by Peter Arnett
Gallagher has some important information for us. He senses from his contacts in Washington, D.C., that President Johnson is more likely than the slain President Kennedy was to send American combat troops to fight in South Vietnam. Accordingly, he is planning to beef up our bureau with more permanent staffers.
A distinguished reporter in World War II, Gallagher offers me some friendly advice for the future. “Get along with the generals and the top sergeants and be polite and you’ll do fine. It’s your personal demeanor they will judge you on, and not your stories.” I respect Gallagher’s opinions as much as I am impressed with his striking bearing. But as for his advice? Well, I’d tried that already in Saigon, and it didn’t work.
Gallagher is prescient. Lyndon Johnson does indeed commit American combat troops to South Vietnam, in March of 1965, when it becomes clear South Vietnam’s military forces are being defeated on the battlefield. With the arriving Marines and Army units comes a swarm of reporters and photographers from newspapers and television networks.
Also in the mix: an accompanying cadre of military officers and civilian officials intent on shaping the news coverage to the needs of the Johnson administration. In earlier wars, strict censorship on the battlefield molded the message to the home public. The Johnson administration, already meeting criticism at home about the fighting, is unwilling to admit that the commitment to Vietnam is as consequential as earlier conflicts.
Meanwhile, Gallagher declares a war of his own, criticizing political interference in reporting foreign wars. In a speech to a group of newspaper editors in 1965, he observes that government officials frequently cite what they call “the national interest” in trying to discourage the reporting of unpleasant news from Vietnam and other troubled areas. He asserts, “We are not a vehicle to serve ‘the national interest’ as defined by politicians, but to publish the truth as we see it.”
I am invariably polite to the arriving American officers and soldiers that I cover, as Gallagher has suggested, and I’m not a confrontational person, anyway. That is not being said about my reporting. The commanding officer of the U.S. Marine Corps, General Wallace Greene, flatly denies an exclusive story I write on Aug. 20, 1965, about a column of mechanized Marines badly mauled during the first amphibious landing of the war.
The mission of Supply Column 21 is to reinforce a Marine battalion farther inland, but the swampy paddy fields bog down three of the heavy armored vehicles. Concealed communist soldiers dressed in black pajama uniforms and camouflaged helmets rise out of hedges and swamps, close enough to lob hand grenades and fire anti-tank shells at the stranded Marines. The terraced paddy fields make maneuvering difficult for the two tracked vehicles still mobile, and when one is knocked out the survivors lock themselves in the remaining one. When I step off a rescue helicopter with photographer Tim Page we see American bodies half submerged in the swamps and badly wounded Marines desperate for medical attention. As we try to help, the survivors tell us their stories, of the death struggles of brave young men, of the fear of injury or capture as projectiles slam against the only shelter they have. I file my story that evening with my photographs. Newspapers play it big, some using many of the photos, because of the premonition of things to come.
Marine Corps spokesmen insist on the broader success of the mission, to secure territory to the south of the planned air base at Chu Lai. Officially, Supply Column 21’s travails never happened. General Greene’s criticism is so damaging that Gallagher invites him to a conference at AP headquarters in New York. He shows him all my pictures. He reads him my story. The general finally believes.
Months later the AP sends me a letter written by Corporal Frank Guilford of Philadelphia, one of the Marines I quoted. He writes that my story had worried his wife but that he was glad I had arrived at the scene and written my account “because American soldiers are not receiving enough credit for their sacrifice in Vietnam.”
My Marine story foretells the struggle American soldiers will have in the heavily populated rice farming regions in South Vietnam, where local communist guerrillas fight to defend their villages. I write a series of stories a few months later portending the greater struggle American forces would face against North Vietnamese regular troops in the border regions where 300-foot-high triple-canopy jungles and high mountains define the battlefields.
I see Neil Sheehan, formerly my UPI competitor and now with The New York Times, boarding a transport plane for Pleiku in the early hours of Nov. 15, 1965, at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport. We are heading for the same location, a remote battle scene hundreds of miles away in the mountains along the Cambodian border. We’ve heard the same sketchy reports that the first major battle between American troops and the North Vietnamese army is raging in a place called Ia Drang.
We hitch a jeep ride to the Pleiku base of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division’s 3rd Brigade, and watch medical evacuation helicopters arriving with wounded soldiers. We ride back with one of them to the pickup point, a cramped landing zone called X-Ray hidden among the trees in the Ia Drang valley. We see organized mayhem. Wounded are being carried on stretches to our helicopter. We hear shouts of “incoming” as shells explode nearby. I see Joe Galloway, a reporter from UPI running toward the chopper we have just left. He throws a thumbs-up as he clambers aboard and heads off to file his exclusive stories of the first day’s battle.
There is still plenty for Sheehan and me to see. I find Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, the commander of the embattled unit, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, squatting beside a tree and barking orders into his phone. He confirms that the communist attack is continuing, and he’s identified the North Vietnamese 304th Infantry Division as one of the enemy units. He worries that one of his infantry companies is missing behind enemy lines. He’s calling for more ammunition. He doesn’t have much time to talk with me, but he’s already said enough. I join a patrol probing enemy positions through the tree lines to the west. I interview wounded soldiers waiting for rescue. By late afternoon I leave to file my story from a communication center at Pleiku and return in the morning with photographer Rick Merron.
