Reporting Vietnam, 2 vols.

Part 1, American Journalism, 1959-69

Library of America, 858 pages, $35

It was "a quiet evening in the sleepy little town of Bien Hoa twenty miles north of Saigon....The presence of the Americans symbolized one of the main reasons why South Vietnam, five years ago a new nation with little life expectancy, is still independent and free and getting stronger all the time." In classic Henry Lucian July, 1959, Timestyle, the Library of America opens its two-volume anthology of reporting on the war in Vietnam with an artifact from the museum of journalism prose. The eight American soldiers described by Time write letters, play tennis, and watch a Jeanne Crain movie, when "six Communist terrorists" creep out of the darkness and let fly a "murderous hail of bullets." Two Americans die - the first of 58,000 Americans to die in Vietnam.

Within a few pages, however, in Stanley Karnow's article from the Reporter (January 19, 1961) and Homer Bigart's dispatch in the New York Times (February 25, 1962), it is clear that, rather than a new nation getting stronger, President Ngo Dinh Diem's regime is a corrupt dictatorship on the point of collapse, and that America is stuck in a very real war, with no end in sight.

The Library of America, beginning in 1982 with Herman Melville's Typee, Omoo, and Mardi, has republished 105 classics of American literature - including detective fiction. With the publication of Reporting World War II (two volumes, 1995), the best of daily and magazine journalism - long known as literature in a hurry - achieved the literary status it has long deserved.

Now these volumes on Vietnam also document - with excerpts from David Halberstam, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Michael Herr - the development of the "new journalism," which (because standard journalism could not adequately portray the emotional impact of the '60s revolution) went beyond Associated Press impersonal reporting and employed the interiority, interpretation, and cinematic techniques usually associated with fiction.

With the New Yorker's Robert Shaplen, we tour Saigon, once a lovely French colonial city, now, due much to the American presence, swarming with whores, beggars, and profiteers. With James Michener, we reconstruct minute-by-minute the Kent State killings and shudder with disbelief when the national guardsmen actually lock live ammunition into their rifles. As Tom Buckley interviews the aging, infamous General Loan, the man photographed executing a bound prisoner during Tet - the moment the American public turned against the war - the general whips out a little pistol - and lights his cigarette. At 5:30 A.M., April 30, 1975, Bob Tammarkin, of the Chicago Daily News, is lifted off the U.S. Embassy roof, as the North Vietnamese tanks, trucks, and troops roll into Saigon. Below, hundreds of Vietnamese stare into the sky, waiting for the next helicopter - which will never come.

These pages have their heroes, like the unnamed soldier in Daniel Lang's Casualties of War, who risked his future to report his four comrades who raped and murdered a Vietnamese girl, and Specialist Fourth Class Jack C. Smith, now an ABC-TV reporter, who endured one of the most horrifying fire fights ever recorded, as men all around him - chests, bellies, arms, and heads blown away - screamed and screamed and screamed, until they bled through their mouths, passed out, woke up, screamed again, and died. But what will linger longest are the atrocities. A witness tells Seymour Hersh about My Lai: "They had them in a group standing over a ditch - just like a Nazi-type thing....One officer ordered a kid to machine-gun everybody down, but the kid just couldn't do it. He threw the machine gun down and the officer picked it up....I don't remember seeing any men in the ditch. Mostly women and kids."

The editors, not offering an introduction or explaining the rationale behind their choices - newspaper, magazines, book excerpts, and one TV commentary, Waiter Cronkite's 1968 post-Tet report concluding that the United States should quickly negotiate its way out - tacitly invite critics to second-guess their list. I would make room for I. F. Stone's 1964 analysis of the Tonkin Gulf incidents, Anthony Lewis's denunciations of the Nixon-Kissinger 1972 Christmas bombing of Hanoi, and Eric Sevareid's 1972 CBS commentary: "There does come a time when the heart must rule the head. That time is when the heart is about to break."

Recently one of my students wrote of his father's Vietnam experience: "When he went he was a thirty-day-old husband. When he came back, he was a three-hundred-and-seventy-seven-day-old murderer. And he never let himself forget that." As the father struggled to allow himself to heal, "He couldn't allow his subconscious to swallow memories of faces without skin, babies without arms, men without heads. But he also knew that he couldn't allow himself to get stuck in the past." Ideally, books like these can help heal us, if we allow them to teach.

I finished reading the World War II anthologies, whatever the sadness of lost lives and ruined cities, with some feelings of pride and hope, for many of the sacrifices had been precisely that - offerings, that a better world would emerge from the blood and rubble. But much of Vietnam journalism leaves us crushed with sadness. We suffered 58,000 American, 220,000 South Vietnamese, and 1,100,000 Vietcong and North Vietnamese military dead, plus 300,000 South and 50,000 North Vietnamese civilian dead. And then we limped away, our honor stained. Martha Gellhorn, after visiting a children's hospital, warns us in the Ladies Home Journal (January 1967), "Someday our children, whom we love, may blame us for dishonoring America because we did not care enough about children 10,000 miles away." And Neil Sheehan, in the New York Times Magazine (October 9, 1966), hopes that his country will not, in the name of some anti-Communist crusade, do this again.

Tragically, with all its sorrow, wounds, scars, and unforgiven sins, one of the few positive legacies this terrible war has left us is the literary excellence and moral outrage of the writing it inspired.

Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., assistant dean of Fordham College Rose Hill, visited Vietnam in 1996.