The students, all in their late twenties, volunteered for the daredevil August mission to follow the journey of the US Army 1st Stryker Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, based at Fort Wainwright, Alaska, with their journalism professor.

"It's a war zone, it's going to be dangerous," Jennifer Canfield, who is 25, told the Chronicle of Higher Education before here departure with fellow students Tom Hewitt, 26, and Jessica Hoffman, 28.

"But I made a commitment to myself that I'd go out and get some kind of foreign-reporting gig, and this kind of came up, and I couldn't say no."

During their current stay in the highly unstable northern province of Diyala, where temperatures easily jump above 120 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), the student-reporters have sent articles to their state's newspaper and television outlets, while chronicling their adventures at shorttimers.blogspot.com.

But sending inexperienced young students to the front in a major war in the Middle East has left some perplexed.

"It's a very unusual undertaking because of the risks involved," Northwestern University professor Ellen Shearer told AFP, expressing hope the students had enough training.

"Journalism can be dangerous and I don't think we would do students any favor by not making them aware of the dangers. Whether it's the best way remains to be seen," added Shearer, who teaches a class on "Covering Conflicts, Terrorism and National Security."

Since the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003, hundreds of journalists have embedded with the GIs to cover the conflict. But this is the first time journalism students have been sent to the war-torn country.

The brains behind the initiative is University of Alaska president Mark Hamilton, a retired general, who launched a call for candidates and budgeted 35,000 dollars, including a 4,500-dollar insurance with Reporters Without Borders Canada, for the endeavor.

The bulletproof vests were graciously provided free of charge by the US Army.

"Thus far, it has proven to be an extremely interesting, often rewarding program and experience -- both for the journalists themselves, as well as the many soldiers they are covering," 1-25 Stryker Brigade spokesman Major Chris Hyde wrote via email from Forward Operating Base Warhorse in Diyala.

The students, he insisted, were receiving "no special treatment." So far, the young apprentice reporters have covered combined patrols with US and Iraqi forces, detainee releases, ceremonies and an air assault mission.

According to their professor, Brian O'Donoghue of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the students are on a mission to find "a focus when thrust in the middle of a huge story."

As training, the youths regularly kept in touch with correspondents who have been embedded with the military and were assigned reading on reporting in "hazardous situations," just as 139 journalists have died in Iraq since 2003, O'Donoghue explained via email from Iraq.

"The risk has proven to be reasonable at this time in Iraq, but it is war," he acknowledged. "And I would look hard at the situation before considering this again."

Minutes after landing in Baghdad, the aspiring journalists had a cold sweat: the military convoy that carried them from the airport to the highly fortified Green Zone narrowly escaped a roadside bomb explosion on their route.

"The realization that we were minutes away from having triggered an IED triggered a reaction that came like a flood," Hewitt wrote on the group's blog.

"This is a war, and while as embeds we might sometimes be divorced from the immediate realities of the fighting, our lives are in the hands of the people whose job it is to never get complacent, to never forget where they are and what the consequences are if they let their guard down."

Share This Article With Planet Earth

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Related Links
Iraq: The first technology war of the 21st century

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News