Peter Arnett - Vietnam

Vietnam

Some of Arnett's early days in journalism were in Southeast Asia, particularly Bangkok. He started out running a small English-language newspaper in Laos in 1960. Eventually, he made his way to Vietnam where he was a reporter for the Associated Press. He worked with other AP staff in their Saigon office writing a number of important articles, such as "Death of Supply Column 21", which attracted the ire of the American government. In July 1963, he was punched in the nose by South Vietnamese undercover police while covering Buddhist protests.

He went on dozens of missions with troops, including during the traumatic battle of Hill 875, in which a detachment went to try to rescue another unit of soldiers that was stranded in hostile territory. They themselves were nearly killed during the rescue. In September 1972 he accompanied a group of U.S. peace activists, including William Sloane Coffin and David Dellinger, to Hanoi, North Vietnam to bring three prisoners of war back to the United States.

Arnett got into trouble for writing in an unvarnished manner when trying to report the stories of ordinary soldiers and civilians. Arnett's writing often was perceived as negative. General William Westmoreland and president Lyndon B. Johnson and other people in power had battles with the AP over trying to get Arnett removed from his assignment.

Arnett's most famous act of reporting from the Vietnam War was a story published on February 7, 1968, about the provincial capital Bến Tre: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong." The quotation was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The accuracy of the original quotation and its source has often been called into question. Arnett never revealed his source, except to say that it was one of four officers he interviewed that day. US Army major Phil Cannella, the senior officer present at Bến Tre, suggested that the quotation might have been a distortion of something he said to Arnett. The New Republic at the time attributed the quotation to US Air Force major Chester L. Brown. In Walter Cronkite's 1971 book, Eye on the World, Arnett reasserted that the quotation was something "one American major said to me in a moment of revelation."

Arnett was one of the last reporters in Saigon after its capture by the North Vietnamese Army, and met with NVA soldiers who showed him how they had come into the city.

Arnett was the writer of the 1980 mini-series documentary - Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War.