How to Lose a War: Reflections of a Foreign Correspondent - by Robert Elegant - Part 1

“Underneath the whisperings of tropical nights there is a darker whispering that death invents especially for northern men….” -- William Carlos Williams “Adam”

In the Early 1960s, when the Viet Nam War became a big story, most foreign correspondents assigned to cover the story wrote primarily to win the approbation of the crowd, above all their own crowd. As a result, in my view, the self-approving system of reporting they created became even further detached from political and military realities because it instinctively concentrated on its own self-justification. The American press, naturally dominant in an “American war”, somehow felt obliged to be less objective than partisan, to take sides, for it was inspired by the engage “investigative” reporting that burgeoned in the US in these impassioned years. The press was instinctively ”agin the Governmnent”—and, at least reflexively, for Saigon’s enemies.

During the latter half of the 15-year American involvement in Viet Nam the media became the primary battlefield. Illusory events reported by the press as well as real events within the press corps were more decisive than the clash of arms or the contention of ideologies. For the first time in modern history, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen. Looking back coolly, I believe it can be said (surprising as it may still sound) that South Vietnamese and American forces actually won the limited military struggle. They virtually crushed the Viet Cong in the South, the “native” guerrillas who were directed, reinforced, and equipped from Hanoi; and thereafter they threw back the invasion by regular North Vietnamese divisions. None the less, the War was finally lost to the invaders after the US disengagement cause the political pressures built up by the media had made it quite impossible for Washington to maintain even the minimal material and moral support that would have enabled the Saigon regime to continue effective resistance.

Since I am considering causes rather than effects, the demoralization of the West, particularly the United States, that preceded and followed the fall of South Viet Nam is beyond the scope of this article. It is, however, interesting to wonder whether Angoloa, Afghanistan, and Iran would have occurred if Saigon had not fallen amid nearly universal odium—that is to say, if the “Viet Nam Syndrome”, for which the press (in my view) was largely responsible, had not afflicted the Carter Administration and paralyzed American will. On the credit side, largely despite the press, the People’s Republic of China would almost certainly not have purged itself of the Maoist doctrine of “worldwide liberation through people’s war” and, later, would not have come to blows with Hanoi if the defense of South Viet Nam had not been maintained for so long.

The Brotherhood

“You could be hard about it and deny that there was a brotherhood working there, but what else could you call it?” This is a question that Michael Herr asked in his Dispatches, a personally honest, but basically deceptive book.

“But…all you ever talked about was the war, and the could come to seem like two different wars at the same time. Because who but another correspondent could talk the kind of mythical war you wanted to hear described?”

I have added the italics; for in the words “mythical” and “wanted” the essential truth is laid bare. In my own personal experience most correspondents wanted to talk chiefly to other correspondents to confirm their own mythical vision of the war. Even newcomers were pre-committed, as the American jargon has it, to the collective position most of their colleagues had already taken. What I can only call surrealistic responding constantly fed on itself; and did not diminish thereby, but swelled into ever more grotesque shapes. I found the process equally reprehensible for being in no small part unwitting.

John le Carre (whose extravagant encomium adorns the cover of the Pan edition of Dispatches: “The best book I have ever read on men and war in ourt times.”) is, I feel, too clever a writer to believe he painted an even proximately accurate picture of Southeast Asia in The Honorable Schoolboy (1972). But he initially depicted the press corps and the correspondents, briefly se down in the brutally alienating milieu called Viet Nam, turned to each other for professional sustenance and emotional comfort. After all, there was nowhere else to turn, certainly not to stark reality, which was both elusive and repellent.

Most correspondents were isolated from the Vietnamese by ignorance of their language and culture, as well as by a measure of race estrangement. Most were isolated from the quixotic American Army establishment, itself often as confused as they themselves were, by their moralistic attitudes and their political prejudices. It was inevitable, in the circumstances, that they came to write, in the first instance, for each other.

To be sure, the approbation of his own crowd gave a certain fullness to the correspondent’s life in exile that reached beyond the irksome routine of reporting and writing. The disapprobation of his peers could transform him into a bitterly defensive misanthrope (I think here of one industrious radio and newspaper stringer who was reputed to be the richest correspondent in Viet Nam, except, of course, for the television starts). Even the experienced correspondents, to whom Asia was “home” rather than a hostile temporary environment, formed their own little self defensive world within the larger world of the newcomers.

It was no wonder that correspondents writing to wing the approbation of other correspondents in that insidiously collegial atmosphere produced reporting that was remarkably homogeneous. After each other, correspondents wrote to win the approbation of their editors, who controlled their professional loves and who were closely linked with the intellectual community at home. The consensus of that third circle, the domestic intelligentsia, derived largely from correspondents’ reports and in turn served to determine the nature of those reports. If dispatches did not accord with that consensus, approbation was withheld. Only in the last instance did correspondents address themselves to the general public, the mass of lay readers and viewers.

