“For the Embassy here the problem has not been how to deal with the crisis—there is no way to deal with it under U.S. Standard Operating Procedures—but rather how to explain what is happening in any coherent terms.”
FitzGerald portrayed Ky as a man of little substance or independent power, whose government embraced “speculators, grafters, bribe-takers, black marketers or outright crooks. It suffered them in the silence of a government which needs a few powerful friends.”
Her voice was quite unlike most of the other articles on the same subject. Life magazine published “Irony of Riots on the Heels of Hard-Fought Victories” by Don Moser and Sam Angeloff, both staff correspondents.33 It covered much of the same ground and was written with precision and knowledge. But when the authors put the Buddhist riots into historical and political context, they identified themselves with the American war effort. “The U.S., under these circumstances, is peculiarly at a loss. Nothing we say can significantly influence the political direction South Vietnam is taking now,” they wrote to justify Washington’s refusal to alter its course of action or undermine Ky.
They even warned against the United States changing course and withdrawing: “Supposing we, in fact, were asked to leave. What then?” Implicitly, in the Life version, the US was a victim of a flaky Vietnamese government, not a cobelligerent.
FitzGerald measured the responsibility of the US government and President Johnson with the same precision as she employed for Saigon and Ky. “The Honolulu conference was the beginning of disaster,” she wrote. “Having so publicly embraced, the two partners to the agreement were irrevocably locked together. They balanced each other curiously—the illusion of power for the illusion of leverage.”
Once her article was published, FitzGerald could no longer be dismissed as a dilettante. Ward Just certainly knew it. “I had an intimation that Frankie was going to stick around. Right from the beginning she had a seriousness about her that wasn’t usual.”
Frankie wrote an illuminating note to herself: “You must not forget. You simply must not forget. That this war is a tragedy. That the greatest sin is to speak of politics in the abstract.… you must stick to the concrete because that way you will be able to see from more points of view than the abstract.”34
That became the guiding principle of her Vietnam reporting.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Whole New Meaning to the Phrase Foreign Correspondent
THE LIMP BEDSHEET WAS SPOTTED WITH THE DEEP SEPIA brown of old blood. Half hidden underneath was a figure bandaged like a mummy with the face of an old Chinese god. Except the flesh was pink instead of ivory. “Gas burns,” explained Dr. Goodhope, an American physician from a private charity.1
Frances FitzGerald was shadowing the doctor, sidestepping the grime and excrement in the hallway as he made his early morning rounds. The stench was nearly intolerable. At his next stop, two women were lying end to end on a narrow bed. One woman’s stomach was swathed in bandages. The baby she clutched had an arm in a sling. “Mortar wounds,” said the doctor. “The mortars are the nastiest wounds of all—except for the M16 rifles and the white phosphorous.”
The Qui Nhon Hospital, built by the French as a colonial medical center in the 1930s, was now a filthy relic. The US embassy had paid a Vietnamese contractor to clean the facility, provide new beds and furnishings, and install toilets, showers, and tubs. Instead, the contractor pocketed the money and disappeared. Nothing was done. No government authority seemed in charge of this hospital that was treating hundreds of civilians injured during Operation Masher, a joint US, South Vietnamese, and South Korean operation, in the central province of Binh Dinh. (The mission was later renamed White Wing by President Johnson, who found the original name gruesome.)
In Operation Masher, the American troops had used their overwhelming firepower to dislodge the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces from the Bong Song plain in central Vietnam. But the communist troops had withdrawn before a full battle ensued; there were more civilian than military casualties.2
In the aftermath, the American and Vietnamese military said they had no responsibility for civilian casualties. Their injured troops were treated in well-equipped and clean mobile army surgical hospitals, MASH units, and transported as needed to hospitals in Saigon or outside the country. For the local civilians, it was a different story.
Some of the lightly wounded villagers were treated by American military medics in the field, but most had to find their way to the hellhole of Qui Nhon. FitzGerald had opted to follow them as Operation Masher wound down.
Seven hundred patients crammed into the three-hundred-bed hospital. Besides Dr. Goodhope, three doctors and three nurses from New Zealand were the only other full-time staff, sent by their country on an aid mission. After hours and on weekends, several Vietnamese doctors from the nearby ARVN military hospital volunteered to help, working for free.
Dirt was everywhere. There were not enough latrines, so people not only defecated in the hallways but in unexpected hideaways. “They used to bury amputated limbs in the dirt outside until the dogs would come and find them,” said the American doctor. Now they were disposed of farther away toward the jungle. “You don’t want to see the kitchen.”
She watched as one of the New Zealand nurses sawed off a cast from the leg of a slight Vietnamese woman. “Sorry, old girl,” said the nurse. After the cast split off, it released a smell “for which there are no similes” and revealed an ankle covered in yellow pus several sizes larger than the leg. The nurse lifted her patient onto her back and carried her piggyback to a ward so the grotesquely infected wound might be cleaned. Nothing in her pampered existence had prepared FitzGerald for the sights, smells, or sounds in Qui Nhon. “I’d never seen such horror in my life. If I’m going to be in this war I have to be tough and not fall apart to see as much as I could,” she wrote in her notebook.
