Editor’s Note: This piece was submitted, coincidentally on the day of Mr. Halberstam’s untimely and unfortunate death, by Common Dreams reader Dick Atlee with the following note:

“I thought this might be of interest to you. It appeared in Parade Magazine almost exactly 25 years ago, written by David Halberstam 20 years after he arrived in Vietnam on the way to becoming one of the premier journalists of the time. It was written as a letter to his (at the time) 2-year old daughter. I stumbled on a yellowed copy in my mother’s files. I haven’t found it on the Web, and because it is so sadly relevant to today, I scanned it in and fixed all the glitches I could find in the result.

I guess we lost the generation he was hoping to reach…”

A Letter To My Daughter
David Halberstam

May 2, 1982

Two decades ago, David Halberstam went to Saigon to cover the burgeoning war in Vietnam for The New York Times — an assignment for which he received a Pulitzer Prize. In the years since, he has written a number of books, including The Best and the Brightest, The Powers That Be and The Breaks of the Game. But his years in Vietnam have remained very much with him — just as that now-distant war has remained very much a part of America’s national consciousness. PARADE asked Halberstam to reflect on his experiences in Vietnam. His insights have taken the form of a letter to be read someday by his daughter Julia, who is not yet 2 years old. In so doing, he fulfills every parent’s desire to transmit his most profound experience to his children. He believes it important that the rising generation gain as much insight as possible into a conflict that brought with it such bitterness and controversy. We share his belief and commend his letter not only to Julia, but to all readers, today’s no less than tomorrow’s.

Dear Julia,

It is 20 years. But I remember it as if it were yesterday, the ride in from Tan Son Nhut Airport, driving through the semi-rural outskirts of Saigon, sensing the rare combination of energy and beauty, yet aware as well of the dark shadow over the land, for there were already troops everywhere. Never as in that moment had life seemed so real to me, never had I felt so connected to a particular moment; it was as if, and I know this will sound odd and possibly arrogant to you, I had finally arrived at the place where I was always destined to go.

I believed in the cause that was at stake and in the men who were fighting it; like many in my generation, I had been touched by John Kennedy’s inaugural speech and had felt stirred by his words about the long twilight struggle ahead and the great adventure we might all be part of. And here I was, fresh from more than a year of reporting in the Congo, finally, after many requests to my foreign editor, a part of it. Sometimes in those early months, in talking about what the Americans were doing in Vietnam, I, like others there, slipped unconsciously into the pronoun “we.” That we were there to help another country against encroachment from within was the line, and I did not dissent. No one, it seemed to me, said it better than a friend of mine named Clarence Hornbuckle, a Special Forces sergeant with whom I spent a week near the Laotian border in the Central Highlands. On his beret was the Special Forces motto, “De Oppresso Liber, ” or, translated from the Latin, “To Free the Oppressed.” “I figure it means “give the little bleepers a break, ” Hornbuckle said.

Someday I hope you will understand how important those moments were for me; more, I want you to understand the importance of remembering, of holding onto and even cherishing a part of what you have been as, more and more, events are thrust upon you. For all too often in this world, and I think with increasing force, the present seeks to obliterate the past-something I hope you will not lightly accept. So let me begin.

I have odd and bittersweet memories of those days, of living in my dreams in the midst of an escalating war. Dreams are fine both for people and for nations. We need them for sustenance and for incentive, but they are dangerous as well, for they may turn into myth, diverting us from what we are and what we might be into what we think we are. If anything, in those days, I loved my assignment too much. There is, in all young reporters — and I was 28 at the time — a certain romanticism.

And in reporters of my generation in the early days of Vietnam, that was heightened into something more complicated: the journalist in search of self as the Hemingway hero. We were testing ourselves without ever really admitting that we were testing ourselves. It was a bad time in Vietnam, not as bad as it was eventually to become, but it was, in addition to all the danger and hardship, an oddly exhilarating time for me, at least in the beginning. There is in here a contradiction that every journalist should ponder; and I reflect on it still: What of us as human beings, if we are at our best in times of such misery?

The war was very near by. A suburban war, if you will. At first, because the U.S. command tried to keep us away from battle by limiting access to helicopters, we simply took taxis to the war. We would rent them in Saigon — huge beaten-up American gas-guzzlers driven by men whose real calling was clearly Le Mans — and we would roar through the countryside to witness whatever battles we could (though never returning at night). Then a man named Ivan Slavich came to the country and he soon became a friend. He commanded the first company of armed helicopters in American history. Ivan was absolutely fearless; if he was not the bravest man I ever met, he was certainly one of the two or three. Irreverent, joyous, unorthodox, he was the kind of man the Army loves in wartime and fears in peacetime. He feared neither the enemy, nor his superiors, nor above all the Army bureaucracy. Despite pressure from superior officers, he used to take us on his gunships and into battle whenever we wanted. This enraged the Public Information officers, whose job in those early days it was to control us and keep us away from battle and, at the very least, keep an eye on us while we worked. Once, I remember, an Army major, a PIO, showed up unannounced and uninvited to go on a mission. It was clear he was there, among other things, to spy on us.

