Saigon Has Fallen

by Peter Arnett

  Carter appoints a presidential commission to Vietnam in March 1977, less than two months after he takes office, its purpose to pursue rapid diplomatic relations with the former enemy and begin resolving a growing controversy over American servicemen still missing in the old war zones. Heading the commission is the president of the United Auto Workers union, Leonard Woodcock, a senior statesman of the American labor movement, also noted for his resistance to the Vietnam War (which had earned him ninth place on President Nixon’s infamous enemies list). Also included in the commission is Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, whom I had first met in a hotel room in Saigon in December 1962, where we discussed the problems of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. I am one of five reporters chosen to go along on this trip with the commission, the first American journalists to visit Vietnam since the war ended nearly two years earlier.

  We leave Washington, D.C., on a presidential jet on March 13, arriving in Hanoi 13 hours later. Word reaches us that if our motorcade gets bogged down in traffic on our way into town it will be a sign of the Vietnamese government viewing the commission with disfavor. We roll straight through. The atmosphere in Hanoi is very different from that on my trip in late 1972, when I visited with an anti-war group and U.S warplanes were still bombing the outskirts of the city. The few people we saw on the streets then were poorly dressed and slight of build. This time I see a city rejuvenating with busier streets and more food in the stores. Peace has clearly brought its bonuses to the victorious north. We are housed at a new five-story hotel on Ngo Quyen Street, much to the envy of resident diplomats who are living in the ancient Unification Hotel around the corner. They tell us our accommodation is the most comfortable in town.

  Woodcock is matched against the deputy foreign minister, Phan Hien, in his negotiations, a five-day marathon that he later describes as the toughest in his career. He brings a unique perspective to the talks, a private citizen rather a professional diplomat. He tells us over a beer the first evening that, “if a State Department official had been here with me he would have died a thousand deaths. I emphasized that our two countries were meeting as equals. I told him that this is the best group they would ever get from America, with men of stature like Mike Mansfield. I told him that if they closed the door on us then it might take 10 more years before we are back.”

  The Vietnamese official tells him, “You will not be disappointed.” By week’s end the remains of 12 missing Americans pilots are handed over to the commission, a few of the 795 servicemen still listed as missing by the Defense Department. Hanoi also agrees to set up an office to receive information about the missing servicemen, but on an understanding that the group will take back home the Vietnamese view that American aid and reconstruction for the war-torn country are required as “a question of humanitarian principle.” Unlike in my last days in Saigon in May 1975, officials here are cooperative, my stories moving swiftly to New York without censorship.

  Meeting with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong just prior to our departure, Woodcock again plays the concerned private citizen, and tells him, “Speaking personally as an American, we being here is like rolling the clock back to 1945, a time when the United States based its policies on the support of allies in Europe rather than the aspirations of people here. Now we can start over again.”

  We fly out of Hanoi to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where a big C-141 StarLifter aircraft is waiting to load the remains of the recovered servicemen. Watching the uniformed aircrew reverently loading the steel caskets into the interior of the plane is Dr. Roger Shields, a consultant to the Pentagon on POW affairs. He tells me, “I’m remembering something from four years ago, when we were welcoming the released American prisoners of war arriving here at Clark. They were alive and joyful that day, they were going home. And so these boys are going home, too.”

  President Carter never does get his Vietnam policy off the ground. His administration tries hard, withholding its veto on Vietnam’s admittance to the United Nations, but both houses of Congress flatly refuse to provide aid to the Hanoi government. And the missing prisoner of war question blows up into a passionate political issue that takes years to resolve. The man who led the Vietnam mission, Leonard Woodcock, in 1979 becomes the first American ambassador to a China under communist rule.

  Vietnam fades as an American foreign policy issue, but the human suffering cannot be ignored. Thousands of discontented Vietnamese take to the seas beginning two years after the war, seeking refuge in any other country that will take them. They are the boat people whose privations on their long voyages in often unseaworthy ships shock the world. Their suffering is worsened by the depredations of Thai pirates, who emerge from the thousands of legitimate fishing boats in the Gulf of Thailand to brutally rape, steal from and kidnap as many as 30 percent of the seafarers, according to United Nations estimates.

  In 1978, AP photographer Eddie Adams and I set out on a four-continent assignment to write about the world’s 10 million homeless people. On the advice of a human rights activist friend, we travel to the Malaysian island of Bidong, once a paradise with blue waters, white sandy beaches fringed by coconut palms, topped by a verdant hillside. We were told it was a haven for boat people. What we find is a tropical Skid Row, home to 30,000 desperate Vietnamese on a 100-acre slice of land that has been reduced to a living hell. A putrid odor assails us as we step off the ferry boat from Kuala Terengganu, the nearest mainland port two hours away. We are told there are no toilets on the island other than what nature provides on the rocks, hillsides and low-tide beaches.

  We see the latest arrivals, a small red boat with 11 bedraggled people on board trying to land at the beach, but Malaysian marine police will not let them in immediately. Watching them, Nguyen Phong Lau, 33, who says he is a former interpreter for the U.S. Provost Marshals in Saigon, recalls his own arrival there on the evening of Jan. 9. “When me and the 60 others on the boat land at the beach we are set upon by young Malaysians armed with knives, who take everyone’s wallets and watches and most of the food. And then they tried to push us back into the water until police arrived to help.”

  Rutted dirt paths lead from the filthy beaches through a shantytown of small dwellings made of cardboard boxes, straw mats and tree branches. The people we see, particularly the many children, look thin and unhealthy. We are told there are 2,500 orphans on the island. The Reverend Nguyen Xan Bao of the Christian Reformed Church holds classes for several hundred of them, and he explains why there are so many. “Their mothers in Vietnam told them to go down to the beach and play. You might get a trip to America, they are told, and they hitch rides from passing boats.” Dr. Nguyen Van Hong, 34, is a general practitioner who also helps with social services. His office has lost its wooden back wall since there was no other available material to build a coffin for an old man who had died of asthma. Dr. Hong says people here are on the verge of starvation.

  We see Vuong Kiet Khiem scaling up the hillside with his ax and his three oldest children. He is looking for the tough stumpy trees that can be sold to make crude furniture. He’s a 39-year-old Chinese-Vietnamese merchant expelled from Saigon for no reason, he says. He paid 50 ounces of gold, all the money he possessed, to flