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Book Review: Robert Anson's War News

By Pete Zastrow

Pete Zastrow
VVAW National Office

Robert Anson's WAR NEWS is a fine book, hanging out to dry some of the dirtiest laundry of the U.S. press corps in Vietnam 20 years ago. As a member of the opposition, however, I can say that Anson missed a few items.

Anson was the leftie correspondent for Time Magazine from 1969 on for well over a year. Much of his tour was spent in Cambodia where he was for some time the "senior" American correspondent until that sad country disappeared into the nightmare of Pol Pot. Arriving in Vietnam in July of 1969 Anson spent the early part of his tour in Vietnam, constantly fighting with the Time Saigon staff who were cheerleading for the U.S. presence in Vietnam. Worse, none of Anson's stories got printed in the magazine where the editorial board was just as rah-rah about U.S. government policy in Vietnam (a surprise to no one who remembers Time's flag-waving articles for years of the Vietnam War).

Unable to reach a truce with the others (including, importantly, the Time bureau chief in Saigon) Anson was exiled to Laos and Cambodia, shortly afterwards choosing Cambodia as his area of operations. From Cambodia, his articles got printed to the point where his photo appeared in Time's "Newsmakers" section, something unheard of according to Anson. His articles were accurate enough so that he was declared persona non grata for three days while Time put pressure on the U.S. government which put pressure on the Cambodians and Anson was invited back.

It's clear from the book that correspondents in Cambodia suffered from one of the most potent enemies of the U.S. troops in Vietnam—boredom. Boredom plays no role in the dozens of Vietnam movies or TV reprises; boredom is only touched on in some of the sources of novels about Vietnam. This is not surprising: boredom hardly sells. Any troop who was in Vietnam, however, can tell about days or weeks of dreary flat boredom; it might have been broken by moments of intense excitement or terror or something else (something well remembered) but mostly not much of anything happened.

For correspondents in Cambodia boredom was not only boring but was an attack on their livelihood, since no action meant no stories. The search for action left a few correspondents dead or disappeared and presumed dead. Anson counts the missing—the total is 18 who disappeared and were never found in the first 6 months of the Cambodian War, somewhat less than the number of U.S. or Vietnamese military personnel killed. Anson himself came close, often blurring the imaginary line between reporting and participating. He led a Cambodian army into a town near Ankor Wat because the Cambodian leader asked him to (the troops would follow an American was the logic; the episode says much about the Cambodian military and about the depth of U.S. involvement). He spent a night protecting ethnic Vietnamese from being butchered by Cambodian troops (as a Vietnamese invasion grew more and more likely Cambodians reacted with ferocious attacks on the Vietnamese). Finally, he was captured by the Vietnamese, shuttled from place to place, threatened with death—a threat he fully believed—interrogated, imprisoned, and finally released when the Vietnamese discovered he had saved Vietnamese from an earlier prospective massacre.

For a book about reporting on the war, there is plenty of action. As a zinger, Anson describes returning to Vietnam 20 years later and meeting the Vietnamese who was, as a member of the Time bureau in Saigon, the source of much inside information during the war. When he returned, Anson met him in the uniform of a colonel of the [North] Vietnamese military; he had been a high-ranking intelligence officer for the North Vietnamese during the whole time he had worked for Time.

Anson does not take on the obvious question about the war being lost because the media stabbed the U.S. effort in the back. But, he doesn't have to. Whether it means to or not, the book constantly demonstrates the incestuous relationship between the press and the U.S. government and its various Southeast Asian flunky governments: as the anti-war movement suspected all along, there was little difference between he government line and what the press wanted to report. Anson was shocked when the U.S. government chief military press officer appeared at Anson's first Saigon party with his arm around the rest of the Time staff. Anson seemed to know then about mouthpieces for the government line.

There was more than just parroting the official line, however. Anson tells of the senior U.S. military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh who was booted out at the insistence of Arnaud de Borchgrave, then a Newsweek correspondent, who felt the U.S. was not prosecuting the war with sufficient vigor. Arnaud de Borchgrave has since gone on to be the Moonie man on the scene as editor of the Washington Star, organ of the Unification Church.

