But, over-all, this is what my job was: to go out on these missions where nothing happened except that we might kill a few civilians, if we found them, and pretend that we were really winning some battles when, actually, it was Americans being killed.

Moderator. Larry, you mentioned you had trouble sort of perceiving what your job was at first. Did you ever write what you consider to be a truly objective news story? In other words, one based on the facts?

Craig. To me there was never any question about anyone wanting me to write what I saw in the field. The job of our newspaper was to build morale in the field and as a public information office our job was to propagandize the American people.

And this is what we would do. We would go to the field and write a story that was personally related to what we saw taking place, but what was actually happening was that our people were being killed as they alienated the Vietnamese people in the villages that we went through on search and destroy missions. That was never what we would write about.

One particular mission near Dau Tieng we lost. I think, about five men that day, but we happened to find some rice. Well, this was a big cache, fine. So we made it into a real victory. We didn't see the Vietnamese Communists who shot at us. They left. They killed several of our men and left. We found some rice.

Well, the story that I wrote, which is the kind of job that I had, was that we had a very successful mission. I didn't mention that the rice was marked, I think it was from Houston, Texas. This wasn't allowed. Any of the rice caches that we found was generally rice that had been diverted from Saigon to the Viet Cong. This is generally the kind of work that I did.

Moderator. You mentioned that there was never any question in your mind that that was policy. How did you come to the realization that that was the kind of thing you were supposed to do, the slanted story? I mean, did somebody say, "Larry, I hereby order you not to write a . . ."

Craig. Generally it was more subtle than that. But one time in particular an order came down from division headquarters and I was at the Division Public Information Office when (I believe it was the information officer a Major-told us that we had to write stories about cooperation between American Infantrymen and the ARVN, the South Vietnamese Infantrymen. Well, this was non-existent.

The ARVN in our area weren't re?ted; there was no good feelings between the American infantrymen and the South Vietnamese and yet this was an order that came down-that we were to make them look good in the way of cooperation.

One thing that I did see, I was walking with an American unit along a river. A South Vietnamese unit was cooperating on the other side of the river. One of their armored personnel carriers hit mine. Probably two fellows at least got killed. Our side cheered. This was nice. We were happy for ARVNs having their track blown up. But the order that came down was that we were to write about how well the ARVNs were doing and how we cooperated with them.

Moderator. That order came from the division information officer, field grade officers, is that right?

Craig. He was a major, yes.

Mike McCusker, 29, Sgt. (E-5), Public Information Office, 1st Marine Division (1966 to 1968).

I was a sergeant in the Marine Corps and I served in Vietnam in 1966 and '67 with the 1st Marine Division as what they call an Infantry Combat Correspondent. This meant that I went out with every unit of the Infantry that was stationed, generally in Chu Lai, but I ended up all over the I corps with almost every Marine infantry unit and also almost every Marine reconnaissance unit because I was also reconnaissance qualified. These things that the men from the 25th told you were covered up. None of these instances were generally reported. Most of the stories that we wrote generally appeared in such publications as Stars and Stripes, a paper we had in I corps area called Sea Tiger, various other military news services, and the civilian press. They appeared in ways that we did not even write them. Information in them was either deleted or added. Quite often what we had written, what we had seen, what he had covered, just didn't come out in the stories. It was something entirely different. The general policy of being an Informational Services man (that's what the Marine Corps calls its reporters, The Informational Services Office). The only thing we had to do with information, I believe, is to cover it up, disguise it, or deny it. Some of the things that we could not write about, and if we did write about them they were always redlined from our stories, were the amount of American dead. Now they'd always go into light casualties, medium casualties, or heavy casualties. However, heavy casualties were never reported upon because when they got to Da Nang-and if they mention casualties in the Da Nang press center, if a platoon went out and got wiped out, they would measure platoon by battalion strength and that would, of course, be light casualties. And play those little games. Every Vietnamese dead was naturally a Viet

Cong; even six months old babies, 99 year old men and women. If they are dead, they are Viet Cong, which is a misnomer, at any rate.