LOSING IT IN 'NAM

Paul Ham

There was no shortage of reporters yet the media failed to get to grips with the reality of Vietnam, argues Paul Ham in his new history.

During 1968 the press, which had generally supported the Vietnam War or stuck to feel-good stories of heroism and mateship, vigorously changed its tune. The media reacted to growing middle-class disenchantment with the war: they did not initiate or promote anti-war feeling; they reflected and fed off it.

The 1968 Tet Offensive was the catalyst for this shift in the media's line on the war, the moment most of the press joined the anti-war bandwagon. Editors, sensing dismay and revulsion in their readers, viewers and listeners, sought to reflect the public mood (they ran a business, after all), and soon both press and public tended to share and mutually reinforce their response to the war.

In time, editors published reports and photos, safe in the knowledge that their readers were now receptive to anti-war coverage. Intimations of defeat leavened the journalists' copy: not only was the war a crime, it was also a losing battle. The media generally reported Tet as a sign that the Allies were losing the war. The US cause had suffered an incredible setback, it concluded: "Where are we winning?" (The Australian, February 1, 1968); the "pain of war" must end (The Age, February 2, 1968); allied commanders were "outgeneralled" and had "surrendered the initiative" (The Sydney Morning Herald, February 2, 1968); and guntoting calls for the US to "get tough" (The Daily Telegraph, February 2, 1968).

The weeks passed with little follow up or analysis. Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman, growled: "We are mired in stalemate." When he saw the film of the attack on the US Embassy, he wondered: "What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war."

In this light, the media utterly miscast the Tet Offensive. Few reported it for what it was: a comprehensive Viet Cong defeat, both in military terms and, more importantly, as a test of southern loyalties. The fact that the South Vietnamese had refused overwhelmingly to rally to the communist standard received little airplay. The media even failed to report the communist atrocities at Hue. One reason is that most of the press corps rarely left Saigon or paid much attention to communist atrocities. When blood and gore and piles of corpses lay on the journalists' doorstep, they presumed the US had lost the initiative, and filed panic-stricken reports.

After Tet, the relationship between the military and the media rapidly deteriorated and never recovered.

THE SAIGON PRESS PACK WAS, IN general, a cheerful, louche young tribe of star-struck hacks, heroes of their own personal drama, who hung around the Caravelle and Continental hotels waxing drunkenly about their latest "assignment" in juvenile imitation of the Graham Greene or Ernest Hemingway of their imaginations while drawing their sustaining verbiage from that great round-up of half-news, the Five O'Clock Follies, at which US military commander General Westmoreland's PR men told sweltering fibs about the body count and "light at the end of the tunnel".

Of the 600 to 700 accredited foreign correspondents (of whom about 80 were women) in South Vietnam in 1968, "only 50 gave journalism a better name than it deserved", wrote Michael Herr, correspondent for Esquire magazine, author of Dispatches, and demonstrably one of the 50. And certainly Australian journalists such as Denis Warner, Denis Gibbons, Alan Ramsey, Creighton Burns, Pat Burgess and several others were among that number. Yet the majority of the Saigon press pack were "not first-rate", as Jack Valenti, the influential president of the Motion Picture Association of America, told President Johnson. "Most of them [were] strictly third-class. Most ... cover the war from the bars in Saigon."

Yet the US Army's press officers, for whom the media had lost any scrap of respect as early as 1965, encouraged this inertia. Inexperience was part of the problem. It was easy to get a press card, and hundreds of cub reporters did. They simply presented themselves at the US Army Press Centre in Saigon, with a South Vietnamese visa and a letter from their employer. No combat training was required. Freelance journalists needed only a letter from their news agency.

The new reporters were told the ground rules on security and no-go zones, and off they went - no doubt topped and tailed in their safari suits, CBS jackets or Abercrombie & Fitch combat gear, with their names stitched on the breast pocket: hence John Shaw, Time; Michael Herr, Esquire; or, to general hilarity, Alan Williams, Queen. Thus Sean Flynn, the son of film star Errol and the French actress Lili Damita, went to war, a tall thrillseeker whose flashing eyes, perfect teeth and sculpted face marked him down as a matinee idol. (Flynn and his mate, Dana Stone, the "easy riders" of the Mekong, later disappeared in Cambodia.)