She stuck with it, and for the rest of the day FitzGerald prowled the hospital’s wards and hallways, forcing herself to view the casualties of battle that were never included in military briefings or official statistics.
She was witnessing the aftermath of Operation Masher, which was launched just before the Buddhist crisis unfolded in Hue and Saigon and lasted from January through early March of 1966. It was the largest search-and-destroy mission to date and revealed the immense human costs of the new American tactic.
The target was the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese armies entrenched in the hamlets of the Bong Song plain in the An Lao Valley. The American and Vietnamese troops planned a pincher movement to assault their enemy from both the north and the south, forcing the communists out of their bunkers and foxholes.
It was never going to be easy. The communists had been in control of this rice-growing region for years, essentially since the French had left. Unbeknownst to the Americans, the Viet Cong had been tipped off by spies in the community and ARVN that an operation was being planned to destroy them. By the time the major fighting was underway, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had slipped away from the An Lao Valley and disappeared into the Annamite Mountains. They refused to fight a lopsided battle against American firepower.
As a result, the blunt force of American bombing and mortar fire savaged the homes of the villagers, not the enemy. Rice paddies were gouged by 500-pound bombs. The military had “called on every bit of firepower at their disposal”—tactical airstrikes, napalm, B-52 strikes, artillery, mortars—to protect the lives of American soldiers. One estimate said six civilians died for every military death. More than 120,000 Vietnamese were made homeless.
FitzGerald saw what that meant for the villagers: “In the process [the Americans] left hundreds of civilians dead and wounded and ‘generated’ so many refugees as almost to depopulate the fertile An Lao Valley.”
The American and South Vietnamese troops withdrew and declared the battle a victory. The casualties included 288 US soldiers and an estimated 2,150 communists. Maj. Gen. Stanley Larson, the army commander overseeing t
he Central Vietnam coast area, said the troops had achieved their aim in the war of attrition of bringing the battle to the communists, “keeping them off balance,” and wearing them down.
No American or ARVN units were ordered to stay behind and consolidate political or military control. Within a few months, the communists were back in place, building new fortifications, and the villagers of Binh Dinh Province once again lived in Viet Cong territory.
HER EXPERIENCE AT Qui Nhon planted questions that would shape FitzGerald’s investigation of Vietnam, the Vietnamese, and the Americans in Vietnam. When she returned to Saigon, she made plans to visit the sordid camps around the capital where the refugees from Operation Masher ended up, but only after the Buddhist crisis abated.
The Buddhists were stubborn. Through April and May, they refused to give in to the Saigon government, organizing peaceful demonstrations and parades, which government troops broke up with bayonets and tear gas. Monks went on well-publicized hunger strikes. A Buddhist nun committed suicide by setting herself on fire. They were the last independent dissident group challenging the political power of the junta, and they were desperate.
Ky won approval from US ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Gen. William Westmoreland to do what was necessary to end the rebellion. The US would not tolerate infighting among the South Vietnamese while American soldiers were dying to defeat their common communist enemies.3
Ky sent his troops once again to Hue, where this time they fought and subdued rebel troops. They went further and arrested Tri Quang, the most influential monk, effectively blocking the movement’s headquarters in the imperial city. Ky’s officers jailed political opponents, finally ending the Buddhist movement and silencing further well-organized protests for the rest of the war. That left the communists as the sole alternative to the Saigon junta.
In return for American support for quashing dissent, Ky agreed to American demands to hold elections in South Vietnam, which he did the following year. The junta selected Thieu, the ARVN general and head of the junta, as its candidate. Thieu won the election, which was neither free, fair, nor democratic. The political life of South Vietnam was set for the rest of the war: Thieu would remain president until the regime’s final days.
The political significance of the ruthless crackdown of the Buddhists and the Americans’ benign acceptance of the junta was buried in mainstream reporting of the American military expansion of the war into every corner of the country.
In the face of the turmoil, Desmond FitzGerald wrote Frankie in his old-school manner and again said he was frightened for his daughter: “I shall not trouble you with my concerns about your safety during the current mess—except to say again ‘be careful.’”
“Unfortunately,” he continued. “I have no plans to visit Vietnam this spring much as I would like to see you in your new habitat.”
He signed it: “Much love and do be wise and careful, Daddy.”4
Frankie was disappointed she wouldn’t see her father in Saigon: it would have been their first time together where they were both professionals in Asia, one of the pulls that had attracted her to Vietnam in the first place. By the time she received his letter, she had decided to extend her stay even further; safety wasn’t her top concern. She had become committed to understanding and writing about the war, her new universe.
The momentum was shifting with the magnitude of the American presence. Her second article for the Village Voice was written like a fable.5
This is the war in Vietnam.… This is the colonel with the well-pressed suit who directs the army to make war. This is the woman who chews betel nuts and who presses the suit of the well-dressed colonel who directs the army to make the war in Vietnam.
“It is a true story of the colonel who directs an attack against a Viet Cong unit that includes the son of his Vietnamese housekeeper. The bomb misses the V.C. unit and kills a baby. The mother continues to iron the colonel’s uniforms.”
