Flak from Officers

Flak from Officers The bullet arced through the evening air above the radio station, penetrated a skylight over the newsroom, missed the duty newsman's head by inches, tore through two pieces of copy paper in his hand and landed, spent, in his typewriter. That was in Saigon a few years ago, but there have been other perils for news staffers of the American Forces Viet Nam Network (AFVN). Lately, most of those perils have come not from the enemy without but from the brass within.

They started cropping up when a group of young newsmen raised the specter of censorship. Basically, they charged interference with the so-called McNamara Doctrine of 1967, in which the then Defense Secretary stressed that servicemen "are entitled to the same unrestricted flow of information as all other citizens." The officers who oversee AFVN claim that the newsmen were confusing censoring with editing. As is almost always the case, neither side is entirely right. But the brass certainly made matters much worse by some clumsy counterattacks.

Blanketed Walls. One Army newscaster who complained off the air last fall about the network's handling of a major story was reassigned to cleaning records in the music library. A couple of weeks ago, on the air, an Air Force newscaster introducing a piece of analysis by Eric Sevareid wryly suggested that it was sufficiently after-the-fact to avoid "the wrath of Vice President Agnew." He found himself demoted to a production crew in Danang.

But the Catch-22 award for military machination was earned this month after another Army newscaster clearly transgressed. Angered by the apparent pattern of intimidation, Specialist 5 Robert Lawrence blurted at the end of his regular telecast: "A newscaster at AFVN is not free to tell the truth." To a startled audience that included his commanding officer, Lieut. Colonel James Adams, he added: "We have been suppressed, and I'm probably in trouble for telling you tonight the truth."

Indeed he was. The next day, Lawrence was taken before Colonel Robert M. Cook, inspector-general of the U.S. Military Assistance Command Viet Nam (MACV). After denying him legal counsel, Cook escorted Lawrence to the Orwellian atmosphere of an "interrogation room," complete with blanketed walls, tape recorders and (for purposes unknown) a mattress on the floor. As he resisted persistent questioning, Lawrence said: "I don't believe this is happening."

Lawrence finally won his request for counsel, and MACV launched an official investigation of his censorship complaints. As the inquiry got under way, Lawrence found his flank under attack: the Army served him with court-martial charges for insubordination late last year. Lawrence, it seems, was preparing a newscast when a sergeant asked him to drive some soldiers to their quarters. Lawrence refused and, according to the charges, was also "disrespectful in language." Such a trait would hardly seem to fit him for the Army's next move, which was to make Lawrence a chaplain's aide.

Constant Meddlinq. Possibly, some good may come of the Lawrence outburst. It is unlikely to stem from the command investigation, if for no other reason than that the command's office of information (MACO1) is the immediate superior of AFVN and the actual target of many of the censorship charges. When the command inquired into similar charges last year, it dismissed the complainants as "young, inexperienced, impressionable." A healthier airing of the situation could come from a congressional investigation, which has been ordered by John Moss, chairman of the House Foreign Operations and Government Information Subcommittee.

According to TIME Saigon Correspondent Burton Pines, an objective inquiry would find that AFVN's eight TV and ten radio stations are not all that hamstrung by censorship. It is true, as Lawrence charges, that film clips about racial disturbances in the U.S. must be cleared with Lieut. Colonel Adams. But they do run. So do stories about peace demonstrations in the U.S., and so do stories about the current Lawrence affair. Still, adds Pines, the network is the victim of constant MACOI harassment and meddling.

MACOI, of course, is essentially a public relations outfit, seeking to present news in the best possible light. It is accustomed to killing releases prepared by each division's information office (such as a 1969 story about a gung-ho air unit that called itself "Death Wing Inc." and left calling cards on raided bunkers). But when MACOI casts the same protective eye on news film supplied to AFVN by CBS and ABC that has already been shown in the U.S., it sometimes dents the McNamara Doctrine. What AFVN probably needs is some supervision that can separate public relations from news.

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