An alternative newspaper for American GIs in Vietnam offered some raw glimpses into the conflict.
From 1966 to 1972, Overseas Weekly was the “GI’s friend” in Vietnam, as the New York Times put it, though the Pentagon’s top brass hated the popular and eccentric tabloid newspaper for covering the underbelly of the costly and controversial war. At the height of the conflict in Vietnam, the Pacific edition of OW had some 60,000 readers and a staff of highly talented reporters and photographers, including Art Greenspon, Don Hirst, and Brent Procter. Their intimate portraits of American GIs and Vietnamese civilians were published in We Shot the War: Overseas Weekly in Vietnam (Hoover Institution Press, 2018) from which these pages are adapted.
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This article appears in the Spring 2019 issue (Vol. 31, No. 3) of MHQ—The Quarterly Journal of Military History with the headline: They Shot the War
