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| Media and war: reflections on Vietnam |
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Media and war: reflections on Vietnam: Nick Turner recalls his experience as a war correspondent during the Vietnam War. by Nick Turner
My posting to Saigon was really an accident. After entering journalism on the Auckland Star at the age of 17, and then doing a stint with the New Zealand Press Association in Wellington, I had gone to London and joined the Reuters news agency with the aim of becoming a foreign correspondent. In due course, Reuters assigned me to its large Singapore bureau. But then there was a sudden change of plan, and I was sent instead to be the sole-charge correspondent in Saigon, a role for which I was totally unprepared. This was in 1962, before Vietnam had become big news, and like most people I knew little about it. I was just 27 with no experience as a correspondent in the field. My bosses saw South Vietnam as a good spot for a young correspondent to learn the ropes. For good measure I also had responsibility for neighbouring Laos and Cambodia, making visits to coordinate the activities of our part-time local correspondents there. But like Vietnam, these were places Reuters did not expect to hear much from. On my PanAm flight into Saigon I picked up the latest issue of Time, which had a picture of US General Paul Harkins on the cover, with a headline something like: 'Vietnam, the World's Next Flashpoint'. Well, thanks. At this time the foreign press corps in Saigon was small. In the Reuters bureau I was alone apart from a Vietnamese assistant journalist and an office boy who spoke little English. Reuters competed fiercely with its two American rivals, AP and UPI. UPI's man was Neil Sheehan, a young Harvard graduate also on his first real posting. The AP was better off with an American, Malcolm Browne, and a New Zealander, Peter Arnett, who had just arrived in Vietnam after being kicked out of several other countries in the region. The New York Times had Homer Bigart, one of the doyens of journalism and a Pulitzer Prize winner from the Korean War. David Halberstam, a dynamic young reporter with recent experience in the Congo, soon replaced him. There were also a handful of part-time 'stringers' for publications like Time and Newsweek, and three or four French correspondents who kept pretty much to themselves. The big television networks had no staff correspondents in Saigon, and sent people in from Hong Kong whenever a big story broke. Actually the NBC did have an American there for a while, who turned out to be a CIA man using media credentials as a cover. He eventually came clean and worked openly for the CIA. Small group This group of less than a dozen correspondents were the eyes and ears of the world in its next flashpoint. In those days the world's media took most of their news from the three wire services, AP, UPI and Reuters, staffed in Saigon by two Americans and two Kiwis. We were in our late 20s and far from experienced. None of us spoke Vietnamese, and I was the only one in the group with competent French, the second language of most Vietnamese in high places. Another advantage I had was my Vietnamese assistant, Pham Xuan An. We all relied heavily on our Vietnamese assistants, as translators and as interpreters of Vietnamese politics and the developing military struggle. My man was regarded as the best in Saigon, very well informed and shrewd. He was my intelligence officer. It later turned out he was also an intelligence officer for the Viet Cong, with the rank of colonel. Working for Reuters gave him a perfect cover to move around and pick up information. The eventual revelation of his undercover role surprised many of my colleagues and has been much written about, but it did not surprise me. I always had suspicions and told him so, but said it did not concern me so long as he did his job for me. However, I was cautious about sharing sensitive information with him, and he clearly resented this and eventually moved to the Time bureau. Excellent example This was an excellent example of how things in Vietnam often were not what they seemed. One had to peel the layers of an issue like an onion, and you never really knew if you had reached the centre. We had a saying among the Saigon correspondents: 'If you aren't confused, you're not well informed'. When I arrived in Saigon the communist insurgency was just getting started. The South was receiving limited US military aid, as allowed under the Geneva Accords. But soon the US 'advisers' went beyond giving advice and became actively involved in operations, and we correspondents became a problem for the Vietnamese government and the Americans by reporting this. We also reported on the Viet Cong's success in launching small-scale guerrilla attacks. And we reported that South Vietnamese troops were often performing badly, apparently with little sense of loyalty to a government that was autocratic and corrupt, and with little motivation to die for it. And we reported that the Saigon government only controlled a small percentage of the countryside. Were we right? Not entirely. Yes there was corruption, but there always had been, and people accepted it if it oiled the wheels. Only if it became gross was it really resented, and it was no worse in Vietnam than in some other Asian countries. Good reason Poorly motivated soldiers? Yes, but there was a very good reason for this. The Saigon government had no real pensions scheme for the families of soldiers who died, so the soldiers went to great lengths to stay alive, whereas the communists promised that the family of a dead soldier would continue to be looked after financially, reducing the fear of death. Was there a lack of allegiance to the Saigon government? The provincial population traditionally had little consciousness of central government, and really only expected one thing from it--security. The trouble was Saigon found it difficult to provide protection against guerrilla tactics and terrorism, as does the Israeli government today, and that is not for want of loyalty and motivation by the Israeli Army. It is simply the nature of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, very hard to guard against. But the Viet Cong's ability to mount hit-and-run raids in many parts of the country did not mean they had control. I believe we failed to explain