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Mr. LAURENCE: I wonder whatever inspired me to go live in the jungle
for all that time that I did because I can't imagine doing that now.

LAMB: How long were you in the jungle?

Mr. LAURENCE: Twenty-two months.

LAMB: How many different times?

Mr. LAURENCE: Fifty, 40, 60--I don't know.

LAMB: How many different tours?

Mr. LAURENCE: Three tours.

LAMB: Why this book at this time?

Mr. LAURENCE: This is when I finally finished, got it to the
publisher, got it printed. It's done. That's why it's coming out at
this time.

LAMB: The title "The Cat From Hue," where does it come from?

Mr. LAURENCE: The title of the book was always going to be "The Cat
From Hue." Back in '68, when I met this starving, orphaned, homeless,
flea-bitten animal, I recognized that it had the three colors that the
Vietnamese believe are lucky in a cat--they call it the cat of three
colors--and decided that maybe the cat would be lucky for me. So that
was the beginning of a long relationship with the cat. But the
circumstances around which I met the animal--the battle of Hue on the
20th day in 1968, as the Marines in the Citadel were driving slowly,
foot by foot, the North Vietnamese back and finally out of Hue
altogether--were so adventurous, so powerful, so moving in a way that
all wars can be, but were in particular for the Vietnam war, that I
knew that that was where the story should begin, the story of my time
in Vietnam. And so since the cat was involved and high drama were
involved, I decided it just had to be "The Cat From Hue."

LAMB: How long did that cat live with you?

Mr. LAURENCE: Thirteen years.

LAMB: When did--he...

Mr. LAURENCE: He.

LAMB: Meo?

Mr. LAURENCE: Correct.

LAMB: ...die?

Mr. LAURENCE: In 1981.

LAMB: This book, $30. No table of contents, no index, no footnotes,
no photographs, 850 pages of narrative. Why leave all the rest of
that out? What's the thinking, there?

Mr. LAURENCE: I thought it might be distracting. I didn't want the
book--and I presume my publisher didn't want it to be any longer,
either. So the rest of that--the photographs, the epilogue, which
tells you what happened to the characters, the index, and lots of
other stuff will be on the Web site that we're now putting together
called cat--thecatfromhue.com. It'll all be there; it just isn't
available in--in the book.

LAMB: At what point do you expect people to be able to go on that Web
site and find the rest of this material?

Mr. LAURENCE: In a few weeks. As soon as I get back home, we'll
finish up doing it and get it--get it online.

LAMB: Now no chapter headings except for dates, and the different
sections of the book have uneven number of pages. Let me just--for an
overview, the first part, 88 pages about Hue, 1968.

Mr. LAURENCE: Just the battle.

LAMB: Just the battle. The second part, 1965-'66, 346 pages. What's
that about?

Mr. LAURENCE: Before I tell you, let me say that at the end of part
one--and the book is in five parts, or five acts, for a specific
reason--at the end of act one, I--I spend a few pages explaining why I
wrote the book, why I was compelled to write the book, why I needed to
try to relive the experiences I had gone through during my time in
Vietnam, which was '65 to '70, and to try to experience some kind of
healing process. So that's in the last few pages of part one. But
the rest of part one, as I said, is--is simply the battle of Hue and
what happened there while I was in it.

Part two begins back in 1965, at the very beginning of the major
American involvement. I went in August of 1965, just as the build-up
was beginning, the American troops were arriving, and stumbled into
someone who took us to where the advance party of the 1st Cavalry
division was. So we spend the beginnings of part one--part two--or
act two with the 1st Cav, the advance party, with the 101st Airborne
who were providing security for the Cav, and then up to meet the
Marines, who had been there since February or March, and go on some of
the early operations that leads us to the battle of Plei Mei and the
Ia Drang Valley, some of the other early battles in 1965 and 1966, the
Bongson campaign which Colonel Hal Moore led, and meet some of the
most interesting characters of that early part of the war. And that's
a much longer section, as you know.

LAMB: You have act four--act--act three as '67, '68...

Mr. LAURENCE: Right.

LAMB: ...88 pages. Act four is 1970, Tay Ninh, and that's another
long section of 282 pages. What's that all about?

Mr. LAURENCE: That's all about the making of the "World of Charlie
Company," the documentary that we did for CBS in 1970.

LAMB: And why was that important to write about?

Mr. LAURENCE: It was important because in the progression of the
narrative, the narrator goes from being this innocent, very naive
25-year-old exposed to Vietnam and the war and the US military, really
for the first, time in an intense way, very gullible, believes
everything that he's told. And by 1970, on his third tour, here he is
living like a soldier and in the culmination of--of the story,
actually becoming a soldier. So that's why it was necessary to tell
the story of "Charlie Company."

LAMB: And the--act five is 1970 to the present. Where did you write
the book?

Mr. LAURENCE: I began writing it in Vientiane in 1966 on an R&R
trip. I had just been in a really awful battle in which my sound man
was wounded and--and I was nicked and--and everybody, in the little
trench we were, was--was wounded. And the experience was so
overpowering, it--it--it frightened me so much, I filed a report for
CBS. It took them a week to edit because it was so disjointed. I had
tried to write in the first person for the first time and it didn't
work, and they had to rearrange it. So I went to Vientiane and--and
took my typewriter and tried to write a fictional account of--of a
story from Vietnam, and that was the beginning of the compulsion to
write what has finally turned out to be this book.