The Cloud of Unknowing

IT WAS MY IMPRESSION THAT most correspondents were, in one respect, very much like the ambitious soldiers that they derided. A tour in Viet Nam was almost essential to promotion for a US Regular Army officer, and a combat command was the best road to rapid advancement. Covering the biggest continuing story in the world was not absolutely essential to a correspondent’s rise, but it was an invaluable cachet. Quick careers were made by spectacular reporting of the obvious fact that men, women, and children were being killed: fame or at least notoriety rewarded the correspondent who became part of the action—rather than a mere observer—by influencing events directly.

Journalists, particularly those serving in television, were therefore, like soldiers, “rotated” to Viet Nam. Few were given time to develop knowledge, and indeed the intellectual instincts, necessary to report the War in the round. Only a few remained “in country” for years, though the experienced Far Eastern correspondents visited regularly from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo. Not surprisingly, one found that most reporting veered farther and farther from the fundamental political, economic, and military realities of the War, for these were usually not spectacular. Reporting in Viet Nam became a closed, self-generating system sustained largely by the acclaim of the participants lavished on each other in almost equal measure to the opprobrium they heaped on “the Establishment, a fashionable and very vulnerable target.

FOR SOME JOURNALISTS, perhaps most, a moment of truth through self-examination was never to come. The farther they were from the real conflict, the more smugly self approving they now remain as commentators who led the public to expect a brave new world when the North Vietnamese finally “liberated” South Viet Name. Even those correspondents who today gingerly confess to some errors or distortions usually insist that the true fault was not theirs at all, but Washington’s. The enormity of having helped in one way or another to bring tens of millions under grinding totalitarian rule—and having tilted the global balance of power—appears to great to acknowledge. It is easier to absolve one’s self by blaming exclusively Johnson, Nixon and Kissinger.

I found few American correspondents to be as tough minded as one Briton I knew who was very close to the action for many years in the employ of an American wire news service. “I’m ashamed of most of what I wrote in Viet Nam” he told me recently, “But I was a new boy, and I took my lead from the Americans, who were afire with the crusading spirit of 60’s journalism—the involvement, man, in the good fight. When I look at what’s happened now, I’m ashamed of my ignorance—and what I helped to do to the Vietnamese…”

As one West German has confessed (Uwe Siemon-Netto in the International Herald Tribune, reprinted in ENCOUNTER, October 1979):

“Having covered the Viet Name war over a period of fiver years for West German publications, I am now haunted by the role we journalists have played over there.

Those of us who had wanted to find out knew of the evil nature of the Hanoi regime. We knew that, in 1956, close to 50,000 peasants were executed in North Viet Nam. We knew that after the division of the country nearly one million North Vietnamese fled to the South. Many of us have seen the tortured and carved-up bodies of men, women and children executed by the Viet Cong in the early phases of the war. And many of us saw, in 1968, the mass graves of Hue, saw the corpses of thousands of civilians still festively dressed for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.

Why, for heaven’s sake, did we not report about these expressions of deliberate North Vietnamese strategy at least as extensively as the My Lai massacre and other such isolated incidents that were definitely not party of the US policy in Viet Nam?

What prompted us to make our readers believe that the Communists, once in power in all of Viet Nam, would behave benignly? What made us, first and foremost, Anthony Lewis, belittle warnings by US officials that a communist victory would result in a massacre?

Why did we ignore the fact that the man responsible for the executions of 50,000 peasants, Truong Chinh, was—and still is—one of the most powerful figures in Hanoi? What made us thing that he and his comrades would have mercy for the vanquished South Vietnamese? What compelled, for example, shortly after the fall of Saigon to pat himself on the shoulder and write, “so much for the talk of a massacre.”

True, no Cambodian style massacre took place in Viet Nam. It’s just that Hanoi coolly drives its ethnic Chinese and opponents into the sea.

Are we journalists not in part responsible for the death of the tens of thousands who drowned? And are we not in part responsible for the hostile reception accorded to those who survive? Did we not turn public opinion against them, portraying them, as one singularly ignoble cartoon did in the United States, as a bunch of pimps, whores, war profiteers, corrupt generals or, at best, outright reactionaries?

Considering that today’s Viet Nam tragedy may have a lot to do with the way we reported yesterday’s Viet Nam tragedy; considering that we journalists might have our fair share of guilt for the inhumane way the world treats those who are being expelled by an inhuman regime which some of us had pictured as heroic, I think at least a little humility would be in order for us old Viet Nam hands….”

JOURANLISTIC INSTITUTIONS are, of course, rarely afflicted by false modesty. They have not disclaimed credit for the outcome of the war, and their representatives have taken public bows for their successful intervention. The multitude of professional prized bestowed upon the “big story” coverage of Viet Nam certainly implied approval of the general effort.

However the media have been rather coy; they have not declared that they played a key role in the conflict. They have not proudly trumpeted Hanoi’s repeated expressions of gratitude to the mass media of the non Communist world, although Hanoi has indeed affirmed that it could not have won “without the Western press.” The Western press appears either unaware of the direct connection between cause (its reporting) and effect (the Western defeat in Viet Name), or strangely reluctant to proclaim that the pen and the camera proved decisively mightier than the bayonet and ultra-modern weapons.

