REPORTING THE STORY

April 20, 2000
		Praised and derided, accused of saying too much in one breath and too little in another, war correspondents were the eyes and ears of those on the homefront during the Vietnam War.

Online NewsHour Special Report: Remembering Vietnam May 2000: Online Forum: Share your memories from the Vietnam war era April 12, 2000: A discussion on the Vietnam War's effects on the military. April 5, 2000: A look at the Vietnam War's historical impact Jan. 21, 1977: Carter's Pardon May 29, 1978: The Forgotten Wounded April 30, 1985: Lessons Learned April 30, 1990: Healing the Wounds April 17, 1995: Robert McNamara July 11, 1995: Normalizing Relations     March 23, 2000: Secretary of Defense Cohen discusses his trip to Vietnam. Aug. 9, 1999: A discussion of trade with the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. May 15, 1997: Normalizing relations with Vietnam. Browse the NewsHour's coverage of Asia.     PBS/The American Experience: Vietnam PBS/POV: RE:Vietnam U.S. State Department	Now, 25 years after the war that began many of their careers, six of those sent to chronicle the war spent an afternoon remembering it together The event was "Rendezvous with War" -- a discussion in early April at the College of William and Mary meant to bring some context to a conflict that still inspires scores of questions.
	A slowly building battle
	The reporters said they didn't recognize the Vietnam conflict's importance in its earliest years, initially viewing the growing fight as a minor international disturbance. Even as President Dwight Eisenhower sent teams of military advisers to Southeast Asia in the late 1950s to help pro-West South Vietnam in its battle against Communists in the North, there was only a trickle of information coming from the area. Stanley Karnow was one of the first American reporters on the scene, arriving in July 1959. He arrived just as the first two advisers were killed. "On my first trip ... the first two Americans, whose names are at the head of the [Vietnam Veterans] memorial, were killed. So that's my introduction to shooting in Vietnam. It's sort of cliché to say that not in my wildest dreams would I … look back and say 'God, are these guys going to be the first two guys among, you know, 60,000 names?' It seemed unimaginable."	Stanley Karnow on the war's beginning.
	"It's going to be our war"
	As U.S. intervention in the area intensified, so did the number of reporters American news agencies sent to investigate the conflict. Joe Galloway, now a senior writer at U.S. News and World Report, said that as an international correspondent for United Press International he saw Vietnam as a story that couldn't be missed. "I was reading dispatches … and I thought to myself, you know there's going to be a war there," he said. "It's going to be our war or we'll make it our war. It's going to be my generation's war, and by God I'm going to cover it." Galloway threatened to quit if UPI did not transfer him to Saigon, and soon he was in South Vietnam as well. Though not nearly as insistent as Galloway to grab the Vietnam assignment, Time magazine's Wallace Terry, later of USA Today and the BBC, soon came to understand the war's importance. "I went there because it was the biggest story in the world at the time," Terry said "I guess in the back of my mind subconsciously it was an adventure. It was exotic. It was different. Maybe, too, I was restless. But more than anything, it was a big story. I knew it was the war of my generation, and I had to be a part of its coverage." According to Galloway, once reporters got to Vietnam, they were given nearly unlimited battlefield access. "Vietnam was the most free press exercise in the history of this country," he said. "You had that press card, you agreed to a simple list of rules. That press card would take you anywhere. You could go anywhere and stay as long as you wanted to as long as you had the [gumption] to go." And then there was the task of tracking down sources. Reporters covering the war had few official statements on which to base their reports. The military sponsored a nightly briefing dubbed by reporters as "the 5 o'clock follies" because, they said, of the questionable amount of real information disseminated. Karnow said reporters had to move away from such official government reports, and found their sources in lower-ranking officers. "Reporters are only as good as their sources," Karnow said. "If we were writing stuff that critical, it was because we would go out in the field and we'd talk to … many of the advisers in the early days who would tell us many things that bore no relation to what [government officials were] telling everybody."	UPI's Joe Galloway on getting into Vietnam. Time's Wallace Terry on arriving in Vietnam and getting outfitted for the war. Stanley Karnow on wartime sources. AP's Peter Arnett on correspondent competition.
	"I was scared every moment I was there"
	With such freedom, members of the press followed individual units through the Vietnamese countryside, often returning with strikingly personal accounts of the war. But the coverage came at a cost. In all, 148 newspeople were killed while on duty covering the war. Scouring the battlefield for stories, reporters like Terry lived with the fear that at any moment they could become the next statistic. "I'm often asked: Was I scared? That's a dumb question. I was scared every moment I was there," Terry said. "Increasingly, I would go out in the field and do anything and everything I could to get myself the story. I'm always thinking of the story first, not realizing that I'm endangering myself and that I'm endangering my family's hopes and future." For Terry, protecting himself from the constant fear of attack led to bending the rules of combat. "According to the Geneva rules, we are not supposed to carry weapons. We are non-combatant correspondents," he said. "Did I carry a weapon? I carried every weapon I could get my hands on ... I didn't know how to shoot any of these weapons, but I'd scare you to death if you saw me coming." Other journalists took up arms not only for their own protection, but also for the good of the units with whom they traveled. In the middle of a jungle firefight, Galloway became one of them. "I learned that you cannot be, as a reporter, simply a witness," Galloway said. "In times like those, you may have to take up a rifle, you may have to carry the wounded and the dead, you may have to bring water in … you may have to take up a rifle and kill other men."	Time's Wallace Terry on the dangers of reporting in Vietnam. UPI's Joe Galloway on covering the battlefield.
	A misunderstood event?
	Since these reporters returned from the trenches -- and even before the war ended -- many accused the media of negatively reporting the war and eroding public support for the military. Unlike coverage of any previous war, scenes from Vietnam were beamed into living rooms across America. The effect of these television pictures, some alleged, was diminished public support for the war. Among the critics was President Richard Nixon. In No More Vietnams, a book published after the war, Nixon said a deliberate selection of images by the media perpetrated lies about Vietnam that still affect Americans' memories today. "No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War," Nixon wrote. "It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic." But television reporters like CBS's Morley Safer said the intensity of their visual medium was the most accurate way to tell Vietnam's story. "The camera can describe in excruciating detail what war is all about," Safer wrote in 1966. "It's true that on its own every piece of war film takes on a certain anti-war character simply because it does glamorize or romanticize. In battle, men do not die with a clean shot through the heart; they are blown to pieces." Terry said he and his counterparts were looking to capture in print what his television colleagues sought to put on film -- the most accurate picture possible. "The press, from time to time -- and I've heard this in military circles -- gets accused of having lost the war," he said. "Let me say this: By and large, most of the reporters that I knew -- and I certainly felt this a sacred responsibility of my own -- was to be fair, and also to be responsible [for] getting the truth to the American people." But it was not always personal ethic that kept reporters in Vietnam honest, said then-Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett. "From the beginning, there was real competition the media, which meant that there was very little potential for ... corruption in the process," he said. "We were always watching the competition to see, first of all, how effective they were -- and if any mistake was made in their reporting, we'd be the first to point it out. And that survived throughout the whole war." Overall, Terry said, what kept his eye on the story throughout the war was not an allegiance to his organization, but to the soldiers with whom he traveled. "Underneath all of this, I had a serious identity relationship with the man in uniform," Terry said. "They were my fellow Americans; and I would not have reported anything or done anything that I thought would hurt or damage an operation where American lives were at risk." -- By Greg Barber, The Online NewsHour	AP's Peter Arnett on the correspondents' age and experience. UPI's Joe Galloway on the war's legacy.