Henningsen: Remembering Malcolm Browne

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(Host) Malcolm Browne, a legendary journalist whose reporting from
Vietnam won the Pulitzer Prize, died last month. Teacher, historian,
and commentator Vic Henningsen was his neighbor and has these
reflections.

(Henningsen) Cider pressing on our road in Thetford
will be more subdued this season and maple syrup will lose some of its
zest now that Malcolm Browne’s no longer around to share the experience.
He delighted in gatherings where friendships grew as we reaped nature’s
bounty.

I met him a dozen years ago, soon after we came to the
road. I knew his Vietnam reporting, especially his horrifying photos of
the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk whose 1963 protest
against the U.S.-backed Diem regime in South Vietnam became an enduring
visual memory of that tragic era. And I had just finished reading
William Prochnau’s excellent Once Upon a Distant War, a study of
American newsmen in Vietnam in which Malcolm figures prominently along
with David Halberstam and Neal Sheehan. Later, I read Malcolm’s own
Muddy Boots and Red Socks and got the rest of his adventurous story:
being shot down not once, but three times; learning how to walk through
mine-fields; risking everything to get his Vietnamese colleagues out
when Saigon fell.

Malcolm’s fierce reporting gave the lie to "spin
doctors" everywhere. An equal opportunity offender, he irritated the
U.S. government and angered a variety of authoritarian regimes that
detained or expelled him when death threats didn’t work. One of the
youngest reporters in Vietnam he was, at sixty, the oldest war
correspondent in the 1991 Gulf War, where he was slightly wounded in a
Scud attack. For almost forty years, Malcolm covered crises and
conflicts around the world, taking occasional breaks for stories on
topics as varied as trekking in the Himalayas and hunting Nazis in
Argentina.

Malcolm trained as a chemist, becoming a journalist
only when the Army reassigned him from driving a tank in Korea to
working for Stars and Stripes. As a science reporter late in his career
he traveled to Antarctica so often, it’s said, he got a commuter
discount.

He was a true scientist in that he never lost his
capacity for wonder. An almost childlike enthusiasm for discovering how
things worked joined a passion for objectivity that gave
his journalism extraordinary precision and clarity – whether about the inner dealings of a corrupt regime or the
mechanics of a supernova.

Here on the
road, though, he was just Malcolm, an eager participant in neighborhood
affairs, an occasional balloonist down in Post Mills, and a discerning
judge of local cider and syrup.

After cider-pressing last fall I
drove him home in my vintage 1955 MG. Typically, we had the hood up for
a lengthy examination while Malcolm discoursed about gear ratios and
other details of post-war English sports cars, prior to strapping in for
a full speed roar down the road. His Parkinsons had been pretty bad that day, but he laughed all the way home.

In
late August family and friends buried Malcolm Browne on the lovely
Thetford hillside where he watched so many bright dawns – a restless
seeker after truth, come home at last.

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