Saigon Has Fallen

by Peter Arnett

  DePuy calls for artillery support, and I see bursts of flame and smoke in the three landing zones he has designated. We fly on, and the artillery shells keep coming, the explosions so near now that I can almost hear them over the roar of the rotor blades. The shells will clear the landing zones of enemy personnel and fortifications. I was an artilleryman in my youth during required military service in my native New Zealand. I’m thinking these shells are flying right over us, maybe closely. DePuy sees my consternation and shouts into his phone, “The trick, Arnett, is in the timing.”

  Airstrikes from a dozen planes provide a spectacular denouement, splashing napalm and high explosive bombs into the jungle foliage as the first helicopters swing into landing formation and, one by one, hover over the scarred ground, disgorging the troopers and then flying off as the next ship comes in. By midmorning, DePuy has sent more than a thousand of his best troops into an enemy stronghold rarely penetrated in the 15 years of warfare that preceded them.

  Flying back to base with DePuy, I see he is elated. He has other units ready to reinforce, he tells me. He can send them into War Zone C at 90 miles an hour. DePuy even suggests that the epic battle at Dien Bien Phu that ended in disaster for the French in 1954 could have been won with his tactics. Maybe. Ultimately, his Birmingham operation will be less successful than expected.

  DePuy makes colorful news copy. He likes the story I write on Aug. 31, 1966, that calls him a military genius who would either kill all the communists in his division area north of Saigon or they would kill him. He makes the cover of Newsweek magazine on Dec. 5, 1966. But there is a downside to his tactical boldness. To save his soldiers’ lives he orders that in making contact with the enemy they avoid being decisively engaged. Better to call in air and artillery fire while support units maneuver. By keeping American soldiers out of the kill zone while making maximum use of firepower, DePuy does indeed save his own men, but there is a disproportionate loss of civilian lives and property that alarms the high command and clouds his career.

  I interview General DePuy in Washington a few years after the war. He has regained his reputation as one of the brightest officers in the military, widely seen as the chief architect of the restructuring of American army doctrine after the withdrawal from Vietnam. I ask him about “search and destroy,” and he says he regrets the title. “It started out with the best of intentions,” he tells me, “to search for the enemy, find him and destroy him. Later I guess it became associated with pictures of troops searching villages and setting them on fire. It came to suggest we were destroying the whole country.”

  Airlifting soldiers into battle by helicopter is one thing. What they face on the ground is another. AP photographer Horst Faas and I accept an invitation to cover a risky infantry action west of Saigon. The mission is to rout out communist snipers from tunnels and bunkers in the tangle of wild rubber trees and shrub bordering Cu Chi, a town on the main highway to the Cambodian border. The invitation is extended by an officer we see as a friend, Lieutenant Colonel George Eyster, commander of the renowned Black Lion battalion, the 2nd of the 28th Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. Eyster is a tall quiet man whom we often run into in our visits to his brigade base. He’s a West Point graduate and modest about his lineage; his father was a brigadier general and chief information officer for American forces in Europe in World War II. He lives in Cocoa Beach, Florida, and enjoys showing us pictures of his wife and kids.

  We arrive at the operational area at night, and move out at dawn. Eyster and a company commander, Captain George Dailey, decide to go on foot along the visible paths and tracks in the scrub to better bring up jeep-mounted weaponry. They admit it’s a gamble because snipers might be observing us from concealed tunnels.

  An hour into the mission I join Eyster, Dailey and a radio operator to peer at a detailed operational map of the area. Eyster is pointing to a map location just ahead when four shots ring out in a cluster, echoing loudly through the undergrowth. My shoulder is next to Eyster’s, and I feel his body shake. I hear him gasp. He slides to the ground, as I do next to him for my own safety. “George, I’m hit,” he mutters to Dailey, who is now on his feet shouting, “The colonel’s hit, the colonel’s hit! Bring up a medic, bring up a medic!” Horst Faas runs up as Eyster’s eyes open and in a weak voice he mutters, “Horst, don’t get hit, don’t get hit,” and lapses into unconsciousness.

