I never would have done what I did if it hadn’t been for Vietnam.
That war shaped my life like no other event, informing decisions I would make for years to come. Like the rest of my generation, I grew up with images of that conflict beamed into our living room on the evening news. I was still in grade school, but those grainy, black-and-white news clips stuck with me: thwapping helicopters swarming a landing zone to the popping of gunfire; suspected Vietcong guerrillas, rounded up, bound, and blindfolded; GIs setting fire to palm-thatched hooches with Zippo lighters while village women frantically tried to douse the flames before they lost everything they owned.
Watching the news was a nightly ritual, before there was CNN, the Internet, social media. There were only three channels on television: ABC, NBC, and CBS. By far and away the most trusted in our household was Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. I was transfixed, both horrified and fascinated, by the stories from Vietnam that he and the CBS correspondents brought into our home, and the names of many of those places remained lodged in my memory: the A Shau Valley, Da Nang, Dak To.
Our downstairs coffee table was stacked with oversized Time-Life and American Heritage books on the Civil War, the two World Wars, the Cold War. Together, they amounted to a history of photojournalism and war photography. When I was ten, my parents gave me my first camera, a Polaroid Swinger, and a leather-bound diary to record daily life and thoughts. They took me and my two older brothers to see epic productions on the big screen: Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Around the World in 80 Days. And they took us on road trips from our home in upstate New York to Florida to visit relatives along winding, two-lane thoroughfares before Interstate highways homogenized the experience of car travel. It was like magic, moving from the dead of winter with its blowing snowdrifts to the tilled fields and sharecropper shacks of the Carolinas and on to the mysterious backroads of Georgia in the shadow of overhanging boughs bearded with Spanish moss. Travel, photography, writing. My mother and father gave me these gifts and awakened in me a curiosity about the world that one day I would fashion into a career.
By the time we got a color TV, the images from Vietnam were accompanied by scenes of conflict closer to home—confrontations between police and student protestors in the nation’s capital and elsewhere. In the fall of 1969, I left home for a boarding school in New England and joined sit-ins on campus the following spring over the deaths of students at Kent State and Jackson State at the hands of National Guardsmen and police. As a freshman at Yale a few years later, I attended the last big march against the war on the National Mall to protest the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam ordered by President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
I tried to find my way in a confusing, upside-down time. On a year off from college in 1974, I journeyed to Mexico, learned Spanish, then continued overland to South America, traveling by rail, bus, and on the flatbeds of trucks down the spine of the Andes. I worked as a volunteer literacy teacher in an Indigenous community in the Peruvian Amazon. While in Lima, I stayed in a house leased to the U.N. to shelter refugees from Chile. They were fleeing the brutal military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, who had overthrown the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende with the connivance of Nixon and Kissinger, the Pentagon, and the CIA. My Chilean friends—professors, trade unionists, even a professional soccer player—recounted tales of terror and torture at the hands of Pinochet’s secret police and their harrowing escape from the country. Their stories were so wildly at odds with Americans’ view of the U.S.A. as a shining light on a hill, a promoter of freedom and democracy, that I began to wonder if what we had done in Vietnam, and the lying and dissembling our leaders engaged in about it, were more the norm than an aberration.
In 1979, the Sandinistas rode a popular insurrection to power in Nicaragua, toppling the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. Full-scale civil war erupted the following year in neighboring El Salvador, as a mass movement took up arms in response to decades of abuse under a murderous military and rapacious oligarchy. By then I was living in New York City, bouncing between jobs, still unsure of a career path. Slowly, an idea took shape: Maybe I could become a journalist and report those stories myself. But how? I decided to enroll to graduate school, at the University of Missouri, to learn the trade. If I were going to go to Central America, I knew I’d have to go as a freelancer; no news organization would hire a novice straight out of school and send him out to cover a big international story, particularly one that entailed a high degree of danger. To make it as an independent journalist, I would have to acquire as broad a range of skills as possible. At Missouri I took an eclectic mix of courses to cover all the bases: newspaper writing, radio and television reporting, photojournalism.