But more of the writing took place and interviewing began in--in a
serious way in 1977 when I quit CBS to try to write the book for a
year, and then again when I quit ABC in 1980 and went four years,
again, trying to write this book and--and getting many of the chapters
written as they pretty much appear here. But finally, in 1993, I took
a leave from ABC and spent the last eight and a half years working
full time on the book.

LAMB: Physically, where did you write it?

Mr. LAURENCE: Mostly, in London and where I live outside of London.

LAMB: And why do you live outside of London today?

Mr. LAURENCE: Well, my wife and I had a country house, and when we
split up 10 years ago, she decided to stay in London in the flat that
we'd had, and so I got the country house and that's where I've stayed.

LAMB: And why in London--or why in--in Great Britain instead of the
United States?

Mr. LAURENCE: I went in 1971 to replace Morley Safer, who'd just
been hired to work for "60 Minutes," and because I felt more
comfortable working overseas as a foreign correspondent than in New
York or Washington as a domestic correspondent, I decided--and the
networks let me--stay in--in London.

LAMB: What are you doing now?

Mr. LAURENCE: Now I'm enjoying this interview very much. Going
around the country, will be doing more interviews, trying to get
people to have some interest, or at least know what the book's about
before--before considering whether to buy it.

LAMB: Any other way of making money for you right now? Any other
profession? Are you involved in--besides this book?

Mr. LAURENCE: Oh, I've started work on a documentary about optimal
human experience and positive psychology. Some of the work has been
done. I intend to finish that for PBS. And I'm learning
the--the--how to try to raise money from foundations, something one
never had to do with the networks.

LAMB: Go back to your life before you got to CBS just for a moment.
I read in the book, rural Ohio at one point in your life? What was
the--how long did you live there and what were your parents like?
What'd they do?

Mr. LAURENCE: My--my mom and dad--both of whom, God bless them, died
last year--grew up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and they met on the
shop floor of the Columbia Records factory in the 1930s. Dad
organized the first union at Columbia Records, the old CIO in--in the
late '30s and became its first president. And after he got back from
the war in Europe, the management of Columbia decided to make him a
shop foreman so they didn't have to negotiate with him across the
table any longer. And he went into management, and they asked him to
manage the new factory in Kings Mills, Ohio, population 600. So we
went out there in the '40s for three years or so. And--and that was
at the heart of my--of my growing up.

We eventually came back to Connecticut and Dad went on to become
executive vice president of--of Columbia Records, then became a part
of CBS, and a staunch Republican till his death. So from union
organizer to Republican voter was--was kind of a history of him.

And Mom was a--a housemaker--I have two younger brothers and lived
in--in Florida until her final days. She--she gave me lots of good
advice about writing this book and keeping at it and not giving up,
and, you know, following my goal of being able to write a book. I
think she'd have been so proud. She knew that the book was going to
be published, but she'd have been so proud of her son to have just
finished.

LAMB: Born in 1940?

Mr. LAURENCE: Thirty-nine.

LAMB: Thirty-nine and--and went to Fairfield Prep School?

Mr. LAURENCE: Yes.

LAMB: And what did you do after that?

Mr. LAURENCE: From prep, I wan--I--my--asked my dad for advice what
to do with my life, and the space program was just beginning, and
since I had been a good science student, he suggested that I might
want to go to MIT or RPI and become an aeronautical or electrical
engineer. And it was good advice except that I didn't--I discovered
that I really wasn't cut out to be an engineer. I was accepted by
both those universities, ended up at RPI, felt dislocated in Troy, New
York, really out of place, for all kinds of reasons. I missed home.
I missed my girlfriend. I--I missed the collegiality of prep, which
was a Jesuit school in Fairfield. And so I dropped out fairly soon
after I started there and transferred to the University of
Pennsylvania.

And after a year or so in Penn, I discovered the campus radio station,
WXPN, and realized almost at once that that was what I wanted to do.
That was an avocation of the first order. So I never finished. I
started right away to--to work in broadcasting and worked in
Huntington, Long Island, in Bridgeport, my hometown, in Washington,
here at WWDC, where there was a wonderful newsroom run by a couple of
college journalism professors, one of whom was named Joe Phipps, and
people who had come to Washington with Lyndon Johnson when he became
vice president--or senator. They came when he was senator and left
when he became vice president. And so they--it was a working newsroom
but also it was a journalism school because of--of these two
professors.

And from there, after about 10 months, I went to New York and worked
for two and a half years for WNEW, again, a radio station, in New
York, and from there, I was hired to work at CBS in 1965.

LAMB: How old were you...

Mr. LAURENCE: At CBS?

LAMB: ...at CBS when you started?

Mr. LAURENCE: Twenty-five.

LAMB: How did you get to Vietnam?

Mr. LAURENCE: They sent me as the radio correspondent.

LAMB: How did you get to television?

