Saigon Has Fallen

by Peter Arnett

  Westmoreland travels to Washington in November at the request of President Johnson, who is eager to quiet public anxieties about his Vietnam policies. In interviews and press conferences, the general expresses confidence that the war will soon be concluded, that he sees “the light at the end of the tunnel.” Even as he reassures officials in Washington that all is well and that the communist forces are on the run, North Vietnamese military planners are launching the first of a series of major assaults that within three months will test the resolve of the United States to the breaking point, bring down a president and place the future of South Vietnam in grave doubt.

  The enemy picks the time and place for the first battles, the remote valley of Dak To, tucked between two mountain massifs near the Cambodia-Laos border. I fly in an Air Force transport plane packed with combat reinforcements to Pleiku, and hitch an onward ride in an army helicopter to Dak To, landing near a press camp prepared by the 1st Cavalry Division. I throw my pack into a large tent lined with canvas bunks and woolen blankets. The outdoor privies are starting to smell. I join an AP reporting team already assembled there. It is mid-November. By this time, American spokesmen are estimating that 12,000 communist troops have been steadily digging bunkers and protective tunnels in the surrounding mountains, the largest enemy concentration in the whole war so far. I watch with awe as the skyline erupts all around me with fiery red explosions and purple, yellow and white smoke from artillery barrages and airstrikes. America is throwing everything at the mountains. Some colleagues are reporting that the communists have walked into a trap and will be pulverized by American firepower. Maybe it’s the other way around, in the view of a few.

  This time I’m not interested in the big picture because we learn there is concern about the fate of three paratrooper companies from the 2nd Battalion of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. We’re told they’re outflanked to the west and the east near the crest of Hill 875, a pointed knob of triple-canopy jungle and scrub poking up from the valley floor. The brigade is immediately sending a relief mission of three paratrooper companies from the 4th Battalion. They’ll be moving on foot through the jungle, and three journalists from our number are invited to go. We are warned it is extremely dangerous, much of the trip will be at night, and that we will be offered no special consideration. I pull rank by asserting that I’m the senior reporter there, and working for the world’s biggest news organization. I get to go.

  The next 36 hours are the most dangerous in my life. There are 500 of us in the relief party, at the beginning slogging up a ridgeline overgrown with thick bamboo trees and low underbrush. By afternoon the landscape changes into high forest with towering teak and mahogany trees. At dusk, we are still two miles from ascending Hill 875. As darkness falls we move single file, holding hands along a narrow trail to avoid getting lost. The enemy knows we are coming, and hidden gunners occasionally open up with antitank guns. The shells tear over our heads and explode in the trees around us with balls of fire. We scatter until it’s over, and then move on.

  By midevening we are on the slopes of Hill 875 and use hanging vines to help pull ourselves up. In the moonlight we see shapes of dead bodies, and a soldier near me yells out, “We’ve killed a lot of gooks,” until we approach closer and see they are the bodies of dead Americans wearing only their skivvies—their uniforms, boots and weapons carried off by the enemy. Near the crest we come upon the main group, and gasp at what we find. Mounds of dead paratroops lie spread-eagled where they have fallen. Behind pitiful barricades of tree branches hide the wounded.

  I find an open patch of dirt and borrow a soldier’s entrenching tool and start digging a shallow foxhole to spend the night. But the metal strikes at human flesh, a body buried there by a bomb explosion earlier in the day. I recoil in horror and step back on something soft and find it is a detached arm from another corpse. I look about me in the moonlight and feel ill. I have been proud of a certain professional detachment, but now I feel ashamed of my neutrality, useless with my notebooks and cameras and water bottles. I don’t even carry a gun, so I am just one more liability for the surviving defenders.

