Word: vietnam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Indochina presented an entirely new set of challenges to the American army. Trained in the conventional tactics of warfare, the American strategists could not understand the methods of an opposing army that was supported by and mingled with the civilian population of South Vietnam; their response to the frustration of being unable to locate enemy soldiers was large-scale destruction of the countryside...
...many ways, the war in Vietnam marked a turning point in reporters' visions of war. Before Vietnam, as Nora Ephron once wrote, the war correspondent's job was considered "the only classic male endeavor left that provides physical danger and personal risks without public disapproval and the awful truth that for correspondents, war is not hell. It is fun." Reporters arrived in Vietnam expecting--as they had been taught to expect from the war movies they grew up on--adventure, glamor, and excitement. What they found instead was a brutal war, a war that drew no lines between civilian...
...think that Vietnam was what we had instead of happy childhoods," Michael Herr writes in one of the essays in Dispatches. And indeed, for many of the journalists who covered the war, the assignment became a cruel kind of identity crisis, forcing them to reevaluate their methods of information gathering, and even their definitions of truth. In Vietnam, it was no longer enough for war correspondents to attend daily briefings in American forces' headquarters; it became apparent that the officers were lying outright about the number of American victories, in an effort to drum up support for the war back...
...took a little longer for correspondents to realize that the Americans were also lying about South Vietnamese support for the American war effort. U.S. officers falsely billed the war as an invasion of a peaceful country by an aggressive North Vietnam because only a war against aggressors would satisfy the American public. Gradually correspondents realized that their army was lying, that the guerrilla war could only be fought with a supportive population. But it took a while for them to reveal the lies. Even if they had spoken the language and could have asked the Vietnamese how they felt about...
...such a situation, Michael Herr was lucky, and he knew it. Writing for Esquire meant that he could ignore the canons of establishment journalism; he could forget the official interviews with generals who spouted obvious lies, he could forget the press briefings. Vietnam didn't fit into the regular news style, but it fit Herr's. He was able to write long, first-person essays that were much more likely to capture the reality of the war than descriptions of troop movements. He could relate what the war was like from the troops' point of view, rather than the generals...