Saigon Has Fallen

by Peter Arnett

  I meet the Australian cameraman Neil Davis who is walking from the presidential palace. He’d watched North Vietnamese tanks crash through the palace gates. He says President Minh has been arrested and taken away. I return to the office, and soon afterward one of our stringer photographers walks into our office with a North Vietnamese officer and his aide, who are amiable, talkative and appreciative of the snacks we offer them.

  Later that afternoon Esper suggests that with international communications still up, I write about my reflections of the final day. I know the AP generally frowns on using the personal impressions of its reporters on its news wires, but I do it anyway. I start punching a telex tape and it winds to the floor as I write. I feed the tape into the transmitter and it chugs its way through the machine. “In 13 years of covering the Vietnam War I never dreamed it would end as it did at noon today. I thought it might end with a political deal like in Laos. Even an Armageddon-type battle with the city left in ruins. But a total surrender followed a short two hours later with a cordial meeting in the AP office in Saigon with an armed and battle-garbed North Vietnamese officer with his aide—and over a warm Coke and stale pound cake at that? That is how the Vietnam War ended for me today.”

  The tape stops running. I punch a few keys but the machine just coughs a couple of times. I try the key again, no response. The AP wire from Saigon to New York is down—and out. The new authorities have finally pulled the plug.

  I call out to Esper, “That’s it, George. It’s over.”

  * * *

  * This and many other Vietnamese place names have an alternate spelling today, but I use the spellings commonly used at the time of the war.

  2

  Assignment to Saigon

  It’s a rainy afternoon in June 1962 when I arrive in Saigon, my worldly possessions packed in two beat-up suitcases. I’m grateful for the Saigon job. At 27 years old and on my second year with The Associated Press, I’d worried that my career was all washed up after I was expelled from Indonesia by local officials angry over my forceful reporting. My employers trust me enough to send me to a story of far greater interest to the AP’s nearly 2,000 newspaper clients.

  I am a small-statured person, and some suggest that I compensate for it with a pugnacious attitude. Maybe so, but I have learned in the years I’ve been a reporter that a shrinking violet doesn’t get the story.

  The tree-lined streets, outdoor cafés and striking French provincial architecture of Saigon still earn it the “Pearl of the Orient” label popular during the many years of French colonial control. It’s a much more Americanized city than others in Southeast Asia, with young, crew-cut military advisers on leave in civilian clothes crowding the bars and hotels.

  Although I arrive under the impression that this country is being sucked inescapably into a war, it turns out that whole families of Americans are settling in for long stays. The dependents of the diplomats, senior military personnel, civilian aid agency workers and think-tank consultants, they’re arriving by the hundreds from the United States and they are taking over the comfortable homes abandoned by the French middle class a decade earlier. Near my hotel, I see American schoolkids loitering in a bookstore trading comics.

  I pick up a pamphlet at the American Embassy that advises the new arrivals to bring necessary items unavailable here, including “card tables with additional round folding tops, seating six or nine, available at Sears, $6.95; ice cream freezer, hand operated, Sears, $10.97; playing cards forbidden to be sold here; picnic equipment with portable ice chests; folding aluminum tables; Thermos jugs; beach umbrella (two and one-half hours to beach),” along with other items.

  On the Rue Pasteur, I meet Malcolm Browne, the AP bureau chief, in his tiny office, tapping on an old Remington typewriter. I ask him what’s up with all the civilians in town, and he says, “There’s a war going on, that’s for sure, but the authorities don’t want anyone to hear about it. So they pretend things are normal.”

  Browne is a striking figure, tall, blond hair casually combed, with an engaging smile. Born in New York City, he graduated from Swarthmore College with a chemistry degree and as a draftee in the mid-1950s drove a tank for the U.S. Army in Korea. He was soon assigned to Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, a job that that hooked him on journalism. He was hired to cover South Vietnam for the AP in 1961.

