As it happened, and as it was reported
The actual Vietnam war, as fought, and the Vietnam war as reported, were two entirely different Vietnam wars, with two entirely different outcomes.
The 1968 Tet Offensive is illustrative of the vast variance between what actually happened and what was reported by the SLIMC to have happened in the Vietnam war. It was planned and in the making, according to the Viet Cong themselves, since 1966, to be the decisive victory in the Vietnam war. It was a concerted attack on American forces everywhere in South Vietnam, in the expectation that the Vietnamese people would join in the attack and the "revolution" would be complete. But, first, all the attacks were repulsed in a devastating way, and second, none of the Vietnamese people joined in on the Viet Cong side. The attacks not only failed everywhere, but casualties on the Communist side were so high that they broke the back of the Viet Cong movement.
The immediate result of the Tet offensive was that, from that point on, the brunt of the fighting in the Vietnam war would have to be carried on by the North Vietnamese regulars, for the simple reason that there were not enough Viet Cong left alive to carry on the fight.
That's how the most significant event in the Vietnam war actually happened. So, how was the most significant event in the Vietnam war reported in the American media?
Tet was reported everywhere in America as a victory for the North and a defeat for America. Talking-head after talking-head after talking-head prattled on and on, in breathtaking terms, about how devastating these attacks were, and how well coordinated all the different attacks were, and how this proved that this "popular movement" was beyond our limited ability to do anything about it. The Vietnam war itself was virtually lost already. They were lying through their teeth. All of them.
Just like the rest of the Vietnam war, Tet was miss-reported. When producer Jack Fern saw the truth of it and recognized what had happened and suggested to Sr. NBC Producer Robert Northshield that they had gotten it wrong and needed to correct it, Northshield's response was that it was too late. Because, since the Tet offensive was now "established" in the American mind as a defeat, that actually made it a defeat. See? The American people now believed it was a defeat, therefore, it was a defeat. Score a big one for the Reds, with extra special kudos to NBC for doing their part for the Communist movement.
Thus was one of the most lopsided military victories in military history turned into defeat, in "the American mind," for the purposes of the Marxists and the furtherance of the International Communist cause.
While the American military won, big, the media reported that they lost, big.
The media never recanted, never repented, never corrected this gross and obvious lie. They never changed it one iota. The closest they came to recanting is that, over time, gradually, they somewhat softened the story by using slick language. The story line eventually became a variation of:
Although the Tet Offensive was a severe military loss for the Viet Cong, it became a tremendous political victory for the Viet Cong.
The part they left out, and still leave out, is that the sole reason that Tet was a political victory for the Viet Cong was that it was falsely reported by the Leftist American media to be a military victory for the Viet Cong. It would never have been a political victory for the Viet Cong if the Leftist American media had not purposely made it into a political victory for the Viet Cong.
Tet, of course, like all the other battles in the Vietnam war, brought about multiple opportunities for one of the most frequent media lies, the usual one regarding body counts. Whenever lopsided body counts were announced, the talking-head would then lower his voice, raise a conspiratorial eyebrow and say something like, "military supplied body counts are frequently proven inaccurate."
QUESTION: How many times was an official military body count shown to be inaccurate?
ANSWER: None.
During the Tet offensive a bunch of Viet Cong tried unsuccessfully to attack the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Some 19 infiltrators blew a hole in an outside wall before they were all killed or driven off. None of them ever got past the three Marine guards at the front door, and none of them ever got inside. But, as usual, that's not how it was reported.
In a report typical of all Vietnam war coverage, here's what Walter Cronkite reported as "news":
"Snipers are in the building and on the rooftops near the embassy and firing on personnel inside the compound. Twenty suicide commandos are reported to be holding the first floor of the embassy and some were still there toward daybreak."
Every bit of that was a lie. Here's what the A.P. reported, again, in typical Vietnam war coverage:
"Communist commandos penetrated the supposedly attack proof building in the climax of a combined artillery and guerrilla assault that brought limited warfare to Saigon itself. A.P. photographer Dan Van Phouc, who got inside the building, reported bodies were strewn around the rooms. He said the Viet Cong wore gray uniforms with cartridge belts and that some had red armbands."
Again, every bit of that was a lie. Apparently they were just making it up as they went along.
Westy (General Westmoreland) was personally on the scene just as the last of the infiltrators were killed, and personally toured all the floors of the building, and no bad guys ever got in there. Period.
It was in this period that, from Ben Tre in South Vietnam, Peter Arnett, then of the Associated Press, wrote a dispatch quoting an "unnamed" US major as saying,
"It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
The quote ran nationwide the next day in Arnett's report. No one has ever been able to find the mysterious major. So where did Arnett get his "unnamed" US Major? The same place Cronkite and the A.P. got their penetration, partial control and partial massacre inside the US Embassy: out of thin air.
