We only had to stop moving to change drivers.
The Navy calls it "UNREP," underway replenishment. We called it "logging."
When we had eight trucks and plenty of room, we could do two simultaneous loggings. Later we only did one. Eventually, we'd do a halt. Things were just too fucked up, guys were too tired, to trust logging.
But for then, we could unrep fast.
And later, well, there weren't as many Strykers to fuel.
So while I thought about the fucking bind I was in, I talked with Graham. And, yes, I could multitask it.
I asked him what the normal method of sending out this sort of stuff was. Turned out the answer was "it's complicated." Generally is.
There are two sources of any news, print, video, whatever. The first is "primary source" news reports. That's when you've got a known person standing in front of a news camera or a known "byline" reporting in paper or a known voice doing radio. Twenty-four-hour news cycle, they get a few minutes a day. Unless they get really popular, then they get their own show and eventually become an anchor and senior producer and such. Won't go into career progression in the news field.
But most video people saw on TV, and most news stories and most written stories that got converted to voice, was done by "secondary" sources. Stringers. Stringers were usually locals who had developed some connection within their news area. I'm going to stop talking about print because here's where it got interesting.
Stringers didn't sell to the networks. A bit more about print. AP got most of the news from stringers and then sent it on, sometimes with editing that was a bit, ahem, slanted and getting to pick and choose what was going to be news (people defending themselves with guns was never news, gays beating up straights or blacks attacking whites for hate reasons was never news). That was print. Also much of the Internet news and news reports read on radio. About eighty to ninety percent.
AP controlled all of that news. If they didn't think it was news, it wasn't news. Talk about a monopoly.
Video had avoided that for a long time. In the '60s and '70s, TV news was the networks and they filled a bare hour or two of mostly repetitive news. News from distant lands came in by film and then video tape. It was edited at the national studio, script was written and then broadcast. Local news followed the same pattern but without the flying it in. They got that from their parent network.
And all the networks had fair sized "bureaus" in major capitals. So did print.
But with the advent of the 24-hour news cycle they needed more and more video. So there started to be stringers. They'd go through the local bureaus.
But they needed more and more and more. And at the same time they were cutting back bureaus and foreign reporters.
So the media got together and formed a third party that would collect all the stringer videos. Most of it wasn't used. That got cut. Unimportant? Who knows. Nobody ever saw it. What definitely got cut was anything related to context and the networks never saw any of it. All there were were clips of dramatic shots.
The networks paid for the clips and then did voice-over based on the description the company gave of what the clips meant. That was for, call it "Western" news channels. For other countries, for more money, the company also did voice-over in local language.
Follow the money. Here's the thing.
Most of their clients for voice-over, more money, were in the Middle East and dictatorships with an axe to grind against the U.S. and Israel. So, you've got a clip of Palestinians shooting at Israeli soldiers, Israeli soldiers returning fire and a kid dead in his father's arms.
You're cutting that down to thirty seconds. You've got excellent shots of each of these if each is held as a chunk: twenty seconds of Palestinian fire, twenty of Israeli and ten of the dead kid. (Which is just a shot of a dead kid and a grieving father. No clue what kind of bullet.)
You can make one for the Western market with the Palestinians shooting and one for the Arab market of the Israelis but that takes time. And time is money.
You're a company out to make a buck. Your best paying clients are Arabs.
You make a clip of Israeli soldiers shooting and a dead kid in his dad's arms. The voice-over can be very plain. Just "an outbreak of fighting between Palestinian and Israeli forces left three dead including a twelve-year-old boy."
People never see the Palestinians shooting.
Nobody sees it. Not the networks, not the Arabs, not the Israelis who are watching "Western" TV news. As far as they are aware, the Palestinians were just peacefully singing kumbaya when the Israelis opened fire and the kid can only be dead from the Israelis because only the Israelis are shooting. Right?
In the 1990s the company, based in London, was bought by a holding company from the network "cartel." The holding company was owned by the Saudi Royal family.
By 2001, the vast majority of the employees of the company were Islamic. Sunni to be precise.
And it controlled the broadcast news for the entire world.
Plot?
You betcha.
During a seminar in Arab-Western relations in the 1980s, the future king of Saudi Arabia said that "nothing is more paramount than gaining favorable media attention to the plight of the Arab peoples."
This from a guy who owned more Rolls Royces than you could stick in a very big LOG base.
Well, the broadcast news world was in tatters. It was barely functioning even with government largesse. And the Saudis, for the moment, weren't producing oil or money or anything else. The whole region was a vastly overpopulated desert. It had been L.A. times ten and wasn't coming back soon. I had no clue what was happening with that company in London. (And, no Graham didn't tell me all that. He told me bits, how he and Skynet did things, and I had other bits and I worked the rest out in research later. But I'd heard the basics long before.)
We wouldn't be going through that company, though. The way that Graham did stuff was he shot a bunch of clips, whatever struck his and his producer's fancy, then sent them back to London and Skynet. It all got edited there. They might get a request to concentrate on something after a bit. A particular human interest angle, for example.
They'd gotten video of our blown-up Stryker. Also of the dead Iraqis. Also of the Javelins.
We'd gotten video of them dropping out of the sky. Not as good as theirs but very close.
And while they had good uplink/downlink, we had better.
I also had a couple of aces in the hole.
So I told him what we were going to do. And he got white again. Whiter.
Chapter Twelve
Go Do that Voodoo
But, hell, I sort of needed permission.
See, there's this thing. Generally, it's best to do it and ask forgiveness. Especially in the military. Except when it comes to clear and unquestionable violation of regulations. Sure, I could ask for a lawyer but I might as well ask for a last cigarette if I let Graham start broadcasting as an "embed." There was a process.