Books
The Endless Assignment
Nine Perspectives from the Edge of Hell
|
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning Reporting America at War:
An Oral History They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967 Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an oral history Madness Visible: A Memoir of War Naked in Baghdad:
The Iraq War as Seen
by NPR’s Correspondent Chechnya Diary:
A War Correspondent’s
Story of Surviving
the War in Chechnya The Cat From Hué:
A Vietnam War Story |
Chris Hedges, in his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, recalls a bit of sobering trivia calculated by the late historian Will Durant: that in all of human history, there have been only twenty-nine years when a war was not under way somewhere. Given current events, one wonders if there will ever again be a year of peace. Conflicts are simmering in much of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In the first three years of his presidency, George W. Bush has led the United States into war twice. Both wars continue, although the struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan seems all but forgotten.
In the world of book publishing, the Vietnam War also continues, now as a struggle between those who believe that the war was lost by pusillanimous politicians and the press, and might have been won with one more year, ten thousand more lives, the leveling of Hanoi; and those who disagree, including, one suspects, many of the troops who fought the war in the trenches and most of the reporters who covered them.
Hedges would have us understand that a similar dialectic must take place after every war to achieve historical consensus. “The tension between those who know combat, and thus know the public lie,” writes Hedges, “and those who propagate the myth, usually ends with the mythmakers working to silence the witnesses of war.” In a book liberally sprinkled with commentary from Homer to Orwell, Hedges quotes Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
The issue of the Vietnam War is hardly moot, either for tens of thousands of veterans, or for the future of the country. Hedges writes: “If the humility we gained from our defeat in Vietnam is not the engine that drives our response to future terrorist strikes, even those that are cataclysmic, we are lost.”
Drawing on his fifteen years as a foreign correspondent, most of them for The New York Times, Hedges offers many another elegiac insight into wars, the myths that start and sustain them, and the painful probing for truth that follows them. It is only one of several noteworthy books published during the last two years on wars and the people who cover them. Nine are treated here either because they offer the most compelling reading or are the most relevant to today’s issues, Iraq and the presidential campaign.
The two histories were not written by war correspondents: They Marched Into Sunlight, by David Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and biographer of Bill Clinton writing on the Vietnam War; and Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, by Douglas Brinkley, an author and professor of history, writing about John Kerry’s heroics in Vietnam and his strenuous and sustained efforts against the war back home.
They Marched Into Sunlight has an unusual structure. Maraniss tells his story by focusing on two events that take place a day and a world apart in the middle of October 1967: an antiwar demonstration against Dow Chemical (the maker of napalm and Agent Orange) at the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin — the first violent protest of the war; and a single battle in South Vietnam, northwest of Saigon, in which a battalion of mostly untested GIs from the First Infantry Division walked into a brutal ambush by a regiment of well-seasoned Viet Cong troops, a defeat that demonstrated glaring weaknesses in the intelligence capacity, strategy, and field leadership of U.S. forces.
For his battle, Maraniss painstakingly builds up dozens of primary characters and then marches them, slow motion, into the Viet Cong ambush. Using extensive interviews with survivors on both sides, as well as after-action reports by the U. S. Army itself, Maraniss reconstructs the battle with cold-blooded precision. By the end of the day, fifty-eight U. S. soldiers had died, sixty-one were wounded — an almost unheard-of ratio of dead to wounded for the war. Scores of American soldiers were left dead on the battlefield, to be picked up the following day. But as brutal and bloody as the battle was, it was the aftermath that was the most shocking.
The cover-up began immediately. The battle was declared a victory over superior numbers, rumors of an ambush were resolutely denied, and the number of enemy killed was inflated to 103 (a special investigation later estimated the number to be about twenty-two). Speaking to the press, General William Westmoreland dismissed the importance of the encounter by saying it was just one “among many that are going on throughout the country on a day-to-day basis.”
Five days later, Westmoreland visited the evacuation hospitals to spread around some Purple Hearts and came upon Bud Barrow, first sergeant of Delta Company, who somehow had survived being shot through both legs and slashed with ninety-seven shrapnel wounds to his knees, back, and buttocks. A condensed version of Maraniss’s dialogue goes like this:
Westmoreland: I just want to congratulate you.
Barrow: Well, I am not sure whether you oughta congratulate me or the enemy. They’re the ones who won that one.
W: (pinning Purple Heart on Barrow’s pajamas) Tell me, sergeant. What happened out there?
B: Well, sir, we walked into one of the damnedest ambushes you ever seen.
W: Oh, no, no, no. That was no ambush.
B: Call it what you want. I don’t know what happened to the rest of the people, but, by God, I was ambushed.