  I am filming the scene with an 8 mm camera. Horst and I search for the tunnel that we assume the sniper popped out of. We don’t find it.

  My story of the Black Lions, filed the following morning, begins: “It was a long bloody mile we walked Wednesday. At times it was a Dante’s inferno of fire and brimstone. Powerful riot gas drifted through the trees, burning where it touched a man’s sweating skin. Wounded American soldiers writhed on the ground, looking monstrous in their black, grotesque gas masks. It was a walk where death lurked in the trees where the enemy snipers hid, and under the ground where their mines lay.”

  I don’t name Eyster in this story out of concern for his family. We visit him at a base hospital where he lies in a barren, uncooled room under a mosquito net. He is ashen faced and in pain, his neck and chest heavily bandaged, his left arm in a sling. Horst has printed a few pictures of the previous day’s action to show him, and he gazes with pleasure at them, whispering, “I had a lucky escape. I nearly didn’t make it.”

  The 3rd Brigade commander phones our bureau the next afternoon saying Eyster has died overnight. He invites us to attend the memorial service planned for the following day at the base. We can’t make it. We are already on our way to rejoin the Black Lions because my story has received considerable newspaper play in the United States and editors want more.

  Three days later, I write Eyster’s obituary. It begins: “He was the son of a general, a West Pointer, and a battalion commander. But Lieutenant Colonel George Eyster was to die like a rifleman. It may have been the colonel’s leaves on his shoulder, or the map he held in his hand, or just a wayward chance that the sniper chose Eyster from the five of us standing on that dusty path.” His wife, Harriet, reads my story in an Orlando newspaper and writes me, “You gave his children a legacy that no one else could have and his heroism will live for them and be an inspiration to them forever.”

  The launching of America’s conventional war against North Vietnam’s infiltrating combat forces sidelines much of the South Vietnamese army to security duties amongst the general population. American military advisers attached to Vietnamese units watch helplessly as sorely needed equipment and supplies flow instead to the new combat arrivals.

  I hear about a Vietnamese paratrooper company under communist siege for several weeks at remote Duc Co firebase near the Cambodian border. An American advisory team is with them. I arrange a ride with the 52nd aviation company, a daredevil American outfit based in Pleiku. One of my pilots wears a wide-brimmed hat and has exotic insignia pinned to his jacket. The other has been in the bar with me the previous night and looks hungover. Once in the air, they are all business, piloting their Huey over and around and sometimes under the tops of ancient giant gnarled trees, soaring over triple-canopy growth, and dropping into grassy clearings. I am dizzy and glad as the sandbagged parapets of Duc Co appear and we land briefly on a red clay tarmac. Wounded Vietnamese are pulled aboard as I slip off into the base and the Huey departs.

  Inside I see a giant American in a baggy fatigue uniform and a soft khaki cap who is hauling along a wounded Vietnamese soldier with a bloody compress bandage around his right leg. The man is Army Major Norman Schwarzkopf, out of East Orange, New Jersey. He allows me to stay for three hair-raising days as his team helps the Vietnamese airborne troopers survive the constant shelling and combat assaults of communist troops clearly intent on overrunning the camp. Years later in his autobiography, Schwarzkopf tells a couple of stories about me. One claims that in taking me and others outside one rainy night to guide in a medical evacuation helicopter, he asks us to vigorously shake our flashlights
as a signal. I allegedly respond, “Major, I’ve been shaking for the whole two days I’ve been here.”

  In 1991, while I’m covering the first Gulf War from Baghdad for CNN, I hear that Schwarzkopf, now commander of the coalition forces attacking Saddam Hussein, gets so mad at my live coverage that he orders CNN broadcasts turned off at his headquarters in Saudi Arabia. Soon after the war I see him at a gala Washington media dinner. He is a guest of the U.S. News & World Report magazine publisher Mortimer Zuckerman, and is imposing in his dress blues, receiving the plaudits of well-wishers. He towers over me as I shake his hand. I mention in jest that I’d heard he was not happy with my Baghdad reporting for CNN, and explain in my defense that I am one of the few reporters at the war’s beginning who knows how to pronounce his name. A clever man, Schwarzkopf shoots back, “Yes, but with an Iraqi accent.”

