THOMAS D. HERMAN
'A piece of grit' in VietnamWHEN GLORIA EMERSON died in New York recently, America lost a great war correspondent. Her death should cause us to reflect on the role of reporters in wartime and the toll that covering war can take on them.
Unlike some "embedded" reporters who raced triumphantly into Baghdad last year, Emerson's war experiences drove her to challenge the government's version of events, to ask the tough questions -- to be, as she put it, "a piece of grit." Emerson's war was Vietnam. It wasn't easy for her to get there. She was working at The New York Times at a time when the newspaper didn't send women to war. "It seemed unseemly, and one dead woman was so much more trouble than one dead man," she told me not long ago in an interview for a film I am developing on the journalists who covered the Vietnam War. "So I just had to wait and wait and wait until they ran out of men." When she finally got there in 1970, Emerson struck out on her own, away from the pack journalism that dominated the press corps. Unlike her male colleagues whose reports dealt mostly with the fighting, Emerson wanted to write about the Vietnamese, about what the war did to people, not what people did in war. "I wasn't in love with the war as many of the correspondents were. I didn't have to prove I was a big, brave man," she told me. "I wanted to write about the Vietnamese, to leave a record." Much of that record -- of what she found in Vietnamese villages, in GI base camps, and in the small American towns to which veterans came home -- is captured in her book "Winners and Losers," for which she won a National Book Award in 1978. Emerson had visited Saigon in 1956, following a young CIA officer with whom she had fallen in love. She saw a beautiful city that was full of optimistic CIA "boys." as she called them -- the disciples of Colonel Ed Lansdale. They had tremendous energy to implement their democracy-building programs for the South Vietnamese. "They believed they could tidy up the world, and I thought they could," Emerson recounted. "Of course, I didn't see what was coming later." The Saigon she returned to in 1970 was a different city. "It was chaotic and poor and messy and malignant and everything was for sale and everything could be bought," she recalled. She interviewed Vietnamese nightclub singers, widows, prostitutes, draft dodgers, children, amputees, politicians, and refugees. She accompanied Ron Ridenhour, the GI who helped uncover the My Lai massacre, back to the site. "A major told us to be careful -- there was a $5,000 price on Ron's head. This was two years after My Lai! Why would there be a price on his head? So I slept in his room, because if he was going to be killed, I wanted to be there to help him." Continued... |