  But I can write their story. Following a somber day of interviews and self-reflection, I leave on a medical evacuation helicopter. At the Dak To airstrip I sleep under the wing of a transport plane scheduled to leave at dawn for the coastal base of Qui Nhon. When we land I run to the communication shack and plead with a technician to help me. On the phone, he gets my pal Ed White, who is manning the day desk in Saigon. I type furiously, then hand the technician the first long paragraph:

  War painted the living and the dead the same gray color on Hill 875. The only way to tell who was alive and who was dead amongst the exhausted men was to watch when the enemy mortars came crashing in. The living rushed unashamedly to the tiny bunkers dug into the red clay of the hilltop. The wounded squirmed toward the shelter of trees that had been blasted to the ground. Only the dead didn’t move, propped up in the bunkers where they had died in direct mortar hits, or face down in the dust where they had fallen to bullets.

  Within an hour Ed White has the whole story. He quickly sends it on its way via telex to AP New York, and thence to America’s newspapers, whose editors will decide if the fate of those on Hill 875 merits the attention of an anxious country. I’m sure of one thing: Barry Zorthian’s superiors in Washington won’t be pleased.

  Ten weeks later, firecrackers pop and paper dragons dance from their strings. The year of the dragon is here. It is Tet 1968, the Vietnamese New Year, a time to celebrate for the war-weary people of Saigon, me and my family among them. Something is wrong, though, as I try to sleep. The fireworks’ crack seems much more intense than usual, more like the snap of passing bullets. Passing bullets? I spring wide-awake at a sound I do recognize, that of a 50-caliber machine gun firing nervous bursts.

  I open my balcony door overlooking Rue Pasteur in the heart of Saigon. I see it’s a nervous sentry at the entrance to the old Gia Long Palace across the street. Then the phone rings. It’s Ed White. “Hey man, they’re here, the communists, all over the city. Get your butt down to the bureau.” I push my wife and two children into our thick-walled bathroom and toss in a mattress for extra protection.

  I walk quickly to our bureau three blocks away and try not to appear excited. No point in being mistaken for an enemy combatant. I hear heavy gunfire now, from the presidential palace four blocks to the east, from the U.S. Embassy a similar distance to the northeast. I soon learn that the communist guerrillas are emerging from their exile in the swamps and jungles to invade South Vietnam’s cities and towns in an attempt to force America to change its war policies. Forty targets of significance are hit hard across the country.

  Complete surprise, that’s what John Paul Vann tells me at his Bien Hoa headquarters later in the day. Only once before in Vietnam’s history of frequent violent conflict has the sanctity of Tet been so blatantly violated. In the late 18th century, General Nguyen Hue stole upon a Chinese garrison holding Hanoi that was lulled into believing that Tet meant truce. The unsuspecting Chinese were annihilated.

  I fly with a few news colleagues on a government-organized trip to the provincial capital of Ben Tre in the central Mekong Delta, which we hear was the subject of a repulsed communist attack. I had been there before and while the others are loading into a bus for a visit to downtown, I hitch a ride with Major Chester L. Brown, an Air Force officer who had flown me around in his tiny L-19 spotter plane on my previous visit. He warns I will be shocked at what I see, that Ben Tre is in ruins, and that many people have died.

  “It is always a pity about the civilians,” he says. “In the mass confusion of this kind of thing, the people don’t know where the lines are, they don’t know where to hide, and some of the weapons we were using were area weapons instead of against specific targets, and that way people get hurt.”

  He drops me off at the American military advisory compound; it and the governor’s headquarters look like the only places undamaged. I bri
ng up Major Brown’s remarks with an Army major I had met before. He thinks about it for a minute and mentions that when the town seemed about to be overrun by communist attackers, he ordered in the heavy firepower. “We had to destroy the town in order to save it,” he says.

  By the time the bloody battles of Tet 1968 are over, the authorities report that 3,000 South Vietnamese and American soldiers have been killed, along with 8,000 civilians. Some 40,000 communist soldiers are claimed killed, if true virtually wiping out the local communist guerrilla organizations. Westmoreland claims a major victory, maybe true enough if Vietnam’s war is based solely on a high attrition rate, the ratio of our dead to theirs. But the war has become a political struggle, and much of the American public turns against it for two main reasons, the steady diet of optimism fed to it by the Johnson administration that is so dramatically challenged by the Tet attacks, and Westmoreland’s request for another 206,000 American soldiers even as he declares a mighty victory.

