Hot Damn Vietnam
Three years ago, the Library of America published “Reporting World War II,” which collected in two volumes memorable news stories, magazine articles and radio transcripts by such correspondents as A. J. Liebling, Ernie Pyle, Edward R. Murrow, Robert Sherrod, William L. Shirer and John Hersey. Because of strict wartime censorship of dispatches from the front, the tone was primarily upbeat and often sentimental. It was seldom so brutally honest as to damage morale.
“Reporting Vietnam” is a very different piece of goods. In Vietnam, the uncontrolled correspondents had an illegal and unpopular war to deal with, and quite a few quietly grew to favor the cause of the populist “enemy.” They had to buck a layer of official American hatred and suspicion, and if they had been writing about a legally declared war, their copy could have been seen as treasonous. Many came to despise the profoundly reactionary government of South Vietnam, once they understood that it represented only 10% of the population while the Buddhist majority hardly got a look-in.
To compare this Vietnam journalism with the World War II kind, even when it’s very good, is to wonder whether the words “good war,” the extirpation of Hitlerism aside, aren’t simply a synonym for “censored war.” No matter how it began, hostility deepened between the reporters and the officials, both American and Vietnamese, and this theme gradually became the subtext of Vietnam reporting. The uncensored eyewitness accounts of wounds and corpses are undeniably shocking, and combat veterans of all wars will welcome the rare truth-telling here.
Anyone using these dispatches to put together something like a psychological or emotional history of the Vietnam War will be faced with this question: Were the American combatants really as mechanically stupid as depicted, or does their presentation reflect simply the intelligence and skepticism of some extraordinarily gifted journalists? Clever, patient, patriotic Vietnamese over the decades had expelled first the Japanese, then the French and then the not very bright Americans.
One unexpected dividend offered by this collection is the evidence of how broad and unspecialized was the readership for general magazine journalism then. One of Gloria Emerson’s most heart-rending pieces ends this way: “There are other stories I could tell, about the living and the dead, much more than I have told here, but so very much has already been written and none of it ever made any difference at all.” A pretty strong ending to hand the gapers at the girls in Playboy (June 1973).
In the same way, a skeptical piece by Frances FitzGerald on the politics of the Mekong Delta (heavy on idleness and superstition) educated the readers of Vogue (January 1967), and Martha Gellhorn published her vigorous nay-saying in the Ladies Home Journal.
Much of this material is very strong stuff. In November 1965, journalist Jack P. Smith accompanied an American infantry battalion on patrol. After two days of unsuccessful fighting, the battalion found itself under further attack. “A plane dropped some napalm bombs just in front of the line. . . . I couldn’t see the gooks, but I could hear them scream as they burned. A hundred men dead, just like that.” Moving out the next day was anything but pleasant: Three battalions of the North Vietnam army lay dead around the GIs. “There must have been about 1,000 rotting bodies out there. . . . As we left the perimeter, we walked by them. Some of them had been out there for four days. There are more ants in Viet Nam than in any place I have ever seen.”
Moving toward the place where helicopters were supposed to pick them up, almost immediately they became victims of an all-around ambush. Shots seemed mysteriously to come from the trees behind. “There was firing all over the place now, and I was getting scared. . . . This wasn’t the three or four snipers we had been warned about. There were over 100 North Vietnamese snipers hiding in the trees above us . . . way above us, in the top branches.”
The GIs responded with rifle fire, and the noise was deafening. “Then the men started dropping. It was unbelievable. I knelt there staring as at least 20 men dropped within a few seconds. . . . Men all around me were screaming.” One of Smith’s friends was hit and was “bleeding in spurts. . . . Then the XO [executive officer] screamed. A bullet had gone through his boot, taking all his toes with it. He was in agony and crying. . . . I was crying and holding onto the XO’s hand to keep from going crazy.”
The VC now move up their machine guns, and “every few seconds someone would scream. . . . Sgt. Gale was lying near me. He had been hit badly in the stomach and was in great pain. . . . He pleaded with anyone he saw to help him, for the love of God to stop the pain or kill him. He would thrash around and scream some more, and then lie still for a while. He was bleeding a lot. Everyone was. No matter where you put your hand the ground was sticky.”
The massacre finally over, American medics policed the area, removing the few GIs still living. “Almost all the wounded,” says Smith, “were crippled for life.”
This piece of Smith’s was published in the June 28, 1967, issue of the eminently middle-class family weekly “founded by Benjamin Franklin,” the Saturday Evening Post. In the “good war,” it would have been unthinkable for a correspondent to send back stuff like that: too bloody and gruesome and true, a palpable threat to enlistments and home-front morale. In World War II, correspondents were part of the Army, under military discipline, and to write anything that might lower morale made one guilty of insubordination, liable to be sent home instantly. No one was to be recorded, as here, speaking profanity without which the material in this book could hardly be written.
The selection and treatment of these texts is up to the Library of America’s high standard; with one exception, and here I have a complaint. Each of the two volumes contains a mere reprint of a complete book already available, and indeed, well known: Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” in one and Donald Lang’s “Casualties of War” in the other. And moreover, the publicity designates each of these a “novel.” “Casualties of War” is no such thing; it is a carefully researched piece of expose nonfiction that originally appeared in The New Yorker and subsequently became a popular film of the same title. Indeed, its not being a work of fiction is precisely its value, for it is a factual report on the Army’s habit of punishing whistle-blowers to keep its honor clean. Lang’s book is about a group of soldiers on a patrol, who--with the exception of one man--decide to rape and then kill a Vietnamese girl during this mission. The one guiltless man takes up her cause and reports the affair and, of course, is not believed. The guilty soldiers are treated to a series of mitigating reviews of sentence, the effect of which is to suggest that the dead girl, being perhaps a VC, had it coming. It is a finely detailed nonfiction narrative, and a novel is exactly what it isn’t.
Lang’s work occupies 58 pages, and the reprint of Herr’s “Dispatches” takes up 209. Far from a fictional work of any kind, it is a collection of memories and meditations and analyses, and its genre, if it has one, is “essay.” It is the finest thing in these two volumes. Surely, readers interested in the Vietnam scandal already have access to a copy. Better to have used those 209 pages to print a lesser-known--or unknown--journalistic report of high quality. There are many out there.
The Vietnam War was unique. The correspondents who covered it understood this: It was not to be written about in any of the old ways. As Herr writes, “Conventional journalism could no more reveal this war than conventional firepower could win it.”
