Arts of War on the Web

Joe Galloway, the former Vietnam War correspondent, co-author (with Gen. Hal Moore) of the classic Vietnam War memoir/battle history, We Were Soldiers Once and Young , and long-time military correspondent and columnist, recently announced that he will end his weekly column, which for the last seven years was carried by the McClatchy Newspapers, and retire from the newspaper business after fifty years in the trenches.

Galloway, who received a VVA President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the 1999 VVA National Convention, says he will continue to write the occasional op. ed piece. That is good news because Joe Galloway (above in combat correspondent’s uniform in Vietnam), has for many years been one of the nation’s top journalists and has been one of the strongest, most supportive journalistic voices for American veterans and those in uniform.

William Tuohy, the well-respected former Newsweek and Los Angeles Times Vietnam War correspondent, died Dec. 31 following open heart surgery in Santa Monica, California. He was 83, and had received the Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for international reporting for his Vietnam War coverage for The Times.

“Few correspondents have seen have seen and written more about the war in Vietnam than William Tuohy,” the Pulitzer judges noted.

Tuohy moved to The Times in 1966 after serving as Newsweek’s bureau chief in Saigon. He wound up working for The Times for 29 years. Tuohy served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in 1945-46, according to his LA Times obit.

The current (May/June) issue of AARP Magazine has a long feature on the year of 1968 that includes a section about events that took place during that pivotal year in the Vietnam War. The reader-friendly article contains an interview with noted Vietnam veteran film director Oliver Stone, who was an infantryman with the Americal that year. There also are words from Lawrence Colburn, who was a machine gunner on the helicopter piloted by Hugh Thompson that saw what was happening at My Lai and swooped down to save a dozen women and children. You can read it on line at AARP’s website.

Dith Pran, the Cambodian journalist and human rights activist who gained international fame when his harrowing story was told in the movie The Killing Fields, died March 30 at age 65 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The film was based on the book of the same name about the Cambodian Holocaust by American journalist Sydney Schanberg of The New Times, with whom Dith Pran worked as a guide and interpreter in the 1970s. The late Dr. Haing Ngor won an Oscar (in his first film role) portraying Dith Pran’s quietly heroic work in the much-honored 1984 movie.

To read an excellent appreciation of Dith Pran by Janet Wu and Andrew Tarsy in The Boston Globe, go to: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/03/31/dith_pran_two_views_of_a_legend/