Part One: 1959-1969

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At the peak of the Vietnam War, in the weeks surrounding Tet '68, there were more than 600 accredited journalists "in country." During the decade and a half the war lasted, thousands upon thousands of self-professed journalists trekked through. Among them were charlatans, tourists, secret agents, and stoned expatriates. Some never wrote a word or took a photograph; some never left Saigon or talked to a U.S. official below the rank of lieutenant colonel. And a depressing number served as little more than transmission belts between military briefing rooms and newspapers large and small, filling their pages with a numbing numerical soup of body counts, kill ratios, bomb sorties, and tonnages of "soft ordinance" (napalm), all couched in the antiseptic language of the military.

Part Two: 1969-1975

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And then there were the exceptions, the enterprising journalists who sought out their own truth and told it in their own words, the very best of whom are represented in the pages of this remarkable two-volume anthology. Reporting Vietnam covers the war from the deaths of the first two American military advisers in July of 1959 ("It was a quiet evening in the sleepy little town of Bien Hoa twenty miles north of Saigon . . .") to the last airlifts from the roof of the U. S. embassy in April 1975. Wrote Keyes Beech, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his reporting in Korea:

My last view of Saigon was through the tail door of the helicopter. Tan Son Nhut was burning. So was Bien Hoa. Then the door closed -- closed on the most humiliating chapter in American history.

In between, Pulitzer Prize winners and George Polk award winners spin the tale of parallel wars, the one in Indochina and the one in the United States. The reportage of the war at home would make a terrific anthology all by itself: Norman Mailer on the March on the Pentagon and the pivotal Chicago convention of '68; Tom Wolfe on Ken Kesey freaking out anti-war protesters; Michael Kinsley, then a Harvard Crimson reporter, reconstructing a confrontation between Henry Kissinger and his old friends on the Harvard faculty; Joe McGinniss sitting in while Nixon's team puts together an ad about his nonexistent secret plan to end the war (Proud faces of Vietnamese peasants flash on the screen as Nixon intones, I pledge to you: we will have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.) Perhaps the least familiar of these dispatches is the recreation of Kent State, May 1970, when the national guard killed five students, written in clinical detail by the redoubtable James A. Michener. But as welcome as these chapters are, they are a side dish; the meat and potatoes of this book remains the reporting from the front. There were certain shared beliefs that bound most of the journalists represented in these pages, beliefs that are more often written between the lines than boldly stated: a conviction that the war strategy, if there was one, was deeply flawed; that the reporting from the military command in Saigon and from the White House was equally unreliable (Michael Herr called it a "cross-fertilization of ignorance"); that the terrors inflicted on South Vietnamese civilians by indiscriminate bombing missions and heartless relocation programs negated the considerable efforts at winning the hearts and minds of the populace; that the massive U. S. bombing campaign was far less effective than the military believed, and the enemy was far more determined and resourceful; and finally that the poorly motivated and badly led South Vietnamese troops would never be a match in discipline, cunning, or ruthlessness of the North Vietnamese regulars. These were hard-won perceptions, based on months and sometimes years in the trenches, rice paddies, and refugee camps, and for their troubles, many of these reporters were rebuked and even vilified by the U. S. command in Saigon, administration officials back in Washington, and, incredibly enough, even their own editors back home.

Reading these accounts in hindsight, with all that is now on the public record, it is stunning to realize just how accurate and prescient the best and brightest reporters were -- to use David Halberstam's own phrase but without the irony. For all the false data and the denials by officials up and down the line, there was no part of the war that they did not correctly divine through their own sweat, observation, and intuition. In his recent mea culpa, In Retrospect (Vintage, 1995), former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara almost mimics the observations and conclusions of these accounts, many of them written more than twenty-five years and countless deaths before. Here is Michael Herr on the mission and policy itself:

For all the books and articles and white papers, all the talk and the miles of film, something wasn't answered, it wasn't even asked.

And here is Kennedy's and Johnson's defense secretary:

I clearly erred by not forcing -- then or later, in either Saigon or Washington -- a knock-down, drag-out debate over the loose assumptions, unasked questions, and thin analyses underlying our military strategy in Vietnam.

No reporter did a better job of explaining the inherent flaws of the military reporting system than The New Yorker's Jonathan Schell in this bloodless account of his airplane ride over the village of Thanh Phuoc with a forward air controller named Major Billings. A ground commander reports sniper fire, gives the relevant coordinates, and asks for an air strike.

After climbing to fifteen hundred feet again, Major Billings got into contact with the ground commander and said, "Two of those structures seem to be structures of worship. Do you want them taken out?"

"Roger," the ground commander replied.

"There seems to be a white flag out front there," Major Billings said.

"Yeah. Beats me what it means," the ground commander replied.

The churches, along with dozens of stone houses with tile roofs, are leveled. The major, in his report, lists the churches as "Permanent Military Structures" and the houses as "Military Structures."

