Ann Bryan Mariano, reported on Vietnam War

WASHINGTON - Ann Bryan Mariano, who was one of the first female combat correspondents covering the Vietnam War and who sued the Pentagon to keep her publication on military-base newsstands, died Feb. 25 of complications from Alzheimer's disease at Belmont Manor Nursing Home in Belmont, Mass. She was 76.

In 1965, Mariano - then Ann Bryan - was sent to Saigon to start an Asian edition of Overseas Weekly, a scrappy German-based tabloid that saw itself as an irreverent alternative to the semiofficial Stars and Stripes. The paper took particular delight in uncovering the misdeeds of military brass and offered its readers, most of them GIs, 12 pages of color comics and a weekly buffet of bosomy beauties.

Mariano exported Overseas Weekly's iconoclastic exuberance to Vietnam and "added a lot of depth to it," said Tracy Wood, who reported from Vietnam for United Press International. Under Mariano's leadership, the newspaper reported on war profiteers, officers involved in the black market, pot smoking among soldiers and racial prejudice in the Army. It also carried articles on doctors and relief workers assisting refugees and orphans and broke a story about U.S. soldiers at Long Binh Army base, outside Saigon, complaining that they didn't have enough rifles and ammunition.
The Defense Department barred Overseas Weekly from newsstands in Vietnam and post exchanges throughout Asia.

"Our only recourse was a lawsuit," Mariano recalled in a chapter she contributed to "War Torn: Stories of War From the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam" (2002).

In 1966, the paper filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, accusing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara of violating the First Amendment by banning distribution of the newspaper in the Pacific region. While the suit was pending, Mariano arranged for the paper to be published in Hong Kong and flown in to Saigon. Vietnamese newsboys hustled it on the streets and outside military barracks. Local authorities began confiscating copies.

"As it became clear the troops could trust us, soldiers began calling our office directly with tips and information, by-passing official channels," Mariano recalled in "War Torn." "We began getting stories that ran counter to the rah-rah military point of view, which, of course, kept us often at odds with the Pentagon."

Overseas Weekly lost its suit against the Pentagon but won on appeal in 1967.

Mariano also had to fight the Pentagon for battlefield access, not because she reported for Overseas Weekly but because she was a woman. The Pentagon eventually lifted its ban against female correspondents.

She left Overseas Weekly in 1971 and lived briefly in San Francisco with her new husband, Frank Mariano, an Army helicopter pilot and information officer who later worked as a correspondent for ABC News.

The couple returned to Vietnam two years later, and she worked as a freelance reporter for the Associated Press and the Daily Express of London.

