Customer Reviews

Once Upon a Distant War:: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles

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"Once Upon a Distant War," is a highly readable history of the various journalists covering America's involvement in the early years (1961-63) of Vietnam. Prochnau has produced an intriguing popular history that has some flaws, but on the whole is quite a good book.

The strength of the book is the fact that the material itself is so fascinating. Saigon, circa 1963, was an extremely exciting place for a foreign journalist. America had begun a huge build-up of forces in South Vietnam, the Diem regime was at its most oppressive, and the Vietcong were making huge gains in the rural countryside. Into this mix were thrown men like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, Peter Arnett, and Malcolm Brown: relatively young, idealistic reporters who were determined to get the real story. But the US officials in South Vietnam were less than willing to assist the "green" correspondents, who they claimed were not "on the team." Lied to and rebuffed by the official channels, the reporters sought out contacts in the middle of the action: South Vietnamese officers and American field advisors like John Paul Vann who were willing to tell the ugly truth. The result was a constant battle between the Saigon correspondents and the Kennedy administration, other journalists, and even their own publishers. The only people who hated the journalists more were President Diem, his brother Nhu, and most vociferously, South Vietnam's First Lady, Madame Nhu. For two years the correspondents fought for every story and risked everything, including their lives, to get what they believed was the truth about Vietnam out to the American public.

Prochnau is clearly in awe of his protagonists, but I think he still manages to give a fair account. The correspondents are not perfect: Sheehan goofs big time in his early account of My Tho, inflating the body count from 15 to 200. Halberstam was hugely influential, but as Prochnau makes clear, he was also incorrigible, uncompromising, and had a mean temper. One of the most important points that Prochnau stresses is that these men were not anti-war (certainly not at this early stage). Men like Halberstam were ardently anti-communist, and were only angry because the government was lying about a cause that mattered so much. But even the reporters' ostensible adversaries, such as Ambassador Nolting, are given full and fair treatment. (General Harkins is the one exception, but I've never read anything that suggested he was other than incompetent, blind optimist.) In addition to these detailed characterizations, Prochnau adds a wealth of anecdotes that give the book both humor and authenticity. Particularly interesting were the stories of Marguerite Higgins and her Machiavellian ways ("innocent as a cobra"), Sheehan's obsessive 16 year struggle to write "A Bright Shining Lie," and Halberstam mouthing off to high government officials ("Bull..., General! Why are you standing here telling our friend Clurman this bull...?").

My complaints are few. The first is about Prochnau's style: he is eminently readable and well suited for the material, but sometimes his tone becomes so informal it borders on cheesy ("Vietnam was not simply exotic. It was erotic. And narcotic.") My second complaint is that Prochnau glosses over many aspects of the war and does not give a very complete picture of the complex military situation. But his story is about the journalists, so maybe this is an unfair criticism. Then let me leave it as a caveat: do not read this book to gain an in-depth understanding of the political-military situation in South Vietnam, read it to learn about the tribulations of the journalists. In some ways, this book is better suited for people who already understand the history of the era and will not be confused by Prochnau's overly-simplistic (albeit justifiably so) account of the war. That said, this is still quite an entertaining look at some very interesting characters at a crucial juncture in modern American history.

This book has been widely praised as a rich, well-plotted story of the exploits of American war correspondants in the early days of the Vietnam war. But, for students of government and the media, it's much more: it's an illuminating story of how the government uses and seeks to control the press, and how the press seeks to maintain its own autonomy.

