THE STAGE
Weales, Gerald
is the case where a perhaps with some m and then at some it finds itself in disthat a married per" sexual request or in considers herself ghts to self-determimore nuanced an>le...
...Braestrup has a chart to show the differences...
...The kids don't want to fight anymore...
...Shaking of head...
...And now here comes Peter Braestrup with seven hundred pages of scholastic analysis and another seven hundred pages of appendices to say .in his quiet, insistent way that it was all the reporters' fault, they said there were only three Marine outposts around Khe Sanh when there were really four, they said the Vietcong got inside the Embassy when they really didn't...
...No, no...
...But the officials emphasized that, contrary to early reports, the Vietcong never actually got inside...
...Chang would point to the battle site...
...officials denied that the Vietcong actually got inside...
...Okay...
...The French chewed over their disasters in a sea of print and we are still doing the same...
...Hanoi fought for 22 years before Tet, and they fought for another seven years after it...
...This seems to be at the heart of all of Braestrup's points...
...The bombing was escalated too slowly...
...Today umber of Catholic : male rather than !y married women, ees and out of any vith marriage and lite understandably :s in the numbers : scholarships for 5 study—and proive positions befitexpect more emig distortions in WHO LOST THE WAR...
...The MPs outside the compound had said they were getting fire from inside, and the officials who later denied it were not absolutely and entirely trusted by the reporters...
...There mentioned here in id sexuality which irch, helping us to our pastoral care...
...About the worst sin of commission Braestrup can point to is a line in a UPI story the first day of the fighting referring to a battle through the "carpeted hallways" of the American Embassy in Saigon...
...Those "carpeted hallways" were piped...
...But don't you see, the Marines at Khe Sanh were never really in all that much trouble, whereas the reporters kept implying the whole business was mad and useless, part and parcel of the American failure to win the war...
...Phantom jet...
...Now, Chang, were there any . . . whup...
...After two further years of fighting Hanoi finally swept to a final and decisive military victory in April, 1975...
...there are no end of lessons to be learned...
...we're falling back on mercenary armies, just the way Rome did...
...It was their war, and they won it...
...next time we'll know better...
...Consider what happened...
...And now the Vietcong were not only fighting inside Saigon, they had shot their way right inside the U.S...
...He would circle his finger in the air like the rotor blade of a helicopter...
...Johnson is blamed for backing down at the very moment he should have jumped in with both feet...
...rrrrrrrrrr...
...In fact, there was no battle inside the Embassy...
...Were there any . . . nnnnnneeeeowwww...
...But later in the day General Westmoreland and other U.S...
...The reporters kept saying we were losing, the whole thing was going down the drain, but actually, when you consider all the facts, and understand what was really happening, you can see that we were in pretty good shape...
...Saigon bounced back from its initial shock, and the pacification program survived pretty much intact...
...Kissinger blames Congress for pulling the rug out from under Saigon...
...troops performed well...
...This is partly a result of the fact that Hanoi does not invite scrutiny, to say the least, but the real cause of our ignorance is parochialism...
...Like the former UPI reporter in Pnom Penh who explains how he used to cover the war in Cambodia in the early 1970s...
...officials had been saying so for months...
...When Chang came back begrimed with battle the UPI man would go to the wall map of Cambodia and say, "Now Chang, was the fighting here...
...Okay...
...the fellow's right and it's our fault...
...Embassy...
...A detacntoeht of troops landed on the rooftop helicopter pad in order to clear the building...
...Do you get the point...
...they were firing from the upper floors...
...In point of fact, the reporters, for a time that first day, suspected that the officials were fibbing to them...
...We are obsessed with our own wounds and disappointment...
...They were in the compound, yes...
...But the men who ran it in Washington are all blaming it on us, without setting aside five minutes to consider seriously why Hanoi won...
...sible that a husband the area of abortion, ublic moneys, have >man who wants an )r this sympathy is •f the violence and is subjected, but at injustice of bearing which she sincerely h was forced upon irgument especially ried woman...
...whup...
...I'm for it...
...Put more broadly, why did we win the battle, and lose the war...
...He flattened his hand into the slow, logy roll of a fixedwing conventional fighter plane...
...Do you get the point...
...It wasn't just the fact that so many of the bones he picks with reporters are willful and niggling...
...the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), far from collapsing, performed creditably...
...Some of the reporters, like the MPs outside the compound, thought there was fire from the Embassy's upper floors...
...everyone that the questions will be who live with the ad classes of life, iged women from ve kept them out cal schools...
...The military has concluded that a major cause of the Amerian failure was caution...
...But, don't you see, they didn't really get inside at all...
...He defeated his political opponents and the Japanese and emerged in control of his country at the end of the Second World War...
...It's enough to make you go back to smoking...
...The UPI man would put his hand into the rapid, deep diving pattern of a U.S...
...it should have been all-out from the start...
...they won it...
...So the second wave of stories reported both sides of the controversy, while to a degree implying that the Vietcong really did get inside, whatever the officials said...
...I do not consider myself naturally abusive by temperament, but wading through Braestrup's exhaustive and meticulous study, which is far from expressing anything like passion in tone, I found myself growing angry, abusive and passionate in response...
...We were supposed to be winning the war...
...What did this say about the whole U.S...
...Even now almost nothing has been written about their war...
...The reporters made it sound like it meant something, but it didn't actually mean anything because they didn't get inside...
...3 February 1978: 80 The American people may have been for their country, but they were never for the war, and they're glad to be out of it now...