The stubborn bravery of the cavalrymen at landing zone X-Ray was well worthy of acclaim, and the American high command quickly proclaimed it a great victory. But more was to come. On Nov. 17, the North Vietnamese ambushed and overran a marching column of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry in the same area. Of the 500 Americans in the column, 150 were killed, 50 wounded and only 84 could be immediately returned to action. My colleague Merron interviewed the survivors, who told harrowing tales of the brutal slaughter, with the hidden enemy jumping down from trees to attack, and soldiers fleeing in panic.
The commander of American Forces in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, preferred the narrative of glorious victory to any suggestion of defeat. He phoned our bureau chief, Edwin White, and demanded that we stop interviewing “ordinary soldiers in battle because they are not in a position to see the big picture and may be emotionally affected by the action.” White tells me to ignore the call. Westmoreland did not have a veto power on what we wrote. To me, the point of view of the ordinary soldier was the key to many of my best stories.
Back home in Saigon, the phone beside my bed is ringing in the half light of dawn. The night man in our office is calling. He has a message for me from New York. I’ve won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. That makes three for the AP in three years. Malcolm Browne shared the prize with The New York Times’s David Halberstam in 1964; Horst Faas won for photography in 1965, now me in 1966.
My wife, Nina, is awake and questioning. Our son, Andrew, 18 months old, starts bawling. I tell her the news and we hug. I’d married Nina two years earlier after meeting her when she returned to her native Vietnam from a two-year postgraduate course in library science at the University of North Carolina. It was love at first sight for me. Nina puts up with my dangerous professional life, aware that journalists are being killed in combat, including Huynh Thanh My, a tale
nted young Vietnamese AP photographer newly married with a baby on the way, who was killed the previous summer.
Nina understands what it’s all about. Her family fled south to Saigon from the communists in 1955. Her brother-in-law is an officer in the South Vietnamese army. I’ve convinced her journalists have a necessary role to play in telling the truth about war, no matter the risk.
I leave my apartment and walk on clouds down Rue Pasteur to our new office. On the way, I’m stopped by the brilliant New York Times correspondent Charles Mohr, who I suspect was also entered in the Pulitzer Prize contest. He shakes my hand and offers to buy me lunch.
Nina and I fly to New York to attend the 50th anniversary celebration of the Pulitzer Prize in the grand ballroom at the Plaza Hotel. We are on the stage with the year’s other winners, and I look out to the sparkling black-tie audience filled with as many Pulitzer winners in all categories as the organizers had been able to round up. Afterward, I pose for a photograph with the legendary AP winners from two previous wars. I am the new kid on the block.
Wes Gallagher pulls me aside to tell me that President Johnson has been complaining about my reporting, bringing it up to newspaper editors invited to visit the White House. He says he met with the president. I try to imagine the standoff between the most powerful man in America and one of the most influential news executives. They are matched physically, with maybe an advantage for Gallagher with his menacing bushy black eyebrows shading piercing gray eyes. Gallagher tells me the conversation.
“Mr. President, I understand you have been critical of some of AP’s stories from Vietnam?”
“Oh, no,” the president replies, patting Gallagher on the back.
Gallagher: “Well, I just wanted you to know, Mr. President, that the AP is not against you or for you.”
The president: “That’s not quite the way I like it.”
Gallagher pulls me closer. “I want you to keep doing what you’re doing, Peter,” he says. “But I have a warning. Stick to the facts and the truth at all times. If you make a mistake, even a little one, I can’t protect you.”
A U.S. civilian pilot in the aircraft doorway tries to maintain order as panicking South Vietnamese civilians scramble to get aboard during evacuation of Nha Trang, Apr. 1, 1975. Thousands of civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers fought for space on the aircraft to Saigon as communist forces advanced following the fall of Qui Nhon, to the north. (AP Photo)
South Vietnamese Marines leap in panic aboard a cutter from an LST in Danang Harbor in Da Nang, Vietnam, Apr. 1, 1975, as they are evacuated from the city. (AP Photo)
Vietnamese boat people try to escape from Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, to a U.S. Navy ship, Feb. 8, 1975. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
U.S. Navy personnel aboard the USS Blue Ridge push a helicopter into the sea off the coast of Vietnam in order to make room for more evacuation flights from Saigon, Apr. 29, 1975. (AP Photo)
Mobs of Vietnamese people scale the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon trying to get to the helicopter pickup zone, just before the end of the Vietnam War on Apr. 29, 1975. (AP Photo/Neal Ulevich)
Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, burns himself to death on a Saigon street Jun. 11, 1963, to protest alleged persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. (AP Photo/Malcolm Browne)
New York Times reporter David Halberstam, center in glasses, defends bloodied Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, far left, as plainclothes Saigon police agents beat several members of the Western press corps in a Saigon alleyway, Jul. 7, 1963. (AP Photo/Malcolm Browne)
6
“Search and Destroy” Up Close
Success for American combat troops in their earliest battles in South Vietnam gives officials confidence that the war can be won quickly. At least that’s what they say in public. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara visits Saigon so often and is so optimistic in his assessments that people begin calling it “McNamara’s War.” At an airport press conference late in 1965 when I ask him about that, he says, “I’m proud some think that way.” Years later, he is quoted as having doubts about victory around the same time he answered my question.