Later, Major General John Hancock Hay, commander of the First Infantry Division, who had been in Saigon during the battle and flew back for clean-up operations only after the enemy had retreated, was awarded a Silver Star. Hay’s meretricious citation read: “His courage under fire, aggressive leadership and professional competence were responsible for the complete rout of the numerically superior Viet Cong force.” Maraniss hardly needs to drive home the point. An army that lies to itself, rewards incompetence, and fails to learn from its mistakes is doomed.
The second history here, Tour of Duty, is not in the same class, either as literature or history, but is noteworthy nonetheless because of John Kerry’s quest for the presidency and the centrality of his service in Vietnam to his campaign and his character. Much of Kerry’s exemplary war record (a Silver Star — this one well deserved, unlike the one awarded General Hay — a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts) is familiar to any reader who has been following newspaper and magazine articles on Kerry. What this reviewer found of interest in Tour of Duty is the specific criticism the book offers of the officers to whom Kerry and his fellow Swift boat skippers reported.
Captain Roy Hoffman was the commander of the Navy Coastal Surveillance Force, and it was Hoffman’s decision to send Navy Swift boats up the narrow rivers in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam — almost always without support from helicopters or artillery — where they ran the risk of mines and were fired on almost at will by Viet Cong dug in along the river’s banks. A Swift boat mission up a Mekong Delta river was a fool’s errand, serving no greater purpose than showing the flag. At one point, Kerry and a fellow skipper named Don Droz protested to Hoffman’s immediate superior, Area Commander Adrian Lonsdale, an act of courage in itself. Kerry told the commander: “Sir, I don’t see how you can ask American troops to risk their lives when the priority in that area isn’t high enough to warrant their getting certain support. I just don’t think that’s right.” A career Navy officer, Lonsdale told Kerry and Droz he was doing what he was told and couldn’t fight it.
The operation proved so dangerous, writes Brinkley, that the Swift boat crews “began to rack up more and more medals — and death certificates.” Shortly after Kerry returned home, his friend Droz was killed when his boat was sent upriver with 800 pounds of high explosives and was raked with rockets and machine guns. Brinkley argues that it was the pointless death of Droz and the insanity of the Swift boat operations that would turn Kerry into such an ardent protester against the war and dedicated advocate for fellow veterans.
All the other books on this highly subjective reading list were written by, or concern, war correspondents. Reporting America at War, a volume that grew out of a PBS series of the same name, contains reminiscences and reflections by eleven well-known war correspondents of our age, from Walter Cronkite to David Halberstam to Christiane Amanpour, as well as fond recollections of three legendary reporters from an earlier age: Martha Gellhorn, Edward R. Murrow, and Homer Bigart.
Elegant and highly readable, Reporting America at War addresses, among other issues, the crucial importance of open and honest war reporting itself. Lamenting the lack of coverage during Grenada and the Gulf War, Walter Cronkite says, “In the future, I would hope that democracies will understand that the people have to know what their young people are doing in their name.”
Another theme voiced by several contributors to Reporting America at War is their regret and even astonishment that the collective effort of reporters in South Vietnam failed to bring the war to a much earlier end. David Halberstam offers one theory: “The only growth industry in America is spin.” Gloria Emerson, who covered the later years of the war for The New York Times, offers a similar comment: “There were many great reporters, and people tend to think of the whole press corps as those great reporters,” says Emerson. “But there were hundreds of people who were toeing the line.” Indeed, in every war the majority of journalists feed the myth of war. Hedges ruefully notes: “Mythic war reporting sells papers and boosts ratings. Real reporting, sensory reporting, does not . . . .”
Embedded, the second collection of oral histories, is a compilation of interviews with reporters who covered the “shock and awe” stage of the Iraq war, mostly with those who were “embeds” with U. S. and British invading forces, but also with a few “unilaterals” who covered the war on their own. The book jacket makes vainglorious claims for this anthology: “Collectively, Embedded is an eyewitness to history and will do for the war in Iraq what Michael Herr’s Dispatches did for Vietnam.” I doubt it. The Iraq war is not the Vietnam War and if there were any modern-day Michael Herrs present, they are still working on their manuscripts. Embedded is useful largely as a reference book for anyone thinking of bedding down with U. S. forces the next time around, if the opportunity presents itself again. (Generally speaking, the contributors judged the embed experiment a success.) There is one chapter, however, that is almost worth the price of the book, a trenchant attack by John Burns of The New York Times on some in the Baghdad press corps for their failure to report the true horror of Saddam Hussein’s regime before the invasion by U.S. forces.
