How unusual.
I no sooner talked about Peter Arnett and the Vietnam Struggle in a column about Venezuela, then he died.
The column ran December 11. Arnett died every week later in Newport, California.
The column, in relation to the U.S. navy buildup round Venezuela, was about Arnett telling me in Saigon in 1967 that we had been dropping the battle.
He was 91 years previous when he died and given the wars he coated, starting with Vietnam, it’s a surprise that he lived that lengthy.
After Vietnam — and fame — he went on to cowl different wars like Operation Desert Storm in addition to to attain unique interviews with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and terrorist Osama bin Laden.
However it’s for his protection of the Vietnam Struggle for the Related Press that Arnett is most remembered.
Peter Arnett was the very best reporter who coated the Vietnam Struggle. He arrived in Vietnam as a younger Related Press reporter in 1962 and coated U.S. fight operations from its starting in 1965 to its finish in 1975.
His tales in these pre-television, pre-cell cellphone, pre-computer days dominated the information and had been learn by hundreds of thousands of American newspaper readers.
It was a time when individuals acquired their information from newspapers, not from soundbite snippets or cell telephones.
It was a controversial battle the place 58,220 Individuals troopers had been killed, and nothing was gained. Some 35,000 of these Individuals had been killed after Arnett mentioned we had been dropping the battle. Few on the time listened.
The battle wrecked a lot of Vietnam and precipitated a livid anti-war riot that just about wrecked the U.S. as effectively.
Arnett coated all of it, and he knew extra about it than any politician in Washington or basic in Vietnam.
It was way back and much away, to make certain.
Whereas individuals are inclined to erase the controversial battle from their dimming collective reminiscence, the battle nonetheless haunts us. It was the incorrect battle, on the incorrect time within the incorrect place.
Additionally it is an instance of what can occur when a president goes off the rails, as President Lyndon Johnson did when he threw the nation right into a battle it had no enterprise preventing.
Arnett was a tricky and fearless New Zealander who wrote concerning the battle from the battlefield with a realism that always led to the dismay and anger of President Johnson and the battle hawks surrounding him.
It was a time when the Related Press was a revered, goal and reliable worldwide information company, and never the leftist woke pushed operation it’s right this moment.
And Arnett was the proper reporter, gritty to the core, to be overlaying the battle on the time, largely as a result of he was not an American cheering the battle on, however an goal New Zealander who had no pores and skin within the recreation.
When U.S. troops misplaced a skirmish or a battle, he wrote about it. Fellow reporters beloved and revered him. Washington politicians not a lot.
Sooner or later in March 1967, I used to be alone in Saigon on the lookout for the preventing. It didn’t take lengthy to search out it. It was in every single place.
On my first armed helicopter experience to a navy operation, I believed the lights from the darkish jungle beneath had been fireflies. They weren’t. They had been Viet Cong fighters taking pictures on the helicopter.
Sooner or later I met Arnett in Saigon. New to the battle, I wanted assist. I wandered Saigon on the lookout for the press operation of the Army Help Command.
I went as much as a man carrying a digital camera standing exterior the constructing.
“Are you a reporter?” I requested.
“Proper, mate, I’m Peter Arnett of the AP,” he mentioned.
“I’m Peter Lucas of the Boston Herald. Didn’t you simply win a prize or one thing?” I requested.
“Yeah, mate, I simply received the Pulitzer Prize,” he mentioned.
“Nice. I’ve been studying all of your stuff.”
We hit it off. He took me underneath his wing, gave me recommendation and I didn’t get killed.
Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas will be reached at peter.lucas@bostonherald.com.
