Landing On His Feet

The shelves in my study are crammed from floor to ceiling with Vietnam volumes--novels, poetry, memoirs, photographs, sketches. It seems that every Army, Marine, Navy and Air Force unit has put out its own history. Veterans deluge me with recollections of their exploits; periodically I receive a now-it-can-be-told manuscript by a former covert agent. Bookshops and libraries are congested with retrospective, frequently self-serving analyses by officials, diplomats, generals and admirals. The previously secret tapes of presidential conversations are being published. The war is the subject of movies and documentaries, even a musical. It is taught in schools and colleges by instructors who weren’t born when it began to students who weren’t born when it ended. Lately enemy soldiers have been relating their experiences, which are remarkably analogous to those of our own grunts.

Given this surfeit, you might wonder whether there is more to be said about Vietnam that we don’t already know. But, judging from John Laurence’s phenomenal account, “The Cat from Hue,” we have only scratched the surface.

The conflict lured a plethora of ambitious young journalists hoping to launch their careers, Laurence among them. He arrived in Southeast Asia in August 1965, as U.S. involvement was escalating; and, with interruptions for other assignments, remained for five years. As a correspondent with CBS he was present at such pivotal episodes as the battle of the Ia Drang Valley, the siege of Khe Sanh, the fight for Hue and the American incursion into Cambodia.

Several of his over-eager colleagues died trying to make their reputations, but he survived, which could explain the cryptic title of his book, “The Cat From Hue.” It alludes to the filthy, forlorn kitten he picked up in the rubble during the horrendous struggle for the imperial city of Hue in February 1968. I construe it to be a metaphor for himself--as if he, like the animal, was endowed with nine lives.

With some notable exceptions, print reporters tended to cover the action only occasionally, as I did. But TV correspondents and cameramen were required to capture the images that their audiences could view in the comfort of their living rooms. Thus they had to be in the field constantly. And Laurence was in the thick of it, day-by-day, week-by-week, month-by-month, courting extraordinary risks. Friends accused him of obsessively nurturing a death wish. For him, it was his job.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, who usually gathered just enough information to produce the brief sound bites that accompanied their footage, he accumulated more material than he could possibly use on the air. So his narrative is a catalog of detail, some of it numbing, most of it vivid, all of it significant. He was a combined audio and video system.

His delineation of infantrymen edging forward is not merely an inventory but illustrates the way heavily equipped American troops operated in the hostile terrain. They were an interminable human conveyor belt sweating in the suffocating tropical heat and humidity as they carried “rifle ammunition, machinegun bullets, mortar shells, hand grenades, rockets, tank gun canisters, high explosives, food, water, batteries, mail, medicine, morphine, IV fluids, bandages, body bags.”

He portrays the wounded and dying as they lay on tiers of blood-soaked stretchers in airplanes and helicopters, traumatized and sobbing in pain as they waited to be evacuated to hospitals. “Some of them had lost entire arms and legs, some only fingers, hands, feet, ears, eyes, pieces of skull.” Implicit in his description of this grotesque scene is the message that we were not the invincible Rambos depicted by Hollywood.

Nothing, however trivial, eludes Laurence’s keen vision. When he seeks shelter in a house in Hue during the height of the battle, he notices that the garden in the rear is “tangled with tall vines” and “fat leafy plants,” and hears beneath the foliage a “gurgling stream” and the screeching of “invisible insects.”

Enclosed in a courtyard, the pastel stucco, tile-roofed villa was “graceful, harmonious and elegant,” and probably belonged to an upper-crust Vietnamese clan. Laurence pictures the parents and grandparents and great-grandparents as they convened weeks before with their progeny to celebrate Tet, the lunar New Year, the sacred holiday. Their house would have been decorated with “bright-colored flower blossoms, lanterns and handmade prints,” and smelled of fresh-baked pastries and other delicacies. They would have assembled to exchange gossip, and observe such ancient rituals as tending family tombs and honoring ancestors. The elders would sit with the children, laughing and regaling them with folk tales. Then, while they slept off the festivities, the war burst upon them with the “convulsions of a volcano.” The sudden Communist attack--aggravated by the cataclysmic American bombings--killed thousands, whose mangled cadavers were bulldozed into mass graves.

Contrary to the canard that the press corps opposed America’s intervention in Southeast Asia, virtually all the journalists who covered the conflict during its initial phase firmly believed that the commitment was necessary. David Halberstam, invariably cited as an early critic of the war, commented in 1964 that Vietnam was “a strategic country in a key area [and] perhaps one of only five or six nations in the world that is truly vital to U.S. interests.”

Other reporters, myself included, echoed the same thesis until we perceived that the American forces, despite their overwhelmingly superior firepower, faced adversaries prepared to accept unlimited losses to achieve their goal. We witnessed their corpses piled up like cordwood following every clash and saw that the enterprise was fruitless.

It is unsurprising that Laurence would ultimately discover after slogging through the snarled jungles, mangrove swamps and flooded rice fields that the U.S. crusade to obstruct the spread of communism was not only futile but catastrophic: “America came to Vietnam to save it from evil,” pulverized the land and “ended up sacrificing its own soul.”

He predictably excoriates President Lyndon B. Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, Gen. William Westmoreland and the rest of the U.S. leadership for their “blind plunge into a maelstrom of anguish.” Nor does he spare the slick spokesmen insulated in their air-conditioned Saigon offices who blatantly lied or contorted the truth in their endeavor to persuade the public at home to support the campaign in Vietnam even though they knew that it was failing badly. Their daily news conferences, a litany of phony statistics and rosy forecasts, were eventually lampooned as the “Five O’Clock Follies.” The phrase “credibility gap,” which skeptics applied to the calculated policy of deception subsequently practiced in Panama, Grenada, Somalia and the Persian Gulf, originated in Vietnam.

Fortunately Laurence resists the temptation to bloviate on the global consequences of Vietnam though he concludes on a banal note, suggesting that the “best legacy” of the horrendous venture would be a “deep and sincere love between people of the two countries” based on “where we have been together [and] what we have endured.” But that lapse is a minor flaw in a dramatic personal chronicle that will stand as a unique contribution to the colossal array of Vietnam literature.

*

Stanley Karnow, author of “Vietnam: A History,” was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1990.