Once Upon a Distant War; Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles

Times Books/Random House, 1995. First edition. Stated. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xii, 546, [1] p. Occasional Footnotes. Illustrations. Interviews. Documents and Sources. Source Notes. Bibliography. Index. William Walter Prochnau (August 9, 1937 - March 28, 2018) was an American journalist. In 1996 he began working for Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. Before working for Vanity Fair, Prochnau was the Washington-bureau chief for The Seattle Times and he later served as a national affairs reporter for The Washington Post. He reported from Southeast Asia and Vietnam, making two tours of Vietnam in 1965 and 1967. Prochnau wrote articles which include the profile of Pat Robertson and a report on the kidnapping of multinational businessmen held for ransom. His work on the Vietnam War while at the Seattle Times landed him on the infamous master list of Nixon political opponents. Prochnau won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship[5] in 1988 to research and write about the media as it operated in the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Derived from a Kirkus review: The early years of American involvement in Vietnam unfold in this well-written study of the war correspondents who made it their beat. The Vietnamese government was hostile to American media inquiries, and reporters who came face to face with the Saigon regime were about as well liked as the Viet Cong. At one point in 1963, in fact, as Prochnau relates, several members of the American press corps had to seek asylum at the American ambassador's residence lest they be assassinated. The reporters included Richard Tregaskis, author of the classic Guadalcanal Diary; Neil Sheehan, whose 1988 book A Bright Shining Lie was born in the chaos of Saigon in 1963; Malcolm Browne, and, most famously, David Halberstam, who began reporting for the New York Times full of JFK's conviction that this was a just, even chivalric enterprise and became disillusioned by the lies and delusions the American government fomented. Prochnau's account makes for fascinating reading.