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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A valuable compilation, September 3, 2000
This review is from: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975 (Library of America) (Paperback)
Reading this collection of Vietnam-era reportage from The Library of America is a stark reminder of the lasting power of the written word. Has it really been nearly a quarter-century since the black and white images of the helicopters taking off from the roof of the American Embassy faded from our television screens? Grenada, Panama, Iraq -- three wars and God knows how many humanitarian efforts (Somalia, Yugoslavia, did I miss any?) Yet, the power of memory is such that it doesn't take much to bring it all back. Dipping into these compilations of writings about Vietnam -- the original reportage and memoirs in the Library of America volumes and the best of everything else in "The Vietnam Reader" -- shards of long-forgotten memories were struck just by reading the names of towns and villages. Khe Sahn, Haiphong: The words sound so completely alien, as if they had been coined by H.P. Lovecraft. They trigger memories of tracing the S-curve of the countries on maps in the newspapers, seeing the photographs in Life magazine -- for me, the 1960s will always be remembered as a series of black and white freeze-frames from the magazines, with color reserved only for the more silly stories found in the back of the book -- and hearing them recited on TV in the stentorian tones of Walter Cronkitethe who would recite the weekly casualty figures, printedon screen before the national flags, like baseball scores, while the family ate our meat loaf and mashed potatoes and waited for Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom to come on at 7. Time has passed and in this media-drenched age, so much history has been created, screened and absorbed over the past quarter-century. Vietnam and Cambodia became a backwater in the American consciousness, flaring up from time to time in response to specific, finite events such as the debate over Agent Orange, the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the screening of "Platoon" and "The Killing Fields," and the debate over draft evasion by Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle, Phil Gramm and Newt Gingrich. For those of us who were not there, who can view the war almost dispassionately, it is this lack of intervening history that makes these books so powerful and painful to read. This is a chronicle of a nation marching deeper and deeper into a war that the journalists there saw as early as 1965 -- about 150 pages into two volumes that total more than 1,600 pages -- could not be won the way it was being run. Historians will probably argue eternally if it could have been won at all. The repressive and corrupt South Vietnamese government could not win enough "hearts and minds" of the people to defeat the Viet Cong, and an invasion of North Vietnam could have triggered a Korean War-style invasion from China. It took nearly a decade for the United States to find the way out of that bloody tunnel and another two decades before full diplomatic relations were reestablished. The casualty figures fly beyond the mind's grasp: 58,000 Americans killed, 4,400 South Koreans, 500 Australians and New Zealanders, 180,000 Cambodians (with another million perishing under the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1978), a half-million South Vietnamese and an estimated 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. "Reporting Vietnam" starts with Time Magazine's report on the first U.S. advisers killed in South Vietnam, then continues chronologically with the inevitability of the Zapruder film of John Kennedy's murder ride. It moves with reports from the field -- a report on a Viet Cong massacre in the Ca Mau Peninsula, Neil Sheehan's account on South Vietnamese troops refusing to fight in the battle of Ap Bac, to Joseph Alsop's profile of South Vietnam's president Ngo Diem, from the scenes in Washington of President Johnson and his advisers defending their policies to Tom Wolfe's account of Ken Kesey disrupting an anti-war rally in Berkeley and Norman Mailer's self-important essay about the March on the Pentagon. Then there are the incidents, as bizarre as any recounted in "Apocalypse Now." The American-run television channel presenting the German opera "Hansel and Gretel" backed by the American Chamber of Commerce; Gloria Emerson reporting the idea by the head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development Support, challenging his fellow CORDS members to participate in the 1971 decathlon comprising "bridge, tennis, gin rummy, volleyball, nautical sports, Chinese chess, winetasting, close harmony, etc." (Emerson, who had spent two years in the field as a correspondent, quoted and commented on Richard Funkhouser's memo: "`It is always open house here at Bienhoa for competitors,' Funkhouser wrote, in that playful spirit so many of us in Vietnam really lacked.") While movies and TV news reports will fade with time, this will remain as a monument to show the madnessa and unreality of this terrible war.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Best and The Brightest, June 7, 2006
This review is from: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975 (Library of America) (Paperback)
THE VIETNAM WAR AND THE MEDIA
I am a Vietnam Veteran, a college graduate of the Vietnam Era, and a professional journalist. That should establish either some kind of credibility or culpability. The Vietnam War began when I was l7 years old, and ended when I was 30. That means my generation of draft-aged males... lived with the reality of War throughout their adolescence. I went to college in the '60s and, like most of my classmates, lived under the shadow of Vietnam for my entire college career.. Flunk out...you get Drafted. (that happened to a friend of mine at Yale. He partied too heartily and ended up as a grunt in the Mekong Delta.) As the War escalated, so did the dissent and the polarization of the country.
