OPINION: Former military writer angered, sorrowed, by presidential lying to justify America’s part in the Vietnam war

Like many others in Warren and neighboring counties, I’m avidly watching Ken Burns’ “Vietnam” series on the local public television channels. Avidly because I was a military writer in the Pacific through the 1960s, trained for combat correspondents’ duty in Vietnam if and when called, and watching now how Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Generals Westmoreland, Abrams and others consistently lied to we correspondents as the war progressed. The only difference between now and then, that cast of characters knew how to lie proficiently and effectively for more than a decade.

Following each night of “Vietnam” I have dwelt on my memories of the Vietnam war and become more and more angered by the senseless slaughter of 57,000 young American soldiers, including my best friend, Bill Barton of Pontotoc, Miss., a fellow Associated Press correspondent who was fatally wounded on the distant battlefield. Others of my profession also gave their lives…

Military writer Malcolm Barr Sr., is “imprisoned” in a bamboo enclosure while taking part in war games with the 25th Infantry Division in the Koolau Mountains of Hawaii in the mid-1960s.

As I watch this excellent series, my admiration and love for the guys in the military of that day increases, particularly those of the First Marine Brigade. This Hawaii-based group deployed to a place, South Vietnam, that I so desperately wanted to go.

However, while the Associated Press sent my journalist colleagues, including Bill Barton, to Saigon, they sent me in the opposite direction for duty as a Washington correspondent in the nation’s capital. Bill was bitterly opposed to the war; I, guardedly, was for it. I felt guilty when he died and have not thought about it much since. Until now. Watching Ken Burns’ series, I am angry, angry at how the American public was fooled for so many years at the cost of so many lives. In countless interviews I was fooled, carrying the propaganda, the lies, forward to the public. I’m not ashamed to say I was glad to be overlooked.

Barr also took part in war training with the U.S, Marine Corps First Marine Brigade. He was invited into the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association (USMCCA) about 1975.

I do not intend to belittle in any way my military friends’ service to their country during Vietnam, nor that of all the young men who are portrayed so gallantly in the scenes from the film series, but gaining more knowledge of the war through this series puts me increasingly on my colleague Barton’s side. At the time, his death to me was not warranted (“why my best friend?” was the question I asked myself) and now, as I watch the television series night after night, I begin to see the senselessness of it all. As a military reporter, and a frequent interviewer of McNamara, Westmoreland et al, I cannot believe how we in the media, and more Americans than we at the time realized, were taken in by our leaders in what fast became a losing battle.

I am sad as I write this. Repeating myself, I am relieved that the AP, in 1967, assigned me to Washington, D.C. rather that to Saigon. To my colleagues who are, with me, proud members of the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents’ Association, I say “Semper Fi” and may those they left behind continue to rest in peace.

Editor’s Note: The writer’s son, Malcolm Barr Jr., is a graduate of Randolph Macon Academy and an Iraq war veteran. The writer, Malcolm Barr Sr., is a veteran of the Royal Air Force.