War Correspondents and Vietnam: Part Two – Explaining History
War reporting is never neutral. It is a filter through which the chaos of conflict is organized into a narrative. In the Vietnam War, that narrative was a battleground as fierce as any in the Mekong Delta.
In this week’s podcast, I returned to Philip Knightley’s classic study of war correspondence, The First Casualty. Knightley, a member of the legendary Sunday Times Insight team (who broke the Kim Philby story), argues that Vietnam was a new kind of war that required a new kind of journalist.
The Independent Eye
American journalists in Vietnam faced a unique dilemma. They were often “embedded” with troops, relying on the US military for transport, protection, and information. This closeness bred a dangerous complicity. To report the full horror of the war was to betray the young men you were sharing a foxhole with.
British correspondents, however, had a different vantage point. Unburdened by patriotism or direct dependence on the Pentagon, writers like John Pilger could see the war for what it was: a crime against humanity. Pilger, who passed away last year, made his name by refusing to treat the war as a sterile military exercise. His reporting for the Daily Mirrorfocused not on “heroic” battles, but on the civilians carpet-bombed by B-52s.
When critics accused Pilger of being “emotional” or “anti-American,” he countered that his work was simply “anti-war.” He argued that the charge of emotionalism usually came from correspondents who had been exposed to the violence for so long that their compassion had died.
The “Vast Brothel” of Saigon
One of the most shocking aspects of the war—often ignored by reporters focused on combat—was the staggering level of corruption. Knightley describes Saigon in 1967 as a “vast brothel,” a city where economic activity had ceased, replaced by a frenzied black market.
The scale of theft was industrial. In one year alone, half a million tons of imported American rice vanished. Weapons, washing machines, and even helicopters were sold to the highest bidder—often the Viet Cong themselves. This wasn’t just petty pilfering; it was a systemic rot that implicated top US brass and South Vietnamese officials. It mirrors the rampant corruption seen decades later in the US occupation of Iraq, where billions of dollars in cash simply disappeared.
Racism as a Weapon
Perhaps the darkest element of Knightley’s analysis is the role of racism. To motivate conscripted soldiers to fight an elusive insurgency, the US military actively inflamed racial hatred. The Vietnamese were reduced to slurs—”dinks,” “gooks,” “slopes.”
As Frank Harvey noted in his reporting on the air war, many pilots viewed the conflict not as a geopolitical struggle, but as a racial crusade. “We have to stop communism,” one pilot told him, “and we’d rather do it here… than on the coast of California.”
This dehumanization had lethal consequences. If every Vietnamese person is viewed as subhuman, then the distinction between combatant and civilian evaporates. This logic led directly to atrocities like My Lai. As the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed, this racism was not new; it was a fundamental fact of American society, exported to the rice paddies of Indochina.
However, we must be careful not to view this as uniquely American. The French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, and the Belgians in the Congo all relied on the same colonial racial chauvinism to justify their violence.
The Legacy
Vietnam changed war reporting forever. It shattered the “World War II” style of journalism—the cheerful, morale-boosting dispatches of “our boys” storming the beaches. It forced reporters to confront the complex, interdisciplinary nature of modern conflict, where political lies, economic corruption, and racial hatred are as important as ballistics.
Reporters like John Pilger showed us that the duty of the journalist is not to be “objective” in the face of atrocity, but to be truthful. And the truth of Vietnam was that it was a war fought largely against civilians, fueled by a racism that corrupted the souls of those who fought it.
Further Reading:
- The First Casualty by Philip Knightley
- Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse
- Dispatches by Michael Herr
- Fire in the Lake by Frances FitzGerald
Transcript
Nick: Hi there again and welcome to the Explaining History podcast. Today, I’m diving back into Philip Knightley and his writing on the Vietnam War, particularly on the war reporting of that conflict.
Philip Knightley was, of course, one of the journalists on the Sunday Times Insight team who, in 1967, broke the story that the rumoured defector to the Soviet Union was none other than MI6’s head of counter-intelligence, Kim Philby. Knightley wrote an excellent biography of Philby and later visited him in Moscow.
The First Casualty is Knightley’s seminal work on war reporting. Previously, we talked about the difficulties American journalists faced in accessing verifiable facts and how the “embedded” journalist became complicit with propaganda. The lies and deceptions pioneered by the American military in Vietnam became a template for every modern war.