  7

  Fighting the War of Words

  By the fall of 1967, the hope of quick American military success in South Vietnam “has died along with the nearly 13,000 Americans soldiers already killed.” The observation is from an AP analysis I write about the growing stalemate on the battlefield. It can be broken, I argue, only by bringing in more American troops or by revitalizing the dispirited South Vietnamese army. The 400,000 American soldiers already in combat “could be tied down for a decade just holding the lid on communist forces now active all over the country.”

  The Associated Press looks to me, by now its longest-serving reporter in Vietnam, to write such assessments of the war. The American military high command often disagrees with them, as it does in this case. Not for the first time, I’m called in by Barry Zorthian, the normally affable former U.S. Marine colonel sent to Saigon in 1965 by President Johnson to manage press relations. He says his superiors in Washington are not happy with my latest story. “Damn it, Peter,” Zorthian says, thumping his fist on his desk. “You write these analyses without including our side of the story. That’s unfair.”

  I remind him that his side of the story is given every afternoon in the official Saigon press briefings, regularly attended by other AP staffers, and is sometimes useful but more often not, justifying the sobriquet given by the attendees, “The Five O’clock Follies.” And there are the well-covered press conferences hosted by Defense Department, State Department and White House officials in Washington, invariably optimistic about Vietnam. I tell Zorthian my stories are fed into the mix along with all the others, and it’s just too bad he’s held accountable for the most critical of them. “Well, we don’t like what you do,” he says.

  In April 1966, I have a run-in with Zorthian over what I see as unnecessary roughness by an American military policeman during a Buddhist protest demonstration in Saigon directed against the policies of Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky. Stones are flying and voices raised as the protesters square off against Saigon police near an important pagoda. A nervous American MP emerges from the ranks and demands that I and several other western reporters leave the scene. I assert that he doesn’t have authority over us, a view backed up by my colleagues including Bob Schieffer, at that time reporting for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The MP draws his .45, waves it around, and then points it directly at me as I continue to protest his commands. The tension is worsened by photographer Eddie Adams, an AP colleague sometimes prone to mischief, who starts calling out loudly, “Shoot him. Shoot him. It’ll make a better picture.” The MP is looking increasingly rattled. He backs off and we continue covering the story.

  Eddie got a dramatic picture of the MP in action against us. The next morning, I go to Zorthian’s office to complain. He says he’s already heard from the State Department and that Secretary Dean Rusk saw the picture in The Washington Post and ordered that such things not happen again. Zorthian says his office is considering laying charges against me, anyway.

  “What’s the charge?” I ask in surprise.

  His lips curl. “Assault against a peace officer with a deadly weapon.”

  “What deadly weapon?” I demand.

  He responds with bemusement, “A pen and pencil.”

  My news coverage of the war depends not on the usual press briefings and insider background sessions with top officials. I rely on the generosity and the collaboration of Americans in the field who have read my stories over the years and trust me. I spend much of my time with combat units, chronicling the endeavors of the officers and ordinary soldiers sent to do battle in an environment uniquely hostile to the American military experience, and against an implacable, always threatening enemy.

  I also visit civilian officials in the beleaguered provincial towns where they direct American aid programs and have valuable insights into the local people. The best is John Paul Vann, the gutsy former lieutenant colonel I first met in 1962 when he was a military adviser in the Mekong Delta. He was let go by the Defense Department, partly for his critical outbursts to me and other reporters over South Vietnamese military incompetence in the battle of Ap Bac in January 1963, the first major action of the war. Before he left the Army, though, he submitted a blistering critique of the Pentagon’s assistance program, calling its claims of success “a bright shining lie.” The phrase became the title of Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Vann, published in 1988.

