War Correspondents: The Basic Flaw in Viet Nam

To Military Historian S.L.A. Marshall, the U.S. Army’s Operation Paul Revere II was perhaps the major military operation of the summer in Viet Nam. Airlifted from the east coast almost to the Cambodian border in less than twelve hours, the 1st Air Cav proceeded to rout the enemy in a battle “larger than San Juan Hill and El Caney combined, bigger and more impressive than Pork Chop Hill, bloodier than Cantigny, and lasting as long as Belleau Wood.”* Yet that fight, Marshall notes incredulously in the current New Leader, did not rate a single lead headline in any U.S. newspaper.

The neglect of Paul Revere II, says Marshall, reflects a basic flaw in the reporting out of Viet Nam. The “over whelming majority” of reporters, he claims, exhibits a “cynical faddishness” that has not characterized the reporting of any previous U.S. war. “Today’s average correspondent prefers a piece that will make people squirm and agonize. 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 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.”

Surefire Sidebars. In his harsh assessment, Marshall even suggests that some of his younger colleagues do not display a war reporter’s proper enthusiasm for lengthy bouts of bloody and dangerous combat. Too many U.S. newsmen, Marshall complains, are like the TV crews who “want blood on the moon every night.” They make brief searches for “tangents and sidebars.” The offbeat yarns that attract them “fall into several familiar patterns, none of which promises a beat any longer, though collectively they are beaten to death. Any demonstration or riot is surefire copy. Then there is the thing-that-went-wrong story. Hapless civilians have been killed in every war fought by the U.S., but only in Viet Nam, where they are far less common than in France during the invasion or in Korea, do they command front-page treatment every time.”

Soldiers dying from their own air bombs or artillery fire, says Marshall, are also “dependable bell ringers.” Such incidents occurred more often in previous wars, but reporters never made so much of them. Now, “if one correspondent could compile a large enough file of writings about these accidents, he might cop the Pulitzer Prize.”

Sitting & Sneering. Correspondents in Viet Nam have complained bitterly of the military briefings they are given in Saigon, but Retired Brigadier General Marshall flatly contradicts them. A grizzled veteran who has dealt with military PIOs from the Sinai desert to Korea, he found a “high level of competence” in Viet Nam. “The deplorable thing,” he says, “is that young writers, too lazy to gather the facts themselves, sit around and sneer at all that is said. With the conference reeking of pseudosophisti-cation and half-baked cynicism, perspective inevitably becomes blurred. The result is an accenting of the negative and trivial story that obscures the truly important.”

“The pity is,” says Marshall, “a national will might polarize around this solid, shining and reassuring performance, if we were but permitted to view it.”

* Operation Paul Revere II involved upwards of 10,000 U.S. troops and lasted 25 days. The twin battles of San Juan Hill and El Caney, during the Spanish-American War, involved 6,000 U.S. servicemen. Pork Chop Hill, in Korea, concerned only a succession of rifle companies; but it was, said Marshall, impressive “because the infantry, man for man, outgamed the Red Chinese.” The capture of the small French town of Cantigny was the first American-German confrontation of World War I; it demonstrated the fighting qualities of the newly arrived A.E.F. Capturing Belleau Wood from five German divisions cost the 4th Marine Brigade nearly 8,000 officers and men over a period of two weeks.