And, there were the lies of omission. Everyone in America probably knows about what happened at My Lai, the site of the massacre of some hundreds of villagers by members of the Americal division. They might not remember that it was an aberration, that it was reported and investigated by the military, that courts-martial ensued and so forth. What they probably most often remember, rather, is that it was "typical" of American service in Vietnam. It was an incident that was heavily, HEAVILY reported on in the American media. You might say, hammered.
But, the entire American SLIMC was studiously missing during the unraveling of the story behind the Hue massacre. The only place in South Vietnam that the Tet offensive was not immediately crushed was Hue, which the Viet Cong managed to hold for some twenty five days. During that time the Viet Cong officer in charge sent out lists of names on clipboards to have citizens gathered for some "education" and training in the new government ways. Five thousand people were rounded up in that way, and they all disappeared.
Later when a farmer accidentally found the first of the mass graves, the American media seriously avoided the story, to the point that the word "censored" would not be too strong. Eventually over three thousand bodies were uncovered there; there were still around two thousand missing, from the lists and the "educational" meeting invitations, who were never accounted for. No American media talking-head reported on the massacre at Hue. Not one. In the print media, it was buried; never anywhere close to the front page, if it was reported at all. It appeared to be religiously censored.
In the PBS crockumentary 13-part "Vietnam: A Television History" they put a former Viet Cong officer on the screen to explain how "the people of Hue" took matters into their own hands and killed all of these people, despite Viet Cong efforts to protect them. Right. It was the people of Hue who killed all those people of Hue. What PBS didn't mention was that the very officer they were interviewing was the perpetrator. He was the guy who handed out the lists and the clipboards. Which might explain why he got on so well with PBS. Birds of a feather, you know.
But let's look at Khe Sanh, a good microcosm study of how the Vietnam war was reported. In fact, that's how they reported it, as a microcosm of the whole Vietnam war. Khe Sanh had another one of the most popular lies, repeated by just about every talking-head available. And it was:
"Charlie decides who lives and who dies on Khe Sanh."
No kidding. It would appear that Charlie made a whole heaping, giant, enormous pile of bad decisions along that line. Again, this reporting was typical, in microcosm, of how the entire Vietnam war was miss-reported in the news.
When Viet Cong general Giap, the purported "hero" of Dien Bien Phu, brought some 20,000 Viet Cong to bear against the American emplacements at Khe Sanh, the media began perpetrating pro-Viet Cong, anti-American myths immediately. First, they reported that all of this was a surprise; the Marines were caught by surprise, see? The Marines disagreed with that. Second, they reported Khe Sanh as an "imminent disaster." Again, the Marines disagreed with that. Third, they linked it, strategically, to what happened at Dien Bein Phu. The Marines probably would have laughed at that if they weren't too disgusted.
The differences were staggering. At Dien Bien Phu, the French Legionnaires were the ones down-hill, surrounded and cut off, with no effective artillery or air support. Khe Sanh was somewhat different. The American positions occupied all the high ground in the area, were well dug in, with their own artillery and close tactical air support. And, of course, the infantry here were not conscripts or draftees, they were Regulars. And they weren't merely Regulars, they were members of an elite corps. And they weren't just members of an elite corps, they were genuine United States by God Marines, over six thousand of them, dug in, fully prepared, occupying all the high ground, with their own artillery and close air support. As I said, the differences were staggering. That whole area was under Marine control.
Nevertheless, the media consistently hammered the similarities between Khe Sanh and Dien Bien Phu. Bernard Fall's "Hell in a Very Small Place", which recorded the events of Dien Bien Phu, became required reading for all journalists on their way to Khe Sahn or about to report on Khe Sanh. They all read it, passed it around, recommended it, nodded in agreement that, yep, the same thing was going to happen at Khe Sanh.
But what happened there was totally different. The French, Moroccans, Legionnaires and others who parachuted into the valley at Dien Bien Phu were on an offensive mission, intended to take control of the valley. But - first and foremost - they failed to take the high ground. (The French ignored highest sites around as "impassible"; they were NOT impassible, as the Communists proved by turning them into gun emplacements, looking down on the French, and rendering air support impossible.) Thus, the French never even gained control of the valley.
Khe Sanh, on the other hand, was planned from the beginning to be a high-ground, highly defensible position, in a key strategic position, from which it could, and did, severely disrupt supply traffic on the Ho Chi Trail. The Marines SET OUT to be an un-removable thorn in the ass of the enemy, to GET THEM TO ATTACK. Which they did. From the low ground, because the Marines occupied the high ground. Which is something Marines always tend to immediately do.
