Once Upon A Distant War, written by William Prochnau. Vintage Books. Paper, $15. By Mari Wadsworth IN 1961, A time before television ruled the American reality, a handful of war correspondents blessed their great fortune at being the early arrivals in a small corner of southeast Asia most Americans didn't yet even know existed. This charming land of shimmering green rice fields and friendly, exotic women clad in Parisian fashions had everything: French bistros, modern hotels, and a wild landscape. Moreover, it offered an idealistic American reporter's dream: an emotive, moralistic battle to bring down communism and "save" an intoxicating paradise called Vietnam. With painstaking documentation, William Prochnau recreates the American perception of the Vietnam of the early '60s, "a place so foreign to their experience it often took on a storybook surreality, a fairy kingdom, a toy country as alien and enticing as the Siam of The King and I, as remote and mystically alluring as Shangri-la. Vietnam was not simply exotic. It was erotic. And narcotic." Such passages fill every chapter, giving the jaded, Vietnam-weary modern reader a renewed sense of place and history. With a novelist's sensitivity with regard to drama and character, Prochnau weaves an insider's insightful criticism with rigorous journalistic detail to tell us a story hitherto untold, to rekindle an image of Vietnam far removed from the endless rows of body bags, and the Apocalypse Now images, if only to vividly recreate the truth of the Pentagon's landmark "secret war" later on. To endeavor to write something new about the Vietnam War would seem an impossible task, but this is one Asian battle that ends in resounding victory for the author, himself a former national correspondent for The Washington Post, who made two reporting tours of the Vietnam War. Once Upon A Distant War is a complex story which succeeds on many levels, none the least of which is its scholarly approach to historical accuracy. An exhaustive list of interviews with myriad members of the press, former key White House staff and military personnel join more than 50 pages of source materials including newspapers, magazines, videotapes, a compilation of personal collections (specifically, those of ground-breaking correspondents David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan and Peter Arnett), library sources and legal documents. Now, as we close in on 30 years after this bitter chapter of history, is the most interesting time to hear what those who shaped history have to say about the fictions they attempted. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is Prochnau's chronicling of the role--and the decline--of the print media, taking the Vietnam War as a turning point. "CNN's global village was not yet a dream," he writes, "it was a fantasy," if you can imagine that. "Eventually, shrewd generals, like shrewd politicians, would learn to manipulate television's images to their advantage. The result, three decades later, became the controlled, falsely sterile Orwellian visions projected from the Persian Gulf. "But in 1961, on the battlefield, television was too young." Because of this, and of the isolation imposed on correspondents by both the Washington establishment and the South Vietnamese government, a handful of print correspondents--he points to Malcom Browne, Sheehan, Halberstam, Charley Mohr, Arnett and German photojournalist Horst Faas--wielded unusual influence over the emerging story, marking the last time print media would dominate both the words and images of an international crisis, and thereby establishing the skeptical standards for a new generation of reporters from all media. "Their extraordinary adventure would mark the beginning of the end of the golden age of print," he concludes. He may well be right about that, but his is an account which celebrates without romanticizing an era in journalism when men like Halberstam (who later authored the best-selling analysis of American leadership in the sixties, The Best and the Brightest) believed the press had power, "the power to tilt history, drive large forces." When ambitious, independent men and women persisted, with hopes of succeeding, against the institutions of government, the military and even their own papers, all in the interest of getting the story. That perhaps they were asking the wrong questions about the war--whether we were winning, rather than why we were there in the first place--is one of the pitfalls of history. But Prochnau's eminently readable redress covers so many angles of the conflict, you won't come away wanting for answers.

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