A War of Their Own

Those of us for whom the Vietnam War was an intellectual and moral watershed, even though we were too old to fight it, have a short list of epiphanies -- momentary flashes when we saw, more clearly than before, the ethical consequences of our country's policy. The earliest ones we owed to the press.

My second epiphany came last summer when I journeyed alone to Vietnam, walked the streets of Hanoi, Hue, Danang, and Saigon; peered down at the entombed corpse of Ho Chi Minh; gawked at the old Austin Healy which, in the summer of 1963, the monk Thich Quang Duc drove from his Hue pagoda to the Saigon intersection where he set himself afire. I gazed out over downtown Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) from the roof of the Caravelle Hotel, legendary watering hole of the war correspondents, where, according to David Halberstam in The Powers that Be, CBS's Peter Kalischer took Walter Cronkite aside during the Tet offensive and gave him the real scoop. And where, according to a nasty Time magazine story (September 20, 1963), the Saigon press "club" arrogantly researched the war by talking to each other.

But as I worked my way through the old weapons, the guillotine, the photo exhibits in the War Crimes Exhibition -- GIs display the severed heads of their enemies, etc. -- I was not shocked. I had seen some of these pictures -- like the My Lai corpses, water torture, and the dead Vietcong dragged behind a truck -- twenty-five years before in the American underground and mainstream press. I had read Neil Sheehan's description of what cluster bombs do in The New York Times.

Whatever the limitations of Vietnam coverage, somehow the story got out; the public that paid attention and did some digging had the information on which to base a moral, as well as political, judgment.

Michael Emery's On the Front Lines and William Prochnau's Once Upon A Distant War have much in common. Both share two assumptions: that a democracy depends on the press to inform the public on foreign policy issues; and that in spite of the heroic efforts of some correspondents, the public is often ill-informed. Both books glorify their central characters, reporters who, at historic moments, overcome obstacles -- some in the field, some at their home desks -- to get out the stories that the public needs but does not always want. The press also disappoints: limited by the reporters' or the publishers' or Washington's agenda, it fails to get the story right.

Emery, in a series of clearly focused case studies -- the opening days of World War I, the Munich crisis, Korea, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and particularly the Middle East, which he covered as a free-lancer -- paints the broad scholarly background from which Prochnau's colorful Vietnam narrative can emerge. For example, between 1901 and 1914, the prolific Frederic William Wile dispatched close to a million words to British and American papers warning of Germany's military buildup, to no avail. In El Salvador, Raymond Bonner's 1982 New York Times exposŽ of the massacre at El Mozote led to his leaving the Times and being vilified as a liar for years. In the Persian Gulf war, "patriotic journalism" in the World War II mode failed to develop the story of King Hussein of Jordan's diplomatic attempts to avert a war that didn't have to happen.

Once Upon A Distant War is a great story, oft-told but waiting to be told again, a variation on the "band of brothers" theme in which a glamorous group of young correspondents -- like "Murrow's boys" broadcasting the London Blitz -- both make and report history at the same time.

Between the departure from Vietnam of The New York Times's beloved grouch, Homer Bigart, in 1962 and the assassination of the U.S. puppet South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, Time's Charles Mohr, Newsweek's Fran�ois Sully (whom Diem expelled), United Press International's Neil Sheehan, the Times's David Halberstam, and The Associated Press's Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett carried on a war of their own.

Bigart, fifty-four, the young men's generational link to World War II and the Korean conflict and revered as one of the greatest war correspondents of the century, hated both the war and the place. Where some critics have seen the American presence as corrupting a beautiful Asian people, the crusty Bigart saw a "sinister" Vietnam corrupting the Americans. His successors, however, initially supporters of the administration's goals, plunged headlong into both the culture and the conflict. They romanced, married, or abandoned beautiful Vietnamese women; prowled the opium dens in the tradition of Graham Greene; toted guns and hitched helicopter rides into battle; cultivated sources like Col. John Paul Vann -- later the centerpiece of Sheehan's A Bright Shining Lie -- and Buddhist monks who did their best to manipulate them to their own ends.

