By Arthur Bridgeforth Jr.

Ruby Bailey, a Washington D.C. correspondent for the Detroit Free Press and alumnus of Wayne State's Journalism Institute for Minorities, told JIM students and faculty at a Brown Bag Lunch event on April 16 about her recent assignment as an embedded reporter covering the war in Iraq.

Bailey was embedded for five-weeks with the U.S. Navy's Kitty Hawk Battle Group. She spent time on the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier, the USS John S. McCain, a guided-missile destroyer and the USNS Comfort, a hospital ship that were all stationed in the Persian Gulf.

In fact, Bailey said spending time on the Comfort brought the human side of the war home to her. The Comfort was the ship stationed closest to Iraq, only 45 miles off shore. She said a "black haze" hung over the skies of Iraq from the missile bombings. She also saw the results of the war, when wounded U.S. troops, Iraqi soldiers and civilians being treated on the hospital ship.

Bailey recalled the most chilling question Iraqi civilians would ask through the interpreter when she tried to interview them: "Is Saddam dead?"

Ironically, not only was the Comfort the closet ship to the Iraq shore, but it also didn't have radar, sonar or any defensive weapons, which made it vulnerable if an enemy plane ignored the Red Cross markings on the ship.

Bailey, who graduated from JIM in 1989, also discussed her accounts of being bunked below the flight deck and hearing the rumble of planes taking off the Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier or hearing the missiles being launched from the ship. She told of filing stories via satellite phone, from a laptop on deck while shielding her computer screen from the sun's glare or from the filing room deep in the bowels of the ship adjacent to where the ship's bombs were stored. Bailey also spoke of 15-hour workdays and negotiating the eight-hour time difference between Iraq and her stateside editors.

As she has done throughout her 13-year journalism career, Bailey said she didn't anticipate being sent to Iraq as the rumblings of a potential war were chronicled in the news for the past several months. But when Bailey was approached by an editor who quipped: "Ruby you're going to war," she gamely accepted the assignment as another growth opportunity for her career.

After a short delay, Bailey was on to a week of Risk Assessment Training in Virginia to prepare for her assignment. That training entailed learning a variety of skills from putting a gas mask on in nine seconds in the event of a chemical weapons attack and various forms of first aid to identifying and assessing potential risk while covering the war.

Bailey shared a photo album, a book on Bahrain and clips with the JIM students in addition to her insight and colorful anecdotes on her time spent embedded with the U.S. Navy in Iraq.