“Who the hell are you!” Ivan asked him. The major gave his name. “Did I ask you to come on this mission?” Ivan asked. The major said no. “Then get the hell off that helicopter — this is my company and I’ll damn well take who I want with me, and I don’t need any spies,” he said.

Sometimes a call would come from him at night and he would simply say, “I think you want to have breakfast with me tomorrow.” That meant getting up at 3 a.m. and going off to Tan Son Nhut. They served huge breakfasts in Ivan’s mess, but I could never eat anything. Maybe sip the coffee if I was lucky.

We would take off at about 5. Ivan’s men flew ships called Hueys, and when a Huey changed direction in the air, somehow it always sounded like machine-gun fire, and I would always freeze. This amused Slavich greatly; he told me the secret of my success as a war correspondent was that I was scared only at the wrong times. I still remember the sheer beauty of flying over the Mekong Delta as the dawn came up; I have never before, and never since, seen anything lovelier. I remembered as well odd fragments of baffle, of coming in on a tree line, taking fire, and the pilot of one of the Hueys letting go with his rocket pods at the hut where the fire was coming from. The hut simply disappeared. “Left those SOBs with a headache,” he said as we turned for another pass. At night we went out for drinks with the pilots from that company, a lot of drinks, and we would often end the evening singing. There were two songs I remember. In one the men, who loved their commander, in the last stanza simply chanted his name, “Ivan Slavich! Ivan Slavich! Ivan Slavich!”; in the other, the last line went like this: “Better days are coming, by-and-by/Bleep-bleep.”

I loved those moments, and sometimes in Vietnam if I am to tell you the truth, it was as if we were watching movies of ourselves in which we were the stars; it had that kind of unreal intoxicating feeling. For in those days we lived on the very edge of life and death, and that heightened every experience. Did I like Ivan Slavich? In truth, in those days I loved him. For at moments like this, nothing is ordinary.

Those days produced a rare camaraderie — that of men who have been in battle together — and the intensity of that camaraderie, these many years later, still defies any rational explanation. It is a bond so strong, so immediate, that it wipes away, at least momentarily, all the normal barriers of class, politics and race. Nothing in terms of friendship need precede it, nothing need follow it. It exists of itself, nothing more asked, nothing more required.

I’m sure any psychologist would be fascinated, for it is something short of sexual, oddly pure and spiritual. In those moments, everything is so intense, everything is so completely shared, and everyone is so dependent upon everyone else, that it defies all other relationships. Marriage has its own special bonds, but they are bonds of love and family, set (with any luck) for a long time at a gentle plateau; in contrast, combat is primal, and it is about one thing and one thing alone — the desire to live one more day.

In those days I adopted and was adopted by the American advisory team working with the Vietnamese Seventh Division. It was headquartered in the most highly contested area of Vietnam, and it was just a short drive from Saigon. In addition, the senior adviser, Lt. Col. John Vann, was, if not the most talented American officer in the country (which many thought he was), certainly the most driven and the most fiery.

When we first met, he was still optimistic, but I watched him change as the war slipped away and as his advice was scattered in the wind. He took me in hand, taught me about the war and made sure that I went out in the field with his best captains; they were, he said, the best of a generation of American officers, and he was right. If there were ever young men who seemed a direct extension of the Kennedy inaugural speech — “we will pay any price, bear any burden” — which had so stirred me just two years earlier, it was these officers in My Tho. On my first operation I went out with Capt. Ken Good.

Vann gave Good instructions that under no circumstances was he to lose me. Good was impressive, gentle, fair and strong. The next time, I went out with another captain, Jim Torrence. To this day, I cannot look at a Robert Redford film without thinking of Torrence, for he not only looked like Redford but he also seemed, like the basic Redford character, to embody all of America’s best values; no one meeting him, watching him in the field, could doubt his intelligence, his strength and his kindness. I was in awe of him and later wrote and published a small novel in which one character was in no small part based on him.

The Vietnamese have little hair on their bodies, and what hair they do have is dark. They were fascinated by Torrence, for his powerful forearms were covered by blond hair the color of corn silk. They regarded him, quite properly, as a visiting American god. I remember once, when his Ranger company was under fire near a tree line and everyone was ducking down, Torrence stood up, checked his position as casually as a commuter checking a train schedule, and then beckoned his people forward. Later, I asked him how he could be so cool under fire. “Oh,” he said, “I might have been more nervous if that stuff was incoming, but most of it was our own. Anyone got hit by that, he was going to get hit from behind.”