The stated American military strategy is to force the communist enemy to call off the war by killing so many of its soldiers so quickly that it has no choice but to give up. Officials point to the well-publicized battle in the Ia Drang valley in November 1965 between American air cavalry troopers and North Vietnamese regular soldiers as a template. Several hundred elite American soldiers were casualties in that brutal, three-day struggle, but far more North Vietnamese combatants died, according to official estimates, as many as 10-to-1. Such a kill ratio, if true and if maintained, seems to portend an unbeatable outcome. The body count becomes the primary indicator of battlefield success.
Not everyone is so sure. I write an analysis that says even with 180,000 combat troops committed to Vietnam at that time, the United States is losing its edge against the communists. Most American and South Vietnamese troops are pinned down by security jobs—including keeping what they hold—so that surprisingly few battalions are available for searching out the enemy. North Vietnam is pouring its own army into the fight. By early 1966, the battlefield situation has returned to where it was a year earlier, before a surge of new American forces tipped the balance temporarily in the allies’ favor.
I try to make friends with Major General William DePuy, the young commander of the renowned “Big Red One,” the 1st Infantry Division based near Saigon. DePuy is a favorite of Westmoreland’s and worked as a staff officer for the general for two years before being sent to his new command with instructions to “get cracking.” DePuy becomes the proponent of a uniquely aggressive tactic labeled “search and destroy,” designed to launch massive firepower and troop assaults against confirmed enemy locations to secure the highest body counts.
One day an information officer with the 1st Division phones me with an invitation to visit his headquarters at Di An. DePuy strides into our meeting room. He says he’s been reading some of my stories in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. “Arnett, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he says. “You better stick around with us for a while. This is where it’s happening.”
I discover that DePuy is a dynamic, demanding leader, and feisty. He’s a “bantam rooster” to his men, a fellow officer commenting that that’s not a bad way to describe DePuy’s “barely contained energy package” in a 5-foot-8-inch body weighing 140 pounds. His intensity frightens his own people as his command becomes infamous in military circles for the high turnover of field officers whose performances he decides are less than tolerable.
While preparing for a field trip with DePuy, I ask him about the criticism and he responds, “I’m interested only in combat effectiveness, not personal feelings or career ambitions. I want only the best.” This trip takes us to the 3rd Brigade base at Lai Khe, once a thriving French rubber plantation now hosting 2,000 American soldiers. Our helicopter lands near a line of waiting officers, and DePuy pins a medal on the chest of one of them, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Haig, a battalion commander being cited for his leadership and heroism at the battle of Ap Gu. Haig’s bravery in surviving a helicopter crash in the middle of the battle and joining his troops in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy wins attention in Washington. Within five years, he’s a general on the staff of Henry Kissinger. A decade later, he’s secretary of state. It’s hard to fault DePuy’s earlier judgment.
DePuy loves helicopters the way NASCAR drivers of that time love their Fords or Chevys. He’s in the sky every day in his UH-1 Huey, hovering over his troops as they tangle with the enemy in villages below and in barely visible battles in the midst of deep jungle, yelling instructions over his field phone. His most dramatic tactical innovation is the massing of multiple fleets of helicopters to airlift his soldiers into battle in the communist-controlled wildernesses of War Zones D and C, north and west of his brigade base camps.
Hearing that DePuy’s planning a large-sc
ale operation in early summer, I beg to go along. I arrive at the Lai Khe base, one of the launching areas, by driving along “thunder road,” the name given to this stretch of Route 13 that is often mined by local communist sympathizers. I learn the operation’s name, Birmingham. At dawn the next morning, I see DePuy consulting with his officers at an airstrip crowded with helicopters. Grim-faced soldiers line up outside the doors.
DePuy beckons me over. He is grinning. “I had to twist the old man’s arm,” he said, referring to Lieutenant General Jonathan Seaman, a popular, mild-mannered officer who is his superior. “But I’ve got nearly a hundred transport and gunships, and we will launch within the hour.” He invites me aboard the command helicopter and hands me earphones. I had written about DePuy’s contention that victory in war always favored the side that was able to concentrate its forces at a critical time on the battlefield. This is what he plans on doing today. But it’s also a tactic that is a cardinal principle of communist guerrillas, whose units rarely attack unless they field superior forces.
The target areas this day are small clearings in the jungle in War Zone C, named during the earlier French war. In the air now, I twist in my seat. I see helicopters swarming around and behind us like migrating geese in seasonal flight. DePuy is chattering on his command phone as the vastness of the war zone opens up before us, beyond the last vestiges of populated communities. I thrill at being a part of this incredible display of America’s military might.