In l968, the following events occurred:
* The Tet Offensive;
* the Democratic National Convention in Chicago with the arrest of the Chicago Seven;
* The Mexico City Olympics black power protests;
* The assassinations of Martin Luther King and RFK;
* student demonstrations at Berkeley, Columbia, and Paris;
* And the increse in the Force Level in Vietnam approached 500,000.
That makes 1968 the most significant year in my life. That was also the year after I graduated from College, and, lacking plans for graduate school, enlisted in the Army (not out of patriotism but pragmatism: I made a deal with the devil--- I'd volunteer for three years as a Broadcast Specialist, and the Army would keep me out of The Killing Zone. When I got to Saigon, I worked for Armed Forces Radio and TV: reading news they wanted me to read (like Robin Williams' character Adrian Kronauer in "Good Morning Vietnam."
During my year in Saigon, part of my job was to attend the daily press briefings cynically referred to by the press corps as "The Five O'clock Follies." (Because they were timed to occur after the evening TV Newscasts in the States). This was long before CNN; Fox News; the Internet; and Pod-casts. The mainstream media then had a far greater role than today. When Walter Cronkite said the Vietnam War was un-winnable, it ended Lyndon Johnson's career. (Johnson later admitted he knew he was finished after watching the CBS Evening News). Vietnam was called the first Living Room War, because most Americans get their news at the dining room table. And that included escalating casualties, various atrocities like My Lai (which is kind of like the Marines in Iraq); and the rising chorus of dissent among the young.
Another disturbing parallel between Vietnam and Iraq is the arrogance, imperiousness, and hubris of the Secretaries of Defense in both Wars. Both Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld were arrogant and disdainful of the professional soldiers they commanded.
Each time they appeared before Congress and the Media, they said basically : this is the way it is. And don't confuse us with the facts. The Press, in the discordantly alliterative words of former Vice President and Convicted Felon Spiro Agnew (his real name) were "nattering nabobs of negativism" (How about: "Clueless Cheerleaders of Colonialism"?)
Had any of them taken the time to read the history of Indochina and the experience of the French ("Street Without Joy" or "Hell in a Very Small Place" by Bernard Fall; "The making of a Quagmire" by David Halberstam; "Fire in the Lake" by Francis Fitzgerald; or "The Best and the Brightest" by
David Halberstam they would have predicted the inevitable outcome of American Adventurism in Other Places. Those who ignore (or, in George Bush's Case, never learned) the lessons of History are condemned to repeat them"
--By Philip Henry
[...]
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Vietnam War Resource from Beginning to End, December 19, 2006
This review is from: Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975 (Library of America) (Paperback)
This is exactly the type of book you want to read about Vietnam - in the words of those who were there, whether soldier or reporter. It contains articles written by the media and excerpts from soldiers memoirs in chronological order from the start of the war until the fall of Saigon. (FYI - There is little here from a directly Vietnamese point of view, though there are some who write very sympathetically of their plight.)
This tome (it's over 800 pages of densely packed information and narration, but doled out in 5-10 page excerpts which make great reading) covers everything from the first days of aerial bombing (letters home from one of the first pilots over there) to the African-American experience in Vietnam, to the desolation of those involved when Saigon fell.
Because this is a compilation of actual stories from the Vietnam Conflict you could use it's wealth of information (and sources) to build a case for any position or point of view. It would be an excellent source for research on the Vietnam War, steeped with original quotes and overflowing with the genuine feelings and experiences of those who were there.
Highly Recommended.
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