In the late 1960 a young reporter working for the news agency Reuters was sent to Vietnam to report on the ongoing war. Whilst this book does not give anywhere near a full story of that war, it does give a comprehensive picture of how futile this war was, and how the Americans were blind to the realities of what was happening there. The story is told from the author's perspective, and focuses on the people with whom he worked and encountered.
This is the first book about the Vietnam that I have read, my knowledge before then limited to what I heard and read as a youngest in the 60s and 70s. It has prompted me to next take off the bookshelf "Many Reasons Why" by Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff. ( )

Hugh Lunn has documented his life and career as a journalist in a suite of light hearted and nostalgic books that captured the essence of Australia and Australians abroad in the 1950's and 1960's. There's a sense in most of that writing that even as he makes his way through Asia and Europe he never strays very far from his roots as a small-town sports journalist. Collectively these books paint an easy going, very Australian portrait; his own story with a touch of self deprecation and in many ways a celebration of innocence and the value of friendship and loyalty.

But it is the very 'niceness' of his other work that makes this book, an account of his reporting in Vietnam in 1967-68, seem like a descent into hell. The more disturbing because Lunn's remains recognizably the 'boy' of his earlier stories, but deeply affected through his experiences. This is his journalist 'coming of age' story, where he realizes that the truth is not in the stories issued by the daily military briefings, or even to be found in reading between the lines of those bulletins. It's in the mud of an isolated fire base, or in the lawless streets of Cholon during the Tet Offensive.

Lunn's war - a reporter's war as he describes it, in some ways parallels the experience of many US and Australian soldiers, their naivety stripped away by the brutality - and futility - of a war that refuses to conform to the 'rules'. It's a story about the survival of decency, and in his case also the pursuit of truth, and then simply, survival.

In an odd twist, Lunn who was there to tell the whole story of the war, doesn't try to do any more here than tell his own story and that of the foreign and Vietnamese journalists he worked with. He rides empty medivac choppers heading into battles to get the stories that Washington didn't want the public to hear, interviewing troops under shellfire and surrounded by their own dead. But Lunn doesn't pretend to be anything more than he is, a reporter who leads a relatively safe existence, who has the choice to put himself in danger, or not. So the title of the book '... a reporter's war' is not a commentary about the nature of the war, but a simple caution to the reader about the limits of his experience. This is the story that he could truthfully report about the Vietnam war, because it was his own.

I'd recommend this as one of the best stories about reporting in the Vietnam war. Read it alongside Sheehan's 'Bright and Shining Lie' and Davis's 'One Crowded Hour', just to name a few. ( )