NOR HAVE THE MEDIA dwelt upon the glaring inconsistency between the expectation they raised of peaceful, prosperous development after Saigon’s collapse and the present post War circumstances in Indo-China. Unquestionably, a number of those approvingly characterized by the New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis as “critics of the American war” have protested against brutal repression in Cambodia. Some (including Lewis, and French journalist Jean Lacouture) even confessed that their expectations of the consequences of a Communist victory in Cambodia were mistaken. But none, to my knowledge, has suggested that he might have erred fundamentally in his vehement and total opposition to the US role in Indo-China. Instead, most partial confessions have concluded with renewed denunciations of American actions.

Jean Lecouture did offer a public mea culpa for having championed the Khmer Rouge. Reviewing a book on “Democratic Kampuchea”, he confessed:

“Francois Ponchoud’s Cambodia, Year Zero can be read only with shame by those of us who supported the Khmer Rouge cause…And it will cause distress to those of us journalists who after the massacre of seventeen of our colleagues in April and May 1971, tried to explain these deaths as part of the hazards of covering a war. In fact, our poor comrades were assassinated—some, we know clubbed to death—by the valiant guerrillas of Khieu Samphan, the ‘socialist’ Khmer who now bars foreign observers from Cambodian soil. His people remain in terror-stricken confinement, one of this regime’s more rational decisions for how could it let the outside world see its burying of a civilization in pre-history, its massacres?…”

An illuminating example is Anthony Lewis, whose horror over abuses of American power apparently led him to the conclusion that similar abuses by America’s opponents were not worth noting. Having earlier found almost as much to praise in Hanoi as to condemn in Saigon, Lewis was belatedly moved to outrage by Lacouture’s observations—Jean Lacouture’s chief qualification was apparently his having been so spectacularly wrong about the consequences of a Khmer Rouge victory:

“…Those who had been critics of the war [Lewis wrote] may have felt skeptical about some of the Cambodian reports because they came from the right wing quarters that had been indifferent to the misery inflicted on Cambodia by American bombers. But these explanations wither in the presence of Jean Lacouture. He is a leading French expert on Indo-China. And he was a profound critic of the American war.”

The reporters—and even the contrite Jean Lacouture have continued to disregard their testimony regarding North Vietnamese coercion offered by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s former chief of state. Sihanouk complained in 1973 that he had been forced to tolerate North Viet Nam using Cambodia as a supply route, training camp, and proving ground for its forces in South Viet Nam, although he knew the massive incursion was destroying his country. Preoccupied with their condemnations of the US intervention in Indo-China, the “critics of the American war” have virtually ignored Sihanouk’s indictment of the North Vietnamese—just as they have ignored the fact that Shianouk had, albeit under duress, tolerated American bombing of North Vietnamese strongholds in Cambodia, the “unilateral action” for which those critics still pillory Henry Kissinger.

The same critics were not outraged at the final conquest of South Viet Nam in 1975 by columns of Russian-built thanks supported by batteries of Russian-made artillery. (That was Hanoi’s second try; the first, in 1972, failed because the Saigon regime was still supported by US air power and was still receiving adequate US war materiel.) These righteous critics have taken little note of the detailed description of that final conquest published by North Viet Nam’s Senior General Van Tien Dung in the spring of 1976. General Dung’s account (128 single-spaced pages in English translation) proudly affirmed that the assault was ordered by the Political Bureau of the Labour (Communist) Party of North Viet Nam, planned the Labour Party’s Central Military Affairs Committee, commanded by Northern generals, supplied from the North, and mounted by regular divisions of the People’s Army of the Democratic Republic of Viet Nam.

Even before General Dung’s report, it should have been clear that the remnants of the Viet Cong—the Southern “guerrilla force” made up primarily of Northerners—were inherently capable neither of maneuvering 700 tanks in conventional formations nor, for that matter, of building and operating the double pipeline that fuelled those tanks with petroleum from the North. Just as they subsequently passed over General Dung’s explicit revelations, the “critics of the American war” ignored such empirical evidence that Saigon fell not to an indigenous people in arms, but to an external invasion mounted by vanguard cadres who consider themselves ideologically superior to their Southern compatriots.

TO TAKE NOTE OF these obtrusive facts would have called into question the very nature of the war in Indo-China—as it would have taken note of them during the conflict. Any searching analysis of fundamental premises has remained as unthinkable to “the critics” as it was during the fighting. They have remained committed to the proposition that the American role in Indo-China was totally reprehensible and inexcusable, while the North Vietnamese role—and, by extension, the roles of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Pathet Lao in Laos—was righteous, magnanimous, and just. Even the growing number who finally deplored the repressive consequences of the totalitarian victory could not bring themselves to re-examine the premises that led them to contribute to decisively to those victories. Thus William Shawcross, before his sententious book, , wrote of the Communists’ reshaping of Cambodian society: “The process is atrociously brutal.” Although “the Khmer people are suffering horribly under their new rulers”, this is how Shawcross unhesitatingly assigned the ultimate blame:

“They have suffered every day of the last six years—ever since the beginning of one of the most destructive foreign policies the United States has ever pursued: the ‘Nixon-Kissinger doctrine’ in its purest form…”

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