Vicky Brock reporting for duty.
Yes, it's true. Being an embedded reporter is, as our President says, hard work. When this reporter was summoned to serve her country in a time of war, she hesitated a moment. After all, being a journalist on the front lines of a war is dangerous, not to mention messy. But once she had attended the rigorous regimen our military requires of its embedees, she came to realize it was a far, far better thing for her to go and serve than never to have gone at all. And so go she did.
Due to her fundamental need to directly communicate with her diary, Vicky Brock is about to change her tense. She has - no, I have - decided to direct the rest of this dispatch in the first person, as much as it pains me to do so.
I have been embedded for lo these many months in an exotic foreign war zone somewhere deep in the Mideast. (Or it could be the Near East; I get those two confused.) My embedders inform me daily that the war is raging outside my hotel, in the very streets of this embattled city. And indeed, as I write, I can hear the sound of distant explosions in the distance. As the woman who changes my sheets so poignantly observed just yesterday, "War is Hell." I have to agree. And yet, it is important that our mission here be accomplished. Many soldiers and mercenaries have lent or sold their support to a beleagured people desperate for something. What is different about this war, I am told, is that many American Corporations also have roles to play. From repair of what we call the infrastructure to re-educating the populace to training the New Army, everyone here is busy getting the job done. Even reporters such as myself are part of the big equation, the answer of which is yet to be determined.
I have to sign off now. Captain Michaelson just phoned and he needs me to take dictation. This is Vicky Brock, embedded reporter.
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