...one of these, one of these Halberstam modern chairs.

Sorry about that. God.

Do you have any curiosity to go back?

I'd like to go back at the right time. Not as a tourist. For the right magazine, yeah I'd like to go back. I'd like to...

What's the right magazine?

Well, I mean that's the question...

Geo wants you to go back.

Well...

Let's go back on the question of reporters and their attitudes, and whether they were questioning the commitment to Vietnam. The point you were making about no hawks and doves.

Well, I think so much of the American investment seemed to be in Diem and there was this idea that Diem was wonderful, he was winning the war. This was the official position, that the war was being won and it was being won because of Diem and he was very popular.

Well, it was quite clear to us that A) the war was not being won and in fact as I said it was not being fought. And in addition he was clearly if anything...if there was any unifying strand to Saigon and to Vietnam, South Vietnam if there is such a country which I think there is not, it was the opposition to Diem. It was the one thing, I think, an awful lot of dissident groups had in common with each other.

So I think those of us had a feeling that there was some alternative. I think probably we were wrong. I think that probably in effect that all of this had been decided because of the French Indochina War and what we were getting now were the people who were either former French corporals who were now generals...Saigon generals were in effect former French corporals.

Or someone like Diem who had sat on the sidelines during this country's war of independence. I mean, no George Washington he. I mean he was the guy who'd...you know...gone to America and to a white colonial...white capitalist society during his own country's war of independence.

But I don't think we saw that. I think we thought that there had to be some alternative because we did not see how deep the root went or how deep the cancer went and in that sense we were wrong in thinking that there was some alternative. The real answer was that nothing was going to work and Diem was not the problem, he was a symptom.

You remember that during the Kennedy Administration there was a notion of counter-insurgency as an alternative.

Yes. Counter-insurgency! They used to...the head of the CIA there Richardson. And when he said counter-insurgency take about five minutes as though he were some expert in this wonderful, mythical, arcane field. It was a very sexy thing, counter-insurgency. All the Kennedy people, Max Taylor, Bobby, they were all in on it, the idea that we would stand...The cold war was at its height.

There was a belief that we could...we Americans could challenge the Soviet advance, the communist advance in the underdeveloped world by having these wonderful people who would be highly trained warriors and spoke several languages and who could, you know, eat snake meat for a week in the field and then befriend the natives. I think we...and Roger Hilsman was very much a part because he'd been with Merrill's Marauders.

I don't think they understood the difference between being commandos and being guerrillas. And I think there's a very considerable difference. I mean it's one thing to stay out overnight in the boondocks and have all kinds of tricks, and it's quite another thing to have a deep political root that the guerrilla has.

And it's not by surprise that the only place that the counter-insurgency or the green berets were effective was with the Montagnards up in the Highlands, because the Montagnards of course hated the Vietnamese. So you were really not talking about Vietnamese nationals. You're talking about anti-nationalism.

But it was a kind of thing about the Kennedy mystique, about the whole idea of swift young men come to take over this century, modern, tough, intellectuals, but tough. Intellectuals with balls, I mean...Rostow, Taylor. It was really silly. It was an awful lot of silliness to that.

Weren't many reporters captivated by the idea of counter insurgencies as an alternative to the Diem period?

Well, I think there was a feeling in the beginning that it would be nice to see you know it work...the commitment work. And I think you...the longer you stayed there the more you felt A) it didn't work and then gradually B) it wasn't going to work. And the longer you were there you felt that the root was deeper and deeper, and the malaise, the sickness, was just particularly deep and it went far beyond the particular moment of the war.

That I mean, somebody once said to me, Dave Hudson, when you talk about the Viet Cong...Dave was a, I think he was then semi with NBC but I think he was essentially with the CIA...said you're talking about some area in the Delta, some province and you're talking about a province chief on our side who is upper class Vietnamese with lower class Vietnamese. Who is a northerner among southern Vietnamese, who is Catholic among Buddhists and who doesn't want to as the Americans wanted him to reach down and touch the peasants. He wants to expand the difference. He wants to get the mud off his heels, not to reach out.

On the other side if he's been trained at all he's been trained by the French or the Americans. Against him is a Vietnamese, Viet Cong commissar who comes from the very village, speaks the very dialect and comes from the very peasantry, knows all the grievances, has fought for twenty years always on the winning side. And I think the longer we got there the greater the sense we had of that. And if you have that portrait finally of what the two sides are, then you realize how silly and mindless the counter-insurgency thing was.

Let's go to an example of an actual reporting situation. I want you to talk about the Ap Bac thing as a case in point. You know, when you start it, just start off by mentioning Ap Bac.