No one in the American media was smart enough to figure that out. They couldn't tell the difference between an offensive position and a defensive one; they couldn't tell the difference between high ground and low ground; they probably couldn't tell the difference between up and down. Thus, with clear Leftist bias and obvious cognitive disability did the media report on the Vietnam war.
The siege at Khe Sanh never was a siege, in the purest sense of the word. Air support, both tactical and supply, was never cut off or even seriously disrupted. There was never any real threat to re-supply. Marines on Khe Sanh took off to go home on leave, and came back to Khe Sanh after being home on leave. An aircraft landing or taking off while under fire is something military planes do in combat zones, and while it might get a little hairy sometimes, that is part of the job of the military. Taking some rounds is part of the job for a Marine, but a heart-stopping, pants-crapping, life-changing event for a typical journalist; thus, some exaggeration may be expected. However, what was reported by the media at Khe Sanh, as in all of the Vietnam war, went way over the top on a regular basis.
A total of four (4) aircraft of any kind, including one C-130, were brought down by enemy fire on or in the environs of Khe Sanh. The lone C-130 proved the point. Media reporters practically lined up to get in the right position, with the burning plane on camera behind them, to report breathlessly how air supply was practically cut off to Khe Sanh. Smoke and fire sells, I guess, so if you look hard enough you can probably find tape of lots and lots of different reporters with that same, lone C-130 behind them. After the flames died down, they were still getting footage with the smoke rising from the same C-130 behind more breathless reporters. Finally, there will be video tape somewhere of reporters in front of the same plane, but without any smoke or flames. They probably would have liked to pour some kerosene and light it up again for the cameras if they thought they could get away with it. All four downed aircraft were in good photo-op spots, all were used to perpetuate the "veritable graveyard of aircraft" version of Khe Sanh. Meanwhile, the supplies kept coming in on all the other flights that somehow or other didn't get on camera.
Another incident that got full camera attention was the time an enemy mortar made a lucky hit on an ammo dump; wild, highly photogenic pyrotechnics ensued, which the media used to great advantage.
Consistently, in the Vietnam war in general and Khe Sanh in particular, the situation was reported as hopeless by the media. Khe Sanh was quite strategically important to the NVA and the Viet Cong, and it therefore also important to the Marines. But here's how Cronkite saw it.
A Vietnam war report from Walter Cronkite, CBS News, on Khe Sanh:
"Since its usefulness as a roadblock and forward base has been so vastly diminished, it can be assumed that Khe Sanh is mostly a symbol . . . but of what? Pride? Moral? Bravery? or administrative and intransigence, and military miscalculation?"
Its usefulness was vastly diminished? Excuse me? I begin to wonder if the man ever spoke a truthful word in his life.
A Vietnam war report from David Duncan Douglas, ABC News, on Khe Sanh:
"When enemy fire comes in the guys run for it. When planes come in, they try to shoot a landing so fast the enemy gunners can't knock them down with either rockets or machine gun fire. The big C-130's sometimes make it - sometimes they don't."
A Vietnam war report from John Lawrence NBC News, on Khe Sanh:
"From the North Vietnamese point of view, Khe Sanh is an easy target for its mortars and rockets. A convenient place to bleed the Marines and tie down and isolate 6,000 American troops and about 20,000 reserves far from the protective coastal plain. For twenty years General Giap has used the same tactics."
He had to make that up. General Giap was lucky in the extreme in both the timing and the opposing leadership at Dien Bien Phu, and he was downright stupid to put so many forces forward to be slaughtered as they were at Khe Sanh. But then, thanks to our media, he was winning another political battle through the American newsrooms, through “news” that was concocted, written and delivered, right down the Communist Party line.
A Vietnam war report from Don Webster CBS News, on Khe Sanh:
"When a plane does land, much of the activity stops while everyone watches to see if the plane makes it. This is all that's left of a C-130 that landed loaded with gasoline. Some inside escaped, others did not. This is the residue of a CH-53 helicopter, the biggest the Marines have. About the time this was being filmed another helicopter was being shot down just a few miles from Khe Sanh, killing all 22 Americans on board."
A Vietnam war report from Murry Fromson CBS News, on Khe Sanh:
"This is one place where the Americans cannot claim they have the initiative in Vietnam. Here, the North Vietnamese decide who lives and who dies - every day, which planes land and which ones don't. And, sooner or later, they will make the move that will seal the fate of Khe Sanh."