During my two years in journalism school, Central America roiled. President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 vowing to “draw the line against communist aggression” in El Salvador. U.S. aid began to pour into El Salvador, despite the government’s horrifying record of death-squad terror and battlefield massacres. Reagan signed a national security directive to arm and direct Nicaragua’s rightwing rebels, called the “Contras,” supposedly to interdict alleged weapons shipments from the Sandinistas to the Salvadoran guerrillas. America’s national security was at stake, the White House proclaimed, as the U.S. launched a war by proxy in both El Salvador and Nicaragua. America would put up the money, the equipment, the training. The “little brown men,” as the top U.S. military advisor called them, would do the dying. Officials in Washington, D.C., saw the world as a global chessboard, with the U.S. vying with the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) for supremacy, with little understanding of the history and conditions that had given rise to revolution in Central America. I decided I would do what I could to rectify that ignorance, at least in the minds of U.S. taxpayers and voters. El Salvador was where I would plant my flag.
Shortly before graduation from Missouri, I met CBS News executives when they visited the campus. At network headquarters in New York City a month later, I was introduced to a gruff, silver-haired man as he stood amid a maze of gray metal desks and barked orders over the clatter typewriters and telex machines. Larry McCoy, the executive editor of CBS News Radio, sized me up through narrowed eyes. “El Salvador, huh?” he said and took a puff on his pipe. “I don’t have anyone there at the moment. Just the damned TV people who send something when I lean on them.” He strode over to a telex machine, a kind of standup typewriter that pounded out a ceaseless stream of reports from the newswires: Associated Press, UPI, Reuters. McCoy yanked a ten-foot-stretch of paper from the machine, tore off a dozen news stories from the scroll, and handed them to me: “Rewrite these as thirty-second news spots, then voice them. You have a tape recorder, right? Good. FedEx the tape to me from the road. Call me collect when you get to Miami.”
McCoy got the tape and liked what he heard. I would be the CBS News “stringer,” or freelance reporter, in El Salvador. He told me to stop at the CBS bureau in Miami, where I was issued CBS press credentials and radio gear—a professional Sony cassette deck, mic, and a set of alligator clips to connect to a telephone receiver, the standard method for filing radio stories across an international phone line. Just as importantly, I had authorization to work out of the CBS bureau in San Salvador, El Salvador’s capital. Before leaving the U.S., I worked out a separate deal to file articles and photographs as the stringer for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. I arrived in El Salvador on June 18, 1983, a newly minted j-school graduate eager to cover the big story.
I wasn’t the only one who had this idea. For a generation of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate journalists arriving in Central America during the early 1980s, the armed conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua—and, to a lesser extent, Guatemala—were to become the crucible where we learned our trade and forged our careers. Many of us—the freelancers, in particular—arrived as idealists, with a passionate conviction that we could make a difference. Twenty years earlier, U.S. officials from the President on down ignored warning signs that propping up the corrupt government of South Vietnam was a lost cause that would lead to disaster. Perhaps this time we could help head off a catastrophe before it happened. After all, the United States was playing a major role in all three conflicts, especially in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and public opinion mattered to American officials and lawmakers. That made us purveyors of the news pivotal to the equation. And Vietnam had made us more skeptical, less willing to take official pronouncements at face value.
I quickly picked up on the more superficial likenesses between El Salvador and Vietnam. There was an unquestionable familiarity about the barefoot peasants stooped under crushing loads, the soldiers in camouflage fanning out across smoldering fields, the anguished wails of bereaved wives and mothers. Green Berets, mostly Vietnam veterans, were training local forces in the arts of unconventional war, and guerrillas were staging punishing attacks before melting back into the jungle. In Washington, officials dusted off the old domino theory that envisioned all of Southeast Asia falling to the Communists, one domino at a time, if South Vietnam didn’t hold the line. This time, President Reagan warned, the proximity of Central America heightened the stakes all the more, raising the specter of the “Red menace” rolling north to the banks of the Rio Grande.
The more covert parallels were not as obvious but no less salient. The secrecy and duplicity that guided much of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia were finally laid bare by the publication in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers by The New York Times and The Washington Post. Likewise, it was after a clandestine resupply flight to the Contras was shot down over Nicaragua in late 1986 that an Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters was appointed who, together with congressional investigating committees, peeled back the most deeply hidden layers of the illegality and deception that lay at the core of Washington’s machinations in Central America.
I aimed to witness what was happening with my own eyes and ears and share my findings with the public back in the States. I had no idea how long I would stay, but it was going to be long enough to dive in deep. I hadn’t come to build a portfolio of exotic datelines. I did not think of it as steppingstone on my way to somewhere else or to further career ambitions. But I did revel in the adventure, drawn to the allure of the open road. I had, in a way, burned the ship that had brought me to shore, precluding an early return. I’d abandoned my old ’66 Chevy Impala in a Miami parking lot and left the keys with a friend if he wanted to take it away. I’d scraped together the funds for a one-way ticket and had just $50 in cash to my name.
