Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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MEMORIES OF THE VIETNAM War, for those who did not serve in it, tend to be drawn from the image bank of television footage: a U.S. soldier applying a Zippo lighter to a peasant hut; a Saigon official shooting, on camera, a suspected Viet Cong terrorist through the head. But before the war escalated into a staple item on the nightly news, a much smaller conflict had played itself out in South Vietnam. This one pitted U.S. military brass and members of the Kennedy Administration against a small group of young print reporters assigned to cover a communist guerrilla insurrection...
...internecine American sniping, which flared up obscurely in 1962-63 while much of the U.S. press concentrated its big guns on stories like civil rights, the space race and the Cuban missile crisis. William Prochnau, an author and former correspondent for the Washington Post, argues that the reporters in Vietnam during those years established "the skeptical standards for a new generation of war correspondents--and television as well. These were provocative, new, adversarial standards that broke from the old and would be used to chronicle America's disaster in Vietnam and events long after...
This thesis is hardly new--Vietnam has long been seen as the lesson that taught reporters to stop automatically believing government handouts--but Prochnau illustrates it in fresh, interesting ways. He recaptures the days when Saigon was still considered a journalistic backwater, a low rung on the promotion ladder for ambitious reporters. And he describes in considerable detail the reporters who arrived there in the early 1960s, particularly Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press, Neil Sheehan of United Press International and David Halberstam of the New York Times...
...Hughes brothers are up to more serious business. Menace II Society had a kinetic kick, but it was also heinous in its uninflected take on teen brutality. Dead Presidents, which spans the Vietnam decade and hip-hops from the Bronx to 'Nam and back again, is expansive rather than explosive. Two friends (Larenz Tate and Chris Tucker) have troubles with deranged soldiers, possessive women, killer pimps and a society that won't give them a break...
...peace holds only because I-FOR is there? Will it still depart? If so, at what point and at what cost? Ignoring such questions, which are essential to defining a mission, can make for confused soldiers. It can also make for dead ones, as demonstrated by deployments in Vietnam and Beirut, where these problems were never adequately addressed...