Mr. LAURENCE: They had an extra camera crew. They'd sent the best
combat crew they could find, Jim Wilson and Bob Funk, camera and
sound, to Vietnam to work with Morley, who had arrived a couple of
months earlier. So they were going to have Morley and this great
combat crew, and Jack as the radio reporter on his own, working
separately. But Morley had discovered a marvelous Vietnamese
cameraman that he enjoyed being with--they were well matched in many
ways--named Ha Tu Kan--Ha Tu Kan. And so when Wilson and Funk
arrived, Morley was already happily partnered, and so Fred Friendly,
who had hired me, decided that he would--he would--he would just try
to see if I could do television.

Fortunately, Wilson knew as much about television as--as any cameraman
in the business, and so he taught me, story by story. As long as I
could find a good place for us to go and do a half-respectable
interview, Jim would pretty much do the rest. He'd tell me what
pictures to lead with and how to try to match the words with the
pictures. It was part of my continuing education, and so I learned in
the field.

LAMB: Your first story that got on CBS News?

Mr. LAURENCE: Was a piece called Dawn Attack: The 101st Airborne.
One company of the 101st Airborne went into a village, a hamlet in the
Vinh Thanh Valley--Happy Valley--near Ah Khe--just northeast of Ah
Khe, and tore it up, just--just tore it to pieces looking for the VC,
some of whom they found and killed, but burned the houses and threw a
grenade in a bunker and killed a pregnant woman, and that was the
first story that I did that got on.

LAMB: Now you write a lot about that particular incident. What
impacted that--go back and tell a little more about that incident.
What--what was--what was the area like, and what was the purpose of
the--of the--you know, when the pregnant woman was killed? What was
the purpose of that particular operation?

Mr. LAURENCE: The area was what the American military and the South
Vietnamese considered to be hostile territory. It had been controlled
by the Viet Minh and controlled later by the Vietcong and...

Mr. LAMB: Who were the Viet Minh?

Mr. LAURENCE: They were the people of Vietnam who fought the French
and drove them out, defeated them at Dien Bien Phu, led by Ho Chi Minh
and--and--and his people.

LAMB: And who were the Vietcong?

Mr. LAURENCE: And the Vietcong were the indigenous South Vietnamese
resistance, the National Liberation Front troops, the armed wing of
the National Liberation Front.

LAMB: I'm going to, by the way, ask you a lot of questions to define
like that because I've found that in preparation for your particular
interview, as I carried the book around, "The Cat From Hue", people
under 40 wanted to pronounce it Hew-ee, anything but Hue, and I--I
started to recognize that people under 40, some under 50, who don't
even know anything about the Vietnam War, so that's why some of these
questions about something like the Vietcong.

Mr. LAURENCE: I wrote that with them in mind. I wrote it a lot for
my daughters who are in their 20s, and because they had so many
questions about the war, and because they had known the cat as they
were growing up, needed to know, I felt, at least a primary history
of--of the war. But I work the history parts into the book little by
little so that it doesn't read like a history. I hope it reads like
an adventure story.

LAMB: Go back again to that first battle that you saw and the killing
of the pregnant woman. How was she killed?

Mr. LAURENCE: A paratrooper was trying to clear some of the bunkers
that were under each of the huts, or houses, in the--in the hamlet,
and--and just tossed a hand grenade in--in fact, Wilson got a picture
of it happening--and he, of course, would not have done that if he'd
realized that there was a 19- or 20-year-old girl in there. I--I--I'm
just sure that the troops did not intend to kill innocent civilians.
And the company commander, as soon as he saw this--and they brought
the body of the woman out and put her on the road, because they wanted
every one of the soldiers, and us, to see what had happened. It--it
was an accident. It--it was a mistake. It wasn't deliberate at all.

And they took--they took a number of prisoners, some of whom were
pretty assuredly VC, and tied them up and sat them in the sun. And
the company commander, right away, said, `No more hand grenades in the
bunkers. Bunkers are like breezeways in America.' He was a very, very
bright, young, West Point graduate--young captain--and--named Martin.
And--and so the troops stopped--stopped throwing hand grenades, but
then they started throwing smoke grenades in--into the bunkers. You
know, they didn't want anybody in the ground who they couldn't see.
They were trying to flush out the VC. And--and wherever they found
documents or a weapon or evidence of VC, they burned the houses down.
First they blew them up, and then they burned them down.

And I wrote a very sympathetic report to--to the soldiers. I--I
didn't criticize them at all, and we didn't dwell on the fact that the
woman had been killed. In fact, the shot lasted six seconds.

LAMB: One of the first questions I wanted to ask you while I was
reading the book is how could you possibly remember all these quotes?
And that--just to give you an open--of course, did you--when we see a
quote marked in this book, did you have that written down somewhere?

Mr. LAURENCE: I either had it written down, but mostly it was on the
videotape or on an audiotape that I had made, or in my notebook, or in
a letter I had written home, or it's in an historical document written
by another author. Every time I use the proper quotation marks,
there's a record that exists somewhere of that. In a couple of cases,
it's--but only a couple of cases--it's in the retelling of a war story
that I have told a hundred times or 50 times to people in the course
of--of telling stories about the war, so there is--there is that
record.

