They forced their way into the capital, Saigon, and even into the United States embassy.

The Tet Offensive was a turning point not only for the Vietnam War itself, but also a watershed in war coverage.

As Frances Fitzgerald explains in her book A Fire in the Lake:

"The Tet offensive had an electric effect on popular opinion in the United States. The banner headlines and television reports of fighting in the cities brought the shock of reality to what was still for many Americans a distant and incomprehensible war. The pictures of corpses in the garden of the American embassy cut through the haze of argument and counterargument, giving flat contradiction to the official optimism about the slow but steady progress of the war. Those who had long felt doubts and reservations now felt their doubts confirmed. For the first time, the major news magazines, Time, Life and Newsweek began to criticise the war policy ..."

Until 1968, the determination to extricate the "truth" about Vietnam did not lie within the "legitimate" press but rather with the much-scorned, emerging movement of the New Journalism. Although labelled as subversive by "traditional" journalists, only the New Journalism had the courage to "tell it like it is" during a time of censorship.

Donald Duncan's "The Whole Thing Was a Lie" was classic New Journalism, supplying the gritty details that the public hungered for and that official reporting failed to provide.

"I was appalled by the heat and humidity which made my worsted uniform feel like a fur coat. Smells. Exhaust fumes. Human excrement; the foul, stagnant, black mud and water as we passed over the river onto Cong Ly Street; and overriding all the others, the very pungent and rancid smell of what I later found out was nuoc mam, a sauce made much in the same manner as sauerkraut, with fish substituted for cabbage. No Vietnamese meal is complete without it. People - masses of them! ... Bars by the hundreds - with American-style names (Playboy, Hungry i, Flamingo) and faced with grenade-proof screening."

Why didn't journalists fulfil their role in the period leading up to 1968?

Few Americans questioned journalists' objectivity or accuracy. As one American academic who grew up in the '60s put it: "We all thought, if things were that serious, everyone would be talking about it. It would have been plastered all over the papers." Instead, the war was reduced to "good guy" Uncle Sam fighting the communist "bad guys".

Many of the best reporters were themselves confused as to what was happening in Vietnam. Others simply shunned responsibility for the public's right to know, as self-censorship, and not critical reportage, was in their best interest. US military personnel supplied and updated all war information, and so became valued sources. Any criticism of the United States or US war policy destroyed the chance of accessing information in the future.

Meanwhile, editors back home bowed to the pressure of readers and advertisers. Critical reports on Vietnam were seldom believed as readily as the government's version of events. As a nation seeking to maintain its morale, the US wasn't interested in military blunders, government deception, intentional destruction of village life, and racial hostility.

The American author Kurt Vonnegut writes in his novel Slaughter-house-Five:

"I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen ..."

But although journalists had the images imprinted on their minds, they had to fight their own war to see them published. Therefore, the best reporters of the Vietnam War tended to see their roles as adversaries.

"The Making of a Quagmire" by New Journalist David Halberstam of The New York Times, for example, dealt with a group of reporters who opposed US officials in an attempt to get their copy out of Vietnam. Ironically, Halberstam's own coverage was targeted when President Kennedy personally lodged a complaint with the Times.

One of the most notable New Journalists of this era was Michael Herr. Commissioned by the men's magazine Esquire, he eventually compiled his Vietnam coverage into the highly acclaimed book, Dispatches. In his story "Khe sanh" he touches on the gung-ho coverage:

"And by then Khe sanh was famous, one of the very few place-names in Vietnam that was recognised by the American public. Khe sanh said "heroic defenders". It could be understood by newspaper readers quickly, it breathed Glory and War and Honoured Dead. It seemed to make sense. It was good stuff."

New Journalists in Vietnam worked within a new style that allowed them to dodge the constraints of press control. Their writing filtered into American consciousness under the guise of "literature" and through essays in magazines such as Esquire and Rolling Stone - a magazine rebel born at about the same time as the New Journalism movement.

Illuminating a shambolic war and an impotent America, New Journalists slashed through the smokescreens set up by American officials. They were seldom accepted by the journalism fraternity as "real" journalists. Yet, they remembered the keys to good journalism, while others who regarded themselves as the "real thing" lapped up the apple-pie patriotism fed to them in military press releases. If nothing else, the New Journalism stands as a reminder of those principles today: to take the initiative and remain the eternal sceptic.

Reporting the War

Frank McCulloch, Chief Reporter for Time magazine in Saigon (1964 - 1966), identified five stages of disillusionment each correspondent experienced in Vietnam.

1 He (or, occasionally, she) arrived, believing that America was saving a grateful people from Communist tyranny.

2 About three months later, the correspondent realised that the American mission was more difficult than he'd expected, and it was often undermined by incompetence, ignorance and military inefficiency.

3 Six to nine months later, the reporter blamed the Vietnamese for the lack of progress.

4 By the end of a whole year in Vietnam, most correspondents had decided that America was losing the war.

5 Finally, there was total disillusionment: America couldn't win the war and was just destroying a country and its own young men for a futile cause.