A look at Laos from the Mekong: Native villages and old Buddhas

The Mekong River has changed from the days when it was a staple of the 6 o'clock news during the Vietnam War 40 years ago. The only incursions were boys doing cartwheels in the shallows and girls hawking their needlework during our two-day river cruise through Laos last January as part of a luxurious trip through Southeast Asia.
To transfer to our cruise, a private, air-conditioned car took my fiance and me from our hotel in Chiang Rai, in northernmost Thailand, to the beachhead at Chiang Khong. There we would cross the Mekong into Laos, where the tenor of our fancy trip changed.
After paying our 69 baht (about $2) to leave Thailand, we stomped through sand to climb into the bow of a river taxi, a canoe-like boat that seats a handful of passengers on low backless benches. The water, though close to the gunwale, stayed out so my luggage at my feet kept dry.
At last we exited the boats onto concrete in Houeisay, Laos, and porters came running to heft our bags. Back to our high-end trip, I thought. Alas, we tourists were herded into a room with benches, where a man took everyone's passports with no explanation.
Half an hour later the passports were returned, and we each paid the $35 visa fee to enter Laos. ATMs were missing here, but Lao people accept U.S. dollars and Thai baht.
Next, in groups of eight, we hoisted ourselves onto the backs of rickety trucks and were promised that our luggage would follow. We squeezed onto yet another narrow bench, and in 10 minutes, nearly 40 of us walked onto our comfortable 110-foot-long river barge whose benches had pads, backs and panoramic river views. Tour guides divided our group by language: English and French. All this adventure and my watch read only 8:45 a.m.
Our cruise ran down a navigable portion of the Mekong, a 2,610-mile river (about 300 miles longer than the Mississippi) that runs from China through Myanmar (formerly Burma), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. Through northern Laos, the many desolate river banks hide the importance of the Mekong as a transportation route and source of food and water.
Our journey through this remote land was not an expedition but more of a lovely visual saunter. The crew retracted part of the roof to let the sun warm us as we passed rock formations and occasional orange groves. We docked on rocks to clomp over the narrow metal gangplank as the crew held each end of a bamboo pole that was our railing. From this near-jungle Hmong village, children ran down to persuade us to buy their bracelets. We climbed rough steps to where, like many villages, the homes were on stilts to avoid the monsoon's water.
Back on board, we enjoyed typical Thai-Lao fare: banana-leaf-wrapped steamed fish, chicken curry, steamed rice and vegetables. The afternoon brought convivial chatting, tea and alcoholic beverages, and lovely vistas of jungle, beaches, mountains and farmland that our guide highlighted. We also shot rapids through boulder fields, thankful for a skilled skipper and steel hull.
As the sun fell low, we docked at a lodge, built for the cruise in 1998 of teak and rosewood with 20 bungalows on a hill backed by jungle. Each room opened with shutters to views of the now misty Mekong.

more info-->>>A look at Laos from the Mekong: Native villages and old Buddhas

War Zero: Nothing Honorable About the Vietnam War

MEvery presidential candidacy relies on a myth. Reagan was a great communicator; Clinton felt your pain. Both storylines were ridiculous. But rarely are the constructs used to market a party nominee as transparent or as fictional as those we're being asked to swallow in 2008.

Still more laughable than the notion of Obama as the second coming of JFK is the founding myth of the McCain campaign: (a) he is a war hero, and (b) said heroism increases his credibility on national security issues. "A Vietnam hero and national security pro," The New York Times calls him in a typical media blandishment.

John McCain fought in Vietnam. There was nothing noble, much less heroic, about fighting in that war.

Some Americans may be suffering another of the periodic attacks of national amnesia that prevent us from honestly assessing our place in the world and its history, but others recall the truth about Vietnam: it was a disastrous, unjustifiable mess that anyone with an ounce of sense was against at the time.

Between one and two million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans were sent to their deaths by a succession of presidents and Congresses--fed to the flames of greed, hubris, and stupidity. The event used to justify starting the war--the Tonkin Gulf "incident"--never happened. The Vietnam War's ideological foundation, the mantra cited to keep it going, was disproved after we lost. No Southeast Asian "dominos" fell to communism. To the contrary, the effect of the U.S. withdrawal was increased stability. When genocide broke out in neighboring Cambodia in the late 1970s, it was not the U.S., but a unified Vietnamese army--the evil communists--who stopped it.

Not even General Wesley Clark, shot four times in Vietnam, is allowed to question the McCain-as-war-hero narrative. "Well, I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president," he argued. The Obama campaign, which sells its surrogates down the river with alarming regularity, promptly hung the former NATO commander out to dry: "Senator Obama honors and respects Senator McCain's service, and of course he rejects yesterday's statement by General Clark."

Even in an article criticizing the media for repeatedly framing McCain as a war hero, the liberal website Media Matters concedes: "McCain is, after all, a war hero; everybody agrees about that."

Not everyone.

I was 12 when the last U.S. occupation troops fled Saigon. I remember how I--and most Americans--felt at the time.

We were relieved.

By the end of Nixon's first term most people had turned against the war. Gallup polls taken in 1971 found that about 70 percent of Americans thought sending troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. Some believed it was immoral; others considered it unwinnable.

Since then, the political center has shifted right. We've seen the Reagan Revolution, Clinton's Democratic centrism, and Bush's post-9/11 flirtation with neo-McCarthyite fascism. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of Americans--including Republicans--still think we should never have fought the Vietnam War.

