Vietnam: A Reporter’s War

AUSTRALIAN MILITARY

• In early 1967, as America stepped up its commitment of troops to the conflict in Vietnam, Hugh Lunn, a twenty-five-year-old Australian journalist working for Reuters in London, was sent to cover the war. “All you have to do is sit up on a hill and watch a battle and write what happens,” he was told matter-of-factly.

  259 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., ports. ; 22 cm. reprint (first published in 1985)#010524

• Lunn, Hugh, 1941-
• Vietnam War, 1961-1975 — Personal narratives, Australian
• Hugh Lunn:“When you write a book about the Vietnam War the story never ends.

  Forty-five years after I was there, people still write to me about the War. People I’ve never met visit Saigon and send me photos of the Continental Hotel with my room marked with a cross, or ask if some building in a picture was the Reuter office. Foreign correspondents e-mail reminiscences or check details from the 1960s.

  Saigon 1967.  I arrived age 25 in Vietnam to cover the war for Reuters. I was befriended by a local reporter, Dinh, who warned me “very quick and easy to be killed”. Dinh knew things that I could not: Vietnam is always too short of fortune-tellers; my Melbourne roommate Bruce Pigott is “not long-live man”; and Heaven hurts fair women for sheer spite.

  Faced with the daily US military news briefings where fantasy is put out as fact, I found myself questioning a war that could not be won, and my role in it. My year of duty was almost up when the cataclysmic Tet Offensive changed everything. Four friends were killed.

  I finish the book with Dinh’s final revelation that the most trusted and influential Vietnamese journalist in Saigon was, all along, a Viet Cong colonel.”