NEWSCASTING

Mortars at Martini Time

A line of G.I.s snakes cautiously through the underbrush. The sudden chatter of a machine gun sends them scrambling for cover, and for several long tense minutes there is a furious exchange of small-arms fire. Then, just as suddenly, all is quiet, and out there in the elephant grass a young recruit lies twisted in the grotesque posture of death. He had been with the company for a month, someone recalls, but sadly, no one can remember his name. Says one G.I.: "He had freckles ... I think."

The brief drama, shown recently on CBS evening news, has been replayed in a hundred variations since TV turned its cameras on the war. The principals may change, the settings may alter, but the essentials are always the same: destruction and death, horror and heroics in a brutal struggle against an unseen enemy of unknown character. The TV correspondents, stern faced and looking somehow too neat and clean-shaven, are omnipresent. But their words, imposed on scenes of stark and often shocking realism, seem superfluous. They say that U.S. casualties have risen 15% over a previous month, that the Army uses more than 10,000,000 sheets of paper each day in Viet Nam and, endlessly, that war is hell. The verbiage may even be informative, but what tells the story--and more--is the anger and frustration on the faces of a team of medics as they try unsuccessfully to save a shrapnel-torn G.I. with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Bravura Style. TV, in short, has brought a new and gripping dimension to war. Combat in living color is often wanting in perspective but rarely in impact. Neither those who control TV news nor those who watch it can fully determine its effect, except that it hits hard at the emotions. During World War II and the Korean conflict, Americans were largely left to imagine for themselves the scenes of war as recounted in the often melodramatic reports of broadcasting journalists. In the early days of the Viet Nam war, the carryover of this bravura style was evident in the TV reporters who, packing pearl-handled revolvers and cocking their helmets at a rakish angle, would instruct some G.I.s to fire aimlessly into the bush so that it seemed as though they were in the midst of battle.

But the hard and revealing eye of the camera eventually put an end to such performances, and the image of the TV reporter changed to that of a sober professional who, though his background in Asian affairs might have gone no further than a college survey course, was dedicated to telling the inside story. The tour of network staffers in Viet Nam, unfortunately, was usually limited to six months and consequently the coverage was often little more than each new man's personal impressions of how it is over there.

Hardened Audience. As the fighting intensified, however, the networks strengthened their Saigon bureaus and soon the nation's TV screens were crackling with gunfire and swarming with helicopters and screaming jets. There were shots of wild-eyed Vietnamese women clutching the bodies of their babies, brilliant flashes of napalm scorching a hillside and shavetail Marines charging into a cave with machine guns blazing. Wary of how much the public could stomach, TV editors cut out the goriest footage, explaining that color made even the most superficial wound look fatal. Yet gradually, TV's war coverage became more daring and more disturbingly realistic. Fifteen months ago, a CBS film showing G.I.s setting fire to a Vietnamese village with their Zippo cigarette lighters stirred a furor that was splattered across the pages of the nation's newspapers. A few weeks ago, when the network ran the more shocking scene of Viet Cong bodies whose ears, according to the reporter, had been cut off by souvenir-hunting Marines, there was barely a ripple of response from viewers. Last week alone, the TV coverage of the Dak To fighting could have been viewed as a brutal combat drama in serialized form; night after night, the screen reeled off pictures of American soldiers exchanging mortar fire with the enemy, and medics carrying the wounded to shelter.

The cumulative effect of TV's first war, says University of Chicago Sociologist Morris Janowitz, is that it "has hardened and polarized public sentiment. Those people who are skeptical of the war now have a vehemence in their skepticism. Those who are for the war see Americans being killed and they don't want these sacrifices to be in vain."

Vigil, Not Viewing. With the realization that war is not John Wayne mowing down the Nips at Bataan but a young second lieutenant staring dumbly at his shell-shattered legs, has come a new sense of involvement. Rather than dash off letters to the networks, many people now feel compelled to take up a placard and demonstrate--both for and against the war. Generally, the reaction is visceral, a feeling of frustration, a conviction that somehow, some way, the U.S. must get out or get done with "that war so few people understand," as one CBS correspondent recently described it.

Seeing is not only believing but also benumbing, especially when it hits close to home: that nice neighbor boy, who used to toss a football in the backyard, now tossing grenades; that youngish family man sucking on a cigarette and coldly detailing how many V.C. he killed that day. For those who have relatives in Viet Nam, the attention to the screen is more vigil than viewing. The reaction of one Houston housewife is typical: "I'm always afraid that the next Marine they load on a helicopter will be my nephew. I'm afraid to watch and afraid not to."

Battlefield Privacy. Some viewers complain of a credibility gap. Explains Mrs. Valetta Wheeler of Detroit, who has two brothers in Viet Nam: "What they say on TV and what my brothers say in their letters is not the same." Others, like Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, bemoan TV's "one-sided" war coverage in which the camera focuses almost exclusively on U.S. troops. American viewers, of course, never see the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong in battle, let alone committing brutalities. Indeed, when the Communists do release films to Western TV, they invariably show little more than heroic civilians during an air raid or triumphant Hanoians watching a U.S. plane going down.

As for the State Department, officials commend TV for its taste in "the invasion of battlefield privacy," but deplore the penchant of correspondents for overplaying each skirmish as some kind of turning point. Only recently, in a rare turnabout, CBS characterized the battle of Loc Ninh as simply the recapturing of a town that was overrun by the enemy, while ABC more correctly described it as one of "the greatest American victories of the war."

Mindful that after two years of mortar fire at martini time, the audience is perhaps suffering from battle fatigue, the networks have lately broadened their coverage to stories on the economic and political rehabilitation of Viet Nam. Yet there is little likelihood that the TV news shows will curb their compulsion to run those blood-flecked combat scenes. The labor and expense of filming and transportation are too great, and the competition between the networks too brutal to drop them. Walter Cronkite thinks they may bring about a "general revulsion" against war, which may be too much to expect, since they by no means tell the whole story of Viet Nam. But even in their fragmentary form, they tend to discomfit the stay-at-homes.

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