Saigon Has Fallen

by Peter Arnett

  Returning to Tan Hiep, I see an honor guard drawn up for senior officers, including General Paul D. Harkins, in charge of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, an impressive-looking veteran of World War II. He is usually impatient with reporters. I ask him what is happening and he says with a straight face, “We’ve got the Vietcong in a trap and we’re going to spring it in half an hour,” and he turns away.

  I seek out an American officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, whom I know to be a straight shooter. He is the senior adviser to the Vietnamese 7th Division that launched the Ap Bac operation. Vann is a wiry, compact Texan with a hair-trigger temper and a reputation for bravery. He invites Halberstam and me to talk out of earshot of the others. Vann is very angry.

  He ridicules General Harkins’s statement of a few minutes earlier. He launches into a fierce attack on the performance of the Vietnamese soldiers he had been advising for months. “It’s a damn shame,” he says, that such a debacle could happen after all the efforts by the United States to equip and advise them.

  Vann is red-faced now, stamping his feet and drawing the attention of bystanders some distance away. The Vietcong are escaping, and the Vietnamese officers he is advising don’t seem to care. Vann’s answer, he tells me, is to mobilize his own 60-man American advisory staff, the office workers, the cooks, the maintenance staff and the drivers, led by his military advisory team. “We’ll get ’em ourselves if the Vietnamese can’t do it,” Vann exclaims as he walks away to issue orders.

  I return to Saigon that evening and file my detailed story to New York via phone call to the Tokyo bureau. Again we bypass censorship. A few of our colleagues have been expelled for doing much less, but I figure that with all of the resident western press corps filing Ap Bac stories the same way as we did, the government will be hard-pressed to punish us all.

  AP New York congratulates us on our enterprise and advises that our stories on Ap Bac have received smash play in America’s newspapers. I sense that our eyewitness reports from this distant Cold War outpost will raise less concern from our superiors in the future.

  Saigon youths join Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) troops on May 4, 1975, waving weapons and PRG flags on Tu Do Street in Saigon, Vietnam. (AP Photo/Matt Franjola)

  North Vietnamese troops in the AP Saigon bureau, Apr. 30, 1975, describe their route into the city to Matt Franjola, Peter Arnett, George Esper, and an unidentified AP staffer. (AP Photo/Sarah Errington)

  A North Vietnamese tank rolls through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon on Apr. 30, 1975, signifying the fall of South Vietnam. (AP Photo)

  Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) forces enter Saigon and are seen parked outside the Independence Palace on Apr. 30, 1975, minutes after the unconditional surrender of Vietnam. (AP Photo)

  Defeated South Vietnam President Duong Van Minh (middle) walks out of Independence Palace after surrendering to PRG forces in Saigon on May 1, 1975. (AP Photo/Billy)

  Celebration in Hanoi of the final victory of North Vietnam over South Vietnam. Several thousand marchers filled in the square in front of the Opera house carrying banderoles on May 4, 1975. (AP Photo)

  More than ten thousand people gather in front of Independence Palace in the biggest rally since the PRG takeover of Saigon to attend a ceremony where the Saigon Military Administrative Committee is introduced on May 7, 1975. (AP Photo/Manh Hung)

  4

  Tests of Fire

  Gia Long Palace looms ahead as I walk along streets flying red and yellow bunting and past ice cream parlors busy with the celebrating crowds. I’ll soon have my first look at the small, plump man chosen to be ruler in Saigon at a time when the country is falling to pieces, a man reputed to laugh rarely though today, in a neat dark suit pulled tight around his middle, he smiles a lot. Ngo Dinh Diem is observing the eighth anniversary of his presidency of South Vietnam, defying the odds against his survival that was initially put at six months by some experts. Eight years have gone by, and the bombing attacks and attempted coups d’état against him have come and gone.

