if St. Carl were with us...
...he would undoubtedly remind us that officers giving media interviews are a policy instrument, a conduct of politics (and war) by other means.
It would seem that the General forgot that.
Col. Dandridge M. Malone on the Press
Here's what Col. Dandridge Mike Malone said about press coverage of the Tet offensive in 1968. I first heard this in about 1982 in a folksy tape recording Col. Malone made on the Vietnam War and the Army at the time. Copies of the tape made the rounds in the Army in the early '80s and groups of officers and NCOs were sometimes assembled to listen to it.
Quote:
. . . and captured NVA with Time magazine articles . . . and the splendid victory of Tet, with hundreds of NVA lying scattered in heaps and wide rows outside Kontum, where the deadly gunships had caught them coming, uncharacteristically, across open rice paddies in broad daylight (" . . . they was all doped up and goin' to a party . . . musta been . . . crazy little bastards . . .") . . . and the victory strangely, puzzlingly, lost, somehow, somewhere, up in the air waves of the ten thousand miles between Kontum and home . . .
A text version of the tape with some added material is available on the following link:
http://one-six-one.fifthinfantrydivision.com/mikem.htm