Veteran war correspondent Galloway to give first Pershing Lecture

By Eric McHenry

Asked why he has repeatedly risked his life to report from the frontlines, Joseph Galloway tends to give self-effacing answers.

Of his desire to write from the jungles of Vietnam, he says, "I had the excuse of being 23 years old; I thought I was not only invincible but bulletproof." Explaining his return to combat coverage during the Gulf War, he points to an ineffable war correspondent's impulse: when the opportunity arises, he told the National Press Club in 1991, "like a fool, you'll go to the sound of the guns one more time."

In fact, his reason is something much more reasonable -- neither naïve recklessness nor mere instinct. Pressed on the question, he puts modesty aside.

"I believed that somebody had to go [to Vietnam] and tell that story," says Galloway, a senior writer for U.S. News and World Report, who will deliver the first Colonel John W. Pershing Annual Military History Lecture on April 15 in Morse Auditorium. "And that's a powerful motivator -- to think that men will die and no one will know their names and what they did if you or people like you aren't willing to risk everything to be there. I fought to get to Vietnam from 1963, when I started reading the dispatches of Neil Sheehan on the UPI wire and Dave Halberstam in the New York Times, and seeing Malcolm Brown's pictures of the burning monks in the streets of Saigon. I knew then that there was going to be a war, and it was going to be my generation's war, and 25 or 35 years later it would be a lot easier to explain why I had gone than why I hadn't."

Galloway spent 34 days in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, observing one of the war's definitive early battles. Together with Lt. General Harold Moore, commander of the 450-man American battalion that engaged over 2,000 North Vietnamese soldiers, Galloway is coauthor of a narrative recollection of the battle. A New York Times bestseller, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young (Random House, 1992) draws not only upon the two veterans' experiences, but upon interviews with over 100 survivors, including several high-ranking representatives of the North Vietnamese army.

The book's testimony is firsthand and harrowing: "The enemy was all over, at least a couple of hundred of them walking around for three or four minutes," Specialist Arthur Viera, Jr., told the authors. "It seemed like three or four hours. They were shooting and machine-gunning our wounded and laughing and giggling. I knew they'd kill me if they saw I was alive. When they got near, I played dead. I kept my eyes open and stared at a small tree. I knew that dead men had their eyes open."

According to H. Joachim Maître, COM professor and director of the Center for Defense Journalism, the commitment Galloway has shown to impassive, meticulous military reporting makes him a dignified choice for the inaugural Pershing lecture. The series honors the late Colonel John W. Pershing (CAS'64), an ROTC alumnus, BU benefactor, and grandson of the famous World War I general.

"His professionalism and temperament set him apart," Maître says of Galloway. "As a character, he is unique -- very laid-back, very friendly. And aside from that, he is simply driven by the desire to come up with a professional story."

Maître first got to know Galloway a decade ago, when he invited him to speak at a Center for Defense Journalism event in Washington, D.C. But his admiration for Galloway's writing, he says, dates to the Vietnam War itself.

"Joe Galloway's laconic writing was new," says Maître, who wrote for the German daily newspaper Die Welt during the war. "It was not the flowery prose that previously had distinguished Vietnam reporting. And I recall from my own time covering Vietnam the extent to which Joe Galloway was admired as somebody who remained entirely cool and detached in his reporting."

Galloway hasn't yet settled on a title for his Pershing Lecture, but says he will speak of the book and the battle.

"And since I'll be talking to an ROTC gathering," he says, "I'll probably talk about service and sacrifice, wearing the uniform and what it sometimes means.

"I think I might open up by saying, 'Often it's been said that journalists write the first draft of history. In this case, I also had the privilege of writing the last draft.'"

Galloway will be the second lecturer to offer recollections of Vietnam to a BU audience this month. On April 5, Colonel Michael Novosel, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient who flew combat missions in World War II and the Korean War as well as Vietnam, addressed ROTC cadets. The citation for Novosel's Medal of Honor credited his helicopter evacuations of October 2, 1969, with saving the lives of 29 soldiers.

The Colonel John W. Pershing Annual Military History Lecture will be part of the BU ROTC's 17th annual Tri-Service Presidential Pass-in-Review and Alumni Day. The pass-in-review will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday, April 15, at Nickerson Field. The lecture will follow at 12:30 p.m. in Morse Auditorium, 602 Commonwealth Ave. Both events are free and open to the public. The lecture will also be broadcast live on the World Wide Web at www.bu.edu/features/special/pershing. For more information, call 353-7161.