Saigon's black market equipped the correspondents with all their needs in the field: mosquito net, canteen, knife, canned foods, air mattress, camouflage, first aid pack, water purification tablets, aspirin, maps, cleft sticks, condoms (used as waterproof containers for film, identification papers and matches) and an "optional" pocket pistol.

The Vietnam War rarely impinged on the average reporter's mind above the level of "a great story". The reporter's eye for news tended to be that of the atrocity junkie, hero-hugger, weapons fetishist or war pornographer. Reporters, in general, were not interested in the causes or complexities of the conflict. Hardened reporters grew addicted to the adrenalin rush. "Vot I like eez boom boom," said AP photographer Horst Faas; he meant the sound of artillery.

Jan Graham, an Australian wire reporter, remembered her 10 years in Vietnam, in a story told in Siobhan McHugh's book Minefields and Miniskirts, as "wondrous ... like a big Luna Park every day of the week. Let's try a new ride. Let's jump out of a chopper ... Let's watch people getting blown up by mines. Let's shoot a few gooks." Nora Ephron of New York magazine summarised the consensus: "War is not hell. It is fun."

The Vietnam War was great fun for most journalists, most of the time. The fearless, or mad, British photographer Tim Page said he found war - all war - glamorous (as Australian journalist Phillip Knightley reported in his book The First Casualty): "There is a lot of sex appeal and a lot of fun in weapons. Where else but in Vietnam would a man get a chance to play with a supersonic jet, drive a tank, or shoot off a rocket, and even get highly paid for it? ... You can't take the glamour out of a tank burning or a helicopter blowing up. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex. War is good for you."

Few journalists bothered with Vietnamese history or the complex background to the war. They were on an adventure. A minority went out on combat operations; most were day-trippers who flew in and out of battle zones, usually after battle. Still, a few were recklessly brave - or plain mad. Forty-five journalists were killed and 18 listed as missing during the war. US Marines laughed in amazement at the idea of Michael Herr volunteering to cover Khe Sanh. Four Australian journalists - Bruce Piggott, John Cantwell, Michael Birch and Ronald Laramie - were shot dead on May 5, 1968, when they drove, against army advice, into Saigon at the height of Mini Tet.

IT IS HARD, AT FIRST SIGHT, TO see why the first casualty of the Vietnam War should be the "truth": Vietnam was the first - and probably the last - uncensored war. Westmoreland granted the media unprecedented freedom. He believed that censorship was unenforceable in a war covered by so many journalists, of so many nationalities, in so porous an environment.

The US Army detailed this extraordinary freedom in a little public information booklet - surely never to be repeated - that promised reporters "whatever transportation is reasonably available to assist them in performance of their mission". They should be "afforded the highest priority possible next to requirements for tactical emergency troop movement ... Every possible courtesy will be extended."

The basic principle was simply to divulge anything, within security constraints. The only "non-releasable" information was troop movements, "free world" casualty figures, future operations, rules of engagement and intelligence activities. Thus reporters, like impatient partygoers hailing a taxi, had the run of the helicopters, and flew hither and thither chasing scoops, dropping into operations, joining battalions. However, a kind of unofficial censorship operated in the US Army: lies. Most "facts" about the war were "misinformation or misunderstandings" in a landscape "rife with duplicity and misrepresentation", wrote AP bureau chief Malcolm Browne in his Short Guide to News Coverage in Vietnam. Certain US commanders could be counted on to tell "bald-faced, 180-degree whoppers", Browne wrote. In the field, too, deception was the norm: only the results of successful operations were shown to the press.

The "body counts" were the most shameless example of US hyperbole. The 160 Viet Cong dead after the Plei Ku campaign had mysteriously reached 869 by the time of the press conference. Denis Warner noted the "huge discrepancy" between General Westmoreland's body count and the number of enemy weapons actually captured. Either the Americans were lying or the bodies were civilian. "What no one will accept indefinitely," Warner wrote, "is the persistent attempt to win by pretence what has not been won on the ground."

