Nicholas Kulish gets satirical about War in Iraq with his new book Last One In - By N.L. Belardes

In 2003 I stood in front of a small class of history students at Bakersfield College and named a certain war correspondent. I said I had a bad feeling about him. I asked the students to watch him closely. He was embedded in a combat transportation vehicle that sped across the Iraqi deserts toward Baghdad. He beamed reports to the nightly news.

Many Americans watched him with glee. I was filled with dread.

After he died, classroom moments were surreal. I think students thought I was some freaky mystic who could predict the deaths of journalists. I figured I just saw the danger in what journalists were doing. Entering a combat zone isn’t always the safest of bets. It can be a death wish.

Little did I know at the time, another war correspondent had become embedded with a Marine attack-helicopter squadron for the Wall Street Journal. More mysterious is how I would come to have a few MySpace conversations with him more than four years later in 2007 regarding a fiction novel set during the early weeks of the War in Iraq’s race to Baghdad.

Yes, looking back, it does seem like some of the media portrayed the beginning of the war as a reality TV cross country race, complete with checkered flags, megaphones and a crashing statue at the end…

Nicholas Kulish, now the Central Europe correspondent for the New York Times has sprinkled a few of his own war correspondent memories into his roaring satire of war journalism and the War in Iraq, with his new book, Last One In (July 1, 2007 release).

A quick, engrossing read, Kulish’ novel is written with movie narrative quality. It’s the story of a feisty protagonist who transforms as a journalist. He mingles with the youth of war in a conflict that in its earliest stages, for most ground troops, is a dangerous desert caravan penetrating windstorms and boredom.

Kulish captures the malaise of war with comedic talent as he’s able to satirize a conflict without degrading the men and women of America still serving overseas. His novel is very patriotic, and is respectful of battle-hardened soldiers and war correspondents alike. Yet, Last One In also raises the issue of nouveau embedding programs with journalists who must eventually face one of the biggest and most tragic of all journalistic credos: how to stay out of a war while in one. The question of ‘can you stay out’ proves more difficult than it seems.


Check out Kulish on myspace

War often sucks those in who don’t mean to go there. Main character Jimmy Stephens is the most unlikely candidate for war, a gossip columnist railroaded into a one-year tour (Read the fictitious New York Daily Herald stories by Kulish' character, Jimmy Stephens). His unlikely planting into the American launching of the war in 2003 is a testament to the idea that war can indeed find and grapple with any person, even the most undetermined and under-trained, like Jimmy Stephens, who up until his embedding seemed socially placated by a life of movie stars and entertainment antics.


Real or comedy news site?

I caught up with Kulish and asked him a few questions about Last One In:

Noveltown: Have you been criticized for writing a comedy-drama in relation to the War in Iraq?

Nicholas Kulish: I’ve had some uncomfortable questions about it, without question. I think that people who read the book recognize that it’s a satire rather than slapstick. There’s a lot of humor, but at its heart this is a serious book. It’s also confined to the initial stage of the war, the gung-ho rush to invade. I find that to be its own, isolated event – different from the long hard slog of the last four years.

Noveltown: I’m guessing some real comedic experiences imprinted themselves upon you while you were embedded with a Marine attack-helicopter unit for the Wall Street Journal. This one even made it into your novel as one soldier writes about March 13 2003: “In other developments, our “embedded media” person has arrived. His name is Nick Kulish, and he writes for the Wall Street Journal. Seems like a nice guy – he’s about 27 and is getting the lay of the squadron. Some of our pilots initiated him last night… at about midnight, they all got dressed up in their gas masks and ran into his tent screaming “Gas Gas Gas!!!” Pretty hysterical – he jumped out of his rack with a wild look on his face, until he saw everyone busting up laughing in their masks and realized what was going on. One of the guys even got it on videotape for the rest of us to watch later.” Comments?

Nicholas Kulish: That’s some great sleuthing. I can’t believe you found that old blog post. The “gas attack” is one of the few remaining experiences of mine that was translated into the book. The first draft had more of that, but the pure inventions tended to be livelier and funnier than the based-on-real-life experiences. But that was the kind of seminal hazing experience that – video camera included – would be hard to top.

Noveltown: In your Book Review article, “Embed cred: how close is too close for embedded reporters?” you wrote some poignant thoughts: “When I contemplate the success or failure of the embed program, I think about those briefings in Qatar, at the Pentagon's press office, not the numbing recitation from the podium, but those moments when a questioner, with a newspaper or television transcript clutched in one hand, refuted a bit of stilted Pentagonese by saying, "But an embed with the 3rd I.D." or "ah embed with the 1st Marine Division reported ... " And that's why we were there.”