  When Vann returns to Vietnam early in 1965 as the senior civilian adviser in Hau Nghia province, I get in touch and he offers to drive me around his domain. Positioned to the west of Saigon, his province is one of the most insecure places in the region. Vann runs a pacification program that tries to unite all government security efforts. He picks me up in his jeep at a small Italian-style eatery near our office run by a young Vietnamese woman who affectionately bids him farewell. Vann is bursting with energy, his narrow face burned by the sun, his hair crew cut, his accent decidedly Texan.

  Vann says he is happy to be back even as a civilian, and we clear Saigon’s suburbs and head into what American military personnel are beginning to call “the boonies.” I see a few old French concrete outposts along the highway, manned by local militiamen who, Vann says, rarely go outside because communist guerrillas are everywhere. We turn into a narrow roadway and pass abandoned paddy fields and flattened farmhouses. Vann reaches into the glove compartment and hands me three or four M26 fragmentation hand grenades. I hold them carefully in my lap. “If we hit a roadblock that I don’t recognize, throw a hand grenade or pass one to me and I’ll do it,” he says breezily. “I’m the big man around here.”

  We arrive at his headquarters, a decrepit former post office in a desolate town that was vacated for a year or so before the government set up authority again. Vann is a great source for a reporter to have. He believes strongly in the mission to maintain an independent South Vietnam, but he disagrees with the massive military buildup and the use of overwhelming firepower to win the war. He’s an expert in military tactics and also tuned in to the intricacies of Vietnamese politics. He works tirelessly to turn American attention toward rebuilding the South Vietnamese military and government rather than continuing all-out war. He believes in the tired phrase “winning the hearts and minds of the people,” and begins attracting converts to his views. One of them is Daniel Ellsberg, the former Robert McNamara whiz kid who becomes his friend. They plot to try to persuade the secretary of defense to change destructive military policies. Within a year, Vann is chief of the pacification effort in 12 provinces. He’s willing to brief me anytime I’m interested. There is a condition. “Don’t ever quote me,” he says. “Remember what happened the last time.”

  I never know in advance what will trigger an irate pushback from the military. I write an unflattering assessment of General Westmoreland for the papers of Jan. 27, pointing out that in the three years he has been in Vietnam the war has changed dramatically, that it is 58 times more costly per day, and that American casualties have increased fiftyfold. I quote critics who complain the four-star general has displayed a ruthless ambition, shoring up his base of power by calling for more and more troop deploy
ments when his job had originally been to build up Vietnamese capability to fight their own war. There is no pushback. Then comes the tennis story.

  A visiting AP staffer, Kelly Smith, on a break from her coverage of the White House, is offered a “Day with Westmoreland” story by the general’s PR people. Our charming visitor makes the most of it, a breakfast-to-dinner marathon with the trusting general. Some editor in New York suggests we compare the general’s day to a typical American combat soldier’s experience. On the morning that Kelly is watching Westmoreland shave in the bathroom of his comfortable downtown Saigon home, I am awakening in the midst of an unshaven grunt company from the U.S. 25th Division in the boonies west of Saigon. By evening, after a day of sniper fire has wounded several soldiers, I close my notebook, climb on a medical evacuation helicopter and head home.

  Kelly and I compare notes and sit down to write a long feature for Sunday newspapers. Our narrative includes the information that as helicopters are preparing to ferry out wounded from my unit in my day, in Kelly’s day Westmoreland is settling into his late-morning workout with his tennis pro at the Cercle Sportif, the former French country club in Saigon. The Saigon high command gets its hands on an advance copy of our story and demands a revision, insisting that the general’s tennis game is no one’s business but his own. We leave it to AP editors to decide. The tennis stays put.

  Two weeks later, I’m waiting with other reporters at an official welcoming ceremony at the U.S. 9th Infantry Division base at My Tho for visiting Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Westmoreland is standing in front of me. He turns, scowling. “Well, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve resigned my membership of the Cercle Sportif,” he says. I express surprise and mention that just the previous week, at my wife Nina’s suggestion, I’d joined the club so that my young son can go swimming. “Well,” the general grunted, “maybe they gave you my membership.”