some of these points adequately, for several reasons. Our early reporting reflected a lack of understanding of Vietnam, of Asia and of guerrilla insurgency. In addition, the journalistic impulse under the pressure of competition was to create news impact, which called for raw negativity rather than balance and nuance. And we were not fully cognizant of the impact of our reporting on distant audiences. Incidentally, despite the intense competition between the three big wire services, we mostly had good personal relations. I often lunched with my rivals Sheehan and Arnett, and it was useful to swap notes to some extent, although we never coordinated how we were going to treat a story. Untrue accusations Because our reporting was perceived by some as being 'negative', we were sometimes accused, for example by some members of the US political establishment and right-wing columnists in the US media, of being 'soft on communism' and opposed to the US effort. This was not true. We were liberals, imbued with an idealistic desire to see all countries have democratic governments and social justice (however impractical this might be in a country with no tradition of Western-style democracy and in a state of war). And we knew that Russia and China had the objective of communist world domination, so we believed that America's desire to help South Vietnam resist an armed communist takeover was justified. The problem was that things were not going well, and we felt that making this known might help to bring about an improvement. It was with dismay, not satisfaction, that we catalogued the setbacks and failures. The first big example of this was the famous battle of Ap Bac in January 1963, in the Mekong Delta south of Saigon. Up till then Viet Cong activities had consisted of hit-and-run attacks, avoiding pitched battles. The Americans said that if the communists could be made to stand and fight they would get a bloody nose. Ap Bac was the first pitched battle between substantial Viet Cong and government forces, and it was a Viet Cong victory. And it could not be hidden because on the night of the battle I drove to the scene, taking Neil Sheehan of UPI with me, and at dawn we inspected the battlefield and got a clear picture of what had happened. It was often suggested by opponents of the war that we were prevented by the US and Vietnamese authorities from reporting the truth about what was going on. This was not true at all. The American military were in fact incredibly helpful in getting us round the country aboard their planes and helicopters. We only had to ask. And there were no restrictions on where we went or who we talked to, or on our reporting. It was probably the first war in which the media had such freedom. Truer picture Obviously we had to treat with caution some of what we were told. Official US and Vietnamese spokesmen often gave us misinformation. But there were others who would give us a truer picture and we just had to cultivate them: young officers in the US military, American civilian advisers in the provinces, and younger diplomats in the US Embassy, some of whom were later to become big names in international affairs such as Dick Holbrooke, John Negroponte, Tony Lake and Dick Smyser. There was a rather illogical assumption by some observers that because the Americans and South Vietnamese often lied to us, nothing they said could be trusted, whereas the communist side's claims had credibility. That was silly. Hanoi's version of the war was utter propaganda, while quite a lot of the information given to us by officials in Saigon was in fact excellent. So I reject the notion that we were greatly hindered, but we did have some practical problems. Communications were not easy. This was before the days of satellite transmission, mobile phones and the Internet, and Vietnam had recently been through a Japanese occupation and a war of independence, not to mention French colonial administration. Things often did not work. We relied on brief daily outward transmissions by radio-teletype, supplemented by cables (very expensive) and erratic phone circuits to a few points such as Paris and Hong Kong for brief periods each day. For the television networks, it took 24 hours to get film to New York by courier for processing before broadcast, by which time it was getting stale. Next test After the battle of Ap Bac, our next big test was the Buddhist crisis which began in May 1963 and led to the overthrow of the President, Ngo Dinh Diem. Everyone knows the pictures of monks burning themselves. We reported that Diem was inept, and that by antagonising the Buddhist population he was creating a national schism that the communists inevitably exploited. At first US President Kennedy accepted the advice of his officials in Saigon who rejected our analysis, but eventually he accepted that we were right, and allowed the Vietnamese generals to overthrow Diem. But were we right? On some of the important details and complexities, no, I think we again failed. For example, it was not simply a case of an overwhelmingly Buddhist population being repressed by an unpopular Catholic oligarchy, but this was the picture conveyed by our reporting. From 1963 on, the foreign press corps in Saigon expanded, especially with the North Vietnamese main force invasion of the South, which led to the huge US military response from mid-1965 onwards. By the time of the Tet offensive in 1968, the US media corps in Vietnam numbered several hundred. But there was a problem. Many of them, especially in television, were on short assignments of three to six months. They never really got to understand the country and the complexities of the situation. And they wanted to make a big name for themselves overnight, which resulted in some hyping up of the news, and emphasising the sensational and negative rather than the meaningful. False portayal This was exemplified in the 1968 Tet offensive, which was portrayed as a great military victory for the communists. Communist troops did briefly occupy some areas of the capital and other cities, and a commando squad got inside the US Embassy in Saigon. These successes gained immense media coverage, but they were transitory and misleading. The Tet offensive was intended to be the final victory blow by the communists, but it received virtually zero support from the general population whom they called upon to stage a 'general uprising'. And