They saw the graceful parabolas of orange tracer bullets against the blackness of the sky. They heard the scream of jet fighters and the thunder of antiaircraft fire. They felt their hotel shiver in response to the bombs' pounding. But many of the U.S. reporters clustered in Al Kabir Hotel in downtown Tripoli were not quite sure what was actually going on. Like the people in Plato's parable of the cave who can discern reality only from the shadows that a fire throws on the wall, the correspondents could only make informed guesses as to what was happening.
TIME Correspondents Dean Fischer and Roland Flamini, awakened by the first percussive blasts around 2 a.m., leaned far out their hotel windows to watch the spectacle. "I had awakened into a nightmare," says Fischer, who witnessed the aerial fireworks to the north, over Tripoli harbor. "When I saw the first flash of an exploding bomb, I knew it was for real," says Flamini, whose room faced south, toward Gaddafi's headquarters. Within minutes, TV correspondents in Tripoli were reporting live via telephone to the three anchormen of the nightly newscasts. A nation eavesdropped on telephone conversations between New York City and Tripoli. "Tom, Tripoli is under attack," said Correspondent Steve Delaney, with admirable directness, to Anchorman Tom Brokaw of NBC, the first network to break the news, at 7:02. "What have you seen and heard?" asked ABC's Peter Jennings of Correspondent Elizabeth Colton. Colton was unsure who was doing what to whom; all she knew was what she heard, felt and saw. "Put your microphone out that window and let us hear it," urged CBS's Dan Rather of Producer Jeffrey Fager, who promptly did so, and the pop-pop-pop of artillery fire was heard in millions of American living rooms. Without pictures, television was reduced to radio.
Minutes later, at 7:20, Larry Speakes strode into the White House briefing room, and all three networks cut to his press conference. As Speakes informed the nation of the U.S. attack, Fischer joined other correspondents at Al Kabir in a huddle around ABC's open phone line to New York to hear for themselves what was actually going on.
In Libya last week, U.S. journalists found themselves in an unaccustomed position: instead of trailing behind a U.S. strike force, they were at the center of its target; instead of using the technical wizardry of minicams and satellite feeds to report a battle that seemed to have been orchestrated for the 7 o'clock news, they were forced to use an older tool, the telephone, reviving images of Edward R. Murrow during World War II's London blitz. They were right in the middle of a city that was being attacked by their own military and yet could not immediately confirm what was happening. Initially, they were handcuffed by the fact that they could neither see nor film what was occurring; later they were captives of the Libyans, who became tour guides to the apocalypse, stage-managing events and reality according to what they wanted U.S. journalists and American audiences to see and hear.