Samuel Philips

“Can anyone alter fate? All of us combined... or one great figure... or someone strategically placed, who happens to be in the right spot. Chance. Accident. And our lives, our world, hanging on it.” – Philip K. Dick””

“Now correspondents were coming into Saigon from the outside, traveling on R and R planes. Among them was Oriana Fallaci. She later wrote a book of reminiscences about her Tet experiences which I found somewhat baffling. According to Oriana, she had had to talk panic-stricken U.S. sergeants into providing her with transport to get to the city. The craven U.S. troops at Tan Son Nhut airport had apparently had to be galvanized into action by this frail but intrepid reporter. "Are you a man or a mouse?" she asked them.[...]Maybe Oriana Fallaci's readers were conditioned to see every manifestation of their heroic girl reporter in cliche, comic-strip terms. Correspondents have a technical term for this kind of reporting. It comes under the generic term hyping. Oriana Fallaci, and a few others, were masters of this peculiar art form, which invariably requires an element of factual truth to which the hype is convincingly added. Thus, Oriana Fallaci undoubtedly arrived in Saigon in the middle of Tet, and yes, she did get to Hue in the middle of the fighting with a number of other reporters. But no sooner did she reach the outskirts of Hue than she had to be put back on the first truck convoy, with a bad case of nerves, by Philip Jones-Griffiths, the Magnum photographer. This proved no bar to her subsequent personal account of the fighting, which”