there was none of that in Morley Safer's story." In the PBS series, Reporting America At War, Safer himself said, "...the denials themselves were absurd. [Officials claimed] I had gone on a practice operation in a model village — a village the Marines had built to train guys how to move into a village. Or the whole thing was a kind of "Potemkin" story that I had concocted. There are still people who believe that." After the incident was broadcast, Marines were forbidden from burning any more villages. While reporting another story from Vietnam, Safer and two CBS cameramen were shot down in a helicopter by Vietcong ground fire, although they all escaped serious injury. Brig. Gen. Joe Stringham, who commanded a Green Beret unit with Safer reporting, commented that Safer "was all business and he reported what he saw. ...We looked at eternity right in the face a couple of times...and he was as cool as a hog on ice." Safer received an Emmy Award in 1971 for his investigation and reporting of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Although the war reports were consistently broadcast on television, Safer said it was the country's inability to clearly explain to the public why they were at war that became the main source of people's "disillusionment": During his career as a war correspondent, Safer covered over nine wars. He authored the bestselling book, Flashbacks: On Returning to Vietnam. It describes his 1989 return to Vietnam and features his interviews with known and less-well-known Vietnamese people, most of them veterans of the war. His trip was the basis of a 60 Minutes show in 1989, which Safer said got a reaction of annoyance from some veterans, and a positive reaction from others. 60 Minutes reporter In 1970, CBS producer Don Hewitt asked Safer to replace Harry Reasoner on 60 Minutes, as Reasoner had just left to anchor the ABC Evening News. Hewitt had created 60 Minutes, and he was, according to Diane Sawyer, the program's "guiding, self-renewing, revitalizing genius." Safer, who had been covering the funeral of Charles de Gaulle in Paris, accepted the new position and joined 60 Minutes. The show had by then aired for only two seasons, and Safer, who had until that time reported and traveled alone, recalled that he accepted the new position on condition that if the show failed, he would be given his old job back: