Civil War was released during the ongoing destruction of Gaza, in which the national symbiosis between war-making and the press remains in flagrant display. At same time, the genocide in Gaza has largely happened outside the usually privileged perspective of the American abroad. There are no U.S. troops on the ground in Gaza; there are no independent foreign journalists. Accepting the premise that Gaza is one of the United States’ wars—which it is—makes this a unique moment, in which the American public is viewing its country’s violence without the presence of American mediators. What does this mean for those who wish to bring the war home and those who wish to end it?
Though it is a common canard that the press hated the Vietnam War and caused the nation to lose it, it was during Vietnam when the American soldier and journalist became more reliant on one another and more sought after for their testimonies. The most acclaimed American representations of the conflict were grounded in firsthand experience; in the words of historian Keith Beattie, “You had to be there” to understand Vietnam. Until years after the war’s end, Beattie writes, the home front craved accounts that were “typically, if not exclusively, written by authors who either participated in the war as soldiers or witnessed it firsthand as journalists.” Perspectives from Vietnamese civilians were out of the question, unless they were conveyed by the American media; meanwhile, anti-war protesters at home were met with derision and straightforward hatred. What America wanted were photographs of, and books about, soldiers. It was these that the journalists provided.
Today, we recall the famous atrocities perpetuated against the Vietnamese—the massacres, the flaming villages, Eddie Adams photographing the point-blank execution of an NLF commander. Conservatives draw on this legacy when they moan about an anti-war press. But if anything, American journalists were too susceptible to the military, particularly in the war’s early years. As the scholar Daniel Hallin writes, television coverage in America’s first living-room war was “a series of more or less timeless images of men—or more precisely, of Americans:” pilots gearing up for missions, soldiers describing life under fire. “Almost all television coverage after mid-1965 was about Americans ‘in action.’” The press was against the war, but for the army; the analysis was that America should be in Vietnam, just in a better way. Journalists now famous for their dissent—the likes of David Halberstam and Neil Sheehan—were not particularly unpatriotic in their critiques. They saw Vietnam the same way many of the army men did, as soured by error and needless peril.