"Escape from Saigon - a Novel" takes place at the end of a protracted war that began a half century ago—America's First Television War it was called—and much of the story and its characters center around on the brave journalists who covered those events. Among the main characters in our story by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo are Lisette Vo, the first Vietnamese-American woman to report on the war for a major US TV network and Sam Esposito, the ambivalent, Yale 1962 graduate, whose relentless reporting for The Washington Legend won him praise from this editors, the generals and infuriated every president he wrote about, especially the vindictive Richard Nixon.
The names of some of the journalists of that era are well known: David Halberstam, Walter Cronkite, Frances Fitzgerald, George Esper, Peter Arnett, Dickie Chappell who lost her life to a landmine or Beverly Deepe who arrived in Vietnam in 1964 as a full-time correspondent.
But what of now—who will we be the war correspondents of today, whose deeds and passion for the truth will figure into future historical novels?
One of them will surely be Carmen Gentile who has been covering Afghanistan and Iraq for over a decade and is the author of a forthcoming book "Blindsided by the Taliban" that was inspired by his being wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade that nearly cost him his sight.
Here is the latest dispatch from Carmen Gentile and written exclusively for the "Escape from Saigon" blog.
ISTANBUL March 8, 2017 --- Late last year I was on a reporting trip to Mosul, where Iraqi and Kurdish forces, along with the help of the various militias, were attempting to force the Islamic State (ISIS) from the country’s second-largest city.
What I saw was an all-too-familiar horror. Rows of homes are pancaked by mortar fire. Along the road are
The gruesome tableau in Mosul is an unfortunate continuation of the more than decade-long war US forces waged throughout Iraq. I covered that conflict periodically in the company of young soldiers tasked with not only fighting a largely invisible enemy, but trying to re-establish a military and police force that were dismantled and destroyed during the country’s invasion. Calling their task “no win” was an exercise in extreme optimism. Sisyphus has a better chance of getting his stone to remain at the top of the hill.
There is no shortage of “no-win” wars, flares ups and skirmishes to cover these days. Though statistically there is far less armed violence now then during the just about any period of the 20th century, the killing and maiming seems ever more confounding and less reasoned, a dark echo of the lessons not learned in Vietnam.
Since I started covering global conflict 13 years ago, I’ve seen the worst of humanity on display in the Middle East, South Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean.
That first time was in Haiti was while covering the 2004 coup.
One morning, I came across a group of Haitians in the capital standing around the body of man who had been tortured and shot. His twisted corpse laid in a pool of his own blood. A group of curious children approached the body, looking it over with a mixture of tentativeness and fascination, then proceeded one at a time to jump over the mangled victim as if it were a game.
Days later the U.S. Marines landed in Haiti in an effort to restore some semblance of order and curtail the killing. Months later, U.N. peacekeepers led by Brazilian forces arrived to take over. They’ve been there ever since.
Years later, when I was in Haiti to covering the earthquake, I met young children that spoke reasonable Portuguese because they’d grown up in the shadow of armed foreigners.
As horrified as I was by the degradation of humanity in Haiti, no war has affected me more personally that Afghanistan. I’ve spent years chronicling NATO and Afghan force efforts to contain a persistent enemy with many named but the sake of simplicity I refer to under of the umbrella of “Taliban.”
It’s where I came closest to losing my own life. A few years ago I was shot in the head with an rocket-propelled grenade that fortunately failed to detonate, an injury that in the annals of warfare is considered of the strangest on record.
Reports are now circulating that the Russians helping the Taliban in its fight against US-led forces, a historical “F.U.” for America’s covert assistance to the Mujahadeen that fought the Soviets whose sons and grandsons are today’s Taliban.
It could be considered a tragicomedy worth a chuckle if countless civilians haven’t been killed amid this cycle violence that seemingly grows faster and more ludicrous with every passing year.
Same story in Iraq, where I’m heading back later today to cover the continuing effort to retake Mosul, a fight whose progress is measured by each building seized from the Islamic State. As the generals congratulate themselves publicly for their progress, hundreds of thousands of innocents flee the city knowing that if they ever make it back they’ll finding little left of the life their were forced to leave behind amid the piles of rubble that were once their homes.
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