Schell deadpans: "It is perhaps not very surprising that the Bomb Assessment Reports supplied no blanks for ‘Homes Destroyed' or ‘Civilians Killed.'"

Now we learn from McNamara that "none of us -- not me, not the president, not Mac[McGeorge Bundy], nor Dean [Rusk], nor Max [Taylor] -- was ever satisfied with the information we received from Vietnam." Also that "the increasing destruction and misery brought on the country we were supposed to be helping troubled me greatly."

It is equally stunning to learn from McNamara's book, for instance, that the most stalwart of all Vietnam apologists, and perhaps the key architect of the very worst of the military decisions, understood that the South Vietnamese troops (ARVN) were probably never going to cut the mustard. Here, in starched understatement, is General Westmoreland on our allies in a cable to the Pentagon:

Desertion rates are inordinately high. Battles losses have been higher than expected . . . ARVN troops are beginning to show signs of reluctance to assume the offensive and in some cases their steadfastness under fire is coming into doubt.

Here is how Sydney Schanberg told it with comparable restraint when ARVN really started falling apart, almost a full year before the withdrawal on U. S. troops:

Thousands of panicking South Vietnamese soldiers -- most of whom did not appear to have made much contact with the advancing North Vietnamese -- fled in confusion from Quangtri Province today, streaming south down Route 1 like a rabble out of control.

Among the unsung heroes of these extraordinary dispatches are the bureau chiefs, desk editors, and news service chiefs who allowed their ace reporters the time to search out their own version of the truth. Many of the very best dispatches in these volumes required weeks out in country with no guarantees of a publishable report, let alone a memorable one. "There are no scoops in a rice paddy," as Halberstam wrote in his profile of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann. Some of these articles could fit into the daily newspaper format only because of their exceptional merit, timeliness, and exclusivity -- for instance, Sydney Schanberg's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage on the fall of Cambodia. But the majority were too narrative, too discursive, too personal, too long, and so ended up either in magazine or book form.

Among the big newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post are represented here to an almost embarrassing degree -- embarrassing to other large newspapers, that is. The names of their correspondents constitute a veritable honor roll: Halberstam, whose The Making of a Quagmire in 1965 set the table for the best of the reporting that would follow; Ward Just, whose To What End (1968) would become something of a sacred text; Gloria Emerson, whose reports on the failed South Vietnamese incursion into Laos in 1971 were singular for their clarity and compassion; and, of course, Schanberg, who authored five of the very best of these chapters. And the list goes on: Don Oberdorfer and Peter Baestrup, both of whom would go on to write books on Tet '68, and Fox Butterfield and Neil Sheehan, who would contribute to The New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Pentagon Papers in 1971. The Wall Street Journal more than held its own with its one-man team of Peter Kann, who managed to write not only with style but even humor.

The best single newsmagazine piece, according to the evidence presented here, was not by a newsweekly correspondent, but by Senator John McCain III, whose harrowing account of his years as a POW ran in U. S. News & World Report.

Among the general interest magazines, The New Yorker and Esquire took the honors, Esquire if for no other reason than Michael Herr's Dispatches, and The New Yorker for Daniel Lang's extraordinary "Casualties of War," which, along with Seymour Hersh's reporting on My Lai for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, more than adequately covered the atrocities perpetrated by U. S. troops on Vietnamese civilians. (Jonathan Schell's extraordinary contribution excerpted here came not from The New Yorker but his book The Military Half.) Oddly, several of the very best of these articles ended up in magazines that are now only dimly remembered: the last of three remarkable dispatches from John Saar appeared in the weekly Life just eight months before it closed for business; the book's most chilling piece of combat reporting came from the old The Saturday Evening Post, an account of Specialist 4/C Jack P. Smith's near-death experience in the Ia Drang Valley, in which he was wounded three times and taken for dead by the North Vietnam Army. Smith survived and recovered, but 93 percent of his company had been lost, and several of his friends killed themselves rather than submit to capture. Smith later became a TV correspondent for This Week with David Brinkley, and now is a contributor to ABC World News Tonight and Nightline.

The two volumes conclude with the entirety of Michael Herr's Dispatches, which is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Herr's reporting originally ran sporadically in magazines and was not brought out in book form by Knopf until 1977, a period when few people wanted to think about Vietnam. So I suspect there will be many readers of this book who will be encountering Herr's phantasmagorical account for the first time. A pleasure awaits. The Library of America wisely chose to put Herr's Dispatches at the very end of the second volume, primarily because there was no place else to put this book within a book, and also because it afforded the editors the chance to end with Herr's concluding words: "Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there."

This reviewer, taking his cue from the books' editors, will also leave the final words to Herr, for who could sum the war up better?

Year after year, season after season, wet and dry, using up options faster than rounds on a machine-gun belt, we called it right and righteous, viable and even almost won, and it still only went on the way it went on. When all the projections of intent and strategy twist and turn back on you, tracking team blood, "sorry" just won't cover it. There's nothing so embarrassing as when things go wrong in a war.

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