A Ghgost From Vietnam That Still Haunts the Media   

Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles
By William Prochnau
Times Books

Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles
By William Prochnau
Times Books
548 pages, $27.50

For journalists who long tiptoed on the border between skepticism and cynicism, the Vietnam War gave a long-lasting shove toward the cynical. This is the instructive story behind that tilt, which William Prochnau labels "the beginning of the era of the modern media."

Vietnam might seem exhausted as a topic, and Prochnau draws from a well-established record. But by focusing on the war's earliest days and unifying the scattered accounts, he powerfully conveys the extraordinary conditions that unleashed a fierce new adversarialism.

The era was 1962-1963. A handful of U.S. "advisers" had been deployed in Vietnam, and a sprinkling of young reporters drifted in to cover what seemed a "toy war" inside a "toy country."

Today, a third of a century later, their names ring familiar: AP's Malcolm Browne and Peter Arnett, UPI's Neil Sheehan, the New York Times' David Halberstam, Time's Charley Mohr.

Then, they were green and unknown, solid conventional types for the most part; except for the New Zealander Arnett, they were "classic mid-century Americans driven by a heritage of immigrants' milk and honey dreams..."

Hardly peaceniks, they didn't question the cause and didn't hesitate to pick up a weapon under fire. "We were children of the Cold War," Mohr said. "We believed."

And they were young, Sheehan, 25, Halberstam, 28, though as Prochnau points out, "War is for the young. So is journalism... At Halberstam's age [Gen. William] Westmoreland had already.. led his artillery battalion across North Africa against Rommel."

What Prochnau documents most effectively is the inexorable evolution of this troupe from corn-fed loyalists to angry disbelievers, isolated, semiparanoid and committed — perhaps rashly overcommitted — to exposing the sham and bringing down the shamsters.

From the first, the reporters tangled with U.S. officials, who tried to keep them from combat zones, then "clammed up, covered up, and lied" about everything from Viet Cong body counts ("Any dead object..even cows and chickens, [was] included," a CIA analyst later concluded) to rampant South Vietnamese incompetence and corruption.

Still, the reporters didn't question the mission but how it was being conducted. As Sheehan put it, "We thought these people were losing the war."

For a while it seemed nobody wanted anything other than the rosy reports that flooded from the top brass. Editors toned down the reporters' copy. Old-line journalists like Joe Alsop and Marguerite Higgins attacked their negativism. Politicians from PresiVent Kennedy down pressured the reporters — and their publishers — to "get on the team."

But they couldn't. Confronted with official mendacity, the reporters developed ground-level sources, learned more in bistros than briefing rooms, and intrepidly made their way to the fronts, where the truth was anything but what officials were saying.

In January 1963, a battle at Ap Bac became what Prochnau calls "a turning point." There, a cadre of apparently trapped Viet Cong troops outmaneuvered the overcautious South Vietnamese and inflicted a humiliating defeat, killing three Americans and downing five U.S. helicopters. While U.S. officials dissembled and claimed victory, reporters led by Sheehan used on-scene reporting and grunt-level sourcing to document the defeat.

From then on, through the bloody Buddhist uprisings to the overthrow and assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, coverage became increasingly us-against-them. The reporters pried deeper into the looming disaster; the officials retreated stonily into shoot-the-messenger defensiveness.

Prochnau, a former Washington Post reporter who covered Vietnam later in the war, effectively portrays the day-to-day life of the reporters, from administrative banalities and squabbles with editors, to romances and dalliances, to beatings and death threats.

All the writers were transformed. Halberstam, whom Kennedy tried to get recalled from the country, and Browne, whose uncompromising AP reports underlay middle America's view of the war, shared the 1963 Pulitzer for their reporting. Sheehan, whose Vietnam obsession nearly consumed him, won a Pulitzer for "A Bright Shining Lie," published in 1988. Mohr quit Time after it rejected his dispatch that began, "The war in Vietnam is being lost." And Arnett was propelled on a war trajectory that still finds him hustling off to the latest battlefield.

These reporters were heroes, and history should acknowledge that their eventual "raw-boned advocacy," considered extreme then and controversial now, represented a devotion to truth required by the duplicity they encountered. Still, their legacy — the Journalist-as-Cynic, the Journalist-as-Debunker — seems to have empowered and emboldened reporters to challenge indiscriminately. Their last-resort technique became a worrisome everyday weapon.

Born in extremity, it grew into the norm, just one more ghost from a war that won't stop haunting us.