Several years after the death of legendary journalist Robert Reguly, his son, Eric, travelled to Vietnam to retrace his wartime reporting trips. Eric’s biography of Robert is a thoughtful exploration of journalism and war, writes Michael Petrou.
So wrote German poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht in 1940, a generation before a Toronto Star reporter by the name of Robert Reguly went to Vietnam to live off the war there. What he yielded in return is a topic explored by his son and Globe and Mail foreign correspondent Eric Reguly in his reflective and touching book, “Ghosts of War: Chasing my Father’s Legend Through Vietnam.”
“He didn’t mean to punch me. He was still in his foxhole,” Eric writes. It’s unlikely Robert offered Eric an explanation. Reporters at that time didn’t acknowledge that covering war and tragedy exacts a price and that ripples from such events can travel far. Besides, what can you tell your nine-year-old child about war anyway?
My kids and I were driving from Toronto and Ottawa last summer, as the Taliban took over Afghanistan and hunted down my former translator, chasing him over rooftops and walls until he got away and, limping, found a place to hide. At a rest stop on the 401 I read a text he sent informing me a mutual friend of ours had been killed. My daughter noticed the shadow fall over me. So, in a small way, war’s ripples have reached her, too.
Several years after Robert’s death, Eric travelled to Vietnam to retrace Robert’s wartime reporting trips. This journey is the spine of Eric’s book, running through what is a biography of a remarkable man, a glimpse into the fading glow of the foreign correspondent’s golden age and a thoughtful discussion about journalism and war.
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