  He nods at me as I shuffle along the receiving line. His jet-black hair seems lacquered on. Diem was chosen to lead his country because of impressive nationalist credentials and stubborn courage in stabilizing the south after the French war, but he’s becoming an odd man out for leading the fast-developing life-or-death struggle against the communists. Even Ambassador Frederick Nolting, his most fervent American supporter, acknowledges Diem’s eccentricities and Mandarin style, remembering sitting through six hours of “incredible verbosity” in his first private meeting with him. “Between us,” Nolting writes in his autobiography, “we must have smoked several packs of Vietnamese cigarettes and drank dozens of cups of pale, lukewarm tea.”

  General Maxwell D. Taylor, sent several times to Saigon as an emissary of President Kennedy, tells me in an interview that he noticed Diem “at times getting a glassy look in his eyes and dozing off,” during his presentations. William Colby, chief of station for the CIA, says in an interview Diem sees his function “as a kind of monk to bring his mission to an end, to bring Vietnam into the modern world.” Kennedy’s impatience with Diem’s modus operandi is said to have persuaded him to pursue a military option that will place South Vietnam’s future more under American supervision.

  In mid-February 1963, I sit through a speech given by Ambassador Nolting at a business conference praising Diem and renewing his displeasure with the press, and calling for an end to “idle criticism, from snide remarks and unnecessary comments, and from spreading allegations and rumors which either originate from communist sources, or play directly into communist hands.” I feel we’re covering Saigon like our stateside colleagues are covering Washington, D.C., and too bad that the ambassador doesn’t like it. I don’t know how not to write stories about what we are seeing and hearing.

  In the early morning of June 11, Mal Browne, our bureau chief at AP, is roused from his sleep with a telephone tip from a monk friend at the Xa Loi pagoda, the center of a growing Buddhist protest against the Saigon government. An important demonstration will wind through city streets an hour or so later. Such events have become commonplace, but Browne and office assistant Bill Havantran attend anyway because the continuing Buddhist unrest that began with the bloody police suppression of a religious parade in Hue on May 8 has caught the attention of American editors.

  Police are clearing the streets of traffic. A group of monks march silently and slowly along Phan Dinh Phuong Avenue behind an old gray sedan. They stop in front of the Cambodian Embassy. A few monks step out of the ranks as the others, several hundred in number, form a circle in the middle of the intersection. Browne and Havantran ready their cameras. Something new is about to happen.

  An elderly monk in bright yellow robes walks slowly from the sedan and seats himself cross-legged on a cushion. Two companions pour gasoline over his shaved head and drench his robes. The monk lights a match in his lap and then folds his hands in the lotus position as flames envelop him. An astonished Browne clicks away as another monk in the crowd shouts out in English, “This is the Buddhist flag. He died for this flag. Thich Quang Duc burned for this flag.”

  Browne’s photograph of the aged monk enveloped in smoke and flames shocks the world. Later, Browne is sometimes asked why he didn’t intervene and prevent the suicide. His response: “I was too busy doing my job, but there were several hundred militant monks there. They would have torn me to pieces if I made a move,” he told one interviewer.

  The ramifications of that one picture are immediate. President Kennedy has a copy of the front page of The Washington Post on his desk in the Oval Office when he meets with Henry Cabot Lodge, who has agreed to replace Nolting as ambassador. Kennedy points to the picture and instructs, “Get out there and make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Lodge tells me in an interview.

  The Saigon government clamps down harder on the Buddhists and their sympathizers. One afternoon I see two truckloads of young girls dr
essed in traditional silken white ao dai dresses being driven from their high school dormitories to detention centers because of their Buddhist sympathies. Browne is accused by Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, the firebrand sister-in-law of President Diem, of providing the gasoline for Thich Quang Duc’s immolation.

  The police crack down ferociously on our news coverage. On July 7, I cover a demonstration at the Chantareansay pagoda in the northern suburbs of Saigon. I’m pushed into an alley by surging protesters. I try to get my bearings as I’m punched in the head. I’m tackled to the ground and beaten up and kicked by a group of plainclothes security men who stamp on my camera. They are enjoying it. Suddenly a large person is standing over me, growling like a bear, his fists raised. It is my buddy David Halberstam of The New York Times, who is built like a fullback. He pulls me to my feet and turns to my much smaller attackers and says loudly, “You want him? Then get through me.” I doubt the security men understood his words, but they did his menace. They raised their hands in submission and slipped away.

