TELLING VIETNAM STORY WITH ‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’ : WAR’S ‘ORDINARY PEOPLE’

Al Santoli was an Army infantryman during the Vietnam War. A decade after returning from the war in 1969, he wrote what became a best seller--”Everything We Had,” recollections of 33 Americans who had served in Vietnam, most of them in combat.

He’s still involved in the story of Vietnam. This time, he’s helping a friend, ABC’s Steve Bell, prepare for the latter’s trip this month to Vietnam and Cambodia as part of the network’s coverage of the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.

“I asked him to help out,” says Bell, who reported on the war for ABC in 1970 and now is news anchorman for the network’s “Good Morning, America.”

“I’ve known him for several years, and he has extensive contacts in the Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee communities. He was an obvious person for me to go to.”

Santoli’s work includes helping track down what he calls “the ordinary people” whose lives were affected by the war--American civilians as well as veterans, Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, former government officials and former North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese soldiers.

Many already have told their stories for his new book, “To Bear Any Burden,” whose title is based on a passage from President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address in 1960. The book is due out April 30--the date of Saigon’s surrender in 1975.

“It basically looks at our involvement in Vietnam, and the aftermath of the war, to get a more balanced picture, a story equally voiced by Asians and Americans,” Santoli says. “It’s not really about what happened ‘back then.’ It’s about what’s happening now.”

Awarded three Purple Hearts for wounds during the war, Santoli, 35, who served in the 25th Infantry Division, now is a free-lance journalist, married to a Vietnamese and living in New York City.

Since completing his first book, he’s interviewed scores of Vietnamese “boat people” and other refugees. Although he isn’t accompanying Bell to Vietnam, Santoli has made two trips in as many years to Cambodian refugee camps on the border of Thailand. One of the camps, he says, was shelled by Vietnamese artillery when he was there in 1983.

He is haunted by what he has seen. He frets that despite their best efforts and even though most have covered Vietnam before, the network correspondents returning there this month may not be able to get across what he perceives as the misery of life there now.

He says he thinks that the ordinary people of Vietnam will be afraid to talk freely to the visitors, fearing that if they criticize the current regime “they’re finished, that they and their families will go to the New Economic Zones, the gulags of Vietnam.

“I think the best way to balance it is that one also has to talk to refugees here, people who can say, ‘This is the reality that I knew,’ people already out of Vietnam who have the courage to speak up.”

As an example of what he’s talking about, he praises a PBS “Frontline” program, “Vietnam Under Communism,” made by a crew from CBS affiliate WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. The crew went to Vietnam last year and traveled from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City.

“I thought it was a fair job for the most part,” he says of the documentary, aired Jan. 15. “There were some things they (the show’s makers) didn’t understand because they’d never been there before. But I thought they did a good job in trying to present a well-balanced picture.”

Vietnam was the first war extensively covered by television and was dubbed “the living room war” by critic Michael Arlen. But Santoli’s only brush with a television news crew when he served in Vietnam was on the semi-comical side, he says.

Shortly after a three-day battle with North Vietnamese troops near the Cambodian border, he says, his rifle company was preparing to return to its base camp when “we were told to saddle up and go back in the tree line because a TV crew was coming in.”

He thinks the crew was from an Australian network. “I don’t know if they were aware that the fighting was actually over,” he adds. He says the weary, initially angry men in his company finally just got so tickled about it that they decided to put on a mighty show.

“We did our John Wayne thing, M-60s (machine guns) in each hand, and just blasted that tree line,” he says. He’s still able to laugh about it now.

But he remains critical of the coverage of the war that he saw on network television in the United States after returning from Vietnam in 1969.

“When I went over, it seemed to be, if not supportive, just straight war reporting,” Santoli says. “I don’t know if I was more sensitive when I came back, but it seemed there was more advocacy against the war. . . . I stopped watching because I was so fed up.”

In any event, he emphasizes, “the past is the past, and it’s gone. The key thing is what’s going on there now.”