Arts of War on the Web

Malcolm W. Browne, the former Associated Press and New York Times Vietnam War correspondent best known for taking a much-reproduced 1963 photograph of a Buddhist monk immolating himself  on the streets of Saigon, died August 27 at age 81 of complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Iver Peterson, a retired New York Times reporter and former Vietnam War correspondent,  died August 1 following treatment for acute myelogenic leukemia. He was 70 years old.

After graduating from Harvard in 1964, Peterson went to work for The Times as a clerk for the famed correspondent James B. “Scotty” Reston in the Washington, D.C., bureau. Peterson then left journalism to work for U.S. AID in Vietnam. He returned to The Times in the war zone to cover the fighting.

He “was one of a generation of young reporters who earned distinction as war correspondents in Vietnam,” Daniel E. Slotnik wrote in his NYT obituary. “Besides his dispatches from combat zones, Mr. Peterson wrote of an American dump scavenged by two Vietnamese villages near Danang; drug use by American soldiers; and the practice by Cambodian soldiers of wearing amulets to ward off bullets.”

The acclaimed journalist and novelist Bill Granger died April 22 at the Manteno Veterans Home in Illinois. Granger, 70, who served in the U.S. Army from 1963-65, died of heart failure.

Granger  was born in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisc., and grew up on Chicago’s South Side. He graduated from DePaul University with a BA in English in 1963, and then spent two years in the U.S. Army. During his military service in Washington, D.C., Granger worked part time as a copy boy at The Washington Post. After his honorable discharge, Granger was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and later a columnist and editor at the Chicago Sun-Times.

Granger’s first novel, November Man, a thriller, was published in 1979. He went on to write a total of twenty-five mysteries and thrillers, most set in Chicago, under his own name and the pseudonyms Joe Gash and Bill Griffith. Granger and his wife Lori also co-wrote three nonfiction books.

In a wide-ranging interview on the website The Browser, Martin Bell (above), the long-time BBC war correspondent who has covered more than a dozen conflicts, including the American war in Vietnam, discusses five of the most important books dealing with modern wars.

Bell’s list:  Trusted Mole by Milos Stankovik, which deals with a British Army officer in the Bosnian War; Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, a satirical look at newspapers and war correspondents; Joseph Conrad’s iconic novel, Heart of Darkness; Wilfred Owen’s Collected Poems, which include verses dealing with the poet’s experiences in World War I; and David Halberstam’s celebrated look at Vietnam War policymaking, The Best and the Brightest.

The Best and the Brightest, Bell says, “is an account of how the Americans got into this war. How brilliant people devised schemes that went against all common sense. One of them, of course, was [Secretary of Defense Robert] McNamara, who had been president of the Ford Motor Company. They thought that simply by the application of force and intelligence they could make things happen on the ground. But they didn’t understand.”

Bell says that when he was in Vietnam he “saw in 1967 and 1972 this massive application of fire power. But you don’t change people’s minds with fire power. You can, in fact, just alienate them. What Halberstam delivers is an account of how this happened.”

One of the reasons he chose Halberstam’s opus, Bell says, “is because I think it applies today to what the western powers are trying to do in Afghanistan. There are so many parallel structures – the massive application of fire power and not much understanding of the people. To the Afghans, we tend to be just another foreign invader, however well-intentioned. Which is why, like Vietnam, I think it’s an unwinnable war.”

A version of the interview was republished on Salon.com

The journalist, author, and Vietnam War correspondent Wallace Terry, who received the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award in 1989, will be inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame in January.  In addition to Terry, who died in 2003,  Gwen Ifill, Johnathan Rodgers, Ruth Allen Ollison, and Pat Harvey will be inducted during the ceremonies, which will take place January 26 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. During the last 19 years, NABJ has inducted more than 45 journalists into its Hall of Fame.

“In 1967, Wallace Terry became deputy bureau chief for Time magazine in Saigon. His two years of Vietnam War reporting included coverage of the Tet Offensive and scores of combat missions with American and South Vietnamese pilots,” the NABJ said in announcing Terry’s selection. “In addition to writing for USA TODAY and Parade magazine, Terry was an award-winning author, producer and public speaker.”

Terry’s book, Bloods, an oral history of African-Americans who served in Vietnam, is a classic of Vietnam War nonfiction. He was a good friend of Vietnam Veterans of America, having organized VVA’s big Rendezvous With War academic conference on the Vietnam War in 2000 at the College of William and Mary, and was a regular contributor to The VVA Veteran.

Joe Galloway, the former Vietnam War correspondent, co-author (with Gen. Hal Moore) of the classic Vietnam War memoir/battle history, We Were Soldiers Once and Young , and long-time military correspondent and columnist, recently announced that he will end his weekly column, which for the last seven years was carried by the McClatchy Newspapers, and retire from the newspaper business after fifty years in the trenches.

Galloway, who received a VVA President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the 1999 VVA National Convention, says he will continue to write the occasional op. ed piece. That is good news because Joe Galloway (above in combat correspondent’s uniform in Vietnam), has for many years been one of the nation’s top journalists and has been one of the strongest, most supportive journalistic voices for American veterans and those in uniform.

William Tuohy, the well-respected former Newsweek and Los Angeles Times Vietnam War correspondent, died Dec. 31 following open heart surgery in Santa Monica, California. He was 83, and had received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Times.

“Few correspondents have seen have seen and written more about the war in Vietnam than William Tuohy,” the Pulitzer judges noted.

Tuohy moved to The Times in 1966 after serving as Newsweek‘s bureau chief in Saigon. He wound up working for The Times for 29 years. Tuohy served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in 1945-46, according to his LA Times obit.

The current (May/June) issue of AARP Magazine has a long feature on the year of 1968 that includes a section about events that took place during that pivotal year in the Vietnam War. The reader-friendly article contains an interview with noted Vietnam veteran film director Oliver Stone, who was an infantryman with the Americal that year. There also are words from Lawrence Colburn, who was a machine gunner on the helicopter piloted by Hugh Thompson that saw what was happening at My Lai and swooped down to save a dozen women and children. You can read it on line at AARP’s website.

Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist and human rights activist who gained international fame when his harrowing story was told in the movie The Killing Fields, died March 30 at age 65 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The film was based on the book of the same name about the Cambodian Holocaust by American journalist Sydney Schanberg of The New Times, with whom Dith Pran worked as a guide and interpreter in the 1970s. The late Dr. Haing Ngor won an Oscar (in his first film role) portraying Dith Pran’s quietly heroic work in the much-honored 1984 movie.

To read an excellent appreciation of Dith Pran by Janet Wu and Andrew Tarsy in The Boston Globe, go to: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/31/dith_pran_two_views_of_a_legend/