New York Times
By Manny Fernandez
April 14, 2018
When I arrived at the Texas National Guard Armory here, several troops were already exiting the palm-tree-lined building. They wore camouflage combat fatigues and serious expressions.
I was in this border city to do a media embed — the backstage pass of combat journalism, when reporters were allowed to shadow American military units in overseas war zones for months at a time. My embed was far different: I was going to spend a few domestic, peacetime hours with some of the National Guard troops dispatched to the border on the orders of President Trump.
I asked a soldier if these were the troops we would be shadowing.
“They’re heading to lunch,” he replied.
That moment set the tone for the rest of my embed — assume nothing.
I thought I’d be riding in a military vehicle, but we rode instead in civilian trucks and minivans. I thought we’d spend most of the time in a so-called O.P., or observation post, but instead we spent hours traveling on the road. I thought I would see a lot of political stagecraft, but I saw plenty of unscripted reality.
I saw, for example, a hint of the money being spent. Officials have been vague on the precise cost of the deployment, but the resources before me were stunning: pricey Bushnell binoculars, hotel rooms, rental vehicles. Texas has had troops on the border since 2014 as part of a state mobilization, and the cost was roughly $1 million a month. This new, federally financed deployment will run far higher.
It all started last Saturday, when Marc Lacey, The Times’s National editor, asked me to request an embed with the troops on the border in Texas. On Monday, the Guard sent me an email back stating that I had been selected, along with the Times photographer Lynsey Addario. We would have five hours, starting at noon Tuesday, the first of several media embeds of Texas ground forces planned during Mr. Trump’s deployment.
But first, I had to sign my life away. The Guard gave us a five-page form. By signing it, I acknowledged that I had been advised by the Guard that, “in pursuing the successful accomplishment of its mission,” the state’s military forces could not “guarantee my personal safety or the safety of my equipment.”
On Tuesday at noon, Weslaco was hit with a lightning storm. Part of the armory where we and a few other media outlets gathered had no power. Soldiers were walking around dark halls using the lights from their phones. Our departure at noon was pushed to 1:45 p.m.
Before we got on the highway, we were told we could not reveal our locations, other than to say we were in Starr County. And we could not photograph the full faces of the troops — to protect their identity and safety. Military leaders worried that smugglers would target them for speaking out.
On the one hand, there was an element of organizational paranoia at play. But the border — not the towns and cities where people live, but the physical line on the Rio Grande — can be a dangerous place. In 2011, drug smugglers trying to protect a raft loaded with marijuana threw rocks and fired up to six gunshots at officers on the border near the places where we traveled (the agents answered those six gunshots with a barrage of about 300).
I thought about that incident as I stood next to a soldier overlooking the river.
He said nothing to me as he stared through binoculars. He was in his 20s. He wore a wedding ring. He was Latino. I would guess he lived not too far away from where he stood at that moment. This young man was a visual representative of America and vulnerable to those six gunshots in a way that I was not. So much of this debate has been filled with generalities that I appreciated the chance to put a specific human face on the issue. When I think about it now, I picture that silent, focused young man, his M-4 rifle and his silver wedding band.
There was a moment at the first observation post when Ms. Addario — who has risked her life covering war zones around the world and was captured and held in Libya for six days in 2011 — wanted to stand on a Humvee to get a better shot. She was told not to. It was too risky. At the second observation post, Ms. Addario persisted, and ended up climbing a Humvee. A soldier who served as the media coordinator assured a captain that she had, indeed, signed a waiver, and they let her do it. She came down safely, without a scratch.
Mission — that little one at least — accomplished.
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