  The local authorities up the ante. Two days later, Browne and I are ordered to the main Saigon police station on trumped-up charges of assaulting the police, and subject to a four-hour interrogation that borders on the Kafkaesque in its disorienting and menacing quality. We are freed after word reaches the American Embassy that we might face serious charges that would further heighten the already fraught situation and become a cause célèbre.

  By now our troubles have caught the attention of the media establishment in America. Our New York headquarters advises us of a letter sent to President Kennedy on July 18 by the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Herbert Drucker, editor of The Hartford Courant. It says in part, “In recent weeks as you are aware there have been charges that Vietnamese secret police pummeled, knocked down and kicked American reporters and smashed their cameras.” He concludes the letter, “It is not yet certain that all possible efforts are being made to prevent further deliberate obstacles to free reporting. Whatever the difficulties, we urge you to bear in mind the need for the American people to have the fullest possible factual information from South Vietnam, no matter what anyone may think is right or wrong about the situation there.”

  I feel the wind in my sails. The bruises, the arrests, the hectoring by officials are nothing compared to my growing awareness that I’m doing the right thing, that I, Browne and the other reporters have consequential roles to play in the growing drama that is South Vietnam.

  I’m at the airport to cover the arrival of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, scion of a prominent Massachusetts family, a legendary figure in American diplomacy and politics. I ride there with my colleagues in a bus escorted by police through streets emptied by the early curfew. We expect Lodge’s appointment to be a game changer, with pressure put on Ngo Dinh Diem to allow political freedoms and to improve military competence. Halberstam and Neil Sheehan, both well versed in New England patrician ways, joke that in the challenging days ahead for American-Vietnamese relations, “Our old Mandarin can lick your old Mandarin.”

  Lodge did not disappoint. He emerged from his aircraft into glaring television lights and began talking about American democracy and the essential role of the press. Four newsmen on the flight with him include the AP’s chief executive in Asia, Robert Eunson. He pulls me out of the crowd and says, “The ambassador’s on our side,” introducing me to one of Lodge’s aides, Major John Michael Dunn, who nods in affirmation.

  I’m exhilarated. Unlike his predecessor Frederick Nolting, the State Department veteran, who always seemed impatient with the press and regularly swatted at us as though we were flies buzzing around carrion, Lodge is an old pol, a former candidate for the vice presidency of the United States among many other political offices, and in his early life a journalist. He knows the value of a friendly media.

  Within a few hours of his arrival on Aug. 22, 1963, Lodge makes a well-publicized visit to two Buddhist monks granted asylum at the U.S. military headquarters on Rue Pasteur. On Nov. 1, 71 days later, the Saigon government is overthrown in a brutal coup d’état by disaffected military officers. President Diem and his influential brother Ngo Dinh Nhu are both murdered after surrendering.

  Flashing forward 15 years, it’s early autumn 1978, and I sit with an aging Lodge in his family home in Boston. As amiable as always, he’s agreed to a television interview for a documentary I’m working on. He tells me about the day Diem died.

  “I visited his palace late morning along with General Harkins and Admiral Felt. I was leaving for Washington on a routine visit the following day. Diem says, ‘Every time the American ambassador goes to Washington I hear coup rumors. I hear these rumors now, I know there will be a coup but I don’t know who’s behind it.’ I took Harkins and Felt home to lunch, and while we’re sitting there we hear this tremendous automatic weapons fire, it sounded as though it was right in the next room. And the planes were flying overhead. It was the beginning of the overthrow.”

  I ask Lodge what he knew in advance, because the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. government’s secret study of the war, had already revealed American awareness of the plotting. The old Mandarin smiled. “President Kennedy told us to stay out of it, let it run its course. He wanted the Vietnamese to run it as a Vietnamese thing. And Washington said they would stay out of it and they stayed out of it.”