"After the war's 1975 conclusion," Michael Tomasky wrote in The American Prospect in 2004, "Gallup has asked the question ("Did the U.S. make a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam?") five times, in 1985, 1990, 1993, 1995, and 2000. All five times...respondents were consistent in calling the war a mistake by a margin of more than 2 to 1: by 74 percent to 22 percent in 1990, for example, and by 69 percent to 24 percent in 2000."

Moreover, Tomasky continued, "vast majorities continue to call the war 'unjust.'" Even in 2004, after 9/11, 62 percent considered the war unjust. Only 33 percent still thought it was morally justified.

Vietnam was an illegal, undeclared war of aggression. Can those who fought in that immoral war really be heroes? This question appeared settled after Reagan visited a cemetery for Nazi soldiers, including members of the SS, at Bitburg, West Germany in 1985. "Those young men," claimed Reagan, "are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps."

Americans didn't buy it. Reagan's poll numbers, typically between 60 and 65 percent at the time, plunged to 41 percent after the visit. Those who fight for an evil cause receive no praise.

So why is the McCain-as-war-hero myth so hard to unravel? By most accounts, John McCain demonstrated courage as a P.O.W., most notably by refusing his captors' offer of early release. But that doesn't make him a hero.

Hell, McCain isn't even a victim.

At a time when more than a fourth of all combat troops in Vietnam were forcibly drafted (the actual victims), McCain volunteered to drop napalm on "gooks" (his term, not mine). He could have waited to see if his number came up in the draft lottery. Like Bush, he could have used family connections to weasel out of it. Finally, he could have joined the 100,000 draft-eligible males--true heroes, to a man--who went to Canada rather than kill people in a war that was plainly wrong.

When McCain was shot down during his 23rd bombing sortie, he was happily shooting up a civilian neighborhood in the middle of a major city. Vietnamese locals beat him when they pulled him out of a local lake; yeah, that must have sucked. But I can't help think of what would have happened to Mohammed Atta had he somehow wound up alive on a lower Manhattan street on 9/11. How long would he have lasted?

Maybe he would have made it. I don't know. But I do know this: no one would ever have considered him a war hero.
_______
About author
Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?," an in-depth prose and graphic novel analysis of America's next big foreign policy challenge.

