The Last War Dispatches

Suddenly the war in Vietnam was a big story again. --Time, March 31

AMERICAN NEWSPAPER accounts of the Saigon government's collapse last week seemed fairer and more compassionate--if only because they conveyed some of the event's magnitude and ambiguities--than there was reason to expect. Outside of big cities, headlines like "Red Blitz Continues" topped wire service copy. But even the wire services tried for impartiality. Nestled between headlines about orphans and columns of political jostling over whether or not the Indochina war was a "mistake," and if so by whom, lay solid chunks of information about the war's latest effects on the people of Indochina.

If the American correspondents who flocked back to Vietnam provided little insight into what will happen when the Saigon government falls they gave an acute sense of what is happening now, and a clearer overview of Vietnam than any available to the most recent thousands of Vietnamese refugees.

Uncertain of the consequences of a National Liberation Front victory, and familiar with offensives by what newspapers call "their" soldiers or these soldiers' American backers, the peasants who ran last week's losing southward race against the advancing battle field lacked the objective detachment and human-interest perspectives that American papers offered their far-away readers. Maybe the discrepancy should have attracted a commentator or two, in a week when even tired reporters tried to make their stories transcend the day-to-day suffering they had detailed or ignored for years.

The Chicago Tribune, self-styled the World's Greatest Newspaper told its readers that the week, stood for 20 years of United States intervention in Indochina. Americans were defending South Vietnamese refugees from Communists, bravely and properly but without much chance of success, since the South Vietnamese government unaccountably failed to fight for its own people. Some hostile commentator could easily have offered the Tribune another of the week's images for the last 20 years: Americans reading falsehoods about a far-off war while their government decided what to do about it. Some of the falsehoods had been reduced by time, to be sure, and so had some of the government's freedom of action.

Nevertheless, the language that reflected and helped shape American attitudes towards the government's enemies was still in the newspapers last week. As they had throughout the war, the newsmagazines led the way, with reporting whose bias verged on the ridiculous. To Time magazine, the Saigon government's abandonment of half its country was "a gritty gamble," a "historic rearrangement of the Vietnamese political map" to be celebrated with an in-depth look at the government's head: "As both soldier and politician, Nguyen Van Thieu has fought the Communist menace from the North, and it remains his abiding passion today." Similarly, U.S. News and World Report reassured its readers--in suitably muted tones--that "a long, costly investment of American lives and treasure" was not "about to go down the drain." The "air of gnarled confidence" that permeated Saigon," the magazine said firmly, was "only partially contrived."

Such reporting was blatantly tendentious, but even where this was not true, the Provisional Revolutionary Government and the NLF were still "the political arm of the Viet Cong" and "Communist-led forces," and the Republic of Vietnam, now little more than an enclave around Saigon, was still "South Vietnam." In United Press International's dispatches, North Vietnamese troops and the NLF "overran" province after province. And Time attributed many of Saigon's difficulties to Montagnard tribesmen "who, as despised fourth class citizens in South Vietnam, were ripe for exploitation by the Communists," and who now "infested" much of the country where they were fourth-class citizens.

BUT THOUGH THE insect metaphors held over from Korea had not disappeared, they had lost most of their sting. It was so clear that the insects would take care of themselves. Far more serious, under the circumstances, was most papers' inability to resolve their overview even a little, to vary their alarms of struggle and flight with any specifics about what immediately preceded and followed them. For example, why were the refugees running away?

In 1917, when Russian peasants deserted the Czarist army in droves while parliamentarians claiming to represent them vowed continued war, Lenin said that the deserters were voting with their feet. Most American politicians would have indignantly rejected that idea--its most obvious application last week was to the Saigon troops who deserted, fled, or went over to the NLF--but this did not prevent them from seizing triumphantly on the phrase. Nevertheless, no reporter in Indochina attributed the mass flight to the simple fear of Communism the politicians cited. Instead, reporters spoke of a combination of factors--fear of renewed American bombing, fear of NLF "reprisals," fear of looters from the Saigon army, and a vague but pervasive terror that swept whole villages, feeding on rumors as if increase of appetite had grown by what it fed on.