Burns accuses unnamed correspondents of bribing Iraq officials with candlelight dinners, $600 mobile phones and “thousands of dollars” to gain access, while never mentioning the minders, the terror. “And in one case,” says Burns, “a correspondent who actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people’s stories — mine included — specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others.” Burns adds, “He was with a major American newspaper. Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance.”
Someday, Burns may be tempted to write his own memoir. If so, the following five memoirs have set the bar high.
In addition to Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, they include: Madness Visible: A Memoir of War by Janine di Giovanni, a senior foreign correspondent for The Times of London; Naked in Baghdad by Anne Garrels, a veteran NPR reporter; Chechnya Diary by Thomas Goltz, a free-lance TV reporter; and The Cat From Hué by John Laurence, a CBS correspondent for three tours in Vietnam. (Published in 2002, The Cat From Hué was released last year in paperback.)
All of these memoirists should be read for their own rich stories: Anne Garrels for the dark humor of living in the twilight world of Saddam Hussein’s final days as despot; Janine di Giovanni for an understanding of the depravity of Balkan wars of ethnic cleansing, during which Slobodan Milosevic waged and lost four wars in a row for Serbian supremacy; Tom Goltz for the tortured history and implacable sense of revenge of the Chechen people; and John (“Jack”) Laurence for the eloquence, acute sensibility, and elephantine memory he carried with him into battle.
All of these memoirs, however, can also be read for something else: the collective insights they offer into the world of war correspondents working at the razor’s edge of their profession, those who return over and over to battlefields and war zones, repeatedly risking their lives to send back word images, audio tapes, and TV film for an often indifferent audience. Between them, these five correspondents have covered forty conflicts: after three tours in Vietnam, Laurence went on to cover Northern Ireland, the India-Pakistan war of 1971, and Angola. Garrels, di Giovanni, Goltz and Hedges variously worked the stations of the cross for the next generation: El Salvador, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, the West Bank, Afghanistan, and Iraq One and Two, to name but a few.
Anne Garrels’ title Naked in Baghdad is an apt metaphor for the war correspondent’s experience in general: often alone and vulnerable in an alien land with possible enemies around every turn. Shelter, food, security, transportation, and a night’s sleep are often to be had only at the sufferance of total strangers. In Garrels’s book, the title comes from a scene that takes place just days before the U.S. bombing of Baghdad. Having heard rumors that her hotel would be searched by Iraqi officials for illegal satellite phones, Garrels broadcast her daily All Things Considered report in the buff and in the dark. If someone knocks, she reasoned, I can pretend they have woken me up, beg for a few minutes to get dressed, and then perhaps have enough time to dismantle the phone and hide it.
In Madness Visible, Janine di Giovanni describes being strip-searched by drunken Bosnian Serb soldiers and robbed of the 3,000 British pounds that she had stuffed down her trousers. “As a final humiliation,” she adds, “they gave us receipts, saying we could reclaim the money after the war, in Belgrade.” Chris Hedges was variously beaten by the Saudi police, imprisoned in the Sudan, and captured and held by the Iraqi Republican Guard in the aftermath of the Gulf War, during the failed Shiite rebellion.
But at least Laurence, Garrels, di Giovanni, and Hedges had the backing of premier media enterprises. Tom Goltz was a freelance television reporter from Montana, operating on a good-faith understanding with Video News International about a possible one-man documentary on “the Chechen spirit” for ABC’s Nightline. If these other reporters were working the edge, he was over the edge. Without airline tickets, combat zone insurance, or even much cash, and displaying the fearlessness and recklessness of so many freelancers in war, Goltz smuggled himself in a car with strangers through eight checkpoints and across the border into Russia. His six weeks of filming in the besieged Chechen town of Samashki ended up as ninety seconds on ABC World News Tonight — a freelance triumph. “Remarkable how ninety seconds worth of prime-time attention can change your life for a day, maybe a week, or maybe a lifetime,” Goltz muses. Months later, a half-hour version of his documentary was aired on some PBS stations, most often at 2:30 a.m., but he was not complaining. He was on air, and he was alive. He ends his book declaring: “Myself, I never want to see war again.”
As one would expect, these memoirs are full of close calls on the battlefield. In Kosovo, di Giovanni has to run from bombs dropped mistakenly by NATO planes. Laurence is pulled off a C-130 cargo plane bound for Khe Sanh by his cameraman just before takeoff, and learns that night that the plane crashed with no survivors. During the battle for Hué, a bullet from an AK-47 misses him by inches, “a small miracle.” Hedges survives ambushes on roads in Central America and sniper fire from Serb marksmen in Sarajevo. Goltz finds himself in the middle of a firefight in Chechnya so brutal that he arrives back in Moscow to discover that Russian television has declared him as “missing and presumed dead.”