On the photography side of my fledgling enterprise, I started out with a single Nikkormat 35mm camera. In a Miami photo shop, I loaded up on a mix of color and black-and-white film before leaving the States: Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Tri-X, and Plus-X. To economize, I bought a bunch of Agfachrome, cheaper than Kodak’s chrome films, but I would find out later that its dyes deteriorated with the passage of time. I eventually acquired a second camera and thereafter kept one loaded with color, the other with black and white. I tended to favor black and white; the film could be quickly processed in one of the makeshift darkrooms set up in the bathrooms of the AP, UPI, and Reuters bureaus at the Camino Real Hotel in San Salvador, which served as a kind of command central for all the major news organizations covering the war.
The very accommodating newswire photographers would develop my film, then quickly take a blow dryer to the negative strips as they hung from the shower-curtain rod. They would print the image in chemical trays laid out under a safe light on the bathroom counter, then send it out on a rotating drum transmitter that took up to twenty minutes to complete. In this manner, many of the stories I wrote for the Journal-Constitution and other publications were accompanied by my photographs. The hurried and slapdash nature of the process accounts for the graininess evident in some of the images.* I sent out the text for those stories from the CBS bureau via a telex machine.
Working for both print and broadcast media, I evolved a somewhat eclectic reporting style in the field. At times I’d raise my camera and snap the shutter if I wanted to capture a fleeting moment before it vanished. I found that the camera could sometimes help me enter the space of strangers and engage them first before pulling out my notebook and pen. Sometimes it was the other way around. I’d nearly always seek a subject’s tacit permission, establishing eye contact as I moved into position. I was honest and upfront about what I was doing, no subterfuge or sneakiness. I often used a 20mm wide-angle lens, despite the exaggerated distortions that would sometimes result. It allowed me to get more visual information into the frame, and it forced me to move in close to the subject.
An offer to hand out Polaroid photos also proved to be an excellent icebreaker, a trick I learned from Time photographer Bob Nickelsberg. But it wasn’t after my father gave me his old SX-70 when I was home for a visit that I could make the fotos al minuto that helped smooth the approach to prospective subjects. If a source’s voice resonated with emotion that would make for powerful radio, I’d pull out the microphone and roll tape. Before long I also became a scout and a de facto field producer for the CBS Evening News, leading Dan Rather’s visiting correspondents to locations where I knew we would likely find the rebels, the government army, or something else of interest. Writing stories for print, taking photographs, recording and voicing for radio, I was an early practitioner of what came to be known as “convergence journalism.” Amused colleagues who saw me multitasking in the field called me the “robo-journalist.”
We enjoyed access to the competing sides in a way that few other frontline reporters ever did or have since. The fortunes of the belligerent forces were inextricably linked to the images each projected to far-off audiences who did not speak their language nor have firsthand knowledge of their hopes and struggles. Nevertheless, by virtue of their own governments’ power to furnish or withhold arms, training and intelligence, to the warring factions, the people of the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe constituted a parallel theater of engagement. As the intermediaries between the shooting war and the information war, we journalists were in the crosshairs—the targets of lies, pressure, and propaganda from all sides. But we also enjoyed a thin layer of protection; anyone who killed a journalist, especially a foreign journalist, would have to answer to higher-ups. Few commanders wanted to deal with that kind of public relations imbroglio. That didn’t keep journalists from dying, but there was a system of accountability that discouraged the wanton targeting of reporters.
In Vietnam, few, if any, American journalists ever attempted to hook up with the Viet Cong. It was inconceivable. It would have been considered treason and could well have been suicidal. And once the escalation began in earnest in 1965, Vietnam became an American story, a story about Americans in Vietnam. It was not about the Vietnamese, not even those who were on “our side.” The Viet Cong and the peasant civilians from whom they were largely indistinguishable remained an inscrutable enemy, easy to discount and dehumanize.
Many of us were fluent in Spanish. We could speak to the actors on all sides—peasants, politicians, soldiers, guerrillas. Especially for journalists who knew Spanish or made a reasonable effort to speak it, there was a cultural affinity with our Latino hosts that guaranteed a certain level of understanding, even with hardcore revolutionaries who vowed a bloodbath if the Yankees invaded. Despite the concerted efforts by the Reagan Administration and its Republican allies in Congress to demonize the FMLN in El Salvador or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, we got to know the putative “enemies” well enough and provided enough coverage of their views and actions to assure they would not be a faceless foe, like the Viet Cong had largely been.