Sometimes, after a day or two in the field, we would go out for dinner together. I remember one evening at a Vietnamese restaurant in My Tho where, at Vann’s orders and for reasons I cannot properly explain — perhaps the Catch 22 quality of the war was beginning to catch up with us — we had to eat with chopsticks with the opposite hand. “Everything else here is assbackwards, ” he said. It was his way of proving that everything in Vietnam was in some way reversed, that day was night and right was wrong and, worse, wrong was right.

That night the talk, as it often did, came around to the other side, the Vietcong. There was always, when field officers spoke, a grudging admiration for them, for the excellence of their leadership, the bravery of their ordinary soldiers, and the careful way they exploited their limited resources. In contrast to the Arvin, the South Vietnamese troops, who were worthy soldiers but often poorly led, the Vietcong were seen as admirable adversaries. Both Vann and Torrence began to talk about how they would like to serve as advisers to the VC for a month or so. It was an interesting note, and I was to hear it repeated frequently in Vietnam. There was nothing political about it; this was simply one brave soldier’s way of saying he admired the ability and courage of his foe. But, as I pondered it more and I learned more, the implications of it became greater, and they were inevitably political. Why was the other side braver than our side? Why was its field leadership so strikingly superior? Could this mean that we were on the wrong side?

Those dinners with Vann and the other officers turned darker and more bitter as 1963 progressed. Ken Good had been killed at a battle called Ap Bac, and the Vietnamese commanders had deliberately chosen to let the Vietcong escape. Vann was enraged and became even more outspoken, as gradually so did other officers in other sections of the country For the war was not being won, as the Saigon command boasted; in truth it was not even being fought, and it was therefore being lost. The Vietcong were winning without any real resistance. The American expertise was being wasted.

The American officers were taking the maximum risk, they were giving their best advice, but their advice was not being listened to. That became a chorus among field officers up to the rank of colonel, and my friend Vann became the most outspoken and, as his superiors in Saigon refused to listen to him, the most bitter. His job, they told him, was to keep his mouth shut and get along. As he continued to challenge the optimism, he was almost relieved of his command. When he tried, on his return to Washington, to talk to superiors, he was threatened with a court-martial. No wonder he had made us eat with chopsticks with our opposite hands.

When something like this happens, there is only one thing for a reporter with any conscience to do. He has to follow his information and his instincts, and I began to write pessimistically about what was happening. It was not what I wanted to write but it was, in conscience, the only thing I could write.

Later it was said by some critics of the press corps that what we did was trendy — that is, tailored to fashion — and it is true that by the late ’60s, there were more journalists who opposed the war than favored it. But in those early days it was very lonely indeed, going against the main currents of American opinion and your own preconceptions and beliefs. It was the beginning of an odd and complicated reevaluation, not just of policy but of self, that I began in those days. I had wanted our side to win, I believed in our values, but we were not winning. If our values were not working, were they in fact the values we thought they were? For we saw ourselves as egalitarian, democratic, anxious to help the Vietnamese against the Communists; but the peasants saw us as rich and white, the friends and principal bankers of the French, who had been their colonial rulers and who had fought them during the bitter eight-year war for independence. Our sense of who we were was completely reversed from theirs.

My friend Bernard Fall, the distinguished French historian-journalist, once said: “The Americans are walking in the same footsteps as the French although dreaming different dreams.” That change in my attitude, of course, came slowly and reluctantly. Reporters, more than most people, are fond of writing about their loss of innocence, and I have a few friends who have lost their innocence three or four times. Still, I lost my innocence in Vietnam. Ideals of egalitarianism, I decided, were not easily exported, and often the people in Washington most eager to export them were in fact those who most clearly failed to live up to them at home.

I also, for my troubles, became the enemy of not just the American Mission in Saigon but sometimes, it seemed, the entire government in Washington. In ancient times, messengers who brought the king news he did not want to hear were executed for their trouble. Now, in modem times, we simply attack reporters. So it was for me. Because I was the reporter for The New York Times, the most influential of the country’s newspapers, I became the main target of all the people who had a vested interest in making the war effort look better than it actually did. I was attacked for being left-wing, which I was not; attacked for cowardice, though I had been on some 50 missions by then; attacked even for my manhood and my patriotism. Nor was it just ambassadors and generals and magazines and newspapers. Soon it was two Presidents as well. President Kennedy, whose vision of our national responsibility had so challenged me, asked the publisher of The Times to pull me out of Saigon. Lyndon Johnson was more blunt. I, like my colleague and friend Neil Sheehan, was a traitor to my country, he told reporters.