I didn't rely on memory, except in one unusual case, and--and that was
just extraordinary, Brian. I--each chapter took about a month to
write, and while I was--and each chapter is about one story. There
are 85 chapters in this book, 850 pages. Each chapter is a story, or
a large hunk of a story, and it has a beginning, a middle and an end.
So the book can be read as individual stories, but all strung together
to form a larger story with--with--with--you know, with--with a larger
point to make. In one case, what happened was that I would start
dreaming about the chapter that I was writing. I would start to
relive--my own conscious was getting into the act, and occasionally,
it would throw up a scene that I had forgotten. And I'd be sitting
there and remember something that had happened, just a description
perhaps, or an incident that had happened.

But most of the record comes from elsewhere--from the--from the films
that we shot at the time. I went back to CBS in 1977 and screened
most of my pieces from--from '65 until--until '70, and took extensive
notes and made audiotapes and looked at the outtakes and all of the
rest.

But once--there's a description as Charlie Beckwith and his Special
Forces Delta team--in fact, one of the first military operations that
Delta ever did was to relieve the garrison at Plei Mei Special Forces
camp. This is in October of '65 just before the Great Ia Drang
Val--Valley battles. And--and we are coming in--Wilson, Funk and I,
and an NBC cameraman named Nguyen and Charles Mohr of the New York
Times.

We are coming in with a South Vietnamese Ranger battalion, and it is
ambushed. The--an armored convoy on its way to Plei Mei, a South
Vietnamese armored convoy, lots of American advisers, is ambushed by a
regiment of North Vietnamese. And this is the first major contact
between regular units of the North Vietnamese and American forces.
The South Vietnamese hold with--with casualties; the North Vietnamese
take a lot of casualties, and it ha--the attack takes place at
twilight, and it was one of those beautiful, glowing, orange and blue
sunsets behind us, and American planes were sent--F-105s, I believe,
came in to bomb along the side where the attack was taking place, and
both Charlie and I remarked, for years later, at how much of a
medieval duel it seemed like between the North Vietnamese antiaircraft
gunners--they had antiaircraft guns with them--and the American
pilots, and the--the tracers of the bullets shooting out of the
airplane and the tracers coming up towards the airplane were
intersecting like crossed swords, very colorful, very bright,
especially at that--that time of day.

The next morning, after the battle, after the North Vietnamese had
retreated, our Ranger battalion walked down into the valley where the
fighting had taken place, and by chance, we came across that North
Vietnamese antiaircraft gun and--and it was still pointing in the air
and all the gunners were dead from the bombs the American pilots had
dropped. And--and--and Wilson took a picture of a North Vietnamese
soldier. He--he couldn't have been more than 18 years old, and half
his head had been blown away, and it was exposed to the light,
and--and, you know--it--it was an ugly thing to have to look at. And
I was sitting there at the computer writing, trying to describe this,
this young soldier's eyes looking at me and my reactions to it, and I
remembered something that I hadn't taken a note about. Wilson got
down on--on one knee with his big Oracon film camera and put the lens
about that far--you know, the minimum distance he could to take a
close-up from the soldier's exposed head with the wound, and turned it
on--focused it and turned it on and looked up at me and said--and
rolled for about a minute, and he said, `They'll never use the shot,'
meaning they'll never use it in New York because that's where the film
was processed and screened. He said, `But it'll sure `F' up their
lunch.' He had a wicked sense of humor.

That quote came from memory. And I think I probably only put it in
single--I'm not sure now--single quotation marks. But if I hadn't
gone that deeply into the experience and examined my memory,
conscience, imagination, creative abilities as thoroughly, it would
not have come back. But it was truly reliving the experience when the
subconscious can throw up a quote like that.

LAMB: By the way, he started out--Jim Wilson, the ph--photographer,
calling you a tenderfoot?

Mr. LAURENCE: Yes.

LAMB: Didn't like you?

Mr. LAURENCE: Not particularly. I wasn't professional enough for
him. We got along and we became friends, but Jim was a hard
taskmaster. He--he wanted to work with--with big-timers who could
write great scripts, as Morley Safer did working with him.

LAMB: I'm going to jump around a lot. As you know, your experience
over there--one moment you're in Saigon, the next moment on you're in
the field; one moment in a battle, next minute you're in a bar. And
so I apologize, but I want to--for this reason, because there is
something that happened in your reporting that changed the way the
military and television get along to this day, and it's the whole
business of the rebellion, walking down the road, and we jump from
1965 for a moment to 1970. What are the circumstances of this series
of reports and then a documentary?

Mr. LAURENCE: I went back with Keith Kay and Jim Wilson--Jim
Clevinger--sorry--as camera and sound, three guys commissioned by CBS
to go and do a series of reports living with American soldiers in the
field. Before then, the best documentary I thought that had been made
about the Vietnam War was by a French camera team led by Pierre
Schoendoerffer, a fine, fine writer and fine documentary maker and
filmmaker and--and a fine man. They'd called it "Anderson Platoon."
And they'd spent a few weeks living with a platoon from the 1st Cav in
1966, and made this marvelous documentary full of action and combat
and very sensitively made and beautifully photographed.

