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THE VETERAN

Page 16
Download PDF of this full issue: v54n2.pdf (38.8 MB)

<< 15. How Does One Fight for Peace?17. Hell, No, We Didn't Go! >>

Into The Quagmire

By John Crandell (reviewer)

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Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles
by William Prochnau

(Crown, 1995)

All of the wretched tragedy that was to come was foretold by western journalists in a delectable, Boomer oriented era of joy and consumption, before Diem and Kennedy were shot twenty one days apart in one month of autumn. Ironically, the author of the subject of this review was yet to arrive in 'Nam for the first of two tours reporting for the Washington Post. The Beach Boys' 'Surfin' USA' had been the number one hit of 1963. Years hence the The Animals' 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place' became the favored song by Vietnam vets (eventually, Jeff Buckley's 'Once I Was' would come to haunt so many strung-out members of said Boomer generation). In-country, over three years remained until the arrival of journalist Michael Herr who eventually would pen his memoir titled Dispatches, that which novelist John le Carré assayed as "the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time." Prochnau's and Herr's works remain as two exceedingly rich companions. It has been three decades now since the former produced the most engaging volume of all the literature of the early US effort in preventing Ho Chi Minh from winning at Dominoes.

Adjectives such as intriguing, alluring and even romantic can also apply to what is Prochnau's foremost work published by Times Books in 1995. The work remains available via Amazon for nineteen bucks. His research included ninety interviews and an impressive array of sources rendered narratively for each of eighteen chapters plus a bibliography of periodical and broadcast elements.

Prochnau's magnetic work is the one book of the Vietnam war which I've returned to repeatedly, been enraptured by an author who was not present to witness the place and time which he examines—journalists and national media while JFK was alive and in the White House. Peter Osnos, our present day expert on the war edited the work. Reporters for agencies such as Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International and the New York Times are lionized for their efforts to break through to reality, shatter the force of Washington's and mass media's nationalistic ship of state. Those individuals were Charlie Mohr, Francois Sully, Stanley Karnow, Malcom Browne, Peter Arnett, Ray Herndon, Mert Perry, Keyes Beech, Homer Bigart, Pam Sanders and especially the duo of Neil Sheehan and David Halberstam. The script also includes old guard/rear guard bad boys such as journalism's Richard Tregaskis, Joseph Alsop and Ernest Hoberect. And then there was Westmoreland's self deluded predecessor, Paul Harkins—likely the nation's worst ever commander stonewalling at the American embassy. The notoriety of Sheehan and Halberstam in America soon resulted in the arrival of one "fire eating, Commie hating" reportorial queen of the Korean war named Marguerite Higgins. She with Halberstam's forehead targeted in her eyes. Both the brother and sister in law of the South Vietnam's president had no restraint in their capacity for evil. Various ethnic and religious sects banged their drums; all elements combined and Saigon's environment boiled amidst the sweet and sour pulp of Tamarind.

Could a book regarding journalists at the very apex of their lives in a leavening exotic locale be translated, become the greatest film of the United States' experience in Vietnam? One such effort could unwind, delve into a society's mandate to conform for the preservation of status. That, added to human capacity for self deception in a democratic realm—a nation's primary bedrock operative long ago became a political necessity. A bit of perspective: in his sprawling, highly lauded Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow would include only two short paragraphs in his work reducing the wide scope, prepossessing array of journalistic efforts revealed by Prochnau's intoxicating, alluring, street-level immediacy. Karnow's vast perspective is rendered from one very high atmospheric balloon.

I write this on August 9th, the little-noted 50th anniversary of Dick Nixon's disgraceful exit from the White House. CIA operative Lucien Conein had nearly got himself included amongst Tricky's Plumbers earlier arrested at the Watergate, a full decade after Sheehan began calling him "Three Fingered Mordecai'"due to his activities in Saigon. No other American cast more intrigue instigating a coup d'état which instead became a coup de grâce, therein failed to prevent the deaths of Diem and brother Nhu eighteen months before any American combat personnel arrived.

As we all came to learn, profits were being made off of the Black Market—from Ca Mau Province north to the DMZ. Eventually I would come into conflict with certain personnel assigned to the 4th Division Post Exchange. Certain transactors were under suspicion and one sergeant's number popped up at my APO window. With the assassination in November of '63, a wide, well-lubricated runway opened up for Lyndon's White Market, way back home in Texas. He and Lady Bird would soon back their truck up to the loading dock in their associating and investing activities. By that point in time, astute reporting by a very independent cast of journalists had revealed a story of one great ship of state having already sailed into a steamed morass of human nature. All of the horror and tumult for America yet remained. William Prochnau's tome presents a grand, unmatched view of national self delusion.


John Crandell, a one-time insubordinate postal clerk for the 4th US infantry, is now retired from Beale AFB, propagates large-sized exotic succulents, and has nightmares regarding Donald Trump.





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