It was the 101st Airborne’s second day of fighting in Karbala, Iraq.

A group of American soldiers lined up, one squad behind the other, ready to attack.

But while most men held their rifles at the ready, one man—buried within one of the trailing units—marched with his weapon of choice, a laptop, slung over his shoulder.

Suddenly, the troops came under fire.

Over the crash of artillery shells came the command, “Hit the wall!” Several soldiers ducked into a small, protected courtyard. But the man without a gun couldn’t quite fit—his laptop was in the way.

He turned around, surveying his escape options and locked his eyes on a small doorway. With a powerful shove, he forced himself inside the sealed doorway and joined the other soldiers.

“See that reporter,” the commander exclaimed, apparently shocked by the strength and resourcefulness of the man with the computer, “Put him with the lead element.”

The reporter was Julian E. Barnes ’92, and his experience put him on the front line—if not of the war, then of a new kind of combat journalism.

Known as embedded reporting, the practice first emerged in Kosovo and Afghanistan, but saw its first large-scale implementation in Iraq—where roughly 600 reporters were embedded in coalition units.

Embedded reporting has introduced an unparalleled level of detail into the way journalists cover war.

Barnes, along with his fellow embedded journalists, was prepared for the experience during a week-long media boot camp run by the military that covered topics from personal hygiene to how to march in formation with the soldiers. Barnes said he was at first a little unsure of how helpful the lectures would be.

“We spent a whole half day on hygiene—learning how to change our socks,” he said.

But once he began marching alongside the soldiers, he said he realized how important hygiene could be. “My feet got really disgusting,” he said. “I was definitely glad we had the whole lecture on keeping feet dry.”

After mastering the basics of military life, the journalists were deployed alongside combat units, allowing them to report directly from the battlefront, focus attention on individualized stories of combat and dissect the war from the battlefield up.

“Embedded reporting let us convey to our readers what was happening on a closer level,” said Barnes. “I heard the general confer with the colonel, the colonel with the lieutenant colonel, the lieutenant colonel with the major, all the way down to the soldier. I watched it trickle down. It allowed me to see how a battle is put together.”