Guerrilla Nation: My Wars In and Out of Vietnam

Michael Maclear

Sep 2013 · Dundurn

About this ebook

A celebrated journalist finds himself reporting on the savage war in Vietnam while in combat with his own network.

In September 1969, Michael Maclear, the first Western television journalist allowed inside North Vietnam, was in Hanoi for major Canadian and U.S. networks. He recounted in gripping detail how an entire population had been trained for generations in guerrilla combat. His reporting that the North was motivated more by nationalism than Marxism was highly controversial.

Later Maclear was taken blindfolded to a Hanoi prison for captive U.S. pilots, some of whom condemned the war. Nixon’s White House said the Canadian reporter was duped, and Maclear’s own network questioned him in those terms on air. Later, the network found reason to dismiss Maclear as a foreign correspondent.

Recently, Maclear returned to Vietnam and interviewed surviving key figures from the war. In this book he includes startling new information on guerrilla tactics and delivers an impassioned argument for the necessity of journalistic impartiality and integrity.

About the author

Michael Maclear was a foreign correspondent for CBC-TV in the 1960s and early 1970s. His weekly CTV documentary series Maclear earned him an ACTRA Award as Best Broadcaster. In the early 1980s he wrote the television series and book Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War. In 2013 he was presented with the Canadian Journalism Foundation's lifetime achievement award. Maclear lives in Toronto.