The lies are boringly consistent. Time magazine showed a portrait cover of NVA General Giap, with a story inside of Khe Sanh as a re-run of Dien Bien Phu, with luminaries such as Bob Young and Walter Cronkite hailing the fact that "the victorious general of Dien Bien Phu was again in charge." Newsweek portrayed Westy on the cover, titled, "Man On The Spot," with typical negative reporting on the Vietnam war.
The March 18 1968 Newsweek was even more egregious than most. The cover photo was of the spectacular fireworks from back when the ammo dump was hit. No mention of the fact that all of this had happened over two months earlier; the readers were left with the impression that what they were reading was quite current news. With input from Cronkite and David Duncan Douglas, it put a typical negative spin on Khe Sanh.
"Though the US dilemma at Khe Sanh is particularly acute, it is not unique. It simply reflects in microcosm the entire US military position in Vietnam. US strategy in Vietnam up to this point has been a failure."
And so we have another, quite consistent, flagrant categorical lie, reported as news.
Do you see what I'm talking about?
This is the common media reporting thread that can be seen in all reporting throughout the entire Vietnam war. None of them had anything positive to say about American prospects on Khe Sanh. Not one. If Cronkite had been a general instead of a journalist, he would have just surrendered all the Marines right then and there.
Bottom line, the Marines held Khe Sanh, the NVA never really made any progress at all, and they suffered so many casualties as to be considered "wiped out." No NVA ever got within 100 yards of the Marines before being killed, and the Marines sent out periodic patrols to go and kill some more of them. Direct assault on Khe Sanh proved so costly as to not even be tried again; they never mounted any direct assault that amounted to anything. Repeated attempts at trenching their way up toward the top, each time, only made certain amount of progress before the trenches were obliterated into a barren moonscape by heavy aerial bombardment, and they (meaning, replacements) would have to start the trenching exercise all over again. Getting and staying within three kilometers of the Marines to avoid heavy B-52 air strikes only brought on Marine Tac Air support that would strike up to within 1 KM of the Marine positions. Being within 1 KM of the Marines invariably meant getting killed by the Marines themselves. This is, in the words of media reporters, including most especially Cronkite, an example of how the entire Vietnam war was fought, in microcosm.
Quote the figures - 205 Marine KIAs on Khe Sanh versus 13,000 NVA KIAs - to any old Marine you know, and he'll think about it a minute and say, yeah, that sounds about right. Quote the same figures to any talking-head media-crat, and he'll say something like, "in the past, body-count figures supplied by the military have been suspect."
That typifies Vietnam war reporting.
Eventually Giap quietly pulled his few survivors out and the battle ended with a whimper. Just as quietly, the media pulled out; and, it would appear, the cat had their tongue. They didn't want to talk about it; or, to put it in their terms, there were other stories of greater importance at the moment. This too was typical of how the Vietnam war was reported. When the news was bad or could have a bad spin put on it, they couldn't report it enough; when the news was good, it wasn't important enough for real Vietnam war coverage.
So - at Khe Sanh, we had an enemy that entered the field with better than 20,000 NVA regulars, took some 90% casualties, with at least 65% of the total force killed, before quietly skulking off to hide and lick their wounds. The whole event, in microcosm, was typical of the entire Vietnam war, as actually fought, and as falsely reported.
And, we also had, in the overall Tet Offensive, a well orchestrated Viet Cong military disaster, in which better than 100,000 Viet Cong were killed outright, effectively removing the Viet Cong from the list of effective enemy organizations available for action against us in the Vietnam war. Again, each action in Tet was stereotypical of other actions throughout the Vietnam war, in how it was fought, and in how it was reported.
Results? Dominant civilian view of American Vietnam war veterans was as of common war criminals, baby killers, bombers of peaceful civilians. Degenerate draftee-soldiers, on dope and demoralized, losing battle after battle, always shown in defensive positions and postures, sometimes terrified, sometimes killing their own officers and NCOs. A military comprised of low-class minorities who couldn't get a job anywhere else, or who were drafted.
(For the record, less than one out of four Vietnam veterans was a draftee, and the overwhelming majority of draftees did not see action in Vietnam. No elite forces(Marines; Airborne; Rangers; Special Forces; etc.) ever have draftees. Among front line infantrymen, who called themselves "grunts," moral was quite high. Very nearly all of them volunteered for service in Vietnam. Use of dope, incidents of "fragging," cases of low moral, like war crimes or prisoner-abuse cases, were exceptionally rare, and not common, per capita. Abuse of drugs or alcohol and criminal activity was probably considerably lower among the military serving in Vietnam than among any similar male populations, including on American campuses and among American demonstrators, journalists and other revolutionaries at the time.)
