Foolish Tragedy

FLASHBACKS: ON RETURNING TO VIETNAM by Morley Safer

Random House; 206 pages; $18.95

In 1965 Morley Safer accompanied a force of U.S. Marines on a search-and- destroy mission to the hamlet of Cam Ne. It was mostly destroy. The footage of troops burning peasant huts was seen by millions on the CBS News. It was an era of "tragic foolishness," says Safer in Flashbacks, an artful contrast of past and present that recalls a time when the typewriter, not the portable hair dryer, was the essential tool of the TV journalist.

He visits former battlefields and old soldiers, including Vo Nguyen Giap, the masterful North Vietnamese general. Safer is not awed by legends carved in brass: "The trouble with generals is that they live in the big picture, and Giap, I decide, is a perfect example. Utterly brainwashed by ambition." TV commentator Bill Moyers, formerly L.B.J.'s press secretary, is still "the sometimes overly pious public defender of liberal virtue." Safer also resents coziness between politics and press, the most blatant example being Vietnamese journalist Pham Xuan An. He worked two jobs: one as a reporter in Saigon for TIME, the other (secretly) as a spy for Hanoi.