  Browne is nobody’s fool. He tells me of an incident a few months earlier when, while dining at the riverside Majestic Hotel, he saw a U.S. Navy transport ship docking across the street, its decks packed with Army H-21 workhorse helicopters, popularly known as “flying bananas” because of their unusual shape. He called an embassy aide for official comment because imports of such specialized military equipment are forbidden under the 1954 Geneva Agreements governing the end of the French colonial war. The American official arrived at the restaurant, and stood beside Mal looking across the street. “I don’t see anything,” the official said, and walked off.

  Mal sees my perplexed expression and explains, “That embassy guy would prefer that I didn’t report it. America is doing much more here than it publicly admits. The Kennedy administration is attempting to muzzle every American here because of the political fallout from a military program that is turning into a secret war.”

  “Did you write the story?” I ask Mal.

  “Of course,” he says, laughing.

  A few months earlier Mal had discovered that American pilots were flying combat missions against the communist Vietcong in Skyraider bombers provided to the South Vietnamese as training planes.

  He hands me a pamphlet he has written, a dozen pages of copy paper stapled together, covering subjects ranging from field gear and war coverage survival tips to the artful handling of inside news sources, both Vietnamese and American. It is Browne’s manual for successfully covering a secret war. If the military had anything similar it would be classified!

  This is the best journalism instruction I have ever received, I tell myself as I read it. The most inspiring passage is Browne’s definition of a war reporter’s role. “The job for the newsman, as we see it, is simply to cover all the news as fairly and as completely as possible. Our concern is not what effect a given piece of news will have on the public. Our concern is to get the news before the public, in the belief that a free public must be an informed public. The only cause for which a correspondent must fight is to tell the truth and the whole truth.”

  I am aware that the name Saigon is just beginning to register with an American public more familiar with datelines like Havana and West Berlin and Seoul on critical foreign policy issues. News from the capital of a small Southeast Asian country half a world away is evoking little interest among Americans who would identify the Soviet Union as the prime offender in the Cold War. And the troubles of a beleaguered band of young journalists are hardly likely to make the headlines.

  An international peace conference in Geneva in 1954 gave North Vietnam to the communists after the conclusive defeat of French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu earlier that year. The status of the south was left in doubt. The administration of President Dwight Eisenhower removed any doubt where America stood by authorizing some public and much clandestine support for the survival of South Vietnam as an independent, pro-American state.

  John F. Kennedy inherited a worsening political and military situation in South Vietnam when he became president in 1961. The country was threatened by an active communist insurgency amongst the rural population and was poorly governed by a Vietnamese family hierarchy that was losing support not only of the population, but also of the American diplomats and military officials who had originally put it in power.

  Playing for time, Kennedy sent Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson to Saigon to explain that South Vietnam was essential to American policy. In an over-the-top endorsement, Johnson publicly described President Ngo Dinh Diem as “not only the George Washington, the father of your country, but the Franklin Roosevelt as well,” and declared that success in Viet
nam would keep the United States from having to fight the communists “on the beaches of Hawaii.”

  At the same time, a worried Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Ambassador Frederick Nolting as he left to take up his post in Saigon in 1961 that “the way things are going out there we’ll be lucky if we still have a mission in Saigon six months from now,” a comment Nolting mentions in his autobiography.

  At a White House meeting, the president told Nolting that he backed the Saigon government, and, as Nolting told me later, “the outcome of your mission depends on finding out for us what kind of man Diem is.” But Kennedy was already toying with the idea of a military solution, initially cloaked as a counterinsurgency effort but rapidly emerging into the open as an American war plan.

  Ambassador Nolting campaigned to convince Washington that Diem was worthy of support but he was unexpectedly challenged by the visit of an influential figure who had formerly championed the Vietnamese leader’s abilities. In the first week of December 1962, I’m invited to meet with that visitor, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, at his suite at the downtown Caravelle Hotel. My colleague Malcolm Browne is there, along with David Halberstam of The New York Times and Neil Sheehan of UPI.