All these, and simple war-weariness, were plausible explanations for people leaving their homes, but reporters rarely provided the specific details needed to illuminate or test them. What sorts of people took to the roads? All sorts? Rich peasants? Saigon soldiers families? Did the Saigon army encourage refugees to leave, or order them to leave? Did they expect to return to their homes, and under what circumstances? Whom did they blame for their homelessness?

In the confusion, maybe it was impossible to tell. But there was little more news about those who stayed behind, Was the NLF restoring order, ordering reprisals, putting its state amnesty program into effect? Maybe the North Vietnamese didn't want correspondents filing dispatches from the front--Le Monde wasn't any better than the American papers, and Agence France-Presse's Hanoi bureau largely limited itself to monitoring NLF broadcasts (which, Le Monde reported, "everyone" in South Vietnam was listening to,) Whatever the reason, there was hardly any information about the new PRG. There was one NLF photograph of people thronging Da Nang's apparently newly peaceful shopping district, and one UPI dispatch indicating that NLF occupiers were releasing their comrades in local jails. And that was about all Millions of Americans read the exciting UPI story about the last desperate ride out of Da Nang, but no one in this country knew anything about what happened in the city after it was "abandoned."

EVEN IN WHAT they did report, American papers left their readers to guess at Key connections and supply crucial facts themselves. Montagnard involvement in the conquest of Ban Me Thuot received some play, but no one pointed out that the tribesmen--however ripe Time now considers them for Communist exploitation--generally fought in the past for France and the United States. Is the apparent Montagnard defection another sign of the end of Thieu, a portent of a new national Vietnamese unity that will embrace racial minorities or just a matter of different groups of tribesmen? The Guardian, a Maoist news weekly, claimed that a French reporter killed last week by Saigon police was silenced for attempting to discuss Montagnard defection to the NLF. Maybe that isn't so; in any case, other reporter haven't discussed the Montagnards much. In general, what the American papers have been best on is not political news of any sort by weird vignettes end horrifying statistics--gruesome descriptions of the refugees' flight and photographs that are almost funny, like the last 'few murders in an Elizabethan tragedy.

If last week's photographs were more tragic than funny, its editorials were merely grotesque. Certain that the United States had been right all along and that they personally had done their part to stop Communist aggression, right-wing papers could lavish President Ford's calls for forminal military aid with the ridicule they deserved. The Chicago Tribune stated flatly that Lon Nol's "only claim to distinction" is the fact that his name is a palindrome. But the liberal papers, always less confident than their more consistent brothers, seem to have been held back by a guilty suspicion that their items might have something to do with past slaughter by the Unites States, or future killings by the NLF, or maybe both. While a Tribune reporter asked Ford if American involvement in Vietnam had been wasted, the Washington Post warned that a similar question--about whether American sacrifices had been "unwarranted" --involved "trifling with the deep sensibilities of the survivors of the 55,000 American dead." The Post didn't say why the question was trifling, or whether the deeply sensible survivors had a right to be concerned about what had caused the wastage if the answer was yes. Similarly, when the New York Times, like the Post, endorsed Ford's plea for terminal aid--explaining first of all that Congressional approval would keep Vietnam out of the 1976 presidential race--it did not explain why the issue should be kept out of the race, or why American politics took precedence over Vietnamese lives.

The Times did get around to explaining Saigon's collapse, attributing it to a "paralysis of command" and a "leadership vacuum." With the point settled in this manner, the Times next day invoked Clio, the goddess of history, and pleaded with every else to just forget about Vietnam. The dead wouldn't mind, the theory seemed to be, and the living could trust in the benevolence of God or the Times's well placed friends to see that the "scenes of blood and horror" that "stun the emotions and make imagination a beggar" didn't recur somewhere else. In the meantime, the Times suggested that Indochina be seen "as an earthquake, not a battlefield."