The theme running throughout the book is how the U.S. government lied to the press and to itself about the progress of the early war. The accounts of wildly inflated body counts, surrealistic assessments of battlefield success, and obvious ignorance of the situation outside Saigon by the American brass is well- known, but worth reviewing. But the book also shatters the post-gulf war myth that journalists had easy access to the story in Vietnam, and were cut out of the story in Iraq when the Pentagon "learned from Vietnam" how to control the press. Clearly, as Prochnau tells us, the government was seeking to control the press in Vietnam, by denying access to critical reporters while giving favored journalists, such as Joe Alsop, the V.I.P. tour of the war, complete with the same distorted statistics and outright falsehoods. The military eventually failed in Vietnam, but not for lack of trying: they failed because the war failed, and too many journalists, from too many mainstream news organizations--AP, UPI, the New York Times--showed that the war was, in David Halberstam's words, a "quagmire."

This book would be a fine addition to a college course on the Vietnam war, journalism, or media and politics. I recommend it highly to my students, and to anyone interested in this period of our history.

This book is a great companion piece to the more popular "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan. Sheehan (along with David Halberstam and others) and his experiences in Vietnam during the advisor period (1962-64) are the subjects of this book. With it you gain perspective of how Sheehan and the others fought an incompotent and deceiptful American and South Vietnamese government establishment that fought efforts to get the truth (that the war was being lost) to the American people. The relationship between the young reporters and Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann (the subject odf Sheehan's book) also features prominently. The accounts are harrowing and sometimes enraging. This book serves as an effective reminder that the press are not always the bad guys.

Behind Vietnam's shadowy fire-fights of 1961-1963 another kind of combat was taking place, one just as important to the war's outcome. It was a war of words and Prochnau's narrative follows this journalistic battle between a battery of triuth-seeking reporters (Halberstam, NY Times; Sheehan, UPI; Browne, API) and party-line higherups eager to conceal failures in the war's progress. All in all, it's a gripping account.

Prochnau avoids comparing press attitudes from earlier wars to Vietnam, yet a comparison is very revealing. In Korea, cover-ups and propaganda pitches went largely unchallenged for two reasons. Most correspondants reporting from there had earlier reported from WWII, a popular patriotic war that had enlisted everyone on the same team. That team spirit carried over to Korea even when the clarities of the fight against Nazi-ism did not. However, by the early 60's, a new generation of correspondants - a young man's job according to Prochnau - had taken over. Steeped neither in team spirit nor in a tradition of placing press objectives below military ones, they were a new breed of journalists unimpressed with the briefings of big-brass officers. Contributing also to the rise of independent reportage was the scale of official deception, which expanded exponentially from Korea to Vietnam. The inflated body counts, Saigon's fishbowl of corruption, and a host of other calamities, all combined to override official deception much more effectively than anything from the early 1950's.

Prochnau makes clear that these early reporters - including the trend-setting Homer Bigert - had no basic quarrel with US objectives in Vietnam. Like most observers, they believed intervention was necessary to preserve democracy against the communist menace. Rather, the disagreement was the perennial one over methods and not goals. Thus despite repeated appeals to `join the team', Halberstam and company realized early on that the well-armed Diem regime lacked the political wherewithal to contain the Viet Cong. And though their reporting angered higherups, they believed some kind of iconoclasm was needed to bring about a more effective anti-communist effort. In that spirit, they exposed sham victories when ARVN troops avoided battle but claimed victory, and they wrote about those American advisors dying in battle who weren't even officially there.

The fact that government officials abetted these frauds testifies to the level of arrogance and self-deception driving Kennedy's policy at the time, an aspect of press coverage that Prochnau makes clear. The bottom line, however, is that at no time did these rebellious reporters question the fundamental rightness of America's interventionist role. Their faith remained uncritically liberal despite all the sound, fury, and second-guessing from both sides of the information battle. So in some kind of ironical fashion, a larger team spirit triumphed after all.

Anyone interested in the early years of the Vietnam civil war should find this account vivid and revealing.

This book is a great read. A meticulously researched account of the lives of young reporters in Vietnam during the early years of American slide into Vietnam. He chronicles what now would be an inconceivable dilemma besetting young men trying to do the job of reporting the truth no one wanted to hear. This is a unique and gripping story populated with characters all well-known to us now. Highly recommend; especially indispensable for anyone planning to visit Vietnam; the places where the events unfold are all still there.

