Insight: Strength through Truth

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Before being reassigned from The Pentagon to a new duty assignment in the U.S. Air Force in 1981, I received word that I would be attending the Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Lawrence, Indiana.

Ed Pierce's class of military journalists gather for a photo
prior to graduation from the Defense Information
School at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana in 1981.
COURTESY PHOTO

It was a Department of Defense training site for enlisted military journalists from the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Marine Corps, DoD civilians and the U.S Coast Guard. Never having been to Indiana before, I drove there in late August and upon arrival, I was assigned a room in the barracks and found out where DINFOS, the acronym for the Defense Information School, could be found nearby.

I quickly made friends in the barracks with three other U.S. Air Force airmen who were in my DINFOS class. Tim Wyatt and Chan Peter were both studying print journalism like me, and Rick Kerns was going to become a broadcast journalist. Tim was from Texas, Chan was from New York and Rick was from Virginia.

Because I had my own transportation, the four of us would make the short drive to Indianapolis to go to the movies, go out for dinner or sometimes just to get away and explore rural Indiana. After two or three road trips to the countryside, I came away convinced that Indiana farmers worked some kind of magic to grow pigs as large as they did. Some seemed as large as Volkswagen Beetles from the highway.

During the first DINFOS class, the instructor asked us all to write a 1,000-word essay about a television show and what we liked or disliked about it. The purpose was to identify the top writers in the group and have them serve as editors for four mock-up class newspapers.

After thinking about it, I chose to write my essay about the TV show “Dynasty,” not because it was my personal favorite, but because I could focus on the conflict between the show’s characters and the complex story plots. After reviewing all the essays from the class, four of us were singled out as editors and the remainder of the class were assigned to four separate teams under the direction of the editors. The teams were balanced out between experienced and novice writers, and I was directed to lead the first team as an editor.

Each weekday as military print journalists, we received training in how to conduct interviews, write articles and headlines and photo captions. DINFOS also provided us with lessons in how to design newspaper pages. Military broadcast journalists had separate DINFOS training for radio and television production.

Some training sessions were combined between print and broadcast journalists when certain topics overlapped, such as journalistic ethics or involving media relations.

Over the next two and a half months, we had extensive training in reporting about military exercises and deployments, fatal military accidents, and military protocol. We practiced gathering details and turning that information into news stories.

As print journalists, each of us had to complete an assignment for the afternoon daily newspaper “The Indianapolis News.” My assignment was to cover a speech on Veteran’s Day in 1981 made by Herbert Allison, 99, one of the last surviving veterans in Indiana of the Spanish-American War. It posed a significant challenge for me. 

As Mr. Allison was helped up to the podium to speak, torrential rain began to fall and his microphone failed. The speech was called off as the crowd gathered for the occasion ran to their cars. Soaking wet from being in the audience, I followed Mr. Allison to a tent nearby and asked someone from the Indiana Veterans Home if I could interview him for the newspaper.

They gave me a quizzical look and introduced me to him. I asked him what he had planned to say during his speech and he leaned in close to me and whispered, “I hope you all have a good day. Have a good supper.”

For the newspaper article, I focused on Mr. Allison’s military service in 1898, and his subsequent life working for a dairy and plugged in his quote at the end of the story. It was published with my byline the next afternoon.

The following week, my DINFOS team wrote enough articles to fill a four-page mock newspaper. Our top story covered a scoreless tie in a flag football game between two Army units assigned to Fort Benjamin Harrison. The most difficult part of this training for me was not being able to write articles for our mock newspaper. As an editor, my work was to edit articles produced by other military journalists, write the headlines and to design the newspaper.

On the next to last day of our training, all the teams attended a review of the mock newspapers by the DINFOS instructors. Our team’s newspaper received low marks for topic selection but was praised for accuracy and overall layout.

Two days before Thanksgiving, we graduated from DINFOS as military journalists, took one last group photo, said our goodbyes and exchanged contact information. I was headed to my new duty station in Arizona after a month off at home on leave.

At DINFOS, I learned that among military journalists, the pen is indeed mightier than the sword. <