LUCAS : Dateline: Viet Nam (fülszöveg)
Only a reporter like Lucas – Pulitzer Prize winner in the field of International Reporting, twice honored with the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award – could capture the unique record of the war in Viet Nam revealed in these astonishing dispatches covering two years of a "terrible war."
For the first six months of 1964, Jim Lucas was the only correspondent regularly assigned to – working and living with – the combat troops in the Mekong Delta. With 16,000 Americans involved in Viet Nam at that time, Lucas was on a first-name basis with 90% of the officers and enlisted men south of the Bassac River. And most of them knew him as "Jim." From the troops, he got his Army field boots – the ones that had steel plates to protect against poisoned spikes – and side by side with the men he learned what it is like to fight an enemy they could only know "when he starts shooting at you."
Lucas was the first reporter allowed to fly north of the 17th Parallel as the war spread from the rice paddies of the Delta to the mountains where the Viet Cong mounted mortars on the hillsides and shot down onto planes. In a variety of craft, he sailed the Bassac River and patrolled the Gulf of Tonkin while Radio Peking's contemporary "Tokyo Rose" reminded shrilly that "The Gulf is not an American lake."
From the devastating betrayal of the Special Forces camp at A Shau (where a borrowed green beret became the only symbol of authority) to the siege of Long Khanh (the town that exists only for war); from Cai Cai (the dirtiest, remotest, ugliest, most dangerous outpost along the Cambodian border) to the mile long caves where the Viet Cong make their own ammunition, run hospitals and printing presses and fly their own flag – Jim Lucas has chronicled the war in Viet Nam as only one who has spent two years at the battlefronts could possibly know it.
"You know it's a war when you see a young man killed," Lucas writes in an unforgettable opening sentence. It is a "bewildering" war in which the enemy always seems to be somewhere else. A "curious" war with all sorts of interlocking factors being fought by men who are "enduring the unendurable." It is a war in which "harassment" is a significant weapon and the lie detector an important piece of field equipment. A war in which heroism is routine and the enemy – besides the elusive Viet Cong of seemingly endless villainy – includes heat, rain, mud, leeches and snakes. It is a war in which more than 250,000 Americans are now involved.
Only a reporter like Jirn Lucas could have told the story of the war in Viet Nam with the insight, the compassion and the courage that illuminates every dispatch in DATELINE: VIET NAM.
|
|
|
| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
 |
 |
|
 |