We thought we might improve on that by doing an hour, doing it in
color and spending more time with a smaller unit, a squad, or even a
fire team, 12 or four guys. And we went to the 1st Cavalry division,
and it turned out that the information officer was an old friend of
mine from the '65-'66 days, J.D. Coleman, who was a major. And J.D.
knew my record and--and we told him what we wanted to do and he took
us to the di--assistant division commander, General Casey, who
listened to what we had to say and signed off on us going to live in
the field without an officer in escort, or any escort, and just simply
living with the troops and trusting us to get it right.

Well, we did. We lived with a squad in Charlie Company, 2nd
Battalion, 7th Calvary, 2nd and the 7th, and--and got to know them,
won their trust. They--we got to know them, they got to know us and
we trusted them as well. We were in an extremely hot area of War Zone
C in the Dog's Head in 19--in the spring of 1970, just before the
invasion of Cambodia. And the North Vietnamese 95C Regiment was very,
very active in that area and was--was just raising Cain with--with
that brigade of--of the 1st Cav. Our--our battalion was--fire base
was overrun--wa--was very seriously attacked, and p--part of the
artillery was overrun. And they lost their commander as--as a result.

Charlie Company's sister companies were all hit; Alpha, Bravo and
Delta were all engaged in--in serious firefights, took serious
casualties in the same period, and by some miracle, we weren't hit. C
Company was a very careful rifle company under a very careful and
cautious commander, Robert Jackson, Captain Jackson, who was on his
second tour and had taught the troops, `Never walk down a trail.'
Well, he had a heart attack in the field. He was relieved by a
younger captain, a very good man named Al Rice, who took over and,
within the first week, asked his troop to walk--his troops to walk
down a trail. And they didn't want to do it; at least the lead
platoon wasn't going to walk down the trail.

And we photographed this and recorded this and reported this on
"Cronkite." And as a result, as much because of a Newsweek article
that the troops got to read, there was dissention in the company;
there was unpleasantness directed toward us, and we were expelled from
Charlie Company for a time. About a month later, the Pentagon put
enough pressure on the division commander to let us back in, to finish
the documentary, and we did. They--the--you know, they were
gentlemanly enough to realize the project was unfinished, and we went
back in. But they felt that we should not have shown that on "The
American Public."

You see, the military likes to take care of its own house; this,
I--I've learned over the years. And they're very good at it. If
you're an officer and you make a mistake, that's the end of your
career or it means you're unlikely to get a promotion. And the more
senior you get, the more difficult it becomes. They--they discipline
their own very efficiently, but they don't like it to be seen in the
outside world and we had done that.

LAMB: Let's show just a little bit of that point, where the rebellion
starts to take place, and we'll continue talking about this.

(Excerpt "World of Charlie Company," CBS News, 7/14/70)

LAMB: Could you do that today in the war on terror, talk to soldiers
like that in the middle of the battle?

Mr. LAURENCE: No.

LAMB: And was this the last time you could do that?

Mr. LAURENCE: No. Despite the perceived wisdom, it was possible to
cover the Gulf War. For example, John Sack lived with an armored
battalion right the way through the war and wrote a wonderful book
called "Company C," interestingly, about the Gulf War. He just stuck
with it from--from training camp to--in the same way that he did in
Vietnam with a--a great book called "M."

We who covered the Gulf War were able to get out to the units. It
would have been possible to get up to the front lines if--if--if you
tried hard enough. That was the key, just--just to press it. Nobody
pressed harder than Bob Simon, and he got captured by the Iraqis as a
result. But he and his camera crew, Dave Green and the others, had a
plan--Dave Green, by the way, was the first camera crew or anyone from
outside to get into Kuwait City when it was over. They--they had a
plan to do that.

And so it--it was possible in that war to get up to the troops and do
interviews--honest interviews with the troops. You might not get that
kind of dissension today because you've got an all-volunteer Army, and
these soldiers, as good as they were--and they were excellent soldiers
in Charlie Company--were mostly draftees. And, you know, as--as
Gordie Lee said, `Heads are going to roll.' I wish I could find Gordie
Lee. We've been trying to find him for months, without luck.

LAMB: There is a name in the middle of all of this. Is it Bill Ochs?

Mr. LAURENCE: Yes.

LAMB: And the reason I bring it up is because of The New York Times
family in Chattanooga. What was his role in all this?

Mr. LAURENCE: He was the brigade commander, and it cost him his job,
unfortunately.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. LAURENCE: Well, you see, when you--when you--when you get up to
general officer level in the--in the Army, the number of good people
available for promotion every three years is greater than the number
of slots available. So--so if you make a mistake or you don't know
what's going on in your AO or you--you--you know, if you slip up
in--in any way--and I'm not suggesting that Bill Ochs did slip up.
It's just that as a result of the rebellion and the walking down the
road, a B-52 strike was canceled, and the Pentagon doesn't like B-52
strikes being canceled. And--and Bill Ochs was relieved of command
sometime later, a month or so later, and--and that was the end of his
career. He d--he didn't make general as a result. But the Army works
that way. It--it will stop your career if--if you make a mistake.

LAMB: But you had a meeting with him. Where was the meeting? What
were the circumstances? And it's--it's one of those scenes
between--where you have the dividing line between the media and the
military.

Mr. LAURENCE: The colonel and the information officer and some
others came to meet us at Tan Son Nhut Airport to ask us to change the
wording of the script.