  President Johnson has his back to the wall. He is still unforgiving of critical news stories and distressing photographs that in previous wars would have been stopped by the censorship he was politically afraid of implementing in this war. He calls the AP personnel chief, Keith Fuller, to the White House. Fellow Texans, they chat over a lunch of hamburgers in the Oval Office. The president tells Fuller he decided to pull his information specialist Barry Zorthian out of Saigon, “because he has been there too long.” Then, as Fuller later tells me, Johnson asks, “Now hasn’t that Australian Pete Arnett been there too long, too?”

  The president decides in March 1968 that he’s through with the Vietnam War. His popularity is crashing. There are the strong showings by competing Democratic politicians in the presidential primaries. He stuns the nation by announcing he won’t run for a second term, and calls for negotiations with the North Vietnamese.

  Westmoreland will soon leave, a rotation determined months before but interpreted by many as a rebuke for the Tet Offensive surprise. He becomes chief of staff of the army, a prestigious appointment, but he finds it difficult to shake off the growing controversies over the war. After he retires, in 1973, he agrees to let me accompany him and his son, Rip, for a few days for a story as they drive around South Carolina, seeking votes for his candidacy in the Republican primary contest for the governorship. I note that Westmoreland is a man who, in his bemedaled army dress uniform and manly bearing, has become as familiar to Americans as any other person, but in his civilian clothes, pushing open a door at McDonald’s looking for votes, he is not recognized. Westmoreland is good-humored about it all, and after he loses sends me a note of thanks for my tongue-in-cheek story about his campaign.

  The general also agrees to a two-day television interview I conduct with him for a Canadian documentary on Vietnam, and I see him at a few of the military-media conferences on war reporting being held around the country at that time. I have a final meeting, a year or so before his death in 2005, when I’m in Charleston, South Carolina, speaking at a charity event organized by an acquaintance, John Winship. He suggests I visit his friend, and I agree. We drive to Westmoreland’s home at an upscale retirement community in a suburban neighborhood. We’re met at the door by his wife, Kitsy, and she chats for a moment about a meeting we had in Saigon early in the war. Her husband sits in the bright sunlight of a room with a wall full of windows, white haired now and frail looking. He nods to me, squinting a little, seeing a familiar face from a long-ago war that is fading slowly from memory. I thank him for phoning his old friend Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, in 1991, praising my live coverage of the Gulf War from Baghdad, even though he’d also expressed reservations about what I’d done in Saigon.

  “Peter,” he says, “I think your reporting from Vietnam was OK. But I’ll never forgive you for that tennis story.”

  8

  Nixon’s Bigger Picture

  Richard Nixon is visiting Saigon in mid-April 1967 to burnish his foreign policy credentials as he considers a run for the presidency the following year, and I’m assigned to spend a day with the former vice president. He is getting the usual VIP treatment from the American Embassy and the Vietnamese, meeting with Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky before arriving at the airport where I wait with a few other reporters to accompany him on a helicopter trip to the countryside. He is in shirtsleeves and sweating in the stifling heat.

  I’ve heard that Nixon dislikes the press. His bitter outcry to reporters after losing the California governor’s race in 1962, that “you won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” resonates gleefully in combative newsrooms around the country. But he is effusively friendly here. He shakes my hand. He nods over to where some uniformed local girls are bringing cold drinks. “Good-looking, hmm,” he says, grinning. He is equally amiable to the American soldiers and civilian officials he meets in Mekong Delta encampments during the day, listening thoughtfully to the briefings. There’s not much news, though. Nixon’s a well-known hawk on the war and repeats his support of it. He continues his forceful criticism of the anti-war protests growing in intensity back home, saying they weaken the soldiers’ fighting spirit. He leaves early the following morning.