In 1968, the Australian Government took a sterner approach to press censorship. Disturbed by the fallout over the water torture case (see below), and an increasingly hostile media, Canberra imposed its own censorship regime in Vietnam. In September 1968, Australian Force Vietnam gained new powers to restrict reporting in Australian combat zones. Under the rules, reporters were not to meet or quote any Australian soldier "without having first been cleared by a PR officer". (The restrictions were later partly relaxed.)

At the same time, the Australian diggers' contempt for the Saigon press corps deepened. In 1968, the soldiers were scathing about the quality of media coverage of the war. Journalists would return from operations and file stories that bore no resemblance to the soldiers' recollection of events.

Yet the media were, to an extent, complicit in the process of censorship. The sheer brain-numbing horror of the war turned reporters, unwittingly, into their worst censors. Veteran reporters were so inured to the carnage that they became part of the war machine and not detached observers of it. Old media hands eschewed the terms "war crime" and "atrocity" as quaint, morally earnest phrases that lost meaning in one vast war crime, as they understood the war. In time, they drowned in military euphemisms. Who were we to decide what constituted an "atrocity"? argued journalist Peter Arnett. The better correspondents liked to think that they dealt only in facts, not atrocities, a term that implied a judgment, Arnett said.

Yet whose facts? Westmoreland's PR men called an atrocity an atrocity when committed by the Viet Cong, and a civilian a civilian when one of "our" civilians. This was war by public relations, a world decoupled from what was really happening. In 1968, the army "spokesmen spoke in words that had no currency left as words, sentences with no hope of meaning in the sane world", wrote Herr. Language itself became a casualty of war.

Indeed, many journalists "went noggy", in the sense that their reality, their norm, was Vietnam and not the world of the readers for whom they wrote. Phillip Knightley observed this disturbing tendency in The First Casualty. When Philip Jones Griffiths, a British photojournalist, witnessed the shelling of Vietnamese civilians, he did not bother selling the story: "If I had gone back to Saigon and into one of the agencies and had said, 'I've got a story about Americans killing Vietnamese civilians,' they would have said, 'So what's new?' It was horrible, but certainly not exceptional, and it just wasn't news."

On one military operation, Peter Arnett "watched hooches burning down, I saw the civilian dead. I did not write about war crimes either ... we were told of the civilian dead and how they died, but we didn't make judgments because we were witnesses and, like witnesses to robbery, accident, or murder, surely it was not for us to be judge and jury."

Like Graham Greene's English correspondent in The Quiet American, Arnett and other hardened reporters cast themselves as aloof, detached, uninvolved. Yet their very detachment failed their readers: their unwillingness to report civilians as targets meant that genuine atrocities committed on both sides went unreported.

The My Lai massacre was the most egregious example of this tendency. Saigon correspondents ignored the story; it became "news" only when a freelance journalist in the US, Seymour Hersh, stunned by what he heard, wrote about it.

Most of the Saigon press corps (and their editors) simply ignored communist attacks on civilians. "We were watching civilians butchered by Viet Cong, children butchered by Viet Cong," said Australian commander Major Brian McFarlane. "Not one of these reporters mentioned the thousands of civilians the VC knocked off." In the first six months of 1967, 3798 civilians were killed in assassinations or other terrorist acts, and "our Press has scarcely reported it", McFarlane said. The Hue massacre was largely ignored.

In this sense, US and Australian editors imposed a double standard: white "war crimes" were newsworthy; "Asian on Asian" ones were not, and the distinction intensified after Tet.

THIS HELPS TO EXPLAIN the Australian media's delayed reaction, in 1968, to news of an alleged Australian "atrocity": the so-called water torture incident, which first appeared in October 1966. That year, it was virtually ignored; in 1968, the story of the "war crime" took more column inches of newsprint than the Tet Offensive and Long Tan. The water torture incident horrified a credulous nation and branded the Australian war as cruel and barbaric.

