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"Stars and Stripes Forever"
[vs. the Overseas Weekly]
July 18, 1966
After a ten-hour flight from Tokyo, the Air Force C-130 touched
down at 4:30 a.m. at Tan Son Nhut airport near Saigon. Its cargo:
61,000 copies of the Pacific edition of Stars and Stripes, specially
printed on Japanese rice paper. By troop carrier, armored truck
and river gunboat, the copies spread throughout South Vietnam.
And by 4 p.m. that day, bone-tired GI's on a search-and-destroy
operation in the Zone D forest got their Stars and Stripes from
a resupply helicopter bringing in evening chow and extra mortar
shells for the night. Unfolding the tabloid, the troops could
read a UPI dispatch about the new French nuclear tests, an account
by S&S staff correspondent A2C Bob Cutts of air action over
the Gulf of Tonkin and S&S entertainment editor Al Ricketts'
story from Tokyo on the Beatles' invasion of Japan.
Despite distribution problems that challenge even the most
experienced logistics officers, circulation of the Stars and
Stripes Pacific edition has doubled to 150,000 in the last year
as U.S. troops have poured into Vietnam. From the Mekong Delta
to the Central Highlands, copies of the 24-page paper can be
found folded neatly in the waist pockets of GI jungle jackets.
In a war of five-hour-long troop-carrier flights and week-long
sweeps through the jungle, time weighs heavily on the ground
soldier, and many GI's manage to pack along at least one paperback,
magazine or newspaper. "This," said one information
officer in Saigon last week, "is the age of the well-read
soldier."
In addition to the government-authorized Stars and Stripes,
an estimated 2 million copies of U.S. newspapers flow into Vietnam
each month along with 400,000 paperbacks and 150,000 magazines,
from Mad and Playboy to The American Journal of Psychiatry and
the Harvard Business Review (Newsweek's circulation in Vietnam:
15,000).
Yet, The Overseas Weekly, one of the most popular military-oriented
papers, is not available in Vietnam. Published in Germany since
1950, OW long ago earned the nickname The Oversexed Weekly by
blending pneumatic pinups with come-on headlines: TORSO KILLER
LT MAD, HEADSHRINKERS RULE; LT SEDUCED MY WIFE, GENIUS GI TELLS
COURT; SECRET AGENT CAPTAIN FREED IN SHOPLIFTING. To Secretary
of Defense Robert S. McNamara, OW is "personally repulsive,"
and the Pentagon has spiked the paper's efforts to start a Pacific
edition. According to the Department of Defense there is no more
room on PX newsstands in Asia. But 33-year-old Ann Bryan, OW's
comely Saigon correspondent, reported she found dozens of women's
magazines on the racks (in addition to such must reading as Famous
Monsters of Filmland, HairDo, Super Crossword and Zolar's Official
Horoscope).
Bans: OW staffers believe the paper is paying for past
sins. Besides providing a steady diet of sex and sensation, the
privately owned tabloid likes to take on the big brass. In 1960,
the Pentagon reportedly threatened to ban OW from newsstands
in Europe after it ran a series critical of GI living conditions
in Turkey. And the following year, OW stirred an uproar with
stories on Maj. Gen. Edwin A. Walker and his rightwing troop
indoctrination program. Of the current Asian ban, one top Pentagon
civilian says: "The military finally realized that it cannot
get OW off its newsstands in Europe, but it can sure as hell
prevent it from getting on in Vietnam." The weekly's executive
editor, San Francisco divorcee Marion Rospach, 39, has threatened
to take Secretary McNamara to court to get the ban lifted.
The Overseas Weekly (circulation: 50,000) has staked its reputation
on running just the kind of stories Stars and Stripes can't print.
The Pacific edition and European edition (circulation: 142,000)
of Stars and Stripes are pale descendants of the World War I
and World War II voice of such angry young newspapermen as Harold
Ross, Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams and Bill Mauldin.
Today, Stripes is largely a government-laundered amalgam of wire
copy, military handouts, comics and innocuous features (instead
of a letters-to-the-editor column, S&S offers "Boondock
Bards," a sampling of GI poetry). For the affluent fighting
man, it even carries an abbreviated list of New York stock market
quotations.
Saigon Hustle: Despite its houseorgan tone, Stripes
does sometimes show enterprise, particularly in Vietnam. Operating
out of a two-story gray villa on Truong Tan Buu Street, the five
young writer-photographers who map the Pacific edition's Saigon
bureau spend an average of four days a week in the field with
the troops. To keep the news fresh, late-breaking stories are
often phoned to Tokyo, where some 30 military men and an equal
number of civilians put out the Pacific edition in a modern,
four-story plant.
Stars and Stripes sells for a nickel in Europe and most of
Asia, but all except 6,000 of the 61,000 copies that daily go
to Vietnam are distributed in the field free. In Saigon, copies
cost 10 piasters (12.5 cents). At the bachelor officers quarters,
field-rank officers on General Westmoreland's staff buy their
copies from Nguyen Van Bien, an alert, 15-year-old Vietnamese
newsboy who also hawks ten U.S. magazines, assorted paperbacks
and even such heavy hardcover reading as Modern College Physics.
Nguyen can readily appreciate the military reading explosion.
His take-home pay of 7,000 piasters a month nearly equals the
pay of a Vietnamese army captain.
From Newsweek Letters-to-the-Editor Column
August 8, 1966
Sirs:
You attribute the Overseas Weekly's appeal to a steady diet of
sex and sensation. Actually, the OW is about as sexy as a pair
of cushion-sole socks after a 20-mile hike. Stars and Stripes
comes out seven days a week with more "pneumatic" pictures
of pretty girls than OW manages on its one page, once a week.
For a typical story, take this: peabrained company commander,
fresh out of ROTC, decrees that bachelor enlisted personnel will
divest themselves of all pictures and any personal belongings
that cannot be neatly stored inside a shoebox. A cry of protest
goes to OW. OW reporter gallops to rescue. Confronts commander's
superior with imbecilic order. Order is rescinded. Commander
is transferred. The Army momentarily looks more sane than it
is. The Army owes OW a debt of gratitude. The Army hates OW because
the Army was wrong.
Real sexy, huh? Well, that is what keeps the GI plunking down
his 20 cents for the Oversexed Weekly. It is on our side
for that 20 cents. No other publication in the English language
is.
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Sgt. J. L. PERKINS
APO San Francisco |
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