![]() ![]() Paul’s Cathedral against the blitz, David Duncan’s Marines advancing through the Korean mud. One thinks of how one’s memories of those other wars (wars one didn’t fight in) exist for the most part frozen in the still photographs of the great war photographers-Robert Capa’s picture of the Spanish Loyalist falling on the Catalonian hillside, Eugene Smith’s Marine face-down on the beach at Tarawa, Margaret Bourke-White’s St. Real war footage killing full#In the background, you could hear machine guns firing and the voice of the platoon sergeant, a deep-voiced Negro, calling, “Git on up there! Git! Git!” And the boy stayed there for several moments in the camera’s eye, his own eyes staring straight ahead, his face so full of youth, fear, bravery, whatever else, until he finally moved up. At one point in the film, a mortar round fell near the cameraman, and for a couple of seconds the film spun crazily until it (and he) got straightened out again, and then we were looking, through the camera, at a young man-a boy, surely no more than nineteen or twenty-square-jawed, handsome, All-American, poised there on the side of the hill, rifle held in close to him, waiting on the side of the hill for the signal to move up to where the shooting was, and afraid. Real war footage killing portable#briefing his patrol leaders (a sequence that always seems to be staged, although it probably isn’t), and then we were watching a small group of men on their way up a thickly wooded hill (“They went up to investigate the distant voices,” said the on-the-scene correspondent), and heard the sound of faraway small-arms fire, and suddenly men were running here and there in front of the camera, the small-arms fire became louder and more intense, and once again-in our living room, or was it at the Yale Club bar, or lying on the deck of the grand yacht Fatima with a Sony portable TV upon our belly?-we were watching, a bit numbly perhaps (we have watched it so often), real men get shot at, real men (our surrogates, in fact) get killed and wounded. For example, the other Monday night, a little after seven, Walter Cronkite peered out at us pleasantly from the TV screen, said, “Today’s Vietnam story in a moment,” and then there we were, via film that had been taken twenty-six hours earlier, eighteen miles south of the DMZ, watching a Marine scout detail that had been sent out to look for North Vietnamese encampments. ![]() In any case, there are good men who work for television trying to tell us about the war. I think Tom Hayden speaks for all of us.”) Perhaps one is unfair. (At times, I even picture them sitting around in the Communications Club after hours, brows furrowed in meditation, their tumblers of brandy and Perrier water barely sipped at. From Fifth Avenue, two blocks away (you could hear it through the open window), a band was finishing up “The Marine Corps Hymn,” then started “Sister Kate.” Sometimes I wonder what it is that the people who run television think about the war. I forget who Pittsburgh was playing, but you could look it up. Clendenon hit a long ball in the tenth and wrapped it up for Pittsburgh. ![]() (No “Vietnam Review” that week.) Not a bad game, either. There was a baseball game in progress on N.B.C. I went back home at ten to five, got out a beer, turned on the TV set. Somewhere up toward Ninety-sixth Street a band was playing “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Children all around me clutched American flags and looked the way children usually do, with or without flags. A flatbed truck went by full of teamsters, many of them holding aloft placards reading, “It’s Your Country! Love It Or Leave It!” The Putnam County John Birch Society went by singing “America the Beautiful.” An American Legionnaire went by in a wheelchair, carrying a placard reading, “Victory over Atheistic Communism.” The crowd applauded. Lots of those Catholic high-school bands. program called “Vietnam Weekly Review” for whatever it might have to offer, and went outside (it was a nice day-warm, sunny, full of the first hints of summer’s dust and laziness, of all those hammocks one will never swing in), toward Fifth Avenue and the Park, past which close to one hundred thousand men, women, and children were marching as part of a “Support Our Boys in Vietnam” parade. (Not much doing on television in the good old, mythic old American summertime.) The other Saturday, just back from a trip, and for some reason conscious more pointlessly than ever of that miserable war, I made a mental note to watch, at five o’clock that afternoon, an N.B.C. Women walking down East Eighty-sixth Street in those jouncy cotton dresses. Kids already gabbling about the last day of school. ![]()
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