How do you feel about the media coverage of the war?
In South Vietnam you had the whole world’s media there, there’s a corruption case, there’s an atrocity, it’s all over the news. In North Vietnam, who’s covering it? Communist, propagandist, journalists. Now these guys might want to be real journalists, but you know if you’re from North Korea, or Mainland China, or Russia, or Chekloslovakia, you better tow the party line, and so you become a propaganda clown for the other side, and so the western intelligence and western media bought that, oh that they’re not doing anything wrong, and they would see all the dirty linin of Saigon of South Vietnam being washed publicly, none of it from North Vietnam, it was all covered up. I’m sure that the other side, the side that we were supporting, and us, did horrible and terrible things too. But our bad things were exposed to the world. One side, the nationalist, really talking about Vietnam or China, the nationalist side is more open, and so all the dirty laundry is out in the world. The other side is very closed, so none of it gets out. And then people fell for that. The academics, the intelligence, the media, in the West, fell for that.
That bothers me during New Years 1968. The City of Hue (which is the old capital) was occupied, the North Vietnamese just came in and it was occupied, and it was horrible fighting there. The Vietnamese 1st Division, some Marines, and part of the 1st Cav, fighting North Vietnamese. But the North Vietnamese, when they took that, their military was encouraged to do this, they got all of the communist agents, would come up, and say get them get them. It was a massacre. If you were a postman, or a teacher or something, they would come to your house when it was occupied and take you up the river and shoot you. And they would do the same thing along the beaches.
About the same time that this had passed, a couple months, the South Vietnamese and the Americans start digging up bodies, and we get sent out on a mission to go down and then up thee little rivers. We come around a break of bamboo and bang, just right in the nose, death. The stink. And we say oh shit, what is this, and there’s a canal over here, and we go up and here’s a pit, maybe a little bit smaller than this room, and about 8, 9, 10 feet deep, a square pit with a bamboo lattice or something or a grid on the bottom, an then there are all these bodies. And they had been exposed. So it looked like parchment on skeletons, but they’re on civilian clothes. And you can see the hair hanging on the skull. Blond hair. A brunch of West Germans, who had gone to Hue (and their wives), to set up a modern dental school at Hue University. Are these guys here to hurt anybody? Hell no, they were there to help. But when the North Vietnamese occupied the city these people were grabbed and taken up the river and shot, and killed. And you almost never seen anything about it in America.
Everybody in America, everybody in the world, heard of My Lai, the massacre in My Lai. But in America there’s almost no mention of the Massacre in Hue.