First Connection to the War
- How did the media depict the war??
The media really, government really dictated a lot of what we saw in the news. And it was like a scoreboard everyday, we would come home from school and parents would sit down and watch TV and you would have your segment about the Vietnam War, but they always had a score. How many lives were lost, you know the United States lost 27 men, South Vietnamese lost 120 men, Viet Cong lost 400 men, so it was like a score. Yeah! We were winning this war.
- How did the media’s coverage on the war affect you?
As for a kid, growing up watching the news with my parents. They showed battles, they had a lot of embedded reporters, a lot of anchormen that we see some of the top anchormen, they were actually embedded and they would show the wars and what was going on. I get the feeling looking back, that a lot of it was filtered.
- What specific images do you remember from the war, for example the “Napalm Girl” Picture?
I saw it in Life magazine. So now the media started the antiwar sentiment. They were really fighting the government in terms of getting the real horrors of this war to the American public. And as a kid you’re seeing it and you go oh my gosh, “Mommy what happened to her, why is she running around like this” and that was part of the idea. And, I forget the name of that town
-My Lai, the My Lai massacre?
Yeah, it was tough, messed up. I can remember the end of the war watching it on TV, and the people trying to get out of Saigon. They were showing broadcasts of that and the next big media thing after the war was to release the POWs. And seeing these guys, I was about 12 then, but watching this and seeing these guys coming off this plane looking a lot like skeletons. John McCain whose one of our senators from Arizona, and was a presidential candidate. He was a POW in the war, they look back and show old films of him when he got back and was greeted by his family. It was a lot of crazy stuff, especially for a kid. I’ve captured in mind a lot of graphic images; there was another graphic image of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a man. I remember that picture as a kid, and it just “wow” as a kid that’s pretty shocking and that media was out there.
- How do you think the media’s coverage affected those at home?
Watching that on TV made people think “wow!” this is weird this is messed up. A lot of these guys are coming home and they are not the same. Like our neighbor next door, Bruce, wasn’t the same when he came home, he was different. We rarely saw him come out of the house at all. And the moms didn’t talk a whole lot about what was going on. It took him a while and then he went away and I never saw him again.