Anson reports several news conferences where U.S. government spokesmen were asked tough questions. That was not usual. The congenial we're-all-in-this-together relationship between the press and the military/U.S. government propaganda machine precluded any serious disruptions. If a reporter, for instance, wanted to cover a military operation in Vietnam, he had to have the U.S. military fly him to the point of action; was he then going to file a story seriously critical of the same people he would depend on for his next story?

At the same time Anson was arriving in Vietnam, I was the information officer for the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Air Calvary Division. Sometime around July of 1969, the Brigade was stationed in Song Be, a dusty (or muddy) speck of land next to one of the two mountains in lower South Vietnam. Having controlled the dropping of many 500-pound bombs on the jungles through which the NLF was moving supplies, the 1st Air Cav was proud to have provided a large number of hoi chanhs—Vietnamese civilians who were supposed to have been Viet Cong sympathizers and were now putting themselves under the protection of the U.S. military. Not surprisingly—children were bleeding from the ears as a result of their nearness to the explosions of the huge bombs. These were people who lived well back in the jungles, on the edge of civilization (our maps had the area uninhabited).

Then the bombs rained; U.S. troops followed. Villagers allowed themselves, in terror, to be herded onto helicopters—a U.S. propaganda triumph. The press was alerted in Saigon, only fifty or so miles away, an easy helicopter trip. The arrived at the 1st Air Calvary base camp at the foot of Nui Ba Rha where we provided jeeps for the 2 or 3 mile trip into Song Be City where the refugees on the first couple of days turned into torrents until hundreds of men, women and children were housed in Song Be refugee centers. Fine pictures, a good story showing the U.S. military had a heart—and the right story for a time when the U.S. was winning hearts and minds in the process of turning the war over to the South Vietnamese military.

Unfortunately, just as the refugee flood reached its peak, and the press heavies were visiting—The New York Times, Time magazine: the media that information officers always hoped would appear when we were looking good—a couple of local kids (as we learned later) were playing with matches near the base fuel dump. JP-4—helicopter fuel—was stored in 500-gallon blivets which were nothing more than large plastic bags. A leak in one of them, a little fuel running out of the fuel dump, kids with matches, and there was a roaring fire. The U.S. military had no way to douse the fire; clouds of black smoke soared skyward—for hours and then days.

Several of the distinguished correspondents remarked, as we lunched at the mess hall in Song Be, that they had seen the columns of smoke when they took off from Saigon. I had no clear idea how I was going to answer the anticipated questions. I should not have been concerned. There was not a question about smoke covering the area. The correspondents—the best of Saigon's press corps—were there to cover the refugee story and were not about to be distracted by another U.S. military blunder. They were covering their assigned story. Period.

What other U.S. stupidities do we know nothing about because our media watchdogs never bothered to ask? Are there hundreds or thousands of little and big secrets just waiting to be revealed?

We were, back in 1969, in the worst possible position to know how any story was being covered; of course we never saw stateside TV coverage, but beyond that we seldom saw magazines and only occasionally did we see Stars & Stripes, the official U.S. military organ.

Toward the end of War News Anson talks about spending time with Vietnam veterans during the time when Vietnam Veterans Against the War was throwing medals away on the steps of the Capitol Building. "They were regular guys," Anson says, "something I previously hadn't taken the time to find out." As an "information" officer I was making sure Anson & Co did not find out. While they were interviewing "regular guys," I was standing right there wearing my captain's bars (it was the only time I wore them while in Vietnam). I didn't have to say anything, just stand there and be present.

What Anson or another reporter might have learned from the "regular guys" who were fighting the war would never have been printed anyhow. Even a reporter as left as Anson could do little but put forward the government line because the situation required collusion. Anson's story is better when he is with and is released from the Vietnamese military; otherwise he, too, had to rely on the U.S. government. If we in the U.S. military hid information (which we did) the press did not work too hard to find it out. The marriage of convenience lasted until the end of the war when the Vietnamese brought about a sudden and rancorous divorce. The knife-in-the-back theory of why the U.S. lost in Vietnam is part of the divorce propaganda; it never happened and, as War News shows, the relationship could have hardly been closer.