A German Journalist From Vietnam On The Vietnam War

Trigger

Recently (9/27/2013), I came across this article published in the Weekly Standard titled “The Lost Cause/A reporter remembers the agony of South Vietnam” about a German journalist, i.e. Uwe Siemon-Netto, covering the Vietnam War on the ground. A German journalist? I was immediately intrigued.

“He arrived in Vietnam in 1965 … [his] last trip to Vietnam was in 1972”

Summary & Comment

Salient quotes from the article (emphasis added):

1. “Unlike some American reporters who seldom ventured anywhere outside Saigon, Siemon-Netto ranged far and wide across South Vietnam, dipping in on remote Special Forces bases and brave South Vietnamese Army units who were cutting down from trees the corpses of village elders and their children (including babies) who had been strung up, tortured, and murdered by Communist forces.”
2. “He describes weeping Marines coming across hundreds of women and children murdered by the Vietcong on their way to enjoy the holiday. Then, slowly, the full horror of the Tet atrocity emerging when it became clear that the Vietcong had targeted at least 3,000 South Vietnamese civilians on written execution lists even before the offensive started. When this fastidious German reporter came upon a mass grave of victims, he was astonished to find an American television crew standing around with idle cameras. The crew refused to shoot the scene because, they said, they didn’t want to film “anti-Communist propaganda.”
3. “Because he loved the Vietnamese so much, Siemon-Netto became deeply angry that the murderous brutality of the Communist side was never fully reported by American or other Western reporters. Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese commander, supervised a military campaign that deliberately terrorized civilians, understanding that, in Giap’s own words, “the enemy does not possess the psychological and political means to fight a long, drawn-out war.””
4. “There is also a touching scene in which he meets an American machine-gunner who was desolate with grief and contrition because the black-clad figures he had earlier gunned down had turned out to be children. But Siemon-Netto makes it clear that the chasm between Vietcong and American murders was galactic in size: The Communists carefully planned violence against civilians, whereas the Americans punished anyone they could prove had committed such acts.”

Germans are sometimes famous or infamous for saying the truth regardless of who is hurt. German directness!

State Secretary John Kerry you should read this book by that German author!