  Mansfield and his aides insist on assuming the role of reporters, questioning us voluminously on our impressions of the situation and revealing their own ambivalence about American policy. Ambassador Nolting later complains that our critical observations unduly colored the delegation’s negative assessment of South Vietnam—especially Mansfield’s opinion, expressed to President Kennedy, that Diem had wasted the $2 billion that America had spent there. But we were simply telling the Senate visitors things we’d been writing for our news organizations.

  The cover (page i of 25) of The Associated Press Short Guide to News Coverage in Vietnam for staffers and stringers covering the Vietnam War, composed in January 1963 by AP Saigon Bureau Chief Malcolm Browne (1931–2012). The 25-page primer, originally written for Horst Faas and Peter Arnett, provides detailed guidance on all aspects of war coverage, including how to move with troops, how to discern accurate information from propaganda and, most importantly, how to stay safe. (AP Photo/AP Corporate Archives)

  Page 1 of The Associated Press Short Guide to News Coverage in Vietnam, dated Jan. 25, 1963. It advises:

  …Coverage in Viet Nam requires aggressiveness, resourcefulness, and, at times, methods uncomfortably close to those used by professional intelligence units. You can expect very little help from most official sources, and news comes the hard way….

  Good luck. You’ll need it.

  (AP Photo/AP Corporate Archives)

  3

  The First Big Battle

  Just three blocks separate the AP bureau from the military censor’s office at the post and telegraph building in the square opposite the old Roman Catholic cathedral, and I walk quickly, trying to suppress my sense of anticipation. I am holding a four-page news story, the first substantial account of the war that I have written since my arrival a few weeks earlier. It is about my three days with the U.S. Marine Corps’ 163rd helicopter squadron recently assigned to the Mekong Delta town of Soctrang. They’re a friendly bunch, and the commander, Colonel Robert Rathbun, provides a tent for my use. The outfit’s mission is to ferry South Vietnamese troops in and out of action in the nearby mangrove swamps that are a stronghold of Vietcong guerrillas.

  At the censor’s office I hand my story over to a young uniformed Vietnamese officer, who glances briefly at me before taking it carefully in his hand and laying it on his desk. I can sense his distaste.

  He takes up a fountain pen with a thick nib that bleeds black ink on the typewritten onionskin pages each time he strikes out a line. He strikes out many lines, 18 of the 23 lines on the first page, 16 on page two, all of page three and 13 lines on page four. He carefully stamps each page with a large official seal that he signs with a flourish, approval for the communication clerks at the post office to send out what’s left of my story. He hands the pages back to me with a tight smile. I turn and leave. My story is dead in the water.

  American officials in Saigon and Washington publicly insist they have no role in censorship of the western media in South Vietnam. No, they leave it to their Vietnamese allies.

  You don’t question the censor around here. No explanations. I assume that my story had too much information about American military men enthusiastically helping Vietnamese troops fight their war, too much detail about how difficult the task was against an implacable enemy. Both American and Vietnamese officials prefer to downplay all these points.

  I attend airport departure parties for two popular reporters expelled for upsetting the authorities. François Sully of Newsweek, who knows Vietnam well, reported that the increasing American undertaking is beginning to mirror the failed efforts of the French forces a decade earlier. Jim Robinson of NBC, an experienced reporter, mentioned in a story that President Diem is a boring interview. I sign a telegram sent by the Saigon press corps to President Kennedy to intervene in such expulsions, to no avail.

  At a press conference in Saigon, Admiral Harry D. Felt, the commander in chief of American Pacific forces, bridles at a question I ask about the increasing combat role of American soldiers sent here as advisers. He snarls at me, “Get on the team,” the comment later quoted by historian Stanley Karnow in his book “Vietnam, A History,” to show how officials wanted reporters to emphasize the positive. AP headquarters advises us that Washington is becoming highly critical of our reporting from Saigon and wonders why our stories are “about 180 degrees” from briefings given AP reporters at the Pentagon and State Department.