  Nixon takes office as the 37th president of the United States in January 1969. He quickly assures a war-weary public he won’t seek military victory in Vietnam and will soon start bringing the troops home. But his off-the-cuff remarks to our handful of reporters at the Saigon airport 21 months earlier are prophetic. As president, Nixon seems unmoved by anti-war protest, and his increasingly bellicose military undertakings while in office do not cool off public dissent but trigger more. And he is unhurried in winding down the U.S. role in the war. It will be a long four years later, with the combat deaths of an additional 20,000 Americans, before the last soldiers come home.

  Veterans of the embattled administration of the previous president, Lyndon Johnson, blame Nixon for unnecessarily delaying the war’s end. “The American people at the grass roots had come to the conclusion that we should abandon the effort,” says Johnson’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, one of several former officials I interview for a television documentary after the war.

  Rusk says he is surprised that Nixon takes so long to bring about a “particular result” rather than to simply extract American forces, greatly reducing the conflict. “There was no suggestion of defeat in an American withdrawal,” Rusk adds. “We had left behind for the Nixon administration a military position which the North Vietnamese could not have overrun.” The particular result he mentioned was the ceasefire agreement signed in Paris by Henry Kissinger and a North Vietnamese official, Le Duc Tho, effective Jan. 28, 1973.

  But Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, also interviewed for my television project, says that Nixon had no intention of quickly pulling out of Vietnam. Unlike Johnson, who was primarily interested in domestic affairs, Nixon is fixated on foreign policy. “Vietnam was an expedient, a kind of stage where America’s bona fides, our intentions, our motives, were being acted out,” Haldeman says. Nixon aimed to defuse the forces of world communism by exploiting the rivalry between China and the Soviet Union and improving America’s relations with both of them, thereby achieving détente and limitation of arms. “Nixon believed America had to negotiate from strength, to prove its willingness to fight. Vietnam became that place,” Haldeman says.

  Nixon weaves his grand foreign policy designs behind White House doors, aided and encouraged by Kissinger, a Harvard-educated political scientist known as a brilliant and pragmatic strategist. They set in motion a “Vietnamization” plan to soften the blow of the American withdrawal. It is ambitious, calling for the gradual rearming and retraining of the whole South Vietnamese military establishment as a permanent buffer against the communists.

  Nixon’s decision to delay withdrawing troops to achieve his military and political goals means that numbers are reduced by only 60,000 at the end of his first year in office. Nearly 500,000 remain, most of them young draftees. Families at home are impa
tient for their return. The burden facing U.S. military authorities is to extract under fire a demoralized fighting force increasingly prone to behavior that strains military discipline and the code of conduct.

  On my trips to the battlefield I find that American soldiers are aware that they are fighting a holding action until the Vietnamese are ready to shoulder their own burden. For many, there is less personal incentive to win than there used to be, but the dangers are just as real. The soldiers see the final phase as uncertain. Under Nixon, every year the combat keeps escalating: In 1969 the secret bombing of Cambodia, in 1970 the invasion of Cambodia, in 1971 the invasion of Laos, in 1972 a new major offensive by North Vietnam.

  Photographer Horst Faas and I stumble on a story late in August 1969 that some see as a harbinger of things to come. We are with troops of the Americal Infantry Division searching for the wreckage of an observation helicopter shot down a few days earlier. The AP photographer Ollie Noonan was believed aboard. I am with the commander of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Robert C. Bacon, at his field bivouac in the northern coastal mountains near the crash scene when I hear these words over a crackling field telephone: “I’m sorry, sir, but my men refuse to go. We cannot move out.” They are spoken by Lieutenant Eugene Shurtz Jr., the commander of the battalion’s A Company. The unit has been ordered at dawn to move once more down the jungled rocky slope of Nui Lon Mountain into a deadly labyrinth of North Vietnamese bunkers and trench lines.

  A Company is one of three units involved in the assault. Colonel Bacon pales as Shurtz matter-of-factly tells him that the soldiers of A Company will not follow orders. “Repeat that, please,” the colonel asks without raising his voice. “Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?”