not a single unit of any size in the South Vietnamese government forces, even among the rag-tag peasant militia, switched to the communist side. The communists took immense casualties, while casualties on the US and government side were surprisingly light. It was a disaster for the communists, and one they never fully recovered from. But again, that is not how it came across. The US media in Saigon were frankly bamboozled by the Tet offensive, and before the final outcome became clear they had firmly implanted in the minds of the world public that the communists were everywhere and apparently invincible. The subsequent realisation that it was not a communist victory after all failed to register. Landmark events The battle of Ap Bac, the Buddhist crisis and the Tet offensive were landmark events in media coverage of Vietnam, although there were also others later, such as the siege of Khe Sanh, which added to the public perception that Vietnam was unwinnable and therefore a mistake. Even more important in this perception were some visual images from the camera lens. The famous picture of the Buddhist priest burning himself was one, but there were two others in particular: the young girl fleeing naked from a napalm attack, and the chief of Saigon's security police shooting a Viet Cong prisoner through the head. These left a profound and indelible impression on the US and world public. Media coverage of the war has since been the subject of much debate. Was it flawed? And did it, as many claim, help turn what could have been an American victory into a defeat? There is no simple answer. Research has shown that many Americans formed their anti-war views not from news reports out of Vietnam but as a result of peer-group and mass perceptions, reinforced by a sense of frustration at the US casualty toll and concerns about US prisoners of war held by the North. But ultimately the US withdrawal from Vietnam was not driven solely by anti-war sentiment or a sense of defeat. It was part of a Kissinger-Nixon plan for a new alignment of US foreign policy, based partly on a view that the US intervention had largely achieved its aims. Media misperception This analysis has recently gained increasing acceptance among academics and military historians, but not in the media, which still portray it unquestioningly as a defeat for the United States, overlooking a number of important facts: * The Americans were not driven out of Vietnam. The last US combat troops withdrew in March 1973 leaving the North Vietnamese severely mauled, and it was another two years before the North mounted its drive on Saigon, with the Americans no longer in their path. * Not only were the Americans not defeated overall, they never lost a single battle. Even the Vietnamese do not dispute this. * The primary objective of the US intervention was to 'hold the line' in Vietnam until there was no longer a risk of a 'domino' effect across the region. This was achieved. The key turning point in the region was the defeat of the communist putsch in Indonesia in 1965. The failure of the US media in particular to see the Vietnam conflict in its larger regional, strategic and politico-historical context, both during the war years and afterwards, has in my view been one of their most crucial shortcomings. Litmus test From early 1965, I had the opportunity while remaining based in Saigon to travel widely throughout the region, including to China and Indonesia, and became very aware of the extent to which the Vietnam conflict was seen as an absolute litmus test by its neighbours. Yet most of my colleagues in Saigon showed little comprehension of this. They seemed totally absorbed in the minutiae of the fighting. And to them it was essentially an American war, not an Asian one, and when it was over, there was nothing more to be said except to agonise over the failure to achieve a US 'victory'. It is interesting today to contrast how correspondents operated in Vietnam and in the recent Iraq War. In Iraq, hundreds of journalists were 'embedded' within US and British military units which transported, accommodated, fed and looked after them throughout the campaign. This was a Pentagon strategy to encourage more 'positive' coverage than in Vietnam. The journalistic consensus is that it worked surprisingly well, but there was one significant problem. Although the embedded journalists were individually able to provide amazing real-time coverage of events in their area, they lacked an overview. It was largely up to journalists in Washington, New York, London and Qatar to put together the pieces of a mosaic. In Vietnam we were not 'embedded' in the military. We lived relatively normal lives in Saigon, a lovely city, but could travel easily throughout the country and opt in and out of military operations as we wished, to form a comprehensive overview. A significant problem was that we were remote from our audience, and feedback was limited. These days satellite technology allows constant two-way contact and feedback. A correspondent in the desert in Iraq or Afghanistan can get a phone call from Sean Plunket putting the questions that New Zealanders want asked. That is hugely beneficial to both audience and reporter, and has undoubtedly led to much better public understanding of the complexities of armed conflict and the situations that give rise to it. The role of the Saigon foreign press corps in the Vietnam War has been the subject of much debate, and offers some interesting contrasts with coverage of the recent war in Iraq. There were significant shortcomings in the coverage of the Vietnam War, which not only caused much public misunderstanding at the time but subsequently hindered retrospective analysis of its place in history. For all its mistakes and setbacks, the US intervention was more successful than portrayed by the media. Nick Turner was Reuters bureau chief in Saigon with overall responsibility for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in 1962-64, the early days of the war. From 1965 onwards he travelled widely throughout South-east Asia, writing mainly for the Sunday Times (London), the Guardian, the Observer, the Economist and Time magazine. In the 1970s he was a news editor in Radio New Zealand, and he now runs Executive News Service, which provides a daily bulletin of New Zealand news for subscribers overseas. |
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