I wish he would now read a book called War Torn, written by nine women correspondents who covered the Vietnam War with all its pain, suffering and futility. Most of them wound up, like the thousands of troops trapped in the war, wondering why they were there. At home, so did most of us as the war went on and on.
I remember hoping that President Lyndon B. Johnson would declare victory and leave, but he could not bring himself to do that and instead listened to advisers who urged him to slog on deeper into the quagmire.
In War Torn the authors, driven by curiosity and a willingness to take risks, describe civilians and soldiers on both sides coping with death and devastation.
One of them, Kate Webb of United Press International, was captured in 1971 by the North Vietnamese in Cambodia. She recalls “every detail and smell of those nights and days-the nights, walking from dusk to dawn, and the days often crammed stifling in bunkers..... The first long interrogation came as we were lying in the dirt, trying to dig body crabs out of skin after surviving an overnight march that I, at least, had doubted we would finish.” Jurate Kazickas of the Associated Press was wounded at Khe Sanh in an air attack and still carries a piece of shrapnel in her leg. She once wrote about a soldier who tried desperately to bandage the head of a seriously wounded buddy, then held him in his arms as the man died.
“To this day, Vietnam taunts, haunts, and still mystifies me,” Kazickas said.
Denby Fawcett, who wrote for the Honolulu Advertiser, told of the capture of a “frail North Vietnamese who looked more like a 14-year-old boy than a grown man.”
Fawcett observed: “The truth is, the human mind has an amazing ability to block out the full horror of war when it becomes too difficult to endure.
”Ann Bryan Mariano, bureau chief of the Overseas Weakly in Saigon, recalled that her scrappy tabloid was banned in Saigon by the Pentagon and ultimately won a lawsuit in a U.S. appeals court to get the ban overturned.
Of the war, she said, “I had no doubt that America’s involvement was tragic and doomed to fail.” Anne Morrissy Merick, and ABC News producer, told of having to fight an edict from Gen. William Westmoreland barring women reporters from accompanying troops to the front lines. After she pleaded with a visiting Pentagon official from Washington, he finally said the order would be lifted.
She said she had always thought the war
“didn’t have to end the way it did. The Vietnamese could have saved their own country. Their soldiers weren’t cowards, but their leadership was riddled with corruption, and the price was the loss of their country.”
Edith Lederer, the first woman assigned full-time to AP’s Saigon bureau, recalled a horribly burned boy named Diem selling model helicopters he had made from intravenous feeding tubes so he could earn enough money to buy himself a wheelchair.Leader said, “Vietnam taught me a lot about war and peace, about life and death, about relationships and about myself.” Her successor at the AP bureau, Tad Bartimus, wrote, “I tasted real fear under fire in a ditch in the Mekong Delta. I witnessed courage in a Saigon prison cell while interviewing a condemned Viet Cong girl surrounded by her torturers. I trembled with fear as I faced down a tiger on a Laotian mountainside. Those life lessons helped me find my way.” Tracy Wood, a UPI reporter, learned from seeing people die that “fear disappeared, along with spirituality” in wartime. “Something hard inside took their place.” She added bitterly: “Stay human in war. A true oxymoron. The purpose of war is to kill, maim and dehumanise your opponent.”Laura Palmer, an ABC News radio reporter, concluded that “wars don’t end. Every bullet in Vietnam left an exit wound ... Lives stopped, dreams collapsed, futures imploded.”
In writing the book’s introduction, Gloria Emerson, herself a Vietnam correspondent for the New York Times, recalled the death of a photographer named Dick Chapelle, a woman of infinite courage who was covering a Marine operation when a land mine exploded. Given the last rites by a Marine chaplain, her jacket covered with blood, she reportedly said: “I guess it was bound to happen.” Perhaps if the president gets around to reading this wonderful book, he will think twice about leaving the horror of another war as his legacy..