Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 18, 1993 TAG: 9309180210
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HAMPDEN-SYDNEY LENGTH: Medium
"You've got all these people pointing fingers at each other," said Spencer Culp, a Hampden-Sydney College senior.
CBS' Morley Safer and three Pulitzer-Prize winners - Peter Arnett, Neil Sheehan and Stanley Karnow - told Culp and the other students that the media didn't lose the war by turning the public against it; naive strategists and deluded generals got the United States too involved in an unwinnable war.
"The strategy was self-defeating," said Sheehan, author of "A Bright and Shining Lie."
The soldiers didn't lose the war but are now unfairly being used as scapegoats, Safer told a crowd of 1,500 at the campus gymnasium.
Harry Summers, a colonel in the war who also wrote a book about it, said, "There wasn't one truth about Vietnam; there were a million truths in Vietnam. It depended where you were."
"It's getting muddier," Culp said as he sat at the press table, complaining about the difficulty in presenting the diverging opinions to classmates born at the war's end.
Then came film director Oliver Stone's conspiracy theory, which Culp called "kind of a metaphysical explanation."
Stone, director of the Vietnam War movie "Platoon," said he had a "worm's eye view" of the conflict as an infantry soldier. But his vantage point widened when he returned to research "Heaven and Earth," a movie about a Vietnamese woman, due to be released at Christmas.
The war effort was doomed, Stone said, when the policy makers decided to strategically relocate hamlets in South Vietnam under a Catholic U.S. president. The move ignored the Buddhist shrines and cemeteries and destroyed the agriculture infrastructure.
"The peasants never recovered, and neither did the spirits," Stone told the students and Vietnam veterans packed into a gymnasium. "When it is all said and done here, it is my belief that it is the spirits and the ghosts of Vietnam which defeated us."
The night before, Culp heard Walt Whitman Rostow, national security adviser for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, defend the decision to send troops to Vietnam. Then came William Colby, CIA director when the war ended, who criticized the media's coverage of the war and ultimately blamed Congress' lack of will for losing "a winnable war."
Stone said the speeches by Rostow and Colby were "full of untruths."
"I don't think anyone's lying," said another Vietnam War colonel, Charlie Beckwith. "It's just vantage point."
Former Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam, has been critical of the media's coverage of the war and of President Johnson's policies.
There were mistakes made, and there still are unanswered questions about the war, he said Friday night. But he wasn't specific and said he just wanted to relate his personal experiences. "I'm not going to blame anybody."
The North Vietnamese are rapidly moving away from communism, and the United States is now "the No. 1 country on the face of the earth," Westmoreland said. "In the scope of history, Vietnam is not going to be a big deal. It won't float to the top as a major endeavor."
As the elderly soldier walked away, he was ambushed by an off-duty Arnett, who once was told by the military that his reporting was overly negative and he needed to "get on the team."
Arnett said there seemed to be less animosity at this symposium than at similar, less extensive re-examinations of the war. "Is it because we're getting old?"
They shook hands, and Westmoreland said with a smile, "I'm not mad at you anymore."
"Honestly?," Arnett replied.
"We did our job, didn't we?" Westmoreland said.
"To the best we could," Arnett said.
by CNB