Everybody might hate the media, but this is as good an account as you'll get of how they work -- or used to. Toss in a first rate history lesson on the government blunders that got us into Vietnam in the first place -- all this told by a superb story teller, William Prochnau -- and Once Upon a Distant War is too good to pass up.

All the President's Men in Vietnam so to speak. If you don't have that long to live, you should read "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan before this. In fact, that book is so good that you should read it before you eat your next meal or go to the bathroom. But this book is good enough that you should read it before your next haircut or before your next rent check is due. Very engrossing story of the early beat press in Vietnam, who ended up influencing the war very much to everyone's much chagrin.

Not long after I finished the book, I read that Jerry Bruckheimer ("Armageddon" and all those big-bucks Hollywood action thrillers) is planning a major movie on it. Not surprising. Prochnau's "Once Upon a Distant War" reads like an adventure novel: a half dozen young war correspondents fighting everybody -- the U.S. govt, the South Vietnamese govt, their own colleagues in the media, even their bosses -- to get the early Vietnam story to the public. It's also first-rate history. You won't learn more about how we got into the mess in Vietnam -- and learn it with such page-turning narrative drama -- anywhere else. I don't know how I missed this the first time around. It's one of the best war books I've read and the best ever about reporters. Don't wait for the movie.

There are two books that I heartily recommend on the Vietnam War. One is "Vietnam: A Complete History" by Stanley Karnow, and the other is this book. William Prochnau tells the story of the early days of American involvement in South Vietnam in a way that makes the reader feel like he is reading a novel. Perhaps the only drawback to the book is that Prochnau is too thorough in covering the backgrounds of all concerned. The reader at times may feel that Prochnau goes off on a tangent in explaining the background of a new character to the story. But all in all this is an excellent book that tells the story of how America first started its fateful journey into a larger and deeper escalation into war in Vietnam.

To many, Vietnam is a time seen through living color images of American boys in rice paddies, jungles and hanging out the side of UH-1 Huey helicopters. Many don't remember that there was a time before large scale troop deployments brought hundreds of thousands of Americans to Vietnam.
This book captures that era pretty well. The drama clearly has to do with several young reporters trying to get at the story of how American military influence in Vietnam was working: mostly it wasn't -- working.
The battle of Ap Bac was pretty well described and the affect this had on the young reporters. Until Ap Bac, people here didn't pay much attention to Vietnam. Then when the American trained South Vietnamese forces lost the battle of Ap Bac due to numerous failings on the part of many commanders, people started to think South Vietnam was taking a turn for the worse.
It was interesting to see that the Viet Cong controlled most of South Vietnam at the time, and mostly the South Vietnamese forces, or American allies, were generally used as coup protection for the ruling Diem brothers.
I found Prochnau's work pretty revealing when it came to the subterfuge of the American command in Vietnam at the time, the Kennedy Administrations waffling in that area and the plots hatched to get rid of the rulling Diem brothers. Mostly, Kennedy skates by criticism of Vietnam these days and Lyndon Johnson is blamed for the big war build up. It was Kennedy's Sec. of State Dean Rusk and Sec. of Defense Robert McNamarra who guided us down the Vietnam trail.
The book potrays the American commanders, namely Gen. Paul Harkins, as being an inept yes man sending back to Washington only a rosey picture when the truth was far more murky. I don't know if he was or wasn't inept, but somebody passed back faulty information about how well the South Vietnamese forces were fighting in the jungle when mostly they were hanging out in Saigon as palace guards.
The book also does a good job showing the complex relationship between the various ruling bodies in South Vietnam -- the Budhists, Catholics, the South Vietnamese government and the American command.
In the end, though, this book is not a history, but a realy readable work on those who shaped American policy in Southeast Asia -- military commanders, young journalists, diplomats and the White House -- during the 1960s.