From the Publisher

By Louis A. Weil III

Despite the danger, 120 degrees desert heat and threat of poison gas, many gung-ho journalists would jump at the chance to travel with U.S. troops to the Middle East. But the Pentagon brings along only a small pool of reporters, who gather information for the rest of the media. News organizations take turns being on call for such operations, ready to send a journalist at a moment's notice. When the pool was mobilized for Operation Desert Shield, TIME was the newsmagazine standing by to participate (as it was, by coincidence, during last December's Panama invasion and 1987's Persian Gulf tanker-escort mission).

TIME's minutemen in the current pool are Washington correspondent Jay Peterzell and photographer Dennis Brack, who were summoned to Andrews Air Force Base on Aug. 12. The assignment was a welcome one for Peterzell, a specialist in military and intelligence affairs. He packed hastily and caught a few hours of sleep before making the 5 a.m. rendezvous. The pool of 20 journalists flew from Andrews to MacDill Air Force Base near Tampa for a briefing with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command. The reporters were astonished to learn the Pentagon's proposed itinerary: just one night in Saudi Arabia. "That struck us as unsporting," said Peterzell.

But the Pentagon gradually relented. "As the life of the pool was extended a day or two at a time, we learned that the Saudis themselves had put no limit on our stay," Peterzell said. "This whole exercise," he added, "has been one in which all sides are feeling their way forward from a situation in which there was no Western coverage of events from inside Saudi Arabia to one of increasingly unrestricted access." Brack, who took part in the Persian Gulf press pool in 1987, noted that the military has so far placed few restrictions on the pictures he could take. "Some of the Army's photo opportunities might be corny," Brack says. "But they are getting photographers where they need to be -- and the troops do the rest. That's what we came to see."