Question

Read this excerpt from "Not a Dove, But No Longer a Hawk."

When I first walked across the tarmac of Saigon’s Tansonnhut Airport on a warm evening in April, 1962, nervous that the customs officers might not accept the journalist’s visa I had hurriedly obtained from the South Vietnamese consulate in Hong Kong, I believed in what my country was doing in Vietnam. With military and economic aid and a few thousand pilots and Army advisers, the United States was attempting to help the non-Communist Vietnamese build a viable and independent nation-state and defeat a Communist guerilla insurgency that would subject them to a dour tyranny.

What is the author’s connection to the social and political issues of his day?

Answer 1

Between 1959 and 1962, Sheehan fought as an army officer during the war with Korea, in the 7th Infantry Division, whose newspaper he also directed. He was then sent to the Tokyo barracks, where he edited Bayonet magazine. There he began his career as a correspondent for the news agency United Press International (UPI), which entrusted him with the mission of serving in Vietnam. In 1964, for his extraordinary work, the Times recruited him to be one more season in the main theater of operations of the Indochina war.

Sheehan along with David Halberstam and Malcolm Browne were among the trio of most eminent and respected war correspondents in Vietnam. The three of them used to report on the course of the conflict in a different way than the official communiqués reproduced by the press that responded to the dictates of Nixon.