Kerry & Hagel - Vietnam Vets Reaching the Top

[JPRINGLE]

 

 

With the sudden and unexpected resurrection from the near dead of the Vietnam War generation, I suddenly feel a new lease on life, and stagnant journalistic impulses stirring.  Yet nowadays I've nowhere to send my stories, not even to the International Herald Tribune, which in the last few years has ignored most of its former experienced Asia writers.   

 

However, the IHT was still using my stuff in 2004, and it was then I made a trip to the Mekong Delta to do a piece about John Kerry's war, which was in the news again then.  And I also went into the U Minh once impenetrable 'forest of darkness,'  found a former Vietcong village, and wrote a second Delta story about what it was like during the war, and the the tensions among the Vietcong's generations, just as once there were over Vietnam in families in the United States.   

 

Both stories were printed prominently on the OpEd pages of the IHT.  Often these stories were often 'lifted' by the New York Times, of which the IHT is the international off-shoot, though I don't know if these ones were.  The New York Times didn't pay for these 'lifts anyway'; how miserable is the life of the free-lance, as I had then become when I had to step down at the London Times when I reached compulsory retirement age (for everyone except Rupert Murdoch). 

 

I paid the expenses of the trip out of my own pocket, and probably earned US$250 for each, which barely covered my costs. 

 

But they were fun to do, tootling about on the winding waters on fast wooden passenger vessels, or using a small motor boat to penetrate deep into the U Minh, latterly mostly deforested now, as are most other places in former Indo-China.  

 

Given the shock appearance of Kerry and Hagel in the forefront of Obama's second administration, I am sending both stories for the interest of Old Hacks. (Someone among the Old Hacks asked a couple of years back if any of us had been to the U Minh, but I couldn't lay hands on my piece then).  The first, 'Amid the Winding Waters of John Kerry's Vietnam,' datelined Nam Can, was printed on 9 March, 2004, and 'Closing the Circle on Vietnam,' date-lined the U Minh forest In on March 13-14, 2004.   

 

I should say these were unofficial visits to Vietnam, without the minders of Hanoi's Information Dept in tow;  they were furious about my insurbordination, but I couldn't afford their prices and likely interference.  Milly Pringle, who speaks Vietnamese, came with me and interpreted.  And we met a rich Vietnamese expatriate from California in Ca Mau who came with us, and contributed generously to the costs (and invited us to a wedding, which we attended).  I never saw by-lines from other correspondents from these date-lines.  (Carl Robinson wrote stirring stories about the Ca Mau peninsula in more recent years).

 

I am not even an American reporter, and I couldn't imagine why staffers didn't came in to do stories for the US press at the time of that earlier Kerry controversy. It called out for a series on the ground.  Now nobody has any damned money!    I'll just have to restrain those faintly stirring impulses.     

 

J. Pringle

Phnom Penh

10.1.2013

 

  

[Lance Woodruff]

Dear Jim,

Thanks for your sending along these stories, and for the commentary on the state of the media. Alas, ne'er to return...

Lance Woodruff

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