There was one battle that I think was a symbolic battle of the press crisis and of the war at that time. It was the Battle of Ap Bac and if my memory serves me, it's very very early in January, 1963. And I think you have to understand some of the background to understand the significance of it.

This is some year after the Americans have made the enormous, you know, combat...not combat commitment...but booster shot. You know, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, advisors down to battalion level. And of course when we first made that commitment for about two or three months it worked.

I mean for two or three months when you know the Viet Cong would be in a...would attack somebody, and the helicopters would show up, American helicopters would show up, the Viet Cong would panic and they would flee and we would shoot them down in the field. And then as they are, they always learn how to deal with each new western technological device.

Remember, these people defeated the French. They are...they defeated a powerful western army as a guerrilla force. So they are used to the other side constantly having more air power, artillery and gadgetry. It does not throw them. They adapt. So they learned very quickly that when you saw a helicopter, you didn't run and panic. You stood and fought and you finally shot down the helicopter but you made the other side pay.

Well, when the first American helicopters came in there was a momentary victory. Things were going well. And then very quickly the Viet Cong learned how to deal with it. And very quickly afterwards, the Vietnamese army, the ARVN, really began to refuse to fight and began to challenge them.

And we had a very great source down in the Delta, the prime area where most of the battle was taking place. The seventh division around My Tho. And he was a man named John Vann. Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann. Smart, tough, enormously energized. A kind of, in effect, Deep Throat of that day.

And John was getting angrier and angrier because his counterpart would not fight. And he would...John would pinpoint where a Viet Cong battalion was or company was and either they wouldn't attack or if they attacked, they would deliberately give them an escape route. Because he was finding out that his counterpart was under orders from Diem, the great patriot and anti-communist, never to take casualties.

Diem thought that if he took casualties he would lose face. So we began to get this playback starting in about September '62, October '62, November '62 that they were time after time avoiding battle. And the American mission in Saigon would say, "Oh no, no, no. They're little tigers."

Remember the phrase, little tigers? "Little tigers are just as terrific as ever. We're, we're winning this war," where you know, we always...the western army will always have in a guerrilla war better statistics because we have more firepower or whatever, and because the statistics are often lies. But we knew that they were evading battle.

So what happened...what made Ap Bac so symbolic was that they had cornered that given day...I mean Vann had finally prodded them into an attack and they had cornered a legendary Viet Cong battalion, I think it was called the 514th. And I mean they really had them trapped and it was a hell of a battle. I mean they shot down three American helicopters that day which was given the rhythm of the war an enormous number...I mean to be comparable to...later in the war to shooting down thirty.

And there were armored helicopters there and suddenly Vann...with Vann in charge they had closed off three sides of the operation and I mean they really...we had all our firepower and armored helicopters, had a lot of trouble with the Vietnamese troops. They wouldn't...the battalion commander wouldn't take his armored troops in. He was afraid to crack this tree line.

So there's an airborne battalion and Vann is trying to get to close off the fourth side. And his counterpart, Colonel Huynh Van Cao deliberately drops the airborne not to close off the fourth side but to reinforce this other side. So they can in fact escape. And Vann was furious he said, you know, "My god they chose to reinforce defeat. Rather than risk victory!" He was angry and by then at the end of his tour and he was very outspoken and he knew the war was being lost.

And since My Tho was only, God, I think forty miles from Saigon, we could all drive down. We got...very early...I mean it was a very big battle, four or five Americans killed, three helicopters shot down and we all got into cabs and we went down there. And it was true. There was a terrific defeat and everything that we'd been saying that hadn't happened had not happened. I mean it was a symbolic thing of all the malaise and fraud of the war.

So we got down there and we started filing our stories and Vann was very outspoken. So who comes down the next day - when they've already escaped - but General Paul D. Harkins and what does General Paul D. Harkins...says...bunch of reporters around. All of them have been out in the field all night and have seen this extraordinary screw up.

He says, "Gentlemen, we've got it, we've got them in a trap. And we're going to spring it." You know, we got them in a trap and we're going to spring it, I mean, they're gone. I mean they're long gone...I mean there's furious American commanders, I mean they got...there's ten American battalion advisors who are friends of ours who are just bitter as hell that they let them out and my buddy's been killed, my friend...a friend of mine Ken Good was killed. I mean a lot of good people were killed that day.

"We've got them in a trap and we're going to spring it." It was so symbolic of all the mendacity of the war and of all the lying of the American mission. And the outcome of it was, of course, that they almost court martialed Vann not for telling...you know, not because it was a defeat but for talking candidly to reporters. I mean, that was the real sin. It was not a sin to allow the Viet Cong to escape. It was a sin and almost a court martial offense to tell American reporters what had happened.

