Columnist Susan Snyder: War’s vivid pictures can deceive

Friday, March 21, 2003 | 8:25 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

March in central Florida smells like orange blossoms.

Their soothing sweetness engulfs small towns such as Winter Garden, where longtime residents quietly ignore -- or maybe quietly defy -- the walled, stucco subdivisions pressing in from all sides.

It smells good. It's quiet. People leave their doors unlocked out of habit rather than carelessness. In this sweetness and solitude last week, I examined the images of war.

"These are the best kind of Japs you will find," was scrawled across the back of a tattered black-and-white photograph showing dead Japanese soldiers in the jungles of World War II. The lower half of a U.S. Marine standing behind the corpses was visible in the upper right-hand corner.

The soldier is my father. The handwriting is his. The war was one he rarely spoke of. And the rest of the photos are less graphic.

Stoic soldiers in dress uniforms peer from still, soft sienna shades of professionally produced portraits. A U.S. Marine basic training platoon is lined up like a high school football team at its camp in California.

The faces belong to my father, his buddies or my mother's friends. Air raids, gunfire and skylines of foreign cities under siege are left to the imagination.

Now, 24-hour newscasts leave nothing to imagination. Reporters embedded in military platoons blurt whatever comes to mind when their videophones switch on. Satellites beam immediate images of Baghdad and sounds of exploding bombs.

We strain to see explosions glow on the horizon or flash over the minarets as the commentator gives a play-by-play that sounds more like a Super Bowl than a war. One NBC commentator Wednesday evening referred to the broadcast of war as "the biggest event" ever televised.

"Event?"

Oddly, the more we see of war, it seems, the less capable we are of actually seeing it.

The Associated Press wire service was heavy Thursday morning with reports quoting average Joes from all over the country.

"The president knows what he's doing. He's going after that Iraqi leader that supports terrorism and a regime that is based on immorality," a 21-year-old Oklahoma college student told an AP writer.

The young man was visiting Las Vegas on spring break. Big go-team talk from a kid whose biggest risk this week will be taken in a casino. Plenty of his peers are sitting in tanks, airplanes and foxholes waiting to give us another dose of reality TV.

We are assured this war will happen quickly, whatever that means. It had better. We don't have the attention span for the long haul. By the time most people read this, they will have spent half the day channel-surfing for something that moves faster or explodes more often.

"There's nothing happening," they'll say as they switch from CNN to college basketball on ESPN.

Something is happening. We are learning less from better pictures of war. We are bored by detail and lose interest before seeing the whole story.

My late father's photos are 60 years old, yet speak clearly of war. That was a long time ago, he'd say when asked about them. Some guys came home.

Some didn't.

No details. But we got the picture.