The turning point for both Emery and Prochnau is the January 2, 1963, battle of Ap Bac, a Mekong Delta village forty miles southwest of Saigon. The plan had been for an American-advised South Vietnamese helicopter force to swoop in and spring a trap on Vietcong guerrillas. Instead, the guerrillas, who had been practicing how to shoot at helicopters for days, shot down five helicopters and, losing only eighteen men, killed eighty government troops and three Americans. The military spokesmen tried to call it a victory.

The correspondents soon came to see as their real enemies not the communists but the lying generals, like the dim-witted, polo-playing General Paul Harkins, who never visited the battle front. After the generals came dissembling state department officials, the corrupt Diem family, and the toady, drop-in-fly-out, big-name writers like Joseph Alsop and Bigart's rival from the Korean War, Marguerite Higgins, who not only refused to acknowledge the self-destructive effects of the administration's strategy but also portrayed the Saigon reporters as bad Americans who, in the words of Admiral Harry Felt, refused to "get on the team."

As Prochnau's narrative rushes on, the reporters, rather than the history unfolding before their eyes, become the focus of the controversy. Malcolm Browne, on June 11, 1963, acting on a tip, brings his camera to a Saigon intersection, not knowing what to expect. There, though overwhelmed with nausea, he methodically clicks away as Thich Quang Duc goes up in flames. The next day, his picture makes front pages all over the world, and President Kennedy, delivered his morning paper in bed, exclaims, "Jesus Christ!"

Charles Mohr, who clashes repeatedly with Time's "autocratic" managing editor Otto Fuerbringer, begins a file on Madame Nhu with "Vietnam is a graveyard of lost hopes," and when Time's cover story does not reflect his interpretation, he accuses Time's home desk of "shelling its own troops." When Time publishes its piece on the Caravelle "club," Mohr resigns.

Halberstam, the twenty-eight-year-old Harvard boy, pounds out 3,000 to 4,000 words a day on his Olivetti; he documents the ARVN's sloth and the guerrillas' victories, bellows his anger at ambassadors, calls a general a liar to his face, relishes every insult, angers the copy desk with his prose, and takes up the cause of the Buddhist monks with a zeal that drives Madame Nhu berserk. The author of The Best and the Brightest and The Powers That Be, which I assign to my classes, is a pain in the tail. But Halberstam's account of the coup against Diem helps clinch his and Browne's shared Pulitzer Prize.

If Prochnau's story is so good, why isn't this a better book? Partly the style. Prochnau writes in the odd tense called the "future past," for which critics lambasted Halberstam a generation ago. Four "woulds" a page: the reporter who smoked the dope would tell his wife years later that he had been the one who would . . . blah blah. Partly, the tone. The writer's self-righteous, hectic, unanalytical voice. Author of Trinity's Child, a best-seller which became an HBO movie, Prochnau seems to have aimed this one at Vanity Fair, which has run an excerpt, and HBO, which has bought the TV rights. TV cringes from ambiguity like Dracula from a crucifix. Thus unambiguous TV characters: gutsy, sexy, in-your-face reporters; idiot, polo-playing, press-hating generals; a screwy family of Oriental despots; and a "crisis-prone" president -- lest he lose an audience of channel-surfing couch potatoes.

On the Front Lines, though occasionally textbooky in its accumulation of names and dates, is a better book, a good story with a moral center: the author's dedication to the importance -- the necessity -- of foreign correspondents in an era when their numbers are shrinking.

Emery concludes that the Browne-Mohr-Halberstam-Sheehan stories, for all the fuss, had little impact; the U.S. lunged blindly into the swamp until rising U.S. casualties and TV made the public -- and broadcast executives -- pay attention. At a dinner party in 1989, Sheehan, in a gloomy moment, described President Nixon toying with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Asians as if he were playing chess. Any president, he told Emery, would use cruel force to ensure a foreign policy gain.

Unless journalists stop him.

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