THE veteran cameraman from ABC News was excited. As his flight prepared to land at Kuwait International Airport, he explained how the Pentagon had given him permission to use his latest toy: the so-called “lipstick cam”.

The lipstick cam is so small that it can be attached to a Marine helmet and feed back live pictures from the battlefield.

War coverage, it seems, will always reflect the media fad of the age: if Gulf War I was a video game, Gulf War II will be a reality TV show.

“They said lipstick cams were not only allowed but actively encouraged,” the cameraman said, his eyes popping. “I couldn’t believe what I was reading. If only the viewers at home could simply vote Saddam off the show.”

The ABC cameraman is one of about 500 journalists who have arrived in Kuwait City in the past few days. Nearly all have been carefully selected by the US military to become “embedded” with troops for the duration of the war, even if that means eating food with 50-year sell-by dates. In military parlance, “embedded” means eating, sleeping and living with troops, no matter how dangerous, or boring, that might be.

The war corps have been told to bring everything they need to survive, including flak jackets and self-injecting vials of atropine in case of a nerve gas attack, although they will be fitted out with the military’s state-of-the-art charcoal chemical suits. Despite lobbying by several US media outlets, journalists have been banned from bringing their own firearms or vehicles.

All this is very different from the 1991 Gulf War, when the US military restricted access to the battlefield to only a handful of journalists from big media conglomerates, who had to share coverage with smaller media organisations.

In the end, neither the military nor the media were happy; the former because Saddam Hussein scored propaganda points by claiming huge casualty figures that could not be independently verified; the latter because most of the coverage ended up being done from hotel rooms miles from the action.

The “embeds” are mainly Americans, although exceptions include journalists from The Times and, more unlikely, al-Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news channel beloved by Osama bin Laden.

To the Kuwaiti locals the embeds are a bizarre sight, clumping around in brand new hiking boots and Gortex camping gear, all of which they were ordered to buy before going anywhere near any bases.

The experience is no less surreal for the war correspondents themselves: with Kuwaiti restaurants offering only non-alcoholic Budweiser (there are no bars), many of them are in bed, sober, by 10.30pm.

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