...Then he fought and defeated the French in eight years of war between 1946 and 1954, gaining recognized control of half of his country...
...He covered the Tet offensive for the Washington Post, and does not credit himself with much keener perception than that of his colleagues...
...and it wasn't a guilty thought in response to some of his larger, juster criticisms, that perhaps, my God...
...other units took worse casualties than that...
...So the UPI man would immediately sit down at the typewriter and tap out his lead: "Despite American air support, Cambodian troops fell back again today after heavy fighting at . . ." And off it would go to tell the world...
...There are plenty of reasons why the two principal foreign interventions failed in their separate ways...
...But after awhile the reporters were satisfied that the Vietcong didn't get inside the actual Embassy building itself and they straightened their stories out...
...On top of that, the South Vietnamese were even angrier at the Vietcong than they were at the Americans, U.S...
...whup...
...We've lost our will...
...is the case where a perhaps with some m and then at some it finds itself in disthat a married per" sexual request or in considers herself ghts to self-determimore nuanced an>le request...
...But he had also been an Army officer during the Korean war, and the more he brooded about the Tet offensive after the fact, the more he found himself swinging around to the military's point of view...
...Okay...
...Ho Chi Minn founded his party in the 1930s...
...There were thirteen differences...
...At first the reporters, and their editors back in New York and Washington, did not quite know what to make of these denials...
...Lyndon Johnson, General Westmoreland and other U.S...
...Journalism is a high calling, properly up there somewhere between priest and doctor, but some rascals have found their way into it, as we all know, and they tell some horrifying stories of professional irresponsibility...
...This is a common assumption among professional soldiers and many public officials in Washington and it's bound to cause us trouble in the future, but it's wrong-headed in such a familiar way that it's hard to get mad at it...
...Reporters who got to the scene were tolct tiy MPs outside the compound that the Vietcong were inside...
...But to imply that Hanoi's success is solely or even importantly the result of our fumblings or shaky resolve is perverse, feckless, and plain blind...
...And they got into some of the adjoining buildings, where an Embassy official actually killed one of the Vietcong with a pistol thrown up to him through a window...
...effort...
...Maybe Johnson did ask for written assurances from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that Khe Sanh could be held, and maybe he did worry he'd have to authorize the use of tactical nuclear weapons, and maybe Westmoreland did answer he didn't think that would be necessary...
...But the reporters kept talking about the "agony" of Khe Sanh...
...This wasn't "our" war...
...Don't you see...
...This, in brief, was that Hanoi had been guilty of fuzzy strategic thinking, committed many tactical errors, suffered horrendous casualties, and lost the battle of Tet...
...We didn't lose the war...
...Braestrup's answer, never quite put in so many words, is that the reporters got it all wrong and convinced the public we were losing, when in fact we were winning...
...No, no...
...A 19-man Vietcong sapper squad blew a hole in the wall around the Embassy compound and got into the grounds, but the five-man Marine guard inside the Embassy building itself managed to bar the main entrance and the Vietcong never actually got inside the building...
...He doesn't have anything very harsh to say about the reporters' performance—there were conflicting reports, after all, and they did correct their early stories once they were satisfied what had happened—but he has a point to make all the same: the first stories which claimed the Vietcong got inside enhanced the attack's "symbolic" content...
...lortant of all...
...Yes, yes...
...But this was not immediately clear that first day...
...Now, Chang, were there any...
...I'm not just being light-fingered with semantics...
...we came and left in die middle...
...The UPI man certainly did not speak Khmer...
...So their early stories naturally said the Vietcong had fought their way inside the Embassy...
...Besides, only 205 Marines were killed during the siege...
...Chang nodded...
...Here I'm trying to make a point of my own...
...That's a real whopper of a chapter, 107 pages, the longest in the book, the drift of which was that reCommonweal: 79 porters kept talking about the French disaster at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, only it wasn't really like Dien Bien Phu at all...
...And it wasn't even his apparent conclusion, blandly implied, that steadiness at the helm and more of the same would have won the war...
...That's the sort of horror story I expected to find in Peter Braestrup's huge, critical study of American reporting during the Tet offensive of 1968 [Big Story, The Westview Press, two volumes, 1400 pages, $50], but there's nary a one...
...they said we were losing the war when in fact, everything considered calmly and objectively, we were doing real well...
...Americans are too impatient, too dependent on the quick fix...
...Well I didn't get the point, and I found myself failing to get a lot of Braestrup's other points as well...
...He, and his government after he died, then fought the Americans until the last of them went home in early 1973...
...This took about 24 hours to happen, but it takes Peter Braestrup 52 pages to describe...
...we keep asking ourselves why we lost, and seem to be making an effort to learn all the wrong lessons...
...I didn't get the point about Khe Sanh, for example...
...Does it jcussion, or does a is possible to default i marriage-contract...
...Chang did not speak English...
...and tap a town on the map...
...No, no, no...
...Most of the actual fighting was covered by a local stringer named Chang...
...In the late 1950s he launched a war against the American-supported regime in the other half and had it all but won when the Americans intervened in strength in 1965...
...THOMAS POWERS...
...So why, Braestrup brooded, did the Tet offensive have such a calamitous impact on the American public and officials in Washington...
...What really got my blood up is the fact that Braestrup, despite his own frequent references to the "American ethnocentrism" which made American reporters treat the conflict as an American war, is still asking, after all these years, why we won the battle, and lost the war...
...All in all, a victory for our side and a setback for Hanoi...
...They only got inside the compound, where they were all killed...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 3