The tone of mythical disbelief grew out of Frankie’s initial impression of Vietnam as that of walking “through the Looking Glass of print into a land beyond the vanishing point.”
She continued the piece with an American official in the provinces who told her it was impossible to count refugees from all the military operations, so he made up numbers to keep his superiors happy. “I just invent a likely figure—numbers seem to give [visiting dignitaries] a certain sense of security.”
Then she quoted a French priest who sat in his yellowing office that smelled of rats and mildewed religious pamphlets and told her that it didn’t matter whether the Buddhists failed to force the ouster of Ky as they had done in 1963, helping foment the overthrow of Diem.
“‘Nothing will change,’ he said, reflecting his years waiting for the war to end. ‘I have been here for 35 years. Let us talk of something important.’”
This cross between a fractured fairy tale and a Samuel Beckett play was not the standard journalism of the day. A few weeks later, the Voice published a lengthy letter from a reader praising FitzGerald’s unusual articles as “the best on-the-scene writing on Vietnam to be had in [New York].” He especially appreciated her refusal to accept “news” or “facts” that would be disowned as lies the next day.6
FILMMAKERS AND NOVELISTS build war stories around passionate love affairs to provide an intimate narrative to the chaos of the battlefield and as a relief from the body count. Buddy movies do the same thing. At no other time are the senses so alive, the chance of survival so low, and a night of companionship so electrifying. A few intense months are as full as a lifetime. A night of tenderness can offer deeper relief from the sights and sounds of death than a night of drinking.
Ernest Hemingway was a master of the genre: For Whom the Bell Tolls has a doomed romance during the Spanish Civil War; A Farewell to Arms, set in World War I, ends with the death of the beloved in childbirth. Ward Just was a devotee of Hemingway, and in his mind his affair with FitzGerald had begun with the intensity of a Hemingway novel. They were each other’s match in wit and intelligence, two sophisticated writers in a war zone, clearly a couple but never clinging to each other. One minute they were the handsome couple descending the staircase of the Continental, her arm in his, then the next week they were apart, as she disappeared to report from the provinces, and he followed an American unit to the DMZ.
For FitzGerald, the affair was a godsend for reasons she appreciated much later. Just was among the most admired and well-liked correspondents in Saigon. Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post’s new executive editor, had assigned Just to cover the war in 1965 to redeem the newspaper’s reputation. While the New York Times reporters David Halberstam and then Neil Sheehan were digging deeply into the flaws and lies of the war, the Post reporters in Saigon had largely parroted the official American view of the war. Just changed all of that and not only wrote serious, thoughtful, and hard-hitting articles about the war, but also wrote them beautifully.
As his romantic partner, FitzGerald was protected by his status. None of his colleagues would make unwanted advances or oafish attempts to seduce her. That also meant FitzGerald was off-limits as a source of puerile sexual gossip and slander.
There would be no guessing games about how she might be “sleeping around,” none of the crude gossip that had begun to circulate about Leroy and her casual sex. Nor was FitzGerald accused of using her sex appeal to win assignments or special favors from diplomats to boost her career—routine gossip that often had a poisonous effect on the rare young woman in Vietnam intent on becoming a journalist.
Different standards applied to the men. Male correspondents considered their own sexual behavior beside the point. They might frequent brothels and sleep with whomever was willing, whether they were single or married. Nothing critical was said. This was part of the male prerogative.
The glamorous mystique of being a war correspondent was seductive—especially for younger women.
When it came time for men to tell their Vietnam War stories and write their mem
oirs, they dismissed the women trying to become reporters without credentials as vagabonds looking for adventure. Men who arrived with the same lack of credentials were heroic. The few women reporters acknowledged were often those of considerable physical beauty like Pamela Sanders. In William Prochnau’s Once upon a Distant War, an encyclopedic history of the first group of Vietnam war correspondents, Sanders is described largely as the romantic foil for famous journalists like David Halberstam and Charles Mohr.7 Sanders’s novel Miranda, about a woman journalist’s view of the war, is quoted only to show how well she understood Halberstam. Marguerite Higgins, who began reporting in World War II, is the only female journalist treated seriously by Prochnau. But not flatteringly. In his telling, Higgins had once been a respected and talented reporter who during her reporting trip to Vietnam acts like an aging battle-ax, too willing to support the American war.
In Dispatches, deservedly the most admired of the Vietnam War memoirs, Michael Herr mentions there were “all kinds of girl reporters around” but says nothing more, later implying they were either girlfriends or wives of his male colleagues. They were the backdrop to men’s heroics. He mentions only two by name and in one sentence: “Cathy Leroy, the French photographer” and Jurate Kazickas, “a correspondent of great, fashion-model beauty.”8 Nowhere did he think it fit to mention that Kazickas was badly wounded covering the battle of Khe Sanh or that her reporting was so impressive she was hired by the Associated Press back in New York. Or that Leroy became one of the most honored photographers of the war.
FitzGerald was saved from these slights and insults by keeping a low profile. As the lone resident magazine writer, not reporting for news magazines like Time or Newsweek, she had no male competitors; none of them were interested in what she was doing.
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