LAMB: This is in Saigon.

Mr. LAURENCE: Correct. And we had prepared the film and were all
ready to go with the rebellion story, to ship it to--to the States and
have it edited, and they wanted us to tone it down, to--to--to call it
a--a temporary refusal. And I used the word `rebellion'--`brief
rebellion,' and that was the best that I could do. But I had to call
it as we saw it and as it was captured on film. And I know--looking
back on it now, I probably would have done it--I--I would have changed
it. If--if I knew then what I know today, if I was as experienced
today, I--I might have changed--changed the wording.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. LAURENCE: Just because it--it might have made it easier for us
to finish the story, and tha--and that's one of the points in the--in
the book. If you can get along well enough with the military to be
trusted and still trust your own conscience to report fairly and
accurately and without personal bias, you can get along. I mean,
there are reporters in Afghanistan today who are covering the
military, and they've come from Washington and they've come from the
Pentagon and they have won their trust.

LAMB: But you can't go very far, though.

Mr. LAURENCE: Well, what I know is that if--if they don't know you
and know that you're trustworthy, they're not going to let you get
close to them.

LAMB: There's some more video from this documentary--1970
documentary, "Charlie Company," and it's about--it's the statements
about being anti-war. How far do you think you could get with this
today?

Mr. LAURENCE: I'm not sure.

LAMB: Let's look--let's look at it, and it's only about 40 seconds,
and we'll, again, ask you about it.

(Excerpt from "World of Charlie Company," CBS News, 7/14/70)

LAMB: What was the impact of that?

Mr. LAURENCE: I don't--I don't know, again. People were surprised
to see that there were soldiers in Vietnam who felt that strongly
anti-war. Again, he was a draftee. He didn't want to be there. His
analysis of why America was fighting in Vietnam was, perhaps,
different from the rest of the soldiers. I don't think you'd find a
soldier like that in the American Army today in Afghanistan.

At the point that that interview was done, the United States had been
fighting for five years in Vietnam, and the North Vietnamese were
still coming at us, and--and so it was possible to have an anti-war
position as a draftee in the Army. But I'm sure that--that--that the
people in the Pentagon were not happy to see that, as a representation
of some of the ideas by soldiers in--in Vietnam.

LAMB: Characterize the way you felt at age 25 when you started in
Vietnam, in 1965, about the whole Vietnam--American Vietnam effort.

Mr. LAURENCE: I was convinced it was the right place to be. I was
convinced it was a worthy cause. I believed in the military and the
superiority of American fighting power, air power, firepower. I
believed that it was the right--the right thing to do. I believed,
probably, the same way that young correspondents felt at the beginning
of World War II when they went to Europe or...

LAMB: Fast forward to page 531 in your book: `Trying to stop the war
was a burning issue with me.' What happened?

Mr. LAURENCE: Based on my experiences in Vietnam, I came to the
conclusion that, first of all, the war could not be won; secondly,
that what we were doing to the Vietnamese was wrong and cruel; third,
that the Vietnamese would be better off under any kind of political
system--democratic, Communist, didn't matter--that wasn't killing
them. And I felt a kind of moral obligation, based on what I had
learned, to do whatever I could to help to try to stop the war, and
the only way that I could do that was as a correspondent for CBS. And
so we went back the third time in 1970 to make this documentary, to
show people what it was costing us, as a nation, to keep our boys over
there.

LAMB: The next page, there's an incident in a bar--The Slate Bar in
New York City, where Jed Duvall, who was a CBS correspondent about to
go to Vietnam, overheard you say some of these things. And what
happened then?

Mr. LAURENCE: He objected. He argued that it was wrong to bring
your personal attitudes, political attitudes or humane attitudes--I
think it was less political than it was our sense of humanity--to a
story that we were going to cover. And I argued with him that, in
this case, it was an exception. I would agree with Jed that on 99.9
percent of all the stories that we American journalists cover, we
should try to keep our personal biases out of it. But after five
years of--of Vietnam and knowing the history and the little bit of the
culture and what had happened and what we were doing, I felt that the
more that I could do by reporting--if--if you go back and look at
those reports, you'll see that they're not biased. They're just
showing a very detailed look of what the troops felt and--and less of
when I felt.

LAMB: Some quotes: `"You can't do it, Jack," another CBS
correspondent said at The Slate. Jed Duvall was scheduled to leave
soon on his first tour in Saigon. He had been standing at the bar
listening to the conversation between Gould'--Stanhope
Gould--`Kay'--Keith Kay, your photographer, `and me. "You can't go
over there and try and stop the war. It isn't right. You can't cover
the war if you're trying to subvert it."' Now how did--did you write
that down right then?

Mr. LAURENCE: I took notes at the time.

LAMB: Right there on the spot?

Mr. LAURENCE: No. Of course not, no.

LAMB: What did you do? Go back home and take notes...

Mr. LAURENCE: Yeah.

LAMB: ...and write it down? And how often did you do this during
this period?