Now, how do you reconcile your real experiences and criticisms of the embed program with your own message about embeds that you relate to readers Last One In?

Nicholas Kulish: Context is always important. That review was written at the peak of criticism of the program, when everyone was railing about the media manipulation, the co-opting of the reporters, the lapdog patriotic press. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to have civilian observers going along with your military as long as it’s balanced with outside reporting from all sides. I always had a Heisenberg Principle theory that a company of infantry with a reporter was less likely to do something borderline knowing that the notebook, the camera and the microphone were around somewhere. I thought there were some issues with the embedding program and the rules, as well as the way a lot of the coverage went, but in general transparency and access are good. As far as “refuting Pentagonese,” I think it’s important to realize the difference between the politicians, the brass and the troops. The troops in my experience are bright, dedicated, impressive people. You can criticize the strategic decisions while backing the troops on the ground.



Ernst Thälmann monument in East Berlin, where Kulish first lived in 95, was back from 03-05, and is moving again in August, 2007.

Noveltown: As an author, I’m sure you get bugged with this question daily: How much of you is the gossip columnist Jimmy Stephens in your book?

Nicholas Kulish: Very, very little. He was always a separate human being in my head. A lot of the experience he fakes to sound like a legit reporter was my own real experience. On the other hand, we all feel like fakes sometimes and you draw on feelings that you had at various points to round them out. As a writer you have to put yourself in the shoes of a character and try to imagine their reactions, but that means there’s a little of you in every last one of them.




Noveltown: I can’t help but think there was a series of real inside jokes by the kinds of journalists and war correspondents you created for your story: real people, journalists likened to battle-hardened commanders, and folks who mutter lines like, “No one gets laid like a war correspondent.” Thoughts?

Nicholas Kulish: I think in these situations you have a lot of people who are scared but who are hard-wired not to let anyone know it. So you get a lot of joking on the one hand and a lot of tough talk on the other. “You think this is bad? You should have been in Mogadishu.” At the same time, my perspective was that of an outsider. I hadn’t covered Haiti and Bosnia and Cambodia like some of those folks. So a lot of the jokes are outside-in, based on Jimmy’s ignorance of the folkways of this tribe of war correspondents, rather than vice-versa.

Noveltown: I’m curious how you shaped your idea of a novel. When was the seed planted? Before you were embedded? During? Afterwards? Were you already a novelist in the making?

Nicholas Kulish: The seed was planted during the Media Boot Camp, a lot of journalists doing a three-day version of Basic Training. It’s not a bad idea, actually, because you need a familiarity with military procedure just to – I mean this literally – stay out of the way when soldiers react to something. Still, it was pretty ridiculous. Standing there with our lattes as an Army Ranger tries to get us to do calisthenics, firing blanks at us, making us crawl on our bellies. I kept thinking, “We don’t belong here.”


Old Berlin, New Berlin. Kulish says: "The rehabbed buildings versus the fall-of-the-Wall look. I have nostalgia for the latter that most locals don't."

Noveltown: I’m certainly not accusing you, but do you think there are journalists out there who are trying to be the Upton Sinclairs of military reporting? And, do you see any smoking gun kinds of Sacco and Vanzetti style books against the government that people should read cautiously?

Nicholas Kulish: There’s probably stuff on the fringe that I haven’t run across, but I haven’t really seen that. This gets back to the brass-versus-grunts question, I think. If you read Tom Ricks’s book “Fiasco,” it is highly critical of the war-planning and execution. But Ricks loves the Marine Corps (read “Making the Corps”), is wildly well-respected by military professionals, and cares deeply about the people involved. I myself come from a military family. My Dad was a career Army officer and hanging out at Ft. Meyer in Arlington was a regular part of my life growing up. My Uncle Gene was career Navy. My novel is inherently critical about aspects of the war, but one of my friends described “Last One In” as a “love letter to the Marines.” You can do both in a democracy that values free speech and open debate.

Noveltown: Final questions, and thanks for taking part in this interview. I hope you have a great time as the Central Europe correspondent for the New York Times. Maybe a few novels will appear out of those experiences as well. Tell us a little about your hopes and dreams for the novel, Last One In, and for yourself as a novelist?

Nicholas Kulish: That’s the hardest question you’ve asked. There are easy, obvious answers: I want people to read it, to care about the characters as much as I do, to think differently about the war. Then there’s the inherent problem that I don’t want to “explain” the book, or tell people what to get out of it. I hope the book can be read many different ways, by a working mother in Bakersfield one way, a young Republican congressional staffer in Washington another and a scholar of Evelyn Waugh yet another. I hope that it defies expectations or easy categories, and that I have the chance to write many more that do the same thing. Thanks for letting me respond. It’s been a
thoughtful, enjoyable experience on my end.
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