There was not very much fun in this. I do not think you go into this profession to be liked or to be popular, but I think the totality of the hostility and the systematic distortion of what we were doing rankled. In an odd way, the pressure from the top, from Kennedy or from the generals, never bothered me too much. I had never believed a reporter should seek approval from politicians or high officials. But I was going through a highly personal interior debate which was far more complicated. For I bore one special burden, Julia, made up of your grandfather’s own patriotism and love of country and his own high personal courage. He, a son of immigrants who I suspect believed more strongly in American values than many older American families, had served in World War I as a combat medic and in World War II as a combat surgeon.

By 1963 he had been dead for 13 years, but his shadow, indeed his myth, loomed large over me. I wondered often in those days about what he might think about my reporting and decided finally that he, more than anyone else, had taught me to be true to myself, to stand up for what I thought was right, no matter if I had to stand alone. Besides, I remembered, and it cheered me immensely, he was a patriot but not a jingoist; he had hated the bombast of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and had always believed that the national anthem should instead be “America, the Beautiful.” Remembering that, I felt better.

There was, however, one charge against me which rankled greatly at the time, and I think it is worth detailing for you because it may help explain some of the changes I went through. A well-known journalist from Washington named Marguerite Higgins, who was very much a voice of the Pentagon. came out to Saigon for a brief tour. She soon went around telling other reporters what she had been told by a Marine general in Washington. Halberstam, she said, quoting the general, had been shown a photo of a bunch of Vietcong bodies, and he had burst into tears. Tears were for women, of course, and not only had I wept, but I had wept for the other side.

I was stunned; the story was completely untrue and it was, I feared — for I was young and vulnerable — potentially damaging. After all, manhood was particularly important among war correspondents, and the ideal of the Hemingway hero, though fading a bit, was still important. Hemingway heroes did not cry. I was indignant and protested angrily among my colleagues, all of whom had already shared countless missions with me. A few weeks later, the very same Marine general appeared in Saigon, and when I saw him on the airport tarmac, I went roaring after him, confronted him, put my finger in his face and started shouting at him.

“Listen, ” I said, and I can still hear the anger in my voice, “I know what you’ve been saying to reporters in Washington about me crying over seeing a bunch of bodies, and it’s crap, do you hear me, crap! I’ve been on more than 50 missions in this country and I’ve seen a lot of bodies and I don’t cry and you better damn well get that right.”

The general was completely stunned by this — he had no idea that his words might come back at him and that he would be faced down by some demented journalist. He mumbled something about this not being a war for GI Joe reporting. “I don’t want any more of your Pentagon briefing crap, ” I said and walked away.

I was, for a time, immensely proud of myself, as if I had passed some secret test, and my friends were both pleased and amused. But, about a year later, your godfather, Jack Langguth, who succeeded me in Saigon, put the story in better context for The Times. He wrote about the same incident, saying it was a symbol of a changing America, and nothing was expediting the change more than the war itself.

Though the story was not true, he wrote, perhaps it ought to have been true, not just of me but of others. Perhaps we all should have cried more over the sight of bodies from both sides. Future generations of Americans, rather than looking down on someone who, seeing bodies, has cried, might respect him all the more. I think he was right. I think he saw the truth of that incident far more clearly than I did, and I see Vietnam now as not just a story but as part of a personal journey.

I do not think I was alone in what I went through in those years. I think I was simply a part of a great national interior debate taking place throughout the country; we were reexamining not just America in Vietnam, but America itself. If we doubted that we were in the right war, or even on the right side, it did not mean that we loved our country any less. If anything, knowing America’s faults and imperfections, perhaps I love it more than your grandfather and great-grandfather, for perhaps I love it more wisely. During all those years, I kept on my desk a small quote from Albert Camus which he had written during France’s war in Algeria: ‘I should like to be able to love my country and love justice.”

I have thought long and hard about Vietnam over the last 20 years, for something like this does not lightly leave you, and I have decided that the true innocents are not those — as Washington would have it — who are afraid to use force and thus do not understand the real world, but in fact those who still think that in this day and age we can impose our values and our will upon peasants by force. And your godfather was right: I wish in fact that someone had shown me a photo of Vietcong bodies and I had cried.

* Sgt. Clarence E. Hornbuckle was killed in action on June 6, 1968, in South Vietnam.
* John Vann, by then one of the highest-ranking civilians in South Vietnam, was killed near Kontum in 1972.
* Capt. Kenneth N. Good was killed at the battle of Ap Bac on Jan. 2, 1963.
* Lt. Col. James E. Torrence was killed in action on May 18, 1971, in South Vietnam.
* Bernard Fall, the most distinguished historian of the war, was killed near Hue on Feb. 21, 1967.