The facts lead to different conclusions. This is what happened: a platoon led by Second Lieutenant John O'Halloran traced a radio wire, found in the Nui Dinh Hills, to a cave. Inside they found a US radio and, wedged into a crevice above, "like a spider suspended from the roof", a young Vietnamese woman. The Australians detained her; she spent the night tied to O'Halloran, who told her she would be shot if his men were attacked.

Cold and silent, this 23-year-old "hard-core Viet Cong" trembled and vomited when a helicopter arrived the next day; she seemed to believe stories that Australians flung captives out of aircraft. She was delivered safely to Nui Dat on October 25, 1966. Under questioning, she gave her name as To Thi Nau and her position as head of the communist Military Proselytising Committee in Hoa Long. As a trainee radio operator, she relayed signs of Australian and South Vietnamese movement along Route 15 to the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN), in Tay Ninh province, part of the enemy's central nervous system. She was critical in any plan to ambush an enemy road convoy.

Dragged to the interrogation tent, she started to scream when her gag and blindfold were removed. Her interrogator, an Australian warrant officer, Ken Borland, shouted and banged his fists when she refused to speak, then threatened the "water treatment". She was held down, her nose blocked and a small quantity of water from a jerry can was forced into her mouth. Major Alex Piper, the staff officer responsible for organising the interrogation, was "a bit stunned" when he entered the tent to find Borland administering the punishment, which Piper soon ordered to cease. She had swallowed less than a cup. Her interrogation lasted half an hour, after which she was photographed and handed over to the South Vietnamese.

At the time, Brigadier Jackson ordered an investigation; the woman's treatment was clearly against the Geneva Convention. Borland, it later emerged, had no authority to interrogate prisoners, and was removed from further "duties".

"The matter should have finished there," states the official historian, Peter Edwards. "The act amounted only to harassment ... Any suggestion that an atrocity had been committed was without foundation." Jackson, satisfied that he had dealt with the case, decided not to alert Canberra.

Three journalists witnessed the prisoner's arrival and part of her interrogation: John Sorell of the Melbourne Herald, Geoffrey Murray of AAP and Gabriel Carpay, a freelance photographer. None reported the "water torture" in 1966; only Murray filed a story, on the woman's capture, which failed to mention her harsh treatment. Murray later said, as revealed in Trish Payne's book, War and Words: "I had no intention of writing a story along 'torture' lines," acknowledging that he lacked the information. Sorell later claimed that military censorship had prevented him writing the story in 1966, a claim the army denied; yet in 1968 all three would report that the woman had been tortured (none had been in the interrogation tent).

Eighteen months later, in March 1968, a US journalist, Martin Russ, "revealed" in his book Happy Hunting Ground that Australian soldiers had "water tortured" a Vietnamese civilian; his only source was two Australian journalists, one of whom was Sorell. Attuned to the growing anti-war feelings of liberal readers, the Australian media leapt on the story as evidence of a home-grown atrocity: here was the face of Australian evil in Vietnam.

The hysteria drove Phillip Lynch, the new minister for the Army, to declare on national television that he could find "not one scintilla of evidence for the charge". Lynch looked a dill the next day when Sorell wrote a sensational account of the "torture", which the inexperienced Lynch, ignoring the army's protests, accepted as essentially true. Then prime minister John Gorton added oil to the fire: the woman had been well enough to pose for photos after her "torture", he told Parliament.

"A bit wet perhaps?" interjected a Labor MP.

"Yes, a little wet, I agree," said Gorton.

The remark inflamed the anti-war movement: campuses were aghast. The government's boorishness and flippancy merely added to the outrage, and seemed tacitly to confirm that Australian soldiers had tortured a Vietnamese woman. The "water torture" case became part of the popular mythology that Australian troops were routinely committing atrocities. "That the case is the only one cited in evidence suggests that the opposite was true: a distinct absence of war crimes in the Australian war in Vietnam," wrote historian Peter Edwards. "That did not register at the time."

