News of the World: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

In a flashback, Captain Kidd recalls the various wars of his youth. He first joined the military as a teenager in the War of 1812. Everyone in his company is inexperienced and confused, and they hold their own elections for officers. In his first battle, fought against Creek and Choctaw Native Americans, the man elected captain is fatally wounded. The young Captain Kidd risks his life retrieving the officer’s body and is wounded in his own leg. When new officers are appointed, he becomes a sergeant.

Soon, Captain Kidd’s militia heads for Alabama (at that point, a territory, not a state). Captain Kidd works transporting prisoners, but he hates this grim job and soon asks to be a runner, one of the soldiers tasked with carrying messages between different camps. Captain Kidd is an excellent runner with a good memory for maps and reports. Nothing makes him happier than running through the woods “free and unencumbered,” and now thinks of this period as a time when he was able to fulfill his true calling.

After the war Captain Kidd returns to Georgia and apprentices with a printer, but after his mother dies and his sisters marry, he moves to San Antonio to set up his own shop, learning Spanish in the process. One day in San Antonio, he catches sight of a beautiful Spanish girl running after the milkman in the street. She’s from an old, aristocratic family and it’s not easy to be formally introduced to her, but eventually Captain Kidd and Maria Luisa are married and have two daughters.

When the Mexican War breaks out in 1846 Captain Kidd is too old to fight, but he works organizing the communications of the American army and is promoted to captain. Through his work, he’s present at many of the war’s major battles, where the fierce young Texas Rangers ask for stories about his experience in the War of 1812. He appreciates them for listening to an old man’s rambles.

During his second stint in the army, it occurs to Captain Kidd that he should set himself to publicizing the information from intelligence reports and local newspapers. It seems to him that if people really knew what was going on at the front lines they would not be so eager to fight wars. By being “an aggregator of information from distant places” he can make the world “a more peaceful place.” This illusion is shattered years later when the Civil War breaks out. Now, the Captain believes that people want and need not news but stories “dressed up as hard information.”