  5

  Reporting LBJ’s Widening War

  The fallout from the murders of two presidents, Ngo Dinh Diem and John F. Kennedy, just weeks apart in November 1963 is plunging South Vietnam into a political and military tailspin that seriously undermines America’s 10 years of nation building.

  The Vietnamese generals who successfully conspired to overthrow their president are becoming popular celebrities, enjoying their success in the nightclubs of Saigon and inviting the American press corps to party with them. But squabbling behind closed doors over the choice of a successor ends not with equanimity but with the seizure of power in late January by a young field commander, General Nguyen Khanh, who arrests the others and expresses a fierce anti-communism.

  U.S. President Lyndon Johnson is determined to provide strong support to South Vietnam and, as he says to an aide, “not be the first American president to lose a war.” Even though American Embassy officials see the goateed General Khanh as a lightweight, Johnson has little choice but to give his official approval to the new regime, as he does to the nine successor governments and juntas that pass through Saigon in the next 19 months of political upheaval.

  The communist insurgents ratchet up their war tactics with bold frontal attacks against formerly secure targets, taking immediate advantage of the disarray spreading in the South Vietnamese military as officers loyal to the previous regime are purged and as provincial officials are replaced.

  In less than five years, the shadowy communist organization called the South Vietnam National Liberation Front expands from a handful of members to a position of America’s No. 1 shooting enemy, known as the Vietcong. It has grown to an estimated 300,000 active members. Occasional front supporters may number 4 to 5 million.

  The widening war has many fronts, and with little or no cooperation from officials it is difficult for reporters to cover because we are barred for the time being from riding helicopters into battle areas. I settle on a practical if unorthodox approach. When I hear rumors of significant actions, I watch for the early morning airlifts of soldiers out of the Tan Son Nhut helicopter base and determine the general direction. I give chase in my Karmann Ghia automobile along the main highways as long as the helicopters are in view above me. I then take side roads to where I anticipate there is action. I keep trying until I see bodies of soldiers on the road and wounded being treated. My arrival in a white sports car invariably causes more incredulity than alarm, and I usually get the story.

  My companion on these adventures is often our photographer Horst Faas, a beefy, amiable German with a steely determination to shoot the most explicit photos of the war. Horst often wor
ks alone.

  On a late spring afternoon the door of our Saigon office bursts open and Horst comes in. His shirt and trousers are muddied, his hair ruffled. He explains that he’s been riding with a Vietnamese armored cavalry troop on the Plain of Reeds, a desolate place at the southern tip of the country dominated by the communists. An American adviser in Horst’s vehicle called in airstrikes on a village to prevent guerrillas escaping, causing civilian casualties.

  Thirty minutes later, Horst comes out from our toilet that serves as his darkroom. He is holding a bunch of damp black-and-white prints. He lays them on a table with the comment, “It’s the worst I’ve seen in three wars.” They show horrible things, the civilian losses in sharp focus. In one photo, a farmer clasps his 2-year-old son in his arms, the child’s clothes burned off by napalm, his scorched skin hanging. In another photo, a peasant holds the body of a similarly disfigured child up to soldiers, who peer indifferently from the top of an armored personnel carrier. Other pictures are equally upsetting.

  By chance we are being visited by the general manager and chief executive of The Associated Press, Wes Gallagher. It takes a lot to shock him, a veteran newsman chosen by the nation’s most important newspaper, television and radio owners to run AP, the cooperative that is the basic news provider to much of America. Although Horst’s pictures shock him, Gallagher allows us to distribute them, anyway.

  But he tells me, “Every picture editor in America will want to know how such a thing could happen when American servicemen are involved.” He says we must present the context, noting that government officials in Washington may accuse us of bias. I write an accompanying story pointing out instances of communist atrocities and observing that with both sides building up their arsenals the war has entered a new phase of violence and brutality. Napalm, the jellied gasoline that spreads a wall of fire on exploding, is in routine use.