be, “Speak of the devil and you’ll hear the rustle of his wings.”) Or in more modern terms, Putin’s and Kim’s approach is like that of the street cop at the scene an accident, waving his baton authoritatively at cowed passers-by and assuring them “there’s nothing to see here,” even as their eyes show them reality.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has taken a different approach. He has conceded the epidemic that began in Wuhan but insisted on controlling the narrative. He silenced one of its earliest voices in China, the late Dr. Li Wenliang, and seems to be manufacturing the numbers of afflicted in his country that are publicized to the world.
Finally, others diminished the significance of early evidence of the disease’s dangers and only reluctantly were dragged to more realistic appraisals as statistics became more visible and gloomy. This has been the pattern in the United States, where medical expertise is slowly displacing political considerations (hard to do during an election year) in Washington and in state capitals. A consequence of this late, reluctant awakening will certainly be higher human and material costs.
What does this particular “war” have to do with the U.S. Navy? For a crisis that captured the public’s imagination only when COVID-19 outbreaks on cruise ships caught popular interest, it is not clear that Navy leaders in Pearl Harbor or in Washington understood the possible implications to the fleet of the horror stories coming ashore in late January and February from the Diamond Princess and Grand Princess. The response since then suggests that the Navy has opted to follow Xi Jinping’s model: control the narrative, say as little as possible, and stifle those—like Captain Brett Crozier, the former commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71)—who seemingly speak out of turn, irrespective of the wisdom of what they say.
That is wrong, both as a matter of principle and as a way to protect the fleet and advance the war against COVID-19.