What John McCain didn't learn in Vietnam

July 4, 2008 Nobody has denigrated the service of John McCain or his suffering in captivity as a prisoner of North Vietnam, as much as his supporters wish to pretend that someone did. Nobody has denied that his valor in captivity offers insight into his character. But so far almost nobody has asked the most important question about McCain's military experience, which is how his past might influence his future as president.
The most pertinent issue is not what McCain did or didn't do during the war in Vietnam, but what he learned from that searing, incredibly bloody and wholly unnecessary failure of U.S. policy. Clearly he learned that torture is morally wrong, illegal and counterproductive, and he has spoken with great moral authority on that issue. But listening to him now and over the past decade or so, he also seems not to have learned why that war itself was a tragic mistake -- and why we needed to leave Vietnam long before we did.
Indeed, what is most striking about McCain's attitude toward Vietnam is his insistence that we could have won -- that we should have won -- with more bombs and more casualties. In 1998, he spoke on the 30th anniversary of the Tet Offensive. "Like a lot of Vietnam veterans, I believed and still believe that the war was winnable," he said. "I do not believe that it was winnable at an acceptable cost in the short or probably even the long term using the strategy of attrition which we employed there to such tragic results. I do believe that had we taken the war to the North and made full, consistent use of air power in the North, we ultimately would have prevailed." Five years later, he said much the same thing to the Council on Foreign Relations. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal."
Very few military historians agree with McCain's bitter analysis, which suggests that a ground invasion and an even more destructive bombing campaign, with an unimaginable cost in human life, would have achieved an American victory. But perhaps because he is obsessed by the humiliation of defeat -- which fell directly on his father, Adm. John S. McCain Jr., who served as the commander in chief of Pacific forces during the Vietnam conflict -- the former prisoner of war seemingly can formulate neither a rational assessment of that war's enormous costs nor of its flawed premises and purposes.
To reach such an assessment requires, at the very least, a review of the relevant statistics, although such data can scarcely convey the war's horror. Numbers are useful, however, because they provide perspective on the assertions of politicians like McCain, whose rhetoric of "victory" is otherwise meaningless.
More than 58,000 Americans were killed in action between 1965 and 1973. More than a million and a half Vietnamese died during that same period, including hundreds of thousands killed by American bombs like those dropped by McCain during the mission that led to his capture, imprisonment and torture. Prosecution of the war diminished American prestige, as did our eventual defeat -- and the price paid by our armed forces and the returning veterans is still painful to recall. The economic cost of the war, calculated in current dollars, may have been as high as $1.7 trillion.
In McCain's mind, those lives and that treasure were expended in a "noble cause." Presumably he believes that we were seeking to preserve the freedom of the South Vietnamese from North Vietnamese communist oppression. But the politics of Vietnam and the geopolitics of the war were at once more complicated and simpler. Complicated because South Vietnam was a corrupt dictatorship that had forfeited the loyalty of most of its citizens, who regarded the United States not as a liberator but as the latest invader in a long procession that dated back centuries and included the French and the Chinese as well.
What vital American interests required so many deaths and so much suffering? There were none, but presumably, again, McCain thinks that we were forced to push back against communist expansion in Asia. That too was an awful misconception, based on cultural ignorance, since the Vietnamese accepted Russian and Chinese assistance only to expel the American occupation. Within the decade that followed the American defeat in Indochina, our diplomats were opening a new relationship with China while the Soviet Union, along with communism as an ideological threat, was on the verge of disintegration.
If the Vietnam War was premised on strategic misconceptions and cultural stupidity, it was also based on plain old lies, as the true history of the Tonkin Gulf incident has long since revealed. There was no reason for the United States to enter a colonial war that the French had abandoned. Ultimately there was no basis for American hostility toward Vietnam, as McCain wisely acknowledged when he led the effort to normalize our diplomatic and trade relations with the government that defeated us. Now that we live in peace and reconciliation with that same regime, what justifies the war that led to more than a million deaths?
Whenever McCain tries to explain what lessons he drew from the Vietnam tragedy, he cites a simple doctrine. We should not send troops into foreign conflict unless there is a vital American interest at stake, and once we go to war, we must deploy sufficient force to win. It is difficult to see how McCain has applied that logic to Iraq, which we invaded on a fraudulent excuse and where the definition of "winning" remains murky five years later.
But it is easy to understand why a man who thinks that we should have escalated the Vietnam War after 10 futile years would talk about occupying Iraq for a century. And it is hard to imagine why voters would elect a president who still believes that 60,000 American dead and more than 300,000 wounded in Vietnam were not quite enough.

Deaths in Vietnam, other wars undercounted - study

New estimates of war deaths in 13 nations including Vietnam, Ethiopia and Bangladesh show that previous counts vastly understated the lives lost to war in the past half century, researchers said on Thursday.
The new estimates relied on data from nationally representative population surveys done by the U.N. World Health Organization in these countries earlier this decade to calculate death tolls in wars waged from 1955 to 2002.
In most of the countries, this method pointed to much higher loss of life than broadly cited media estimates of the various war death counts had shown, the researchers said.
For example, the method indicated 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the protracted fighting in Vietnam, mostly from 1955 to 1975, compared to previous estimates cited by the researchers of 2.1 million.
Christopher Murray of the University of Washington said the findings, published in the British Medical Journal, suggest standard ways of tracking war deaths using media, eyewitness and combatant accounts tend to underestimate deaths, particularly in smaller wars.
Murray, who heads the university's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, and colleagues designed a method of figuring violent war-related deaths using data on siblings of respondents in large household surveys conducted later in peacetime.
Random samples of people in the 13 countries were asked about their brothers and sisters, including whether they had died of wartime injuries. The researchers then extrapolated the data to come up with national death toll estimates.
In Ethiopia, the method indicated there have been 579,000 wartime deaths, higher than the previous estimate cited in the study of 275,000. In Bangladesh, the toll was put at 269,000, up from the previous estimate of 58,000.
Country by country, on average, the old estimates were about three times lower than the new ones.
In the 13 countries combined, the new method figured there were 5.4 million deaths from 1955 to 2002, topping the previous combined estimates of 2.8 million, the researchers said.
In Bosnia, the researchers figured 176,000 war deaths, up from the 55,000 previous estimate. In Sri Lanka, the new estimate was 215,000 deaths, compared the previous estimate of 61,000.
In Zimbabwe, the new estimate was 141,000 war deaths, compared to the previous estimate they cited of 28,000.
Other countries examined in the study were Myanmar (Burma), Georgia, Guatemala, Laos, Namibia, the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The study did not look at war dead in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Ziad Obermeyer of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, another of the researchers, said accurate estimates of death tolls during wartime are extremely difficult to make.
He also said the findings undercut the idea that the advent of modern weapons like "smart bombs" had made war less lethal. (Editing by Todd Eastham)