As historically occurs with any major foreign policy initiative, particularly an unpopular or controversial one, the Reagan Administration dispatched a series of high-profile emissaries and fact-finding missions to the region. Their visits signaled support for friendly forces and resolve to counter the perceived Soviet threat. They also helped create the impression that policy decisions were calibrated, appropriate, well-informed. The parade of dignitaries included Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, accompanied by then-Major General Colin Powell; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jean Kirkpatrick; Secretary of State George Schultz; and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush. Sometimes they had something to say that was newsworthy. For the most part, however, I felt that my time was better spent out in the field, where the real human drama was unfolding.
Only a few weeks into what would become a seven-year assignment in Central America, I had the chance to put a question to Henry Kissinger on the tarmac of El Salvador’s Ilopango International Airport. He had just arrived as head of the “President’s National Bipartisan Commission on Central America” to put its imprimatur on Reagan’s policies and win support for them in Congress. Despite Kissinger’s role in the secret bombing of Cambodia and the illegal wiretaps of White House staff in the Watergate scandal, he’d shared a Nobel Prize for negotiating the end of the Vietnam War and still enjoyed wide popularity in Washington. At the time of his visit, the Reagan Administration was touting elections as the answer to El Salvador’s deep social ills. The Salvadoran rebels should just lay down their weapons and join the democratic process, the official line went. It didn’t matter that the rebels had taken up arms because of a long history of stolen elections and bloody repression and because they could not campaign safely in a country where their killers went unpunished. The Kissinger Commission’s preordained role was merely to add a veneer of credibility to this unworkable policy.
“Mr. Kissinger,” I shouted across the runway over the roar of jet engines. “Given what the U.S. did to democratically elected governments in Guatemala and Chile, why should the people of El Salvador believe the U.S. is truly committed to free and fair elections here?” (U.S.-supported coups in both countries, in 1954 and 1973 respectively, had snuffed out democratically elected leftist governments and brought to power tyrannical military dictatorships.) Kissinger paused to weigh this bit of impertinence from an upstart reporter. “We will issue our report,” he said, “and the results will speak for themselves.”
The results contributed to another nine years of bloodletting before the war came to an end in El Salvador. An estimated 75,000 lost their lives, and the U.N.-appointed Truth Commission attributed eighty-five percent of assassinations and murders to the military and their death-squad associates. A million Salvadorans would be displaced, half of whom ended up in the United States, mostly as undocumented immigrants. The MS-13 crime syndicate that today plagues cities and suburbs from Los Angeles to Long Island and across El Salvador owes its origins to refugees driven north by the violence that the U.S. supported during the 1980s.
At the time of this writing, Nicaragua is ruled by the thuggish Daniel Ortega and his eccentric, stargazing wife, Rosario Murillo. Ortega led the Sandinista government that the U.S. sought to remove. He was voted out of office in 1990 but later won a series of elections that returned him to power, and he has set himself up as president-for-life presiding over a de facto police state. Guatemalans are still struggling to shrug off the rule of a criminal elite. And in El Salvador, a young populist who describes himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” has led an iron-fisted crackdown on gangs while upending the rule of law and imprisoning thousands without due process. In the U.S., political rhetoric has reached such levels of vitriol as to call to mind the discourse mouthed by Central American extremists to incite the fear and terror that ravaged their countries fifty years ago.
As a journalist who has covered international events since I first arrived in El Salvador in 1983, I have come to acknowledge a profoundly sad truth: To understand how the catastrophe of Vietnam led to the most recent disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the dangerous economic and political polarization at home, one must remember what happened in Central America during the 1980s. In words and images, this book is my effort to reboot our memories and present those tragic events in a new light. It would be worth asking ourselves, for example, what if we had embraced the desires of Central Americans to build more just, democratic, and equitable societies What if we had promoted efforts to make their homelands more peaceable and livable, rather than propping up oligarchies and militaries that sought to stifle change no matter the cost?
I hope this work will provoke renewed debate on such questions. And that members of the press, the public, and aspiring practitioners of journalism, mass media and photography find value in this account of a reporter coming of age in these important but largely forgotten wars.
Central America in the Crosshairs of War: On the Road from Vietnam to Iraq is published by George F. Thompson and available for £32.00.All photographs in this book were originally shot on film and recently digitized for fine-art reproduction.
