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Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975 (Library of America)

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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.

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
[...]

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.

I say semi-definitive reportage because this brilliant compilation of news articles, magazine essays and excerpts from books is the distilled nectar from the two volume hardbound series issued earlier. While I haven't read the above-mentioned 2 volumes, I have read enough other Vietnam material to authoritatively state that this book does a more than adequate, dare I say brilliant, job of crystallizing the plethora of intertwined issues that encompassed the Vietnam war and the world stage upon which it unfolded. This book also offers some very unpleasant lessons to those of us who found our way to it due to the recent round of warfare commenced by the Bush Administration in order to save the world from Communism, ummm, I mean Terrorism.
For better or worse all of the other books I've read on the Vietnam war fall into two categories: The "Minute History of ..." and the "My personal Hell in ...." The problem with the former is that most people either don't have the patience or the desire to wade through all of the excrutiating details that went into the Vietnam war, and since any good history necessarily contains at least a majority of such unsavory bits, all of the 'good' histories of Vietnam rarely, I suspect, get finished. Plus, even when well-done the story is told with such detachment that the reader's mind often wanders while his eyes glide over the text. The problem with the latter style of narrative is that the events contained within are of such a narrow scope that no matter how powerful and well-written (see 'Rumor of a War' by Caputo, and 'A Boy's War' by Wolf, for instance), they are mere pinhole theatre. 'Reporting Vietnam' is unique, enlightening and vital because of the following factors. First, the editors chose to paint a broad canvas of the war by choosing articles that tell not only firsthand of battles, POW camp, campaigns and day to day life but also of home such as the events of and reactions to the Kent State incident, a soldier's return to "the world," and from Norman Mailer, his account of a Vietnam protest in Washington, D.C. The volume also contains extended essays upon the history of Vietnam, its social structures, the conduct of the war and politics (in both USA and in Vietnam), the living conditions and infrastructure of both South and North Vietnam, reportage on the military excursions into Laos and Cambodia, and the effect that the protracted conflict has on tribespeople, peasants, urban dwellers, etc. If one reads this book without more, he will be rewarded with page after page of top notch and fascinating writing. If one chooses to seek answers to common complaints and unspoken questions of history regarding this war, I believe that he'll find some answers. For instance, one of the most common complaints we hear from the diehards (inevitably nonparticipants?) is that we didn't win because we didn't go all out. An answer is found in the article by one of LBJ's personal secretary's on his discussions with her about the war. To wit, only the loonies seriously contemplated nuclear strikes and there was an ever-present threat that some escalation of the war would be the trigger-point for a world war with either or both the USSR and PRC. Also, we really, really were fighting all-out every time our young men and women were out there fighting (at least until the Nixon administration) and it is an insult to any who served in Vietnam to argue differently. An uspoken question never asked or answered in my presence is why didn't the South fight? The easy answer to this is that, of course the South fought, they just were overwhelmed by the Communists. The more compelling answer which this book satisfactorily demonstrates is that the social structure and politics of South Vietnam were fundamentally incapable of sustaining protracted, successful war-winning conflict due to its inherent weaknesses (an "absence of ideology, tradition or a coherent nationalism" says Peter Braestrup in one article). Finally, the question of whether we won or lost the war. To put it succinctly, however inaccurately, we won every battle we fought, North Vietnam won everywhere else. Finally, I believe that this book will lead one to the conclusion that the USA has once again set itself up for the very hard, obviously thankless and ultimately impossible task of saving the world from terrorism by sending US men and women to occupy foreign soil for these stated aims. I base my belief on the contents of 'Reporting Vietnam' which convincingly demonstrate that ultimately no war can be won by proxy, and an occupying power's efforts and accomplishments are always temporary and superficial until and unless the proxy population take to heart the aims of the intervening power's program. This was not done in South Vietnam, I doubt it is being done successfully in the Middle East.

If you are either a politician or a soldier, there were many lessons to be learned from Vietnam. One of these lessons is to make sure the general public will never learn about what's really going on. This particular lesson was applied successfully during the last major wars the US was involved in. What really happened in Iraq and in Kosovo, say, only emerges now. Very slowly, journalists and human rights activists are discovering the other side of the wars, that it the side not shown on CNN. When the Vietnam war was fought, journalists, writers, photgraphers, and filmmakers could move freely and could show and write about what was going on. The pictures of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack or of the Vietcong suspect who's executed by a police officer are in everybody's minds. This book comprises written reports, articles, personal memories and even letters about and from Vietnam. I can hardly imagine a more interesting way to learn about what happened. Reading the letters an Air force pilot wrote before he died or an account of what's going on in a little village gives insight into what war really means. I recommend this book to everybody. Probably, it will never be possible again to compile a book like this about a modern war because politicians and soldiers have learned wht happens if people can get an unfiltered view.

Growing up while this happened makes me now realize what was going on over there, and the losses that our troops suffered. Very well thought out and a must read for all.

Althought this is a compilation of the two volumes previously released, this is a terrific title. All kinds of important people from the Vietnam era have essays in this book. Sixty-one of them. Can't wait to reread it....