The Vietnam war was the first “real time” war in American history. Unlike the Korean War, newspapers and television mediated the reports Americans received from their political and military leaders and often contradicted them. Unsurprisingly, the most widely read books on the war remain those written by journalists who were in Vietnam during the war. Today, the names Halberstam, Sheehan, or Michael Herr are known as much for their academic work on the war, as they for their war correspondence. America’s “media war” remains, intellectually, in the hands of the media.

The two volume Reporting Vietnam that Library of America has put together must be one of the most magnificent achievements of Vietnam scholarship. The volumes divide the writings chronologically, the first containing early writings on the conflict  from 1959 through 1969; and the second covers the latter period from 1969 through the fall of Saigon in 1975.  While the sources are principally taken from the Washington Post and the New York Times, they range widely.  The Saturday Evening Post,  Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Michael Herr’s Dispatches are represented. Both volumes contain carefully organized and thorough indexes.

The writers whose work is included reads like that of a journalism hall of fame: David Halberstam, Seymore Hersh, Sydney Schanberg, Bernard Weinraub, Stanley Karnow, Neil Sheehan, Bernard Fall and Frances Fitzgerald represent but the tip of the iceberg. While the articles generally follow the trajectory of the war, they also cover related topics such as the anti-war movement, the experience of returning Veterans and the influence of the war on surrounding countries such as Laos and Cambodia.

The first thing one notices in reading through these two volumes is how excellent much of the writing is. Jack Smith’s “Death in the Ia Drang Valley” is the most chilling account of actual combat  I’ve ever read. Halberstam’s “An Endless, Relentless War” from 1963, and Bernard Fall’s “Vietnam Blitz: A Report on the Impersonal War,” from 1965, are relentless in their objectivity. If you assumed that the press was crudely one-sided in its coverage of the war, you’ll have to look closely to find obvious signs of this in the articles collected here.

Nearly 30 years after the fall of Saigon, these documents are more than just accounts of battles and historical figures. They are themselves historical artifacts and speak as much of America as they do southeast Asia. The articles are a sort of representative archive of the best American thought in the sixties and seventies. Homer Bigart’s early pessimism towards the war makes him seem prescient. Fox Butterfield’s and Joseph Kraft’s accounts of the North Vietnamese’s tenacity make one realize why the war was perceived as unwinnable. But one must go beyond these generalities about a war long since over. One must examine the specific ways in which they speak of American sensibilities that have, too, been forgotten.

There is no introduction to either volume of Reporting Vietnam, but it is evident that the editors viewed their project more as an historical work on the Vietnam War, and less as simply literary accounts of the war. In this respect, this marvelous collection of essays oddly too perfect. Missing are accounts of progress in the war -- that optimism that Halberstam treated with such irony in The Best and the Brightest. Other than Phil Caputo’s account of the ARVN’s final (and heroic) stand at Xuan Loc in April of 1975, the South Vietnamese capacity to defend themselves is assumed not to exist. Despite their elegance, a sense of destiny hangs over the articles in this collection: America will not be victorious.  The collection suffers as an historical archive because the articles fall into the broader, literary, narrative of defeat.

As an historical archive, the collection might be improved by an imaginary third volume.  This might contain optimistic accounts of the war by military figures who believed the “end was in sight.” There might be articles from reporters who “got it wrong in the end.” Attention might be given to writing on ARVN soldiers who died believing that the old Republic of Vietnam was worth saving. These too are part of the American historical record, and yet these are not to be found in Reporting Vietnam’s history of American defeat.

Rereading these essays as an historian, it is evident that characterizing them broadly as simply "optimistic" or "pessimistic" towards the war prevents their historical specificity from being appreciated.  The more useful questions are the specific ones:  “Optimistic towards what” and “pessimistic in what way” -- questions which yield richer insights into the real history of the conflict. For instance, the earlier “pessimistic” articles by those such as Homer Bigart and Bernard Fall, relate the problems in Vietnam to questions of technology. The key to saving South Vietnam, according to Bigart, was keeping highway nine open and training the Vietnamese -- something America had hardly done an adequate job in doing. Leadership too, was a problem -- because it prevented the apt use of technology. Diem’s incompetence impeded, for example,  the swift military reactions to the Viet Cong, made possible with American helicopters.