Mr. LAURENCE: Oh, I was keeping a journal. I--when there were
significant conversations--I'm sorry. The--the Duvall conversation
was n--is a reconstruction. I beg your pardon, and--and I'm
correcting myself now. That was a reconstruction after the fact. And
as you'll see in the book, it's not in full quotation marks; it's in
single quotations mark. And at the very beginning of the book, I
explain. Where I knew a conversation took place, I have tried to
reconstruct it as faithful--faithfully to the truth as I can, but
using what I recall having taken place, and I put those in single
quotes. I don't have a record of that conversation with--with Jed
Duvall, but those people who were there, who I asked about it, did
remember it: Stanhope and Clevinger and others.

LAMB: We asked Jed Duvall--we asked him to come in and sit in your
chair there a couple days ago and asked him about this particular
conversation, not--not to prove that he didn't say it, but just to get
his version of what he thinks of it today. And we'll--this whole
interview runs on Book TV later, but for the moment, here's a couple
of minutes of what he had to say about this book and that--that
moment.

Mr. JED DUVALL (Journalist): I have no--no memory at all of the
conversation. I've heard about this because a c--a year and a half or
so ago we had a reunion, and Jack told us at the reunion--told me
that, you know, `We had this conversation. This is what you said.
This is what I said,' and so on, and, `I'm going to put that in the
book.' I didn't remember it then. Now that I've read what--the pages
you showed me, I don't remember it now. I'm very happy with it. I
stand by it completely. I--I like th--the recounting of this event
because I'm saying to him--or he has me saying to him, `You've got to
be objective,' and he's saying, `No, I want to go over there with this
whole notion of stopping the war.'

Well, reporters just don't do that. I'll ki--I'll bet you he agrees
with that now. But, anyway, we had this--he--what he reports as an
argument. I do not remember the conversation at all. I'm happy with
it. Wouldn't do--wouldn't disagree with any of it.

Th--I don't think there's this divide of, you know, half the men and
women who are correspondents in television news today or then walking
around saying, `I'll give my opinions on something,' and the other
half saying, `I'm not going to give my opinions.' I don't think there
is such a thing. I think opinionated people get knocked aside in our
business very early.

One reporter, one correspondent, in Vietnam stands out like
Secretariat coming home in the Derby in '73, 31 le--just ahead of
anyone, and that's John Laurence. Everybody agrees. I like John
Laurence, but even if I didn't like him, I would have to agree with
you and of the people who--anyone who might not like him would agree
he was, by far and away, the outstanding correspondent in Vietnam.
But I don't agree with you that there's a bunch walking around saying,
`I will give my opinion.' Those people just don't last in our
business. They just don't last.

LAMB: Anything you want to agree or disagree with?

Mr. LAURENCE: I'd like to thank Jed for the kind words and agree,
definitely, with his position. If you are the subject of a news story
that is done on television, and you see what's done with your
interview and the facts, there is a tendency to disagree with the way
it's been presented. And I think it's essentially because you know so
much more about your subject than the interviewer or reporter or
producer, who has put it together, does. You understand all of the
subtleties and intricacies, and so you're able to recognize the
little, tiny errors of judgment and nuance.

And--and those are simply the--the journalist's best effort made
permanent on the tape, on the film, on the--on the broadcast. And
it's really easy to get irritated with someone for not getting it
right. It happened to me recently, and I had to say to myself, `No,
that was his best effort to get the story right. I'm going to accept
that,' even though I found a dozen mistakes in--in what had been
written. `I'm--I'm just going to acempt--accept the fact that
nobody's perfect.'

LAMB: How important is this book to you?

Mr. LAURENCE: I think it's my life's work.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. LAURENCE: I believe that a good journalist tries to help make a
difference in the world. The very best journalists want to keep the
American public as well informed as possible, even if it--it means
risking their lives or losing their relationships or their sleep or
their comfort or their health, which has happened in many cases.
You--you go to Ethiopia, to the ends of the Earth, to take pictures
and do interviews and gather facts about people who are living through
a famine and starving because you hope that people who see this back
home will give 20 bucks to CARE or volunteer to join an organization
that goes over there to help, and what I've tried to do with this book
is similar to that.

If you read the book all the way through, one chapter at a time,
something happens. The people who have read the book, friends of
mine, and some of my military friends say that it has--like a--like a
Greek tragedy, and it is constructed as a tragedy, like--like a play,
although it's not a play. It--it has all of the elements of, you
know, an Aristotelian tragedy--you know, the--What are they?--ethos
and--and catharsis and reversal and all--you know, there are a whole
bunch of them: discovery, plot, magnitude and, at the end,
evaluation, what the Greeks called dianoye.

If you read the book through, you'll find yourself, like the narrator,
going through all those steps, not in the order I just outlined them,
but you--you--you go through a process of--of seeing that this was a
vast landscape in Vietnam and that--and that the stakes were so very,
very great; that--that people were being killed. Greek tragedy always
has suffering and death involved in it. And there is a story which
has a beginning, a middle and an end--a plot, as there needed to be.
And then the character changes; the--the reversal that's necessary
happens, and out of that comes the discovery that something is wrong
or something has caused this. There's causality, as in--as in
tragedy, all tragedy.