“The work took us to the heart of the killing, the violent core of combat action, the show,” writes Laurence. “It wasn’t enough to cover the war with words, we had to get it down on film. Again and again. Talk about our chances of getting killed was rare, but privately each of us knew the risks.”
The relentless demand for combat footage from producers leaves TV war correspondents very little choice. Goltz recalls the moment he returned from Samashki to Moscow and called his producers back home. He told them he was alive and began to outline his vision of the story. The distant producer’s first response: “But did you get bang-bang?”
Besides the sheer danger of war reporting, these books give a palpable sense of the dislocation and discomfort of the job, the stench of war and the deafening noise of it, the grunge and grime of it. As often as not these reporters had to carry their gear on their backs: flak jackets, helmets, portable typewriters, tape recorders, sleeping bags, clothing, and good-luck charms. And in the case of the TV reporters, cameras, battery packs, film. (By the time he left Vietnam, Laurence weighed less than 125 pounds.) Goltz, working on the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, carried snowshoes, heat packs for fingers and toes, and Dolantine, similar to morphine, in case of shrapnel or gunshot wounds.
Operating in foreign countries at war means dealing with lecherous and greedy information ministers, random searches and shakedowns, and drunken paramilitary units, not to mention drivers, fixers, translators, and minders. Goltz quotes a driver named Emran, whom he had just met, asking: “Do you want a nuclear device? Women?”
Surely one of the most wrenching aspects of being a war correspondent is bearing witness to the suffering of civilians. The affliction of the innocent is not often hard news, and can usually be rendered only in context, in a book or long magazine article. If it is caught on film, very often the film is too terrifying to be aired. The cover photograph for di Giovanni’s Madness Visible is a multitude of anguished faces and outstretched hands reaching for two loaves of bread; the stories within are harrowing. She interviews several rape victims — “women didn’t call it rape; they called it ‘being touched’” — and describes Serbian rape centers where soldiers would shout in their victims’ ears, “we are going to make a good little Serb soldier.” In Sarajevo, di Giovanni frequented a dank orphanage filled with the children of rape. “I would go there and hold them,” she writes.
Chris Hedges tells a chilling story from his trip to the Gaza refugee camp called Khan Younis. As he watched, ten- and eleven-year-old Palestinian children were lured to the camp’s perimeter fence by taunts from a loudspeaker on the Israeli side. “Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!” The Israeli voice barked insults at the boys’ mothers. The boys responded by hurling their rocks at the jeep with the loudspeaker. The Israelis shot at them with M-16s fitted with silencers. Hedges found the victims in the hospital, children with their stomachs ripped out, and with gaping holes in their limbs. He had seen children shot before, he writes, “but I had never watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”
One night Goltz watched a drunken Russian soldier swinging the gun turret of a tank, demanding more vodka. It was produced. After a short interval, the tank rolled over a house in the village, killing everyone inside.
Laurence describes a bombing mission on which he and his cameraman were invited, Laurence on one fighter plane, his cameraman on another. The target was a village near the Cambodian border, supposedly controlled by the Viet Cong. Laurence’s plane dive-bombed, napalmed, and strafed the village, setting the straw roofs on fire. “On the fourth or fifth pass,” Laurence writes, “I saw individual farmers — women and men — standing in the fields outside the village in round straw hats with hoes in their hands. They looked up at the diving plane.” If they’re all VC as they’re supposed to be, why don’t they run for cover? Laurence asked himself. The shells soon struck down the farmers, “tearing through the delicate assemblies of their bodies.” Back at the airbase, he learned that there was no film of the farmers; the plane carrying his cameraman had strafed no one. Laurence sent off a report “focusing on the skills of the pilots, the versatility of the vintage planes.” Several days later, after further reporting, Laurence would get the answer to his haunting question: the mission had the wrong coordinates. The bombed village had been inside Cambodia.
Laurence missed that story altogether. There was another story he missed — just barely — that is relevant to the material under review.
In the fall of 1967, Laurence heard that U. S. forces had been ambushed northwest of Saigon. No journalists had been present during the battle, and information was almost impossible to come by. Laurence flew up to the base camp at Lai Khe and stayed on after the other journalists had left, determined to break through the official silence and piece together an account. “The surviving soldiers were said to be in ‘a state of shock,’ unable to talk,” writes Laurence. He eventually managed to interview three soldiers involved in the battle and prepared a report entitled Anatomy of an Ambush. Laurence’s report never made it onto the evening news because it was one of those rare times that he had come back with the words but no bang-bang. It would be thirty-six years before the story of that particular battle could be told — by David Maraniss’s They Marched Into Sunlight. Sometimes it takes that long for memory to triumph over forgetting.
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