Lack of direction was a problem for the Viet Cong and, in "An Endless, Relentless War," David Halberstam noted that despite their ability to vanish into the jungles, the Viet Cong, too, lacked leadership. Neither Bigart nor Halberstam thought of the Viet Cong as formidable opponents -- this was the province of the Chinese, who loomed menacingly to the north. However, two years later, in September of 1965,  Bernard Fall wrote that the problems of leadership and the Chinese had been made irrelevant by an irresistible force of America’s own:  the “immense influx of American manpower and firepower,” Fall wrote, made the situation “in the short run, militarily unlosable.”

What is striking about these early essays is that their pessimism derives largely from the failure of the US to do more for Vietnam. It is the lack of US involvement, its unwillingness to exercise sensible leadership (or at least install it) that dooms US involvement. They also indicate two distinct ways in which opposition and support of the war took place. In the former case, the language of technology and leadership act as a sort of fulcrum around which one may be optimistic or pessimistic about the war.

Moving to the essays in the second volume, it is no longer the Chinese menace which thwarts US efforts.  It is the Vietnamese themselves. Fox Butterfield writes of the almost primordial capacity for suffering -- and above all, fighting -- that the North Vietnamese possess. Joseph Kraft reports that the same North Vietnamese who have been confronting the US soldiers have indeed been “fighting for eleven centuries.” Donald Kirk reports how in 1971 it is the Screaming Eagles of the 101st airborne division who are “reluctant to fight and lax in discipline.” Technology can no longer triumph over culture.

In the later essays, it is the Vietnamese themselves who occupy center stage. Vietnamese culture has become itself a sort of ideology, a sort of infinite force, and mere technology can no longer overcome it. This evinces itself in two ways. On the one hand, Mary McCarthy writes that “to the North Vietnamese...everything is...a symbol, an ideogram, expressing the national resolve to overcome. All nature is with them, not just the ‘brother socialist countries.’” The bomb shelters in Hanoi are hardly an inconvenience: this is a “people that...is ready to go underground, harrow hell, to rise again like the rice plants from the buried seed.” There is no longer a need for the Chinese to “loom behind” these Vietnamese. Their attachment to their earth is a sacred one.

On the other, the ideology of culture manifests itself in the impossibility of reinvigorating the south. Peter Kann, in a piece written in November of 1969 entitled “Pacification and Vietnamization,” writes of being able to drive through the Mekong Delta for a week and never being shot at. A local popular forces leader tells him that it has been at least two years since a mortar was fired in his area. Kann can’t help but write that in fact “there is an overwhelming sense of peacefulness and prosperity” everywhere. And yet from all this -- and Kann is adamant -- no grand conclusions are possible. The population, despite the presence of peace, “remains sullen.” The Popular Forces outpost, which hadn’t been shot at for two years, is nothing but a “tin shack.” Illegal trade with nearby Cambodia has increased “greased by bribes to Vietnamese, Cambodian and Vietcong officials.” Even the cattle are “milling and mooing” about. The South, despite every impression of peace, rhetorically invites invasion. Just as Hanoi, despite being in ruins, is a symbol of eternal defiance, peace and prosperity in the south is an ideogram of inevitable defeat.

All these observations are preliminary. More research would be necessary to substantiate them -- though given the sensitivity of the authors in Reporting Vietnam, it’s hard not to believe these insights will prove to be substantive. To be read productively as historical documents, what needs to be put aside are abstract questions and assumptions such as “could the war have been won another way?”; “was the ability of the Vietnamese to resist infinite;” “the left fought for peace;” “the right fought for freedom.”  In place of these comforting and timeless abstractions, we need to begin asking specific historical questions from these documents: in what ways did military escalation in, say 1967, increasingly endanger the South Vietnamese (Andrew Krepinovich has done an excellent job opening up this question in The Army and Vietnam)? In what specific ways did the “peace movement” bring about greater death? In short, we need to put aside the "Vietnam Experience," rooted in the mindset of its journalist participants, and begin examining the multiple historical ways in which America and Vietnam encountered one another. 

Reporting Vietnam is available on Amazon.com.

Nathan Alexander is a Lecturer in the Department of History and Literature at Harvard University.

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