Tears Before the Rain by LARRY ENGELMANN

Author:LARRY ENGELMANN
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 1990-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

Keyes Beech, Chicago Daily News

“Christ Almighty, How Can They Do This?”

I should preface everything I say about Asia and Vietnam by stating that we are all products of our times and of our environment. I belong to the World War II generation. And I much prefer winning wars to losing them. That includes Vietnam. So maybe I’m a bad loser; but I still don’t like the way things turned out there.

I don’t like the way things turned out there and I don’t think it needed to happen that way. But that is a long, long story and I don’t want to fight the Vietnam War all over again.

I was somewhat of an anachronism in Vietnam in that I knew that war was hell long before I got to Vietnam. For most of the correspondents there—they were nice guys and hard-working, sometimes very brave and resourceful, and all of that—this was their first war. I didn’t get quite as excited about it. And I wasn’t nearly as perturbed about the morality of it all as they were. I think all wars are immoral, but some are less immoral than others, perhaps. And I had been a Marine in the Pacific during World War II, I was a Marine combat correspondent, and I covered the Korean War, and then I’d covered a number of other things, little revolutions and small wars, all in Asia. In East Asia for the most part. The Indo-Pakistani wars, and the last of the French war in Indochina. So I was not exactly a stranger to the scene.

I took up residence in Saigon in 1965. I was writing for the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Daily News Foreign Service.

David Halberstam was out there at about that time, and Mai Browne and Neil Sheehan and I. I was commuting between Tokyo, which was my home, and Saigon, up until 1965. That was when we committed combat troops and this was no longer a commuting story and I had to take up residence there. I stayed there, except for brief leaves, up until 1971. Then I moved up to Hong Kong. But I never really left. You never really left Vietnam; it was still the only story, and I kept going back.

When the terms of the Paris Agreement were made public, even the antiwar correspondents, the young ones, said, “Well, this is a sellout.” And of course it was. All we were interested in at that time, was getting our prisoners back. We didn’t give a damn about anything else. Really. And so in return for getting the prisoners back, we legitimized the North Vietnamese presence in South Vietnam and arranged it so they could defeat the South Vietnamese at their leisure. That was really the beginning of the end. I saw no threat from the U.S. for the North after that.

I don’t think anyone was deceived by it. It was clear we were getting out and the war had lasted longer than we wanted it to.

I thought it was not a very nice way to do business.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.