And--and by the end of the book, it's my hope that, particularly,
veterans of the war or people who lost friends in the war will see
through what I write in Act 5--or Part 5--that all of this has a
reason; that all of what happened in Vietnam has meaning for us today.
That may not have been apparent before. I--I don't proclaim to have,
you know, a cure for PTSD, but I did have to resolve my own. And
it--it was of difficult, but in the writing of the book, I think it's
happened. And so it's my life's work, Brian, because I hope it may be
helpful to others.

LAMB: In the acknowledgments, you talk about Professor Brian
Crosley's writers' group, who listened regularly to these pages over
eight years and made many fine suggestions. Where is he? What was
the writers' group? And how did you relate to them?

Mr. LAURENCE: It--it started as a course at the University of Surrey
in England, which I joined. I was just starting work on "The Cat,"
book, and I didn't know how to write for the printed page. I--I
genuinely couldn't write anything longer than a--a short article
or--or a letter. I could write for television; I could make a
documentary. I could write to scenes and to pictures, but I had never
written entirely for the printed page. And I needed to learn, so I--I
joined this course. And every week I got to read two or three pages
to Crosley and the rest of the group, and they reacted to it in many
ways, but, especially, they gave me the confidence--one week at a
time--to--to keep going, 'cause I--I--I wanted to--there were times,
truly, when I--I wanted to just give up. It was too painful.

LAMB: Why?

Mr. LAURENCE: Because I had to relive each experience, and some of
the experiences are--are--are--are--are violent. I lost friends in
the war, very good friends, very good people. Thi--this will sound
very--very odd, but it's true. At one point, when I was writing about
the death of--of my friend Sam, I was...

LAMB: Sam Casten?

Mr. LAURENCE: Yeah--I was crying a--a little bit, as I had
when--when I heard of his death, and--and--and--and the thought
occurred to me, `It's time to stop, it's time to give up, it's time to
go back to television.' And it was a--it was a very--very private,
very sensitive moment in my--in my workplace. And--and I heard these
voices behind me. I couldn't see them, but I h--heard these voices,
and they had English accents. They said, `Keep going, Jack. Don't
stop.' And it was Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen.

LAMB: And who were they?

Mr. LAURENCE: They were soldiers in World War I. And it--it only
happened once, and it was only for a--a minute or two, and--and I
thought I was dreaming. But--but, you know, the imagination does all
kinds of things, and I'm sure it was nothing more than that.

LAMB: Throughout your entire book, there's constant references to
alcohol, a lot of it personal. A problem?

Mr. LAURENCE: I think that a lot of us in Vietnam and other wars
self-medicated by drinking alcohol or taking tranquilizers. I was
addicted to all kinds of--of--of drugs, but alcohol in particular. At
the end of the day, after a--a job of work, I drank, and I had a large
capacity for--for drinking. I could, you know, drink much more than
most people do. But I was not a normal drinker. You know, I couldn't
just have two and--and quit. And--and, increasingly, as my life went
on, it became more and more of a problem, and I covered more and more
wars. I mean, the October 73 War in Israel, I was getting drunk every
night.

David Green and I were going to the front every day, and I was
starting to buy a bottle on the way back from the front to the
television studio and--and having several drinks in the car before we
even went to work--screened the film and wrote the script and--and
started to cut it. And then after it was broadcast--or fed from Hertz
Lea, we'd--you know, we'd go to a bar and have a burger and--and--and
drink until 12 or 1:00 and get up at 5--and--and do it all over the
next day. And--and it can--it--it had a--a serious effect on--on--on
my physical health and my psyche and my ability to--to work and on my
relationships.

LAMB: How do you deal with it now?

Mr. LAURENCE: I don't drink.

LAMB: How long has that been going on?

Mr. LAURENCE: About 10 years.

LAMB: Ha--have you ever come close again?

Mr. LAURENCE: Once, on an airplane, after a relationship had just
ended. It was from Los Angeles to London. I was--I was just
wondering whether I was going to--whether I was going to start with a
beer or with a whiskey, as the trolley was coming down with the--with
the drink on it. And I--I said a little prayer. You know, I wasn't
big on prayer in--in those days, although you'll see in Vietnam,
something happens when you pray. I'm--I wasn't a religious person,
but I was saying all those prayers I learned at the Jesuit school in
Fairfield during the war when I was in danger, as I'm sure a lot of
the troops did as well.

But in this case, on the airplane, I said a little prayer and
instantly remembered that I packed a little food in my--in my bag to
take aboard. So I--I--I ate that bagel before the drinks trolley, and
it--of course, it changed the blood sugar in my system, so that I
didn't crave the drink. And I got through that, but th--that was the
one time when I really, really had a craving.

LAMB: We're out--about out of time. Are you happy with this book?

Mr. LAURENCE: Yes.

LAMB: Would you do anything different if you had to do it again?

Mr. LAURENCE: Yes. I--I wouldn't drive my publisher and the people
at Public Affairs quite so crazy by editing it as much as I did, to
the very last minute.

LAMB: What makes you think you wouldn't?

Mr. LAURENCE: That's a good point. Thank you.

LAMB: This is what the cover of the book looks like. It's called
"The Cat From Hue." And as we close with John Laurence, here's some
more from the documentary on Charlie Company that played first in 1970
on CBS.

(Excerpt from "World of Charlie Company," CBS News, 7/14/70)

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The Cat From Hue: A Vietnam War Story