From Tonkin Gulf to Persian Gulf
Veteran AP correspondent considers how war reporting has changed
By Richard Pyle
Richard Pyle is a correspondent for The Associated Press. He covered the Vietnam War for five years, 2 1/2 of those years as the AP's Saigon bureau chief. Pyle also reported from Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
(CNN) -- From the day in early 1963 when a U.S. admiral in Saigon chastised an American reporter for not being "on the team", relations were tense between officials running the Vietnam War and the reporters covering it.
The press in those early days was not particularly critical of the United States commitment to the small Southeast Asian country, but it was beginning to question the methods -- and to doubt much of what U.S. leaders insisted was true.
Again and again, official assertions of "progress" on the battlefield proved hollow; the "body count" became a metaphor for exaggerated victory claims.
That "credibility gap" remained a fixture of the Vietnam War. It took on new meaning in the communists' Tet Offensive of early 1968, in the later invasions of Cambodia and Laos, right up to May 1975, when North Vietnamese tanks finally crashed the gates of South Vietnam's Presidential Palace and helicopters lifted the last desperate evacuees from the U.S. Embassy roof.
Disillusioned by the first loss of a war in its history, battered by low morale and a host of other problems, the U.S. military establishment looked for reasons. Many officials accused the media of having undermined the cause by emphasizing the negative and even encouraging a communist triumph.
While the press made mistakes and had its excesses, such allegations were essentially unfounded. The so-called "living room war" of television was actually lost through flawed policy decisions and the inability of the Saigon regime, even with U.S. support, to match the resoluteness of the communist forces seeking to overthrow it.
Vietnam 'embargoes'
Historically, the U.S. military has followed a public information policy that tilts toward disclosure rather than suppression but is tailored to the demands of a particular conflict. In World War II, Allied leaders enforced strict censorship for obvious reasons of military security. Censorship again was imposed in Korea, although less effectively since journalists were not subject to it outside the war zone.
Some senior officials, including President Lyndon Johnson, advocated censorship in Vietnam. The idea was studied repeatedly -- at least three times in 1965 alone -- and each time was rejected as impractical, even counter-productive. Though frustrated by freewheeling disclosures of information, officials conceded there was no way to control an international press corps of several hundred people from dozens of countries.
Yet operational security needed to be protected as much as possible. The answer was an honor system under which American and South Vietnamese military officials briefed journalists under "embargoes" to be lifted when the first shots were fired. Violators risked loss of their press credentials, and some violations did occur, but they were fairly rare and usually minor. Responsible journalists recognized security as a valid concern, not worth violating for a cheap headline.
In fact, the very issue of security in Vietnam was all but moot. Hanoi had agents and sympathizers in key positions of South Vietnamese society, including the military and -- as was dramatically revealed after the fall of Saigon -- in the press corps as well. When Saigon's forces invaded Laos in early 1971, the enemy already knew the entire plan, right down to which mountain tops would be used as artillery and helicopter bases. The information came from official South Vietnamese documents, not press reports.
'Five o'clock Follies'
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara gives a news conference at the Pentagon during the Vietnam War
The foundation of reporting in Vietnam was the famous -- or infamous -- "Five o'clock Follies," the daily briefing where military officials provided news releases and verbal accounts of battlefield and air activity. These briefings were much ridiculed, and there were many valid criticisms. But some of the loudest complainers in the press were those who rarely, or never, went into the field.
For all their failings, the Follies were not the pack of lies that some critics suggested. The best reporters and news organizations recognized the value of an on-the-record, official version of events to compare with information from field reporters and other sources.
As important as it was to get the official version, there was no substitute for hands-on coverage, and reporters and photographers were always in the field. We drove down roads until the emptiness told us not to go any further. We trudged and sweated with the infantry and Marines, made harrowing helicopter assaults into landing zones, cowered behind paddy dikes as bullets cracked overhead. We waited long hours at isolated helicopter pads, saw B-52 strikes blossom like giant brown flowers, learned the culinary tricks of a C-ration diet, interviewed generals, lieutenants, sergeants and privates in their natural habitat, where the truth at least was bullet-proof.
Field officers and soldiers welcomed journalists; they wanted people at home to know what they were doing and enduring, and recognized our readiness to share their perils to tell their story. Some 75 reporters, photographers and camera crewmembers were killed covering Indochina from 1962 to 1975.
Little to show for Gulf War
Flash forward to 1991, the year of the Persian Gulf War. Only a handful of reporters (including this writer) covered both, and thus could see the similarities and the differences.
By that time, war -- and ways of covering it -- had changed dramatically. Along with new weapons and concepts came a new media. A massive influx of journalists flooded into Saudi Arabia, many of them relying for the first time on instant communications with computers and satellites. This revolutionized the means of reporting and transmitting news, making control of the battlefield more difficult and the old rules of operational security irrelevant. Vietnam, by comparison, had been simple.
The military struggled to solve these problems and essentially failed. Assigned to rigid "pools" that limited mobility and impeded the delivery of news, reporters clashed heatedly with military officials, accusing them of censorship. Temporary news blackouts in the name of security caused further tensions. Perhaps the most glaring failure of Gulf War news coverage was the shocking paucity of television footage and photographs: Given the vast size of the allied commitment, there was precious little to show that the war had actually taken place.
In the end, military officials said the media restrictions would have ended after a few days if the fighting had continued. It was the very swiftness of the sword in a "100-hour war" that left both media and military dissatisfied -- and wondering whether a more satisfactory policy would be in place for any future conflict.
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