  I talk to Mal Browne about the state of play. He says that we should report anything that we see, including arms shipments, troop deployments and operational activities, because “if we can see them, so can the enemy.” And we should quote informants whom we consider reliable “because they are the experts who know what’s going on better than we do.”

  Very soon I’ll recall Mal’s advice at an isolated community in the Mekong Delta fringed with palm trees, where water buffalos outnumber humans and rice fields stretch to the horizon. In Vietnamese, its name is Ap Bac. Translated the name means northern hamlet, but in the history of the American war it means turning point.

  Our office phone rings, the sound harsher than usual because I’m still getting over a lengthy New Year celebration. It is Jan. 3, 1963. I pick up the phone and hear the voice of a crew chief friend from an American Army Aviation company based at Tan Son Nhut airport. He’s breathless with the news that eight U.S. helicopters operating with South Vietnamese forces south of Saigon have been hit, with a least four crewmen wounded. I drive to the airport in my newly acquired white Karmann Ghia sports car, an inexpensive luxury purchased from a Chinese businessman down on his luck. I talk with pilots of helicopters returning from the mission.

  I learn that 14 of the 15 American helicopters participating in the operation were hit with a devastating wall of ground fire from concealed communist guerrillas at Ap Bac. Five of the ships are down. Three Americans are dead, two of them crewman and the third an Army captain advising the ground troops. I’m told maybe 100 Vietnamese soldiers are dead. I phone the information to Browne.

  He picks up the phone to call our Tokyo bureau that has direct communications with New York. He sees that this story is worth risking bypassing censorship, that the battle may well erase any doubt that America is at war in Vietnam, and it is a story that must be told. Browne begins dictating, “In the costliest defeat for the American support effort in Vietnam, communist gunners today shot five American helicopters from the sky and turned back hundreds of South Vietnamese soldiers attempting to capture a tiny hamlet in the Mekong Delta.” Browne’s story hits the front pages of America’s newspapers. Our New York editors demand a quick follow-up story.

  I figure that the authorities will close all access to Ap Bac, or try to. I call a reporter friend from Stars and Stripes, Steve Stibbens, who ofte
n hangs out at our office, and I ask him to help. Next morning, Steve arrives at our office in his U.S. Marine uniform, and David Halberstam of The New York Times and I climb in behind him in his jeep. We head south down Route 1 into the Mekong Delta. Halberstam and I try to look suitably official as our driver negotiates military roadblocks and checkpoints with a smile and a salute, his uniform his passkey.

  Beyond the province capital of Tan An, we bounce over a muddy track to an airstrip alongside a flooded paddy field at Tan Hiep. There is chaos. Trucks and jeeps, engines running, compete for space at the edge of the small runway where Vietnamese soldiers watch as helicopters come and go. I see a familiar face, Colonel Daniel Boone Porter, amongst the American and Vietnamese officers who seem to be arguing with each other.

  Porter is the senior American adviser for the delta region. Friendly in previous visits, he is unhappy today. He tells me that at Ap Bac for the first time the Vietcong guerrillas have stood their ground and fought back when attacked by government troops, fighting strongly rather that striking quickly and melting away into the countryside. Porter shakes his head and says, “We had superior forces and superior firepower. We advisers were hoping for a confrontation like this to prove that our tactics would work. They didn’t.”

  Halberstam and I hitch a ride on an American helicopter that is surveying the battlefield. Down below is a scene of carnage. We see dead bodies in the mud. Bits of downed helicopters are strewn in the rice fields. Deep tracks on the ground lead to the wreckage of armored personal carriers destroyed in the fighting. The village itself is in ruins. In all, 65 government troops were killed in addition to the American dead. The Vietcong slipped away during the night, dragging their own dead with them.