John Laurence, a CBS correspondent in Vietnam, found a stray cat in Hue amid the rubble and chaos of the Tet offensive in 1968. That cat proved almost as intractable and difficult as the Vietnam conflict itself. Eventually, however, like the antagonists, the cat and Laurence worked out their own modus vivendi.
Laurence's eloquent, at times acerbic recollection of Vietnam is one of the finest books in its genre, comparable to Michael Herr's ''Dispatches.'' His Vietnam reportage was exceptional, almost artful; his summary and recapitulation more than three decades later is formidable, gripping and always informative. He deserves to be read thoughtfully and carefully.
For those with firsthand experience of the war, the memory is forever and vividly stamped into their lives. Laurence himself realized that ''I had left Vietnam but it hadn't left me.'' He traces his journey from his arrival in Vietnam in 1965, filled with optimism and idealism -- eager to be with the program, as the Army's public information officers urged -- to a profound disillusionment and cynicism that mirrored that of the nation and, more important, of the fighting men. He recalls the so-called Zippo squads, who torched the huts of peasants as part of search-and-destroy missions; the war had become, he writes, a ''death machine.'' He witnessed the important battle in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, and its signal of a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, Gen. William C. Westmoreland declared it ''an unprecedented victory.'' The other side had left the scene and their body count was higher than the American one; obviously they must have lost.
Most affecting are his accounts of the war's impact on the American soldiers and the Vietnamese peasantry. ''Pacification'' meant only more violence and dislocation. The An Lao Valley was prosperous farmland, worked by thousands of peasants. American officers designated it a Vietcong stronghold and ordered the area evacuated. They promised helicopter transportation for the locals, as well as food, shelter and medical attention. But they reneged, needing the choppers for other missions. They abandoned the peasants in what had become a free-fire zone. The villagers could stay or attempt to walk away, though they had never strayed much beyond their homes. Laurence interviewed the American colonel in charge: ''It's one of those things that happen in a war. These people have been disappointed many times before.''
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When Laurence arrived in Vietnam, he believed the cause honorable and its success certain. After all, the United States had never lost a war. The 25-year-old reporter spent 22 months in the country, spread over more than four years, and the neophyte transformed into a soldier of sorts. When he returned in 1970, in time for the assault against the North Vietnamese command structure in Cambodia, he realized the war was hopeless, that South Vietnam was swollen with corrupt military and political leaders, and yet Richard Nixon proclaimed a determination to win. When he announced the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, Nixon declared, ''The time has come for action!'' And Laurence thought, ''As if five years of bombing and killing Vietnamese has been inaction.''
By this time, Laurence found the killing beyond reason. ''And for what? For pride! For the egos and vanity,'' he writes, of Washington politicians and pundit generals. How can you maintain objectivity in such a climate, he asked a fellow correspondent, who insisted that if you opposed the war, you lost your objectivity. As if accepting the war salvaged your objectivity.
Laurence capped his Vietnam tours with ''The World of Charlie Company,'' an extraordinary documentary, broadcast by CBS in 1970. In ''The Cat From Hue,'' he discusses the making of the film in detail, and it stands as an epitaph of the war's futility. In the film, the soldiers speak for themselves. They know they neither should be, nor want to be, in Vietnam. By this time drug and alcohol abuse in the Army was widespread, and the disconnect between officers and G.I.'s had become ever more apparent. After initially approving and aiding the project, the military shut it down. ''The generals must have known, better than we, that when good soldiers argue openly about the wisdom of fighting a war, as they had in Charlie Company, the war is lost,'' he notes. Shortly after the film was broadcast, a West Point military instructor asked CBS for permission to show it to his classes.
Those who still regard Vietnam as a great moral crusade, who continue to insist that the military would have won had it been properly supported, and who blame the biased reporting of the news media for turning the nation against the war, probably would indict Laurence as a willing accomplice in the outcome. But he offers ample evidence of the futility and disillusionment felt by both Americans and Vietnamese. Pilots related their frustration with the ineffectiveness of their bombing; the military's daily press briefings had no correlation to reality; search-and-destroy missions had turned into the destruction of peasant villages, ostensibly to save them -- it was all there, waiting to be reported. John Laurence and the news media did not concoct the estrangement between reality and the official versions of the war.
The longest war in our history is of value today only for the lessons it taught. We are in Laurence's debt for his sober portrayal of the limits of American power. Why did we fight in Vietnam? Against a primitive socialism that threatened our capitalist system? To prevent falling dominoes? The Vietnamese had no such questions. They knew exactly why they fought. Political cadres won their hearts and minds with Ho Chi Minh's dictum ''Nothing is more precious than freedom and independence.''
John Laurence returned to Vietnam in 1982. The strident slogans of Vietnamese nationalism and Marxism had fallen victim to Soviet incompetence, emerging trade relations with capitalists from Japan and the West and an incipient tourist industry. Laurence had his pocket picked in Ho Chi Minh City to remind him of the good old days in Saigon. While visiting Hanoi, he interviewed an American diplomat. The official commented on the new developments, and remarked, ''You know, it would have been a lot easier if they had just let us win the war.''
Stanley I. Kutler is the author of ''The Wars of Watergate'' and editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War.
Copyright © 2002 The New York Times Company