Today, we’re going to look at how British war correspondents fared. Knightley writes that British correspondents were better placed to write about Vietnam than their American colleagues—just as, later, Americans were often better placed to write the truth about Northern Ireland. However, the British press seemed reluctant to get deeply involved. The Times and The Observer sent people infrequently. The Daily Telegraph had the most regular coverage, but their correspondent, John Doar, turned out to be a double agent—Captain Nguyen Ngoc Phac, aide to the chief of staff of the South Vietnamese army.
The Daily Mirror, which turned against the war in 1966, sent feature writer John Pilger once or twice a year to write his own very personal view. Pilger became a celebrated figure of the journalistic Left. He died last year, leaving behind an enormous body of work informed by the searing experience of witnessing crimes against humanity in Vietnam—specifically, the carpet bombing by B-52 aircraft.
Pilger’s attitude was that Vietnam was a new type of war: impossible to cover without it becoming part of you. And once it becomes part of you, you have to decide where you stand. When you have a war fought to prevent national liberation, resulting in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, it becomes difficult to view it as a sterile, impartial process.
Pilger made his stand clear. The Sunday Mirror launched his series on civilian suffering with the headline: “How can Britain support a war like this?” When critics accused him of being “emotional” and “anti-American,” he replied that he was “anti-war.” He argued that the charge of emotional reporting usually came from correspondents who had been exposed to the war for so long that their compassion had been deadened.
British magazines also relied on freelancers who, while perhaps less informed, had a fresh eye. In 1964, freelancer Brian Monaghan interviewed South Vietnamese Air Force officer Nguyen Cao Ky. Ky told him, “People ask me who my heroes are… I have only one hero: Hitler. We need four or five Hitlers in Vietnam.” When Ky became premier, the US Embassy denied he ever said it. Unfortunately for them, Ky repeated the statement to the BBC the very next day.
Neither British nor American correspondents did well in writing about the unimaginable scale of corruption. Most changed money on the black market or bought stolen goods. One British correspondent was shocked when a US Army captain offered to sell him stolen liquor and cameras within hours of his arrival.
As Murray Sayle of The Sunday Times wrote in 1967: “Saigon is a vast brothel between the Americans… and the mass of the population who are being reconstructed.”
The facts of the corruption were staggering. In Vietnam, the black market turned over millions of dollars a month in stolen US supplies. You could buy anything from C-rations to a tank. In 1967, half a million tons of imported rice simply disappeared. The CIA even allowed Laotian generals to use its private airline, Air America, to smuggle opium.
This scale of theft mirrors what we saw in Iraq in 2003—huge bricks of cash vanishing and contractors looting the state. It likely dwarfs what happened in Vietnam, but the template was set there.
Most correspondents considered corruption stories peripheral. They preferred to attach themselves to combat units and write in simple, World War II terms. Jim G. Lucas, a decorated Marine veteran of Iwo Jima, was typical of this school. He wrote snappy sentences about bravery and the “smell of cordite,” arguing that “young men court danger as they court women.”
This “quiet heroism” narrative is problematic. It mythologizes a conflict where the majority of victims were civilians. It ignores those who did not court danger but were napalmed in their villages. It is as far from John Pilger’s view as possible.
Other correspondents, like Frank Harvey, focused on the air war. He found that 90% of American pilots believed they were there to “stop communism.” One pilot told him he thought they should “start at the DMZ and kill every man, woman, and child in North Vietnam.”
Vietnam required a new kind of correspondent—one who could handle complex political issues and resist the numbing effect of the violence. As John Shaw noted, “Things which shocked you when you first went there… six weeks later shocked you no more.”
Crucially, the war required the courage to face its racist nature. Governments realize that to wage war successfully, troops must dehumanize the enemy. In Vietnam, racism became a patriotic virtue. All Vietnamese became “dinks” or “gooks.” Since the enemy was physically indistinguishable from the ally, hate was directed at everyone.
As Sartre wrote, American racism—anti-Black, anti-Mexican, anti-Asian—was a fundamental fact that went deep. In Vietnam, the US discovered it had liberated an emotion over which it lost control. Frank Harvey quotes a helicopter pilot describing hunting a Viet Cong soldier: “I ran that little mother all over the place… finally he turned on us… we really busted his ass.”
This isn’t to single out America as uniquely monstrous. Colonial powers like France in Algeria, Britain in Kenya, and Belgium in the Congo relied on the same white racial chauvinism to justify their actions.
I’ll return to Philip Knightley later in the week to discuss the reporting of the My Lai Massacre. Thanks very much for listening. Take good care. Bye.
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