Press Failure in Vietnam
MARSHALL, S. L. A.
AMERICA'S SEDENTARY WAR CORRESPONDENTS Press Failure in Vietnam By S.L.A. Marshall Two months ago, following my return to the United States from Vietnam, Major General John Norton and the main...
...They feel strongly that public recognition of the fighting performance of the troops is good for morale...
...But no understanding of its proportions-indeed, scarcely any awareness of its existence, though it involved many of their sons-was conveyed to the people of the United States...
...There are a few who stay with it, who recognize that the name of the game is Being With Troops, and requires sharing their risks part of the time...
...The deployed Army is there, ready and anxious to serve representatives of all information media...
...correspondents in Saigon don't give a damn about them...
...The story of Sam Castan of Look magazine needs no one to point up its moral...
...Nor does the Army hesitate to talk of the grimmer aspects of the ordeal- losses, privations, shortages, and heartbreaking incidents-because officers know these are part of the story...
...time will put him in the company of Ernie Pyle and R. H. D. There are other stickers with the Marines and in III Corps zone...
...Those who noted the press reports at all were entitled to the impression that the cavalrymen were off on another wild goose chase which might incidentally result in some slight drawing of blood...
...It ended on August 25, and by that time Norton had committed 14 Battalions, six of them his own, to the battle line...
...With the conference reeking of psuedo sophistication and half-baked cynicism, perspective inevitably becomes blurred...
...The war in Vietnam is the most fascinating, protean and story-filled conflict in which the U.S...
...Its people are eager to talk...
...They are legion, compared to what the national press sent forth to cover the deployments on the American Expeditionary Force under General Pershing in 1917...
...The radical switch of scene and action took less than 12 hours...
...Its action is kaleidoscopic, its small-picture dramas and human interest angles are infinite in number, and its surprises are unending...
...Our time is the heyday of the fogmakers, and there seems to be no choice but to suffer them...
...and in any event official communiqués seem to have passed out of style...
...It is not the duty of the Army to function as war reporter to the nation, conducting interviews and writing feature stories...
...Flocks of correspondents winged north from Saigon after the President mentioned the incident and stayed forward almost one day to interview Carpenter on his life and loves- to the complete disgust of West Point's one-time Lonesome End...
...The statistics of this battle are eye-opening...
...I would also mention Charley Black of Columbus, Georgia, Bob Boos of the Associated Press and good old Jim Lucas of Scripps Howard...
...Individual battles, ever the mainstream of the fighting story in Vietnam as in any other war, continue to be ignored solely because the majority of U.S...
...Marshall Two months ago, following my return to the United States from Vietnam, Major General John Norton and the main body of his First Cavalry Division Air Mobile fought an important battle in the extreme west of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam...
...Even the television crews are guilty of this attitude, though as a group, they are quite ready to cope with battle risks off and on, and go forward more than others...
...Perhaps the reporters are ignorant of war and do not wish to expose their innocence, or so fearful of the front that they cannot endure the thought of staying with it...
...These was one flash of press interest during Hawthorne II (the Battle of Toumorong) when Captain Carpenter called down napalm on his own company...
...Then as August opened, the great body of the First Cavalry was lifted and committed more than 60 miles westward, beyond Plei Me near the Cambodian border, in a countryside dominated by rugged peaks, covered with dense jungle and rain forest, and permeated by numerous streams...
...That is more than were in Korea and as many as we had in European Theater in World War II...
...He accepted the risks in Operation Crazy Horse and because his luck ran out, paid the supreme sacrifice, though I am sure he would not have had it any other way...
...Confirmed as engaging on the other side were nine specific North Vietnamese Battalions...
...Their trouble is they want blood on the moon every night...
...The episode stays dear in my memory because among the visitors was a 30-year-old "war reporter" for a national news weekly who, on hearing from Colonel Ted Mataxis that I was doing a book on the battles during the southwest monsoon, said to me: General, if you want to know how the fighting here is working out, you must go to Hong Kong and talk to my bureau chief...
...But that is an old story and is no longer true...
...It is not being reported for simple souls who would like to know how it is being fought and how good are the chances that the South Vietnamese and American forces and their allies can bring off a military victory...
...Still, the field Public Information Officers often have to journey to Saigon and convince the reporters that something very special is brewing before they will get off their duffs for a few days...
...The result is an accenting of the negative and trivial story that obscures the truly important...
...I have refrained from saying anything about how this failure of the press contributes to the blighting and confusing of American public opinion regarding the war and the national prospects in it...
...So is the terrorist incident within the city, even though it merely scuttles a worn-out barge and may have been an act of private vengeance...
...The war is being covered primarily for all bleeding hearts and for Senator Fulbright, who casts about for a way to stop it by frightening and shocking the citizenry...
...It is not that the official briefings are bad...
...If one correspondent could compile a large enough file of writings about these accidents, he might cop the Pulitzer prize for war reporting...
...For some part of the failure of the press corps in Vietnam in earlier years, the Government bureaucracy, including the military, was indeed responsible...
...Men like General Norton and his soldiers are above feeling hurt that their deeds go unsung and will be little noted in the future...
...Thus began Operation Paul Revere II, the euphemism chosen by the political authorities to cloak this main trial-at-arms in Vietnam...
...The same has to be said of Operations Austin II, Crazy Horse, Hawthorne II, and Nathan Hale, fought while I was forward with troops in the weeks of May, June and early July...
...forces have ever engaged...
