Working for the People

Gordon Lubold: Senior writer, Army Times, Navy Times, Marine Corps Times

by Karol Crosbie

Gordon Lubold takes notes at the Kandahar International Airport in fall, 2001.

Gordon Lubold, senior writer with the Army Times Publishing Company, faces the kinds of challenges that any professional news reporter incurs: How to break away from competitors and find a unique angle; how to develop relationships with news sources that simultaneously build trust and maintain professional boundaries; how to keep a cubicle-corporate environment from isolating you from your readers and subjects.

He also has a few additional challenges: How to meet deadlines when your Internet connection fails in the middle of an Afghanistan desert; how to stay on task when a sandstorm brings thousands of “camel beetles” to your campsite; how to keep your wife and two young daughters from worrying about your safety when you’re embedded with the troops.

When Lubold ’87 arrived at his job at Army Times in 1999, it seemed far afield from his ambition to work for a foreign news bureau. But, says Lubold, he soon found that the culture he was covering was as new to him as any foreign country. The Army Times, a Gannett-owned company, publishes newspapers for U.S. service members and their families.

“The military is a distinct, separate culture,” Lubold says. “ Members live on base, send their kids to schools in military installations, and receive their benefits from the military. I had no military background, and it was a steep learning curve to figure it out.”

One thing he says he learned quickly was that, like any organization, the military is made up of individuals. “The public is very disconnected from the military. They see it as kind of a monolithic thing—people whom they don’t understand with funny hair and uniforms.”

“Real things happen in war.”

Some of the information needs of Lubold’s readers are routine:What are the best jobs and career paths? Where are the most desirable bases? What is the personal impact of a particular government policy?

And some questions aren’t as routine:What does it feel like to be stationed in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Africa? What’s going on there? Lubold says he likes his job just fine when he’s writing from his cubicle in the Pentagon. But he really loves it when he’s embedded with the troops.

Memories of a 2004 deployments in Afghanistan are still fresh. His small cargo plane landed at night in the middle of a desert in almost total darkness. Lubold carried all his belongings on his back, and high winds sent his sleeping mat flying.

“That night, we slept on the floor of the Kandahar airport, and my isomat would have come in handy. Shards of glass hung overhead because the windows had been broken from explosions a month before. It was pretty crude—pretty stimulating.”

The Marine unit he was traveling with came under fire, and Lubold observed first-hand how service members defend themselves. “They train every day of their lives in the military for events like this. They got really jazzed, turned out the lights, and hunkered down.”

And was he afraid? “It was exhilarating! I don’t want to sound like a cowboy, but it was where I wanted to be at the time. Of course, on trips like this you don’t ever want to see anybody get killed, but you want to know that the war is real. There is the perception that the way Americans fight wars is very antiseptic.

Gordon Lubold (left) interviews General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as they return from a trip to Afghanistan in August 2006.

“As a journalist, it’s good to witness that real things happen in war.”

But journalists who write about wars and warriors must sometimes take cover from professional attack. Lubold remembers, for example, the fire he took from U.S. military commanders about a controversial quote he included in a story. “I was talking to this Marine—just a kid, maybe 18 years-old—and I asked him about ‘winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqis.’”

The young solder’s profane response, in which he advocated sending a bullet through his hosts’ hearts and minds and going home, was the kind of quote that Lubold weighs carefully before he uses.

“I used the quote because I knew that there were other soldiers who felt the same way,” says Lubold. “He didn’t just speak for himself.”

Lubold’s news judgments also include ferreting out the motivations of his sources. “There’s a lot of leaking that goes on around here,” he says. “You’ve got to figure out why somebody is saying something. That kid I told you about? His motivation may have been to get his name in the paper. But he said it, nonetheless, and I believe it reflected what he thought.

“You get used to it. You know you’re getting used and sometimes you willingly get used because it’s a story that needs to be told.”

Another routine challenge that many journalists face—maintaining appropriate boundaries with sources—is sharper for writers like Lubold. “That’s part of the rub with embedding. You’re living, sleeping, and eating with the people whom you’re covering. The only way you get perspective, get a sense of what’s going on, is if you become close to the subject. But not too close. I always remind them, ‘We’re buds, but we’re not friends.’”

Lubold, an English major at Wooster, got his journalism training on the job. Although he says he wishes he could travel more and worries that his Pentagon cubicle keeps him too isolated, Lubold concedes that the beltway is the place to be. “And the war is the best story going on right now. The story is constantly changing, and the debate here in Washington is surging.

“This is where it’s happening.”