Riots in the streets of America. Burning American flags, burning draft cards in public. Marches turned into riots, all televised. Chants of "Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?" on television. Burning campuses, and hijacked campuses. Bob Hope quipped that so many Americans had fled to Canada to avoid service that Canada was now known as "the land of the yellow son."
Again, all of the extremely CONSISTENT "news" reporting that brought all this on was patently false.
So there are two possibilities. Either the media was flagrantly and categorically lying, or, the media was acting as mere mindless parrots, mindlessly parroting the CONSISTENT copy put in front of them. Any who would claim to have not CONSISTENTLY lied should identify whoever supplied the CONSISTENT copy they read while pretending to have gotten it in the usual journalistic ways. Bottom line: it was CONSISTENTLY false. I had to invent a term for it; I call these SLIMC so-called "news" reporters, individually and collectively, FLORMPORIFs.
Now, during those days, Walter Cronkite was almost universally described as "the most trusted man in America," which made his treachery even more insidious than that of the others. He even wrote in his memoirs, with apparent pride
"The daily coverage of the Vietnamese battlefield helped convince the American public that the carnage was not worth the candle."
Military victories reported consistently as losses, American losses emphasized, enemy losses glossed over, trivialized or called into question, American “imperialism,” “colonialism,” use of “puppet regimes” spin on the news had remarkable political effects on Capital Hill, in the Congress and in the White House. Lyndon Johnson could be described as a "media-holic," in that he was particularly fixated upon what the media had to say about the Vietnam war. Today, we have the instant poll; in those days, we had the Network News. Johnson would watch all three channels simultaneously, every day, to get all three major network's delivery of the news.
Despite the fact that he was a big, tough Texan, Johnson had a soft spot for the military. Having served himself with honor, distinction and valor, the public demonstrations, chants and slogans cut him to the quick. It preyed on his mind that anyone could even think that he didn't value life in general and the lives of American servicemen in particular. But the CONSISTENCY of the media news reports began to outweigh even his own intelligence reports regarding what was going on in the Vietnam war.
His daily briefings from the military and from intelligence were also consistent; we were winning, big time, kicking butt, with victories so overwhelming as to be epic and historic. But then he would watch his three networks, and get the media view. He began to nearly obsess over Khe Sanh because the media reports were so CONSISTENTLY negative; he pushed for more intelligence, higher and higher people to look into it, raising pressure on everyone involved, including especially Westy. "I don't want no damn Din Bin Foo" he famously remarked to all who could do anything about it. Even with all the intelligence available to the President of the United States, it was very hard not to believe Cronkite.
Negotiations in Paris had the Viet Cong leadership on the ropes, hoping to negotiate some sort of survival; Secretaries of Defense and State were calling for calm, speaking of a "light at the end of the tunnel." The media was pouncing on them at every opportunity as promoting false hope in a hopeless situation. Then Cronkite did his "special" on the Vietnam war in which he told America that the Vietnam war was "unwinnable" in a scathing attack on American objectives and strategy, in which he stated "There is no way this war can be justified any longer."
That was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. Those words broke the American Presidency, and won the war for the Communists. A shocked, disconsolate Johnson, on watching Cronkite's special, said "If I've lost Cronkite, then I've lost middle America." At that point, the Vietnam war was really over.
An obviously depressed President Johnson announced to the nation that he would not seek and would not except his party's nomination for re-election. Immediately, the position of the Viet Cong negotiators changed 180 degrees, and it was all downhill from there. Under Nixon, the Case-Church bill passed Congress, stating that there would be "no combat activity in or over Southeast Asia," telegraphing to the Communists that we would not enforce the Paris peace accords. Even the provision to respond to violations was discarded by a quick further movement by Congress to cut logistic supplies to American forces in Vietnam. We can only hope that Congress is proud of itself.
Results: First, of course, no more elections. Millions of boat people, from Vietnam, from Laos, from Cambodia. People fleeing on anything that would float, often with no food or water, no real captain or navigator, and at the mercy not only of the elements of the sea, but pirates.
Show trials in Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, of upwards of ten percent of the Vietnamese population, for offenses ranging from collaboration with the Americans to owning more than the average of two goats, or ten chickens. Thousands of show-trial convicted people taken back to their villages and hamlets for public execution, as object lessons for family, friends and neighbors.
As much as one third of the whole population of Cambodia killed in the greatest act of genocide, per-capita, on historic record.
The late "discovery" by the media that, why, yes, we see now, in retrospect, that it was actually, by golly, a Communist movement from the very start, rather than a popular civil war. Gee, what a shame. Meanwhile, in other news . . . |