In Vietnam, old hatreds disappear

The transformation of relations between the United States and Vietnam must seem almost unimaginable to those Americans who lived through the war, a tumultuous period in American history. But as the Times' Susan Taylor Martin reported recently from Ho Chi Minh City, 40 years is a long time — enough, at least, for the two former enemies to begin building a relationship through tourism and business ties and an ongoing diplomatic dialogue. The lesson should not be lost in the current tensions with Iraq, Iran, North Korea and Cuba.
Martin chronicled the fascinating changes taking place in Vietnam since the end of a war that killed 58,000 Americans and 3-million to 5-million Vietnamese. She wrote: "Young Vietnamese watch Wheel of Fortune and vote on their cell phones for their favorite singers on Vietnam Idol. The country's beaches are flush with stunning new resorts," including one at a former U.S. base that will host the next Miss Universe pageant. And in the former Saigon, "legions of tourists browse boutiques with Gucci purses and Fendi footwear."
A war that divided both countries and shaped this nation's political thinking has given way to a bilateral relationship that has every prospect of growing. While the communist government banned private enterprise in the south after reunification, the same government introduced free-market reforms in the 1980s that led to President Bill Clinton lifting the trade embargo and to the normalization of relations between the two nations in 1995. Trade deals followed, along with investment by firms seeking cheap labor. Vietnam's 86-million people are not only literate but are a growing consumer market in a nation relatively free of crime, ethnic division and external security threats.
Some fundamental differences remain. Vietnam is an authoritarian state. Its people lack free elections, a free press and freedom to assemble. The economy and political system are rife with corruption. The government wields a heavy hand against dissidents and "offensive" speech, and as U.S. Ambassador Michael Michalak told Martin: "We have significant issues on human rights."
However, the ambassador was right to point out: "At least we have been able to engage with them." It helps that 60 percent of the Vietnamese were born after the war. But it's not only Vietnam making a fresh start. Hundreds of U.S. companies operate there, and growing numbers of visitors — 30,000 in May — are Americans. U.S. officials and diplomats, Martin reports, say the Vietnamese are genuinely warm toward Americans, which shows the value of people meeting one-on-one.
The changing attitudes in and about Vietnam underscore the wrong-headedness of the U.S. isolation of Cuba. Trade, tourism and normal diplomatic ties cannot paper over major political differences. But they are tools, in Vietnam and elsewhere, that can increase America's standing and influence in pressing for democratic change. If that can happen in Asia, we should at least try it 90 miles off the coast.

Agent Orange Work Progresses in Vietnam

More than three decades after the Vietnam War, the United States and Vietnam have just completed temporary steps to contain dioxin contamination at a former U.S. air base in Danang.
But the U.S. government, as well as U.S. foundations and corporations, should contribute more money to clean up the site permanently, members of a joint U.S.-Vietnamese working group on Agent Orange said Friday.

more-> The Associated Press: Agent Orange Work Progresses in Vietnam