...The off-beat yarns fall into several familiar patterns, none of which promises a beat any longer, though collectively they are beaten to death...
...The battle was remarkable for many reasons, including the fact that it did not make one lead headline in this country...
...Though it was never the case in previous wars when such incidents were more frequent and with less reason, this, too, is now a dependable bell-ringer...
...The story of the war is not being told in its daily columns...
...Jim has a new book of war stories out on Vietnam...
...Any scolding of them would be invidious, since I have no awareness of their personal problems-how their wives feel about danger and urge them to play it safe, what orders and rockets shower on them from the boss's desk, or how their uninformed imaginations exaggerate one man's dangers in war...
...The deplorable thing is that young writers too lazy to gather the facts themselves sit around and sneer at all that is said...
...When they travel, they are freeloaders and some of them, even on short hauls for brief stays, have the nerve to take a trunk along...
...The commanders give them a warmer welcome and take them into confidence more fully than in times past...
...he's the only man who understands that side of the war...
...It has to be a picture of a stricken field or of some poor wounded man mumbling unintelligibly as he is littered to the waiting chopper...
...The Army procedure of playing down the sanguinary character of operations in the Central Highlands by labeling each engagement with some prominent but long-dead American's name is not to be blamed, (though this gentility seems naive and definitely confuses history...
...The Division had been campaigning for months on ground much closer to its large fortified perimeter next to An Khe, inland from the east coast about 30 miles...
...it was the real whopper of the summer...
...So here in aggregate was a battle of forces far larger than those at San Juan Hill and El Caney combined, bigger and more impressive than Pork Chop Hill by any measure, bloodier than Cantigny, and lasting as long as Belleau Wood...
...Troops understand their mission, know what they are doing, and do it splendidly...
...For speed and distance, there is no mass movement of troops to compare with it in military history...
...Indeed, the topic is best dropped...
...Hundreds of outstanding stories are missed...
...Or perhaps they stay chained to their desks in the wretched and rapidly-deteriorating city because of managing editors who deem any other kinds of "war" stories more sensational, more worth having, than what happens to troops...
...Two hundredand-two prisoners were captured, along with more than 300 weapons, many of them crew-served...
...Today's average correspondent prefers a piece that will make people on the home front squirm and agonize...
...Any reporter can make a clean break from the sit-in posture simply by insisting that his post is forward and his professional integrity is at stake...
...To put it another way, there is a cynical faddishness to war reporting out of Vietnam that contrasts diametrically with every prior performance, including Korea and Lebanon...
...My time was spent in II Corps zone, since it is self-defeating to attempt covering too much...
...there is no way to prove that the press failure is more baneful than the deliberate effort of a few statesmen in Washington-and of some speakers before the UN General Assembly-to mislead public opinion by newly raising false issues and aggravating old fears...
...Never before, in any war, has there been so much concentration on the off-beat yarn to the exclusion of a balanced accounting of how operations are being conducted...
...Hapless civilians have been killed in every war fought by the United States, but only in Vietnam, where they are far less common than in France during the invasion or in Korea, do they command first-page treatment every time...
...Any demonstration or riot, and especially a Buddhist demonstration-riot, is sure-fire copy...
...and in that regard at least, the American press continues to be derelict in its main responsibility...
...Today American correspondents are given freer access to battle fronts and bases, with readier and more agreeable facilities for moving about than they were ever accorded in any war...
...The pity is that a national will might polarize around this solid, shining and reassuring performance, if we were but permitted to view it...
...Each of these was a major battle in terms of the numbers of troops engaged and blows dealt the enemy...
...Past service has made them incapable of trying for the name without having the game...
...Jack Norton's good battle of August in and around the la Drang valley was not exceptional in being overlooked...
...There are said to be 350 "war correspondents" in Saigon...
...Possibly some feeling for what is right and what is not is necessary...
...Far removed from all of this wavering and doubt, our Army in Vietnam hews to the line...
...I needed a double take to be sure that he wasn't pulling my leg...
...It is enough to say to them that they may be defaulting on their one great opportunity to achieve a journalistic success that will make life more pleasant for them and their families in the future...
...In any case, the overwhelming majority of correspondents do not get to the front...
...The writer who cannot get a book and a larger reputation out of Vietnam within a brief span should quit the business...
...The actual body count of enemy dead was 861, which under the conditions of jungle warfare, with the enemy risking fanatically to extract his slain, indicates destruction of twice that number...
...I apologize to them that I do not list their names...
...The same goes for the story about soldiers dying from their own air bombs, mortar fire or artillery shells...
...Why is this so...
...None was fully reported to the American people...
...On the Bon Song plain next to the sea, in the hills inland from the port of Tuy Hoa and among the high mountains directly northeast of its own base, its brigades had taken on major enemy forces, exterminated most of them and driven the others from the field...
...In any case, the man has a choice to make, for his main chance to mature as a writer is certainly not in the noxious atmosphere of Saigon...
...But I would still risk one generalization: The only ones who are willing to stay with it, and who believe that the man-against-man play on the fire line is the thing, are correspondents like Black, Boos and Lucas who served the United States under fire in earlier wars...
...Then there is the thing-thatwent-wrong story...
...American dailies do not readily throw away the initial $3,500 investment required to set up a correspondent in Vietnam...
...Paul Revere I was minor...
...there we find only the tangents and sidebars...
...on the contrary, they have a high level of competence...
...In eight weeks in the field I saw but three newsmen...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 20
