Word: burchett
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Australian-born Burchett embarked on his career early in 1939 when he responded angrily to an article in an Australian paper that praised the Nazis. In a long letter he described what he had seen in a visit to Nazi-governed Germany. Since then he has covered the globe, concentrating on leftwing movements and struggles for national liberation. Most of his work has dealt with Asia, particularly Indochina, but he has also written about struggles in Africa and Portugal. By remaining a freelancer, he has escaped the pitfalls that most journalists run into: he contributes regularly to The Guardian...
Grasshoppers and Elephants is important, because it is perhaps the only book in English that describes the military tactics of the Vietnamese guerrillas during that final offensive. On the whole, Burchett says, the Western press failed miserably to cover the war--and this argument has been supported in a series of books by American correspondents, who agree that their inability to speak Vietnamese and their location in Saigon kept them from one whole side of the war. The Western press "never understood the nature of the war," Burchett says, and it is hard to take real issue with...
...Burchett, on the other hand, spent most of the Indochina war on the other side, with the Vietnamese and Cambodian troops who were fighting the Americans. He travelled mainly on foot or by bicycle, in traditional Vietnamese clothes, but the U.S. authorities were clearly aware of his presence. A reporter for the London Sunday Times told Burchett recently that he was with an American battalion that tried to capture the Australian correspondent alive, by covering an area where Burchett was supposed to be with nerve gas. (Apparently, the U.S. authorities thought Burchett could disclose the whereabouts of American prisoners...
...times, Grasshoppers and Elephants is hard reading, as when Burchett goes into long accounts of Vietnamese troop movements, which require at least a basic understanding of military strategy. But most of the book is for popular consumption, so the technical details are played down. Instead, Burchett emphasizes the role the Vietnamese people played in supporting the guerrilla troops, the popular uprisings, the lies to Saigon authorities. Villages developed their own home-made weapons, like the two-meter catapult made of ordinary rubber bands that could silently toss grenades into a nearby fort...
...What Thieu had was a facade of control maintained by an unprecedentedly powerful machine of repression," Burchett writes. "But the waves of organized resistance lapped right up to the walls of what seemed to be bastions of Saigon power and seeped under those walls to erode at the centers of power within." Burchett is one of the few Western writers who has had real access to the organization of that resistance, and he describes it carefully, movingly, in Grasshoppers...