Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 82

LETTERS The Braestrup anecdote is not the only factually questionable item in Stearman’s commentary. His account of the 1972-73 peace negotiations is inaccurate in almost every detail. So is his assertion that American journalists eagerly searched for stories on war crimes by U.S. troops. The My Lai incident, for instance, was reported in considerable detail by communist news media not long after it happened, but American reporters in Vietnam quickly accepted the U.S. command’s denials and made no effort to investigate the communist report. When Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai story for American readers many months later, his report was turned down by a long list of major media organizations before it was finally published by a little-known antiwar news service. Only then did the event get extensive attention. On other atrocity reports and on the issue of civilian casualties in general, the record is clear that American news media were reluctant rather than eager to pursue such stories, and those subjects were, if anything, under-reported rather than overemphasized in U.S. media coverage of the war. Whether Stearman’s misrepresentations of my essay were deliberate or just inexplicably careless, I have no way to know. In either case, they do not advance his argument but discredit it. I am reminded of a quotation from John Adams, who wrote in 1770, “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”3 Whether expressing his views on Vietnam or his disagreements with my essay, Stearman would have been more convincing if he had heeded Adams’s advice. 1. Douglas Pike, The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror. Saigon: U.S. Mission (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1970). 2. Peter Braestrup, The Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington, 2 vols. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977), 1: 279-86; 2: 241-44. 3. John Adams, “Argument in Defense of the British Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials” (4 December 1770). Ph.D. Completion Timeline Lt. Col. Shon McCormick, Ph.D., U.S. Army, Army Strategist (FA 59)—I am writing to voice my concerns with the Ph.D. completion timeline Maj. Gen. Gordon Davis, Brig. Gen. Thomas Graves, and Col. Christopher Prigge portray in their article “The Strategic Planning ‘Problem’” (Military Review, November-December 2013). My own recent experience in completing a Ph.D. program encouraged me to write and ensure prospective Advanced Strategic Planning and Policy Program (ASP3) candidates are fully aware of the cost in time and energy associated with completing the program under the conditions the authors describe. Based on my experience, I do not think most officers can complete their dissertation according to the ASP3 model. According to the article, officers in the ASP3 program need to complete a substantial portion of their dissertation work while simultaneously performing a developmental tour at a “combatant command or other strategic headquarters.” Even though I had the luxury of conducting the majority of my dissertation work as a full-time student, it still took me 18 months of eight- to ten-hour workdays. 80 Moreover, the only way I was able to meet this timeline was to choose a social science approach because it was more amenable to rapid completion. Those choosing a historical approach requiring significant primary research require much more time—time that I do not see provided in the ASP3 model. While the final year focused on completion is beneficial, the student’s research—the most time-consuming portion of the dissertation—has to occur during the developmental tour because research is th