| "For 30 unrelenting years two great powers, first France then America, sought to crush a small Third World nation, only to encounter true superpower… human resistance."
These dramatic words scrawl across the walls of a long-abandoned Vietnamese combat trench during the opening credits of Vietnam: Ghosts of War. The feature-length documentary, airing on History Television, is written, directed and produced by acclaimed veteran TV news correspondent Michael Maclear.
With that opening message, viewers know they are in for a glimpse of the "might is right" arrogance that led a pair of nations into a conflict with an opponent they never truly understood. As a reflection on America’s Vietnam debacle from the point of view of a front-line reporter, Ghosts of War could serve as a companion piece to the Pentagon perspective offered in the Oscar-winning documentary The Fog of War.
To make Ghosts of War, Maclear returned to Vietnam last June and stood in many of the same spots he’d broadcast stories from decades before. Formerly employed by both CBC and CTV, Maclear was the first western correspondent to get behind the lines in Vietnam. Throughout Ghosts of War, archive footage of his wartime reports is paired up with new reflections and commentary to deliver a fascinating then-and-now study of Vietnam.
"When I left the networks and news reporting, I really wanted to do something much more comprehensive on Vietnam," says Maclear, explaining the genesis of the film. The first result of that desire was the acclaimed TV series Vietnam: The 10,000-Day War, which debuted more than 20 years ago and is still being shown overseas.
According to Maclear, the intention of that project was to be even-handed and present the war from all sides. "We interviewed more than 100 key participants – American, French and Vietnamese," he says. "All these years passed and then came the Iraqi war with its Shock and Awe campaign, which I personally found obscene. It made me realize that in the 10,000-Day War series I had presented every point of view but my own. That’s when the idea arose of going back and doing a very personalized piece on what had happened all those years ago."
Vietnam: Ghosts of War bristles with the frank commentary of a man who has covered conflict long enough to know that the same mistakes are repeated. "It takes a matter of weeks or months for the military dynamic to take you to war and it can take you decades to extricate yourself," says Maclear – a lesson Americans may be learning once again with Iraq.
Recalling his wartime broadcasts from Vietnam, Maclear says, "I absolutely stand by my coverage." Some of it was highly controversial – in particular his 1970 conversation with two American pilots in a Vietnamese prison camp, in which they denied being tortured and denounced their country’s involvement in the war. "The controversy over the interview with the prisoners, which was dismissed by the White House as a show camp, Hanoi Hilton, a reporter being duped, etc., caused me a lot of personal grief," he says.
Nonetheless, he makes no apologies for how he covered the war. "The alternative is, you go on as a reporter trotting out the same statistics of death and destruction night after night, and you become a caricature of yourself."
Maclear has seen a disturbing evolution in the way combat is covered by the media since Vietnam.
"In Gulf War One, the coverage was totally sanitized," he says. "Now it’s come a step further and the press (in Iraq) has become embedded. It is turning them into soldiers short of putting on uniforms." As well, he adds, the embedded reporters "really couldn’t be too critical or they would be out of a job. I can say flatly as a reporter I would never have consented to that."
Clearly, Maclear is a throwback to a more daring breed of foreign correspondent. As Ghosts of War proves, his ongoing examination of Vietnam is a testament to perseverance and the kind of introspection that is all too rare among today’s television reporters.
The world première broadcast of Vietnam: Ghosts of War airs Thursday, March 18 at 6 p.m. on History Television. |
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