Amid the uproar, Martin Russ scored an embarrassing own goal. In a Life magazine article on April 1, 1968, he virtually refuted his own claim. "I didn't see ... the Aussies use torture. The incident with the girl I wrote about was hearsay. I wasn't there ... You hear a lot about torture," he wrote.

This admission did little to silence hysteria. Once uncorked, the atrocity genie spread. Other journalists dusted down their dim memories of civilian deaths and reprinted them; "war crime" hunters came out of the woodwork; and the word "massacre" was used as loosely then as "genocide" is today.

Editors and media proprietors jostled to satiate the public demand for "news" that seemed to confirm their ballooning idea of Australian soldiers as savages. The episode supplied an "atrocity" when the media were receptive to one, and equipped anti-war groups with a new weapon.

It was the novelty of seeing war for the first time that led many Australians to oppose it. By 1968, more than 95 per cent of Australian homes had access to television, and four million Australians - a quarter of the country - tuned in to the evening news. In this sense, the technology, the TV - and not the messengers, the reporters - lost support for the war. Western viewers, weaned on the notion of war as heroic, rule-bound and "just", were suddenly seeing thousands dead, millions of refugees, unspeakable suffering ... in short, the things common to all wars.

Commercial television tended to play down this grim reality, and cast the Vietnamese people as bit parts in a largely US-Australian story of great blokes avenging the Western dream of good triumphing over evil. US and Australian television made little attempt to explain the background or rationale for fighting the war.

In Australia, the ABC attempted to give a fuller picture. Yet the public broadcaster displayed several toe-curling examples of editorial cowardice: it caved in to a government demand to rewrite the script of a film on Cambodia. And it self-censored reporter Tony Ferguson's tape of an exclusive interview with Wilfred Burchett by destroying it, because the ABC's Controller of News viewed Burchett as a traitor. Surely that view made Burchett more newsworthy, not less?

This idiotic act of editorial vandalism served neither the "public interest" nor the historical record. After all, Burchett, the son of an Australian farmer, was the best-known Western reporter to cover the war from the communist side. He unapologetically backed the regime in Hanoi, had met and interviewed Ho Chi Minh, and enjoyed access unrivalled among his colleagues to the highest levels of the Vietnamese communist hierarchy.

On his journeys through Vietnam, Burchett cut an ungainly figure in his broad hat, wide girth, black pyjamas and Ho Chi Minh sandals. Yet his undoubted reporting skills were wasted in the service of tyrants. Burchett died in Bulgaria in 1983, too soon to witness the implosion of the political experiment to which he had devoted his life. It is regrettable, nonetheless, that part of his extraordinary life ended on the ABC's cutting room floor.

DID THE MEDIA LOSE THE war? The short answer is, no. This tiresome refrain of soldiers and politicians ignored the fact that until 1968 the Australian media were almost unanimous in their support for the war and troops. Editors gave little oxygen to the anti-war protesters and draft resisters, whom they dismissed, until 1968, as cowards and communists. Only then did the media's support wane - long after public feeling, stirred by students, unions, politicians and clerics, had turned against the war.

The more severe charge against the press concerns the quality of coverage and the failure to report the biggest stories. Many media outlets simply misreported the Vietnam War. They miscast Tet as a loss, failed to follow up "running stories", and later relished accounts of allied "war crimes" when editors felt the public was ready for them. They maligned the troops after wholeheartedly supporting them. Editors ignored stories on the Vietnamese civilian tragedy.

"Ours was a babble of voices that lost all credibility," said Keyes Beech, a US correspondent. "The Vietnam War threw up more imposters and charlatans in the name of war correspondent than I can remember," concurred Denis Warner. Some fine investigative articles and documentaries occasionally obtruded on this bleak picture; in fairness, most reporters in the field simply did what they were told. Back home, their editors sold a complex "story" as though it were a John Wayne shoot-out or a US (and Australian) crime against humanity. The public bought both versions of Vietnam.

This is an edited extract from Vietnam, The Australian War, by Paul Ham, HarperCollins, $55, to be published on November 1.