ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Vietnam: Television Goes To War

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31115, 19 July 1966, Page 9

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Vietnam: Television Goes To War

The publicity given to the pondering by the N.Z.B.C. about a special British television report on the war in Vietnam might have swung the balance in favour of the decision to broadcast it on all channels on August 1. The 50-minute programme considers the military, political and social aspects of a struggle that has been described as “teletrision’s first war.” There are teams from all parts of the world in South Vietnam, according to the “New York Times.” Carrying 20 to 401 b of equipment through jungles and swamp in 90-degree heat, entangled in wires that link cameraman-to-soundman-to-reporter these teams dive into the muck at the sound of enemy fire and then rise cautiously to record the event—in glorious colour and actual sound—for the fireside viewers of the seven o’clock news. Their vantage point is the thick of battle, not the headquarters briefing room, and they have occasionally embarrassed the military echelons, reduced to rage at their own inability to deny the reportage.

“We shoot combat as it’s taking place, not from a Pentagon release,” Bernard Birnbaum, a director for the American C.B.S. network, told the “New York Times.” “You don’t just see a one minute excerpt of our guys beating the hell out of them. You see our guys taking a licking, too.”

IN THE FIELD According to American Defence Department statistics there are 125 television correspondents and crewmen in South Vietnam, 84 of them employed by rival American networks and stations. The coverage is very costly, and A.8.C., which has 20 men there, compared with the 30 of C. 8.5., estimates its Vietnam coverage costs up to $900,000 annually. Some of these men have been wounded, but there have been no fatalities. ‘There’s no such thing as a non-combatant,” said Robin

Still, an English N.B C cameraman. Another N.B.C. cameraman, Larry Travis, was sent to an outpost near Da Nang for a five-day tour and could not work when his camera broke down in the first few hours. He spent four days on guard lobbing grenades into a halfacre of enemy territory until a helicopter turned up to take him back. SHOT DOWN •

A C.B.S. soundman, Bob Funk, a cameraman, Jim Wilson, and a Canadian-born reporter, Morley Safer, were aboard a Medevac helicopter that was shot down near Ankhe Pass.

Safer described the incident for TV while lying in the scrub, with the sounds of bullets recorded on the soundtrack: “The chopper must have taken at least five or six hits. One went past my face, broke the plexiglass and hit, or rather, bruised, the arm of our soundman. We’re not exactly pinned down, but somewhere in the woods are a couple of snipers who had enough fire power, anyway, to bring down this helicopter.” Television people can carry more weight on their backs than soldiers. A cameraman carries the standard 251 b Oricon camera, plus 101 b of food, film, C-rations, two canteens of water, and usually a pistol. The soundman carries an 18|lb battery, while the reporter carries a 161 b tape recorder. "If you walk four or five miles a day in 90-degree heat and 100 per cent humidity, there’s a certain stage when you say the hell with it all, and feel like chucking it away,” Still said. Intentionally or not, many crews have lost or discarded equipment wading through what they thought was a foot of water but which turned out to be up to their armpits.

EFFECT ON POLICY Television coverage has brought changes in military policy, most notably after American marines razed the village of Can Me before the eyes of a C.B.S. television crew. Home viewers saw the marines set fire to the thatched roof houses with cigarette lighters and flame-

throwers, as weeping women and children were led away. “The day’s operation burned down 150 houses, wounded three women, killed one baby, wounded one marine, and netted four prisoners,” Morley Safer narrated on the CBS. news. “These were old men who could not answer questions put to them in English, and who had no idea what an LD. card was.

“In Vietnam, like everywhere else in Asia, property, a home, is everything. A man lives with his family on ancestral land. His parents are buried nearby. Their spirits are part of his holdings. If there were Viet Cong in the hamlets, they were long gone. The women and the old men who remain will never forget that August afternoon.”

Although Pentagon officials denied that the incident had occurred, Safer’s report clearly showed that it had taken place and subsequent publie reaction led the Pentagon to ban such military operations.

The Safer report provoked a storm in official quarters and there was talk that the F. 8.1. and Senate Committee of Un-American Activities might probe C.B.S. News. The Assistant Secretary of Defence, Arthur Sylvester, protested to the president of

C.B.S. News, Fred Friendly, “You know, we checked into this Safer, and although he was very good, he was very tough on the military.” Friendly replied, “Safer had better be tough on the military. He had better be tough on everybody.” ONE SIDE OF ACTION Some officials contended that coverage such as that by Safer bordered on “unpatriotic” journalism, that the graphic footage of American troops taking blind-folded peasant children into custody, and spraying rice with “nonlethal” crop poison gave a distorted impression of the situation. They pointed out that the Viet Cong was even more brutal, but that it was impossible to show it on television because film depicting the Viet Cong’s savagery was simply impossible to obtain. However, some Communist film has been obtained from Japanese sources and shown on American screens.

Complaints have also been directed against the interviewing of young, inexperienced troops during or immediately after bloody battles when their emotions have been high. Photographs of dead and wounded have been shown on television before the Defence Department has had time to notify relatives.

American newspaper critics have frequently complained that television was not covering the war properly. There was a preponderance of small battlefield incidents of the dirty war and very littie attention devoted to the war’s diplomatic and political aspects. But sometimes, as in the N.B.C. Huntley-Brinley Report, the small, squad-level actions have been put into the perspective of related actions. WELCOME SIGHT At times the military has been pleased with TV coverage. To battlefield soldiers, who often feel forgotten back home, the sight of TV crews is evidence that someone cares. Sometimes there is a military request for coverage, as in the case of Colonel Michael Yunck’s gory press conference. Colonel Yunck had been hit by fire from a village while in a helicopter above it. He had just decided not to order a napalm attack on the village because of the women and children there. “But that’s where the Viet Cong were,” he explained on camera as his leg was being amputated. The fact remains that Vietnam is such a hot issue that any coverage is bound to provoke some reaction.