MASSACHUSETTS COMMUNITY COLLEGE COUNCIL

Dr. Timothy E. Trask is Director of the TV/Radio Center at Massasoit Community College, Brockton.


One gets the idea, reading The Mark, that both the Vietnam and Cambodian wars were fought for Jacques Leslie's personal development. This puts Mr. Leslie in good company, for Henry Adams felt the same way about the Civil War--it was another stage in his "education." Both The Education of Henry Adams and The Mark were written by sons who seem more concerned with their forebears than with the business at hand. Journalism was a tool that helped Leslie "writ[e] more deeply than my mother and . . . serv[e] justice more devotedly than my father. Journalism reinforced the treacherous link I felt to my parents, and then it offered hope of soaring beyond them." The crowning achievement of the education of Jacques Leslie, the point at which by using the word "Soaring" as the chapter title he indicates that he surpassed his parents, came when he and Veronique Decoudu, a French war correspondent, managed in 1973 to scoop all other foreign correspondents in South Viet Nam by being the first journalists to enter National Liberation Front (NLF) territory. They interviewed a village chief, an NLF cadre who was a capable leader, and found him to be everything the Americans, including Mr. Leslie's father and mother as well as our mendacious military and political leaders, were not.

But Leslie seems to forget that the NLF, known by most Americans as "Viet Cong," was comprised of real people involved in a real struggle:

Before I entered Viet Cong territory I hadn't believed that triumph was possible. To live meant to suffer; to live nobly meant to achieve tragedy. Now, however, I'd located something astonishing without having to pay for it... Then, over years, something flipped: time deprived Viet Cong territory of its concrete form and turned it into a symbol signifying the existence of an exquisite zone inside my head. (p. 159)

Be it "exquisite" or not, unfortunately, we never really get out of that zone inside Mr. Leslie's head. Much of the rest of the book, it seems, is sprinkled with angst over whether or not he is brave. Nowhere does Leslie bother to define bravery, so it's difficult to figure what he's talking about. To most people, war correspondents are already brave. Who would voluntarily leave a perfectly good free society that has ample opportunities for expression and enter a war zone where life is in frequent peril but someone who is a tad outside the range of normalcy when it comes to bravery? Furthermore, despite the fact that Mr. Jacques was once wounded, he stayed in the war zone and continued to put his person at risk. The Mark is a very personal account of covering Viet Nam and Cambodia in the seventies, right up until both countries were taken over by Communist-led groups.

People who have the "mark" of Mr. Leslie's title seem to be more interested in being where the action is than in the people going through the struggles on either side. War correspondents, as Mr. Leslie presents them, do not seem to agonize over right and wrong or any other philosophical or political issues so much as they try to get at some "truth" behind official pronouncements coming from both sides. In addition, journalists have their own battles waging behind the scenes: who will land a front-page placement? what paper will be the first to report this or that aspect of the war? when will a commander slip and reveal an inconsistency? where will the next significant event take place? why wasn't this brilliant journalistic coup worthy of a Pulitzer?

I found the book to be fascinating, despite being at times annoyed by some of Mr. Leslie's personal revelations, and found that the material was forthrightly presented, making this account seem trustworthy on other, more important observations regarding the business of reporting these wars. The Mark is a worthwhile addition to studies of journalism in the seventies.

BACK

SPRING 1997

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