And I mean, I remember Neil Sheehan went out...Admiral Felt, head of CINCPAC flew in the next day and he said, "I hear it's a very great victory." And Sheehan said, "Well, Admiral, I was there, you know, I was there and it was a defeat." He said "Well, you ought to go down there yourself and take a look." And Neil says, "Admiral, I ah, I ah, I was...I was down there."

Wonderful story about Neil who was a terrific reporter. He was then twenty-five years old and he'd been out all night and the province chief was mortaring...throwing rounds and mortaring his own men, I mean, the great cowardice of that. And Neil is there with a wonderful general, very straight, honorable general named Bob York.

And they're under this terrible firing from the province chief. I think nine of his own men got killed. But he didn't care...he just lobbed mortars...I mean everybody, lob a mortar or howitzer round, hand grenade, who cares, who cares about the peasants, who cares about what's happening.

With this Neil Sheehan absolutely, you know, clinging into the mud...he looks over and there's Bob York, sort of in a pushup position to keep himself dry. And here Sheehan is absolutely terrified and scared and he turns over to General York and he says, "General, General, why'd you...why are you in that position?" And York says, "Son, I didn't want to get my cigarettes wet." I mean it was in the middle of...Sheehan almost got killed with the second round.

I mean...it was all the fraud of the war tied up in one battle. And it symbolized, it symbolized the lack of American leverage with the government, the fact that when they lied we would follow in their footsteps lying to protect them rather than to seek the truth, and we would punish our own officers who were truthful. And we would thereupon challenge the reporters who had tried to tell the truth rather than find out what had really happened.

When you were reporting things that were not popular either with the government in Washington or with the Vietnamese government in Saigon or the US mission in Saigon, did you ever find that you were under pressure from your editors?

Well, I think you have to think of the mind set of those days, of how different it was. I think you had two things. First off, we were challenging in effect a kind of cold war conventional thinking. I mean up to then the cold war conventional thinking was there was a great monolithic cold war struggle...we're the good guys, they're the bad guys.

In a way that was beginning to come apart even before Vietnam. In a way you could see it in Cuba. I mean the idea of bringing the kind of attitudes that dealt with communism, anti-communism and containment in Europe and trying to bring it into areas where it was...you did not have as you had in your comparable Christian democratic societies which wanted only aid. And where you're in fact the very fact that we were aligned with a Christian and democratic society, France, we were aligned with a colonial power and I think that the mind set was very important in terms of the anti-communism.

So you were jarring one set of perceptions and also making your editors quite nervous that you might be accused of being soft on communism. A lot of publications like the Hearst publications and to a lesser degree Time, but not much lesser degree, Time...later wrote about people like me as wanting an Asian Fidel Castro and wanting to be... you know, we're being left wing, radical or whatever.

I mean they would not take the reporting for what it was but they began to politicize what you were doing and trying to put you on the defensive, that you were trying to create a communist menace out there. You were helping the other side which was a very potent argument in the early '60s.

The second thing you had a problem in terms of your editors, was you know the World War II mind set. I mean they were all part of, a lot of these people were part of World War II and Korea where American generals always told the truth, our guys always were straight and honorable, you know. American soldiers walked off to war and God marched in lock step and we were on the good side and other guys were on the bad side and we gave chewing gum to little kids.

All that ended in Vietnam. The mind set of World War II the American generals told the truth and here are a bunch of young reporters saying A) you know, they aren't and they're lying. We always had you know anonymous sources as anybody in Vietnam who spoke to us had to protect a career and therefore had to be anonymous. And so we had a lot of problems.

Our editors were very nervous. Their own mind set was different and they just found it inconceivable that high American officers would lie. It was outside their frame of reference. The Tet Offensive...it was symbolic that it did not change the reporting so much from Saigon, it changed the way editors and readers perceived the reporting.

That was the significance of the Tet Offensive. It changed the way Walter Cronkite thought. It changed the way Ben Bradlee thought. It didn't change the way Peter Arnett or David Halberstam or Neil Sheehan or Ward Just thought. I mean, that's the significant thing...we had a mind set. They had a much more traditional view of patriotism and everything in Vietnam was challenging that.

I mean this was an enormous generational moment. My friend Michael Arlin believes that the really first post war moment begins with Vietnam where you begin to feel that you can, you know, challenge an American version of events while still being a loyal patriot.

Did you have any problems when you were at...

Cut. Just a little left.