Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1969–1975

by Milton J. Bates (Compiler), Lawrence Lichty (Compiler), Paul L. Miles (Compiler)

The Barnes & Noble Review
War Stories

If there's one clear lesson the U.S. military learned from Vietnam, it was: Never again. Never again let the media run around the theater of war, reporting whatever they wanted from wherever they wanted. It was a lesson the Pentagon acted on in the Gulf War, severely limiting media access. It was also a lesson hard learned.

As was happening on college campuses, on concert stages, and at political rallies across the country, journalism underwent a revolution in the '60s and early '70s. Though led by patrician families that were firmly entrenched in the political and cultural elite of the nation, newspapers and magazines were being written by young reporters who came of age with Elvis, the Beatles, and the civil rights movement. All previous generations of journalists had accepted that an American war was a good war. The Vietnam press corps held no such belief.

Reporting Vietnam collects the best writing and reportage from the war into two volumes of gripping, painful reading. Part one covers the war from 1959 to 1969 -- from the first American deaths to the bloody battle of Hamburger Hill. Along the way, reporters fan out to uncover the military blunders, the political minefields, and the cultural changes spreading from America to Vietnam: from the Tet Offensive to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, from a violent Christmas in Saigon to Black Power in the U.S. armed forces.

Part two, covering 1969 through 1975, begins with My Lai and ends with the fall of Saigon and the evacuation of the U.S. embassy. This was the war at its most chaotic, its mostlawless, its most tragic. Concluding this volume, and summarizing the complete experience of reporting on Vietnam, is Michael Herr's Dispatches, a stunning book-length memoir of his experience of the war.

The two volumes compile the works of the best and boldest writers who covered the war: David Halberstam, Russell Baker, Stanley Karnow, Peter Arnett, Walter Cronkite, Wallace Terry, Sydney Schanberg, Neil Sheehan, Gloria Emerson, Philip Caputo, and Michael Herr, to name just some of the more than 80 writers whose work appears in the collection.

Reporting Vietnam is a valuable collection of primary-source narratives from reporters in the field. It is also a comprehensive document of the pain America went through in Vietnam.
— Greg Sewel, barnesandnoble.com

Genres: History, Journalism, Military History, War, Politics, American History, Nonfiction

857 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1998

Reviews

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much like the first volume this outlines in emotional detail the continued consequences of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

There are significant changes. Corruption at all levels is rampant. U.S. troops are committing atrocities. Many detest the country and the Vietnamese people. Troops are rebelling and not following orders. Racial tensions between white and black troops are escalating. There are incidents of fragging, as when a commanding officer becomes overly zealous on patrol to seek out enemy contact. Troops did not want to engage the enemy – they wanted to go home in one piece. Many troops were using drugs from marijuana to heroin. A long war inevitably corrupts and debases.

It was becoming, in many ways, as per the famous quote “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”.

There is a startling portrayal of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan – he is the man in the most infamous war photo of all time.

An article on former President Lyndon Johnson is interesting solely because it demonstrates a deluded leader who feels he was always right and never wrong.

There are also depictions of the North Vietnamese.

Page 253 - 54 (my book) Tien taken prisoner by the South Vietnamese

“We walked [on the Ho Chi Minh trail] eleven hours a day and the longer we walked the more bored and morose we became,” Tien said. “There were many things I missed. First, I wanted a real cigarette. Then, I wanted to see my mother, to be close to her. And then, what I really wanted badly was a whole day of rest.”... In his village there were no men who had come back. There were no letters from any of them. Before 1968, men going south had been granted 15-day leaves, but these were cancelled. No family knew, or wondered allowed, who had been wounded or killed.

Page 371-72 (of bombing in North Vietnam)

The bombs had hit an area about a thousand yards long and five hundred yards wide in the middle of town. According to the local authorities eighteen blast bombs had been dropped, along with four anti-personnel bombs; each of the latter contains 192,500 steel pellets, which are hurled through the air when the bomb explodes.

Many of the stories are about troops on the ground – relatively few are from the Washington perspective. There was a tremendous disconnect between grunts (GIs, marines) in the villages, foothills, and rice paddies – to Saigon officials – and then to the U.S.

The longest article is “Dispatches” by Michael Herr. It captures the essence and horrors of Vietnam; although I wonder how the drugs the author took permeated his viewpoint. He definitely follows the maxim of Nietzsche “And if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

These two volumes (1959 – 1969 and 1969 – 1975) are indispensible for an understanding of the Vietnam War – and all wars.

[David Crumm · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long trek through a war with too much tragedy all around

Last year, I read the entire Library of America "Reporting World War II" 2-volume set, both because I am a lifelong journalist myself and my father, uncles and grandfather all served in World War II. Those volumes brought me closer to my family's experience and I am grateful for the courageous correspondents who documented what was happening. Then, I started the LoA "Reporting Vietnam" series for the same reasons: I'm a journalist myself and, in this case, met a number of the Vietnam correspondents over the years. And, again, family members served in Vietnam.

World War II certainly qualifies for this headline "tragedy all around." Wikipedia's current summary sentence is: "World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in history, resulting in an estimated 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians." But the nature of that conflict was more urgent and the moral imperative of stopping German and Japanese atrocities was clear. Vietnam by the numbers sounds less cataclysmic. Wikipedia's current summary is: "The war exacted an enormous human cost: estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 966,000 to 3 million. Some 275,000–310,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict." (And that does not add the nearly 2 million who died in the related Cambodian genocide.)

Where Vietnam differs is that "we" did not need to wage and escalate this war the way we did for as long as "we" did. The record is so clear, documented by hundreds of journalists in these pages (and later by scholars and historians). We did not need to keep feeding what Michael Herr calls, in the final 200-page section, the "poisonous flower."

I'm pleased that the LoA editors got the rights to publish Herr's famous book "Dispatches" as the last major section of this two-volume collection. I remember reading "Dispatches" when it first appeared. Vietnam was so traumatic for everyone that Herr came home after reporting for Esquire, went through a mental collapse that prevented him from writing for five years, and was only able to publish "Dispatches" in 1977.

How important is this book as a capstone to this 2-volume set? John le Carré called Dispatches "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time."

So, after many months in the jungles of this 2-volume set, I'm shelving it in my library and moving on to the LoA 2-volume set, Reporting Civil Rights.

And for more details about this 2-volume set, I did write short Goodreads summaries of many sections of this book as I was reading it.

[Peter Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an excellent compendium of Vietnam journalism. The editors have been careful to select salient pieces mostly from the American perspective. Civilian life, combat ritual, enemy POWs, war protestors are all covered by various writers (Tom Wolfe, David Halberstam, Hunter Thomspon, etc.) I enjoyed the Kent State piece and the interview with the infamous "bullet-in-the-brain" police director from South Vietnam.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just as engaging and instructive as Part 1. From John McCain's moving account of his captivity to Hunter Thompson's dismantling of the 1972 Repub convention in Miami, these reports capture a critical and crazy time in real time. The final third republishes Michael Herr's excellent "Dispatches" in full, a book I've read and will revisit.

Required reading for anyone interested in this debacle and how it resonates with the more recent disaster in Afghanistan.

[Erik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every bit as informative as volume one though not quite as consistently engaging. I was especially fascinated by the pieces on the US pulling out of Vietnam, a part of the war I haven't had much exposure to.

[Robert Musgrove · Rating 4 out of 5]

As you would Exocet from a compilation, some if these accounts grab you by the neck while others are flaccid. It does span the history of the US war, though, and for those interested in that, it is very worthwhile.