Covering Viet Nam:

Crud, Fret & Jeers

To the 200 newsmen who make up the current working Saigon press corps, theirs is the hottest beat in the business. Veteran and newcomer alike feel the compelling pull of a first-rank story that is in continuously desperate need of first-rate reporting.

Freelancer Wendell Merick arrived in late 1964 for a ten-day visit and has hung on ever since, working as a stringer for ABC and the London Daily Express. "Whenever I thought of leaving," he says, "something else blew up--and I just stayed." The Australian Broadcasting Commission's Donald Simmons plans to stay "as long as I don't get knocked off. Why give up the best news story in the world in favor of pushing a pen behind a desk?" Malcolm Browne, formerly of the Associated Press, has been awarded a fellowship and will leave soon, after five years in Viet Nam. "I have the horrible, sinking feeling," he says, "that I may never be able to come back."

Nobody's On Top. If his fears prove founded in fact, Browne will be missing a reporter's nightmare--a country where reliable sources of any sort are all but nonexistent, where vital communications and transportation are spotty at their best. One Saigon bureau chief recently broke in new hands by telling them that all he had to offer was "crud, fret and jeers. The crud, he said, is indigenous and ubiquitous; the fret results from the job's unavoidable frustrations; the jeers would come from visiting columnists, Congressmen and assorted other critics, all convinced that they know more than the man on the scene. Says CBS's Dan Rather: "It's the only story I've been on in my life where I get a hopeless feeling when I try to get on top of things. It's so many-faceted that nobody can really be on top of it."

Chasing down stories in Saigon itself becomes so exasperating that, for many of the press corps, a chance to go into the field with the troops comes as a welcome relief. "It may sound corny," explains the Los Angeles Times's Jack Foisie, "but it's refreshing to get out where people say what they mean." Viet Nam press-corps veterans have unanimous praise for the cooperation available at every level in the combat areas. "They are terribly frank," says Australian Simmons. "Sometimes, I think, too bloody frank." Combat reporting has its own special problems, of course, not the least of which is the danger. Eight correspondents have died, a dozen have been seriously wounded, and nearly 100 have been nicked. Sheer endurance is a useful skill. "You pay dearly for a misspent life of martinis and cigarettes," says New York Timesman Charles Mohr. "And when you finally do arrive, there is the possibility that you will find Peter Arnett or Horst Faas of A.P. there ahead of you."

Arnett and Faas are a curious double threat. Arnett is a four-year veteran of the war's slog. Though a correspondent, he has also taken outstanding pictures. Faas is the war's top photographer, but he reports so well that his colleagues immediately debrief him after a mission and send out stories under his byline. Since A.P.'s primary job is the day-to-day detailing of events, Arnett and Faas spend most of their time in the field; they have seen more fighting than the average G.I., know more about scrounging rides than any dozen others.

Despite all the correspondents who cover the combat, though, South Viet Nam's shooting war has become the particular province of the news photographers and TV cameramen. Says one wordman ungrudgingly: "A lot of guys take chances in covering this dirty, shifting war, but the camera boys take the biggest chances and take them most often." The living (so far) legend of the TV troops is a tough, wiry Vietnamese named Vo Huynh, 35, a native of Hanoi who came south a dozen years ago. He mans a camera for NBC while his brother handles the sound equipment. Since he joined the network in 1961, he has been in on every major battle. Coolly sucking on liquor-filled candy, he pokes his bullet-attracting camera into the action from all angles. "You can't stay in one place like a reporter," he points out. "If you stay in one place, you get one picture. We have been very lucky."

"Any Idiot." United Press International's Steve Van Meter, 20, agrees. After his tour as a 101st Airborne infantryman, he stayed on to take pictures. "A photographer has to be where the action is," he says. But for all the danger in the field, Van Meter found his scariest moments two weeks ago in the Tinh Hoi pagoda incident at Danang (TIME, June 3). "When you're out in the field, you always know there's your side and the other side. In Danang, I didn't have either side. The street stuff is ten times more dangerous than any jungle."

It can also be far more difficult to cover. There is general agreement among reporters that the U.S.-bolstered Vietnamese cannot lose the war militarily (a noisy dissenter: L.A. Timesman Foisie, who worries about the constant Viet Cong reinfiltration and says, "I've never known a war where you could win and not hold any ground"). But a consensus about politics is something else again. On that subject, the press corps only agrees that the job is both tough and important. "A good police reporter could cover a military action," says NBC's Ron Nessen, "but the big job here is to try to give shape and meaning to what's going on." The Chicago Daily News's knowledgeable veteran Keyes Beech is even more direct. "Any idiot can cover a war," says he.

5 O'Clock Follies. As it grapples with the fractional, fluctuating political story, the Saigon press corps has lost much of the camaraderie of the chummy days of 1963, when so much reporting was aimed at supporting the same anti-Diem line. "Today there is no Halberstam group," says a relieved Pentagon observer, referring to New York Timesman

David Halberstam, who called the tune for the Diem baiters, and now reports from Paris. Today, Viet Nam reporters hardly get along with each other at all. None but the remotest news is pooled. "I've never worked anywhere in the world where I liked fewer newsmen," admits one old hand. Says a blunter and younger type: "I hate every other goddamned newspaperman in this place."

The characteristic irascibility of the overworked corps shows itself most clearly in its view of the armed forces' public information setup. Though some think it the best possible under the circumstances, the Reporter's Denis Warner, 48, a veteran of every Far Eastern fracas since World War II, says, "It is the worst I have known in any war anywhere." Gruffest of the growling pack is Joe Fried of the New York Daily News. "I think we get very poor service here from the authorities," he says. In the daily military briefings, known as "the 5 o'clock follies," the abrasive Fried stokes his fire and brimstone.

"Wait a minute, now wait a minute," he will snarl after almost every statement. Then he bores in, sometimes filibustering to extended lack of effect, but sometimes digging out news that the briefing officer meant to pass over.

Among the rest of the corps, claims Fried, "you don't see enough digging, or balance." Too many reporters, he insists, still look upon Buddhist "politicians" as religious figures and take them at their word. To Fried, the immolations and amputations "are show biz," and it is a reporter's job to dig behind the pizazz.

Newsmen & Buddhists. Fried is not alone in feeling that by and large the Saigon press corps has been taken in by the Buddhists. There are, to be sure, a few exceptions, notably The New Yorker's Robert Shaplen, 49, the Saigon correspondent most universally respected by both his colleagues and Washington observers. Close behind him in both respect and expertise is the Reporter's Warner. Both have painstakingly documented the myriad activities of Thich Tri Quang as he moves above and below the surface to extend his influence.

Both have made clear their distrust of his assurances that he is not soft on the Viet Cong; both suspect that he would cooperate with the Communists in the mistaken belief that he could later over power them.

Others have not been so canny. Press coverage, says the Washington Star's Richard Critchfield, has played into the hands of Buddhism's political kingmakers. "I don't think Tri Quang would have really existed without the American press," he says. "He has fooled an awful lot of people for a long time into thinking he speaks for the Buddhists of South Viet Nam. Now, I know he only pretends to speak for about one and a half million people." Critchfield also questions the immolations: "My impression is that these just aren't voluntary suicides." He is disturbed because his fellow reporters do not interview enough Vietnamese.

A Change of Moods. Ex-APresser Browne, on the other hand, remains a Halberstam clubmate; he is even more distressed than he was in 1963. He finds that "the whole thing is like a cracked record that sounds worse every time it goes around." The Washington Post's Ward Just, who may have been reading Browne's dispatches before coming to Saigon six months ago, says, "All I knew was what I read in the papers. I couldn't see any way out of the war. If anything, I have since become a little more dovish." New York Timesman Mohr, who grew ever more pessimistic about the conduct of the war during his first tour in Saigon for TIME, still feels that "the United States should be in Viet Nam." But Mohr, for whom the war "is just not entertaining any more," is not about to give way to optimism. "You may look foolish if you write that results are going to be impressive," he says. More positive is CBS's Rather, who was once on the White House beat, and has been moved by his new Saigon view: "I wasn't sure before. Now I am thoroughly convinced that what we are doing out here is right."

By far the largest part of the group changes its mood by reflex, with the ebb and flood of crisis. "I go through periods of depression," says NBC's Nessen. Franc,ois Pelou, 38, of Agence France-Presse, concurs: "Sometimes I feel we can win. And then things look bad again. Right now they don't look good." Observes the Chicago Daily News's Beech: "The biggest problem is trying to keep perspective here--not to be in euphoria one week and succumb to despair the next. You have to learn that a situation that seems hopeless on Saturday can seem not so bad the next Tuesday."

Too Much & Not Enough. Among the many frustrations facing the newsmen, perhaps the worst is the numbing awareness that for all their effort, they are not doing a good enough job of getting the story through. "There is an overwhelming conviction," reports TIME Bureau Chief Frank McCulloch, "that no one on the far end, be he reader or editor, understands what it is the correspondent is trying to say. The gnawing realization is that, if such indeed is the case, the faultlies with the correspondent, not the person at the far end."

Browne thinks the press corps is "guilty of trying to reduce the war to statistics, to simplify a very complex situation." The New Yorker's Shaplen states flatly that much too much is written. "The fact that the U.S. public is submerged in a constant flow of words and images does not mean clarification, but can mean obfuscation."

Almost every Saigon newsman agrees that there has been an overemphasis on day-to-day activities, that more time should be spent on background stories. But where will they find the time? Confused by the politics in the cities, worn out by the fighting at the front, "we plod along," says Freelancer Merick, "and delude the American reader by not reporting enough on such things as the rural pacification and rebuilding programs in the villages. I don't think the American people are misinformed, but I think they are ill-informed." And it is the responsibility of the Saigon press corps, at least in part, to do what it can to remedy the situation, to get the story despite its built-in difficulties, and to tell it straight.

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