On 2 July, 1998, CNN and Time Magazine "retracted" the article and reportage that alleged that American forces used sarin gas, or other deadly gas, in Vietnam.
By William Prochnau
(POLICE STATE HEADQUARTERS)
Almost 35 years ago, a young reporter named Peter Arnett was,
as they say in the news trade, collecting string on his first
big scoop in a little war. Arnett had gathered only pieces: scuttlebutt
that American helicopters were carrying gas-warfare agents and
U.S.-backed South Vietnamese troops were using the gas against
the enemy, particularly in quick-hit rescue operations. U.S.
officials declined all comment. The story "burned in my
notebooks" unwritten, Arnett recalled later, until one day
his Associated Press colleague, the big German photographer, Horst
Faas, returned from a single patrol and slapped several rolls
of film onto his desk. The photos showed South Vietnamese troops
carrying gas canisters and bulky rubber gas masks. Their officers
had talked freely to Faas about orders to use it.
Arnett's story rattled around the world in early 1965, shaking
the White House and the Pentagon and bringing the bellicose snorts
out of the Kremlin. There is a certain quaintness now that the
chemical weapon in question was CS tear gas, basically the same
nonlethal stuff that U.S. police were beginning to use in the
streets to control marchers and rioters in the strife-torn '60s.
The story came full circle last week, when Arnett and several
CNN colleagues broke what seemed a far more stunning story: that
U.S. troops might have used the lethal nerve gas sarin against
North Vietnamese troops, civilians and perhaps even American deserters
in a raid across the Vietnamese border into Laos in 1970. (The
use of deadly nerve gas violates the Geneva Convention, and the
targeting of American nationals, even defectors, is horrifying.
WFI Editor)
Oddly, Arnett's first story rattled more cages than his latest.
The nerve-gas report was met with the usual Pentagon call for
an investigation and a modern mix of jadedness and some doubt.
How could such a powerful story have been missed in the most
openly reported war in American history? Vietnam was a reporter's
dream, a military man's nightmare: an uncensored war in which
correspondents roamed almost at will. There was never a war like
it before or since. In the beginning, the first few rambunctious
reporters raced off to battles in beat-up, blue-and-white Renault
cabs, left from the French days. Arnett escalated by buying a
white Karmann Ghia, to chase helicopters to the "front."
By the end of the long war, hundreds of American reporters were
using every manner of military vehicle to seek out combat and
stories.
Yet, to ask how the nerve-gas story was missed - if, indeed, the
facts are known now - is to beg the question. Every war keeps
its secrets - Vietnam still keeps many - and no reporters followed
elite and illegal hit-and-run missions into neighboring
countries. The reaction to Arnett's latest story tells us far
more about how much the Vietnam War - and the press coverage -
changed modern life, especially the relationship between the government
and its watchdog, the media. To fully appreciate this, you have
to do a little imaginative time travel, back to 1961, when President
John F. Kennedy began upping the stakes in Vietnam. It was a
different world. Television was little more than a plaything,
good for set-piece presidential press conferences but not wars
halfway around the world. Commercial-jet travel was almost as
new as today's Pentium chips. The Pentagon had no Xerox machines
to churn out press releases, the reporters no satellites to beam
stories 11 time zones back home.
Still, we had already endured a century full of wars. Heavily
censored wars. So total was the government manipulation of public
opinion in World War I that the chief U.S. propagandist charged
with getting us into the fray later described his efforts as "the
world's greatest adventure in advertising." Censorship was
so uniformly accepted in World War II that Life magazine did not
run a photograph of a dead American until 1943, and the director
of the Office of Censorship was given a special Pulitzer Prize
citation. The Cold War, with its threat of nuclear extinction,
brought self-censorship to a new level. Vietnam immediately became
a different kind of war: Kennedy's answer to the "war of
national liberation," that arch foe, communism, had been
winning.
At first, Kennedy actually believed he could fight it as the communists
fought theirs - in secret. How could you censor a war you weren't
fighting? So Vietnam began uncensored and stayed uncensored.
But Kennedy could not keep the war small and surely not secret.
He sent over escalating numbers of "noncombatant military
advisors" who, from the get-go, engaged in combat. He sent
over aircraft carriers laden with U.S. helicopters that sat moored
in Saigon's harbor while his people denied their existence. Just
as they denied the blond California boys in open view in the cockpits
of fighter bombers and the Americans flying and manning the guns
of the helicopters. (Unfortunately for Kennedy partisans, the
Oliver Stone theory that JFK was assassinated because he intended
to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam is pure speculation;
all solid evidence indicates that Kennedy moved to suppress Communism
in southeast Asia with an iron-fist, to avoid being labeled by
the right-wing Barry Goldwater-Republicans as soft on Communism,
and would have escalated the war along the same lines that fellow-Democrat
LBJ did. WFI Editor)
Inevitably, Kennedy ran head-on into the beginning of the so-called
"generation gap" that would haunt the '60s and - or
did Vietnam start both? -- a massive sea change in American journalism.
Wars are fought by the young. They are also reported by the
young. And the young Vietnam reporters of the early '60s were
neither constrained by censorship nor total-war certainties.
Shockingly, they began to report that the emperor wore no clothes.
Americans were dying. The government was lying. Perhaps the
unkindest of cuts, the United States was losing despite the rosy
optimism of inflated body counts and politicized "victories"
in nonbattles fought by its South Vietnamese clients.
Some of the early correspondents - David Halberstam of the New
York Times, Neil Sheehan of UPI, Malcolm Browne, Arnett and Faas
of AP - became legends and worked their way into history as surely
as the policymakers. Sheehan, standing in an airport knot of
reporters, once welcomed Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara
to Saigon with a loud, mocking stage whisper, "Ah, another
foolish Westerner come to lose reputation to Ho Chi Minh."
The sea change was not without its bruises among the reporters.
Most of them still in their 20s, the reporters were attacked
as too young and inexperienced by Kennedy's government and chased
down as communist sympathizers by the South Vietnamese secret
police. They also were assaulted, their patriotism questioned,
by the old guard in the press corps, veterans of the "last
good war" against the Germans and Japanese.
But the war never did go well and never seemed to end - 12 years
being eons too long for a democracy to fight a nonwar of limited
value. By the time I arrived, shortly after President Lyndon
B. Johnson introduced combat troops in 1965, an Army major welcomed
me with a straigtforward suggestion: "Don't be a Halberstam.
Don't be a Sheehan." A decade later, the war finally over,
those would be mild words indeed in most military officers' description
of reporters. Whether the media's role in Vietnam was destructive
(the voguish view) or a crucial contribution to the American way
(the minority belief, but one I subscribe to), the uncensored
war and its unfettered media left a terrible legacy with the military.
The brass vowed never again.
With Vietnam over, the study groups, seminars and lectures at
the War College began the preparation for handling the media in
the inevitable wars to come. If censorship couldn't be the rule,
outflanking would. By the time of the little war in Grenada,
reporters were reduced to trying to get onto the Caribbean island
by rowboat. During the Gulf War, the government simply corralled
the media mob, an unruly group to be sure, numbering well over
1,000, and ran the public war as a video game of smart bombs and
clean, bloodless air assaults. In the years since Vietnam, the
military and the media have met regularly in attempts to at least
understand each other. I remember one gathering at Princeton
a few years ago. During the reception, Gen. Winant Sidle, chief
Army information officer during the war's crucial years, greeted
Lee Lescaze, a Vietnam correspondent for the Washington Post in
the late '60s. "Forty-nine," said Sidle, chin jutting
slightly. "Fourteen," replied Lescaze. The numbers
bounced back and forth. They were arguing about a body count
from a 20-year-old battle so obscure no one else in the room wanted
to remember it.
Time has not narrowed the gulf. Just the other day I was surfing
the outer fringes of our modern cable world, and came across another
of those military-media seminars, a round table dealing with a
mock war and a moderator asking provocative questions. A hypothetical
had been set up for a Marine colonel. Your unit has been badly
mauled, the moderator began. Two of your men are wounded and
exposed in an open field behind you. To rescue them, you know
you will risk the rest of the men in your unit. Do you go for
them? "Yes, sir," came the instant reply. Now, continued
the moderator, the situation is the same, but it is a TV cameraman
and a correspondent wounded and exposed. Do you go back for them?
"No, sir, I do not," replied the Marine. Then, he
added: "They're not Americans." Legacies.
SOURCE: William Prochnau is a former reporter for the Washington Post, and is author of "Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents & Their Early Vietnam Battles." Reprinted from the 14 June, 1998, issue of the Los Angeles Times, Orange County edition. Excerpted in the public service of the national interest of the American people. |
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