A wartime mosaic.

Byline: The Register-Guard

In the first Persian Gulf War 12 years ago, and again last year in Afghanistan, the Pentagon has kept reporters a safe distance from the fighting - safe for the reporters, and safe for the Pentagon. But in Iraq, more than 500 reporters have been assigned to military units and are moving with them on the drive toward Baghdad. The new arrangement is a great improvement, though not without risks.

The "embedded" reporters, to use the Pentagon's term, must obtain clearance before reporting the details of military operations. Live reports can be filed only in the presence of a public affairs officer. The quality of audio and video reports filed by satellite is spotty. The reports themselves have included some dramatic images of the Iraqi landscape - though so far it has been a landscape curiously devoid of Iraqis.

Except for the immediacy of their reports, the "embedded" reporters are working under circumstances not markedly different from those of their predecessors in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. Those conflicts showed that on-the-scene reporting can provide a thorough and revealing account of a military unit's daily experience. The reports are only fragments of a mosaic, but together with other types of reporting can help provide Americans with an overview of the entire campaign.

The dimension provided by the "embedded" reporters will become especially important as the fighting intensifies. The Pentagon understands that American reporters need to be on the ground to counter Iraqi propaganda, and that modern communications would have opened avenues for war coverage in any event. But the real test - both for the reporters and the Pentagon - will come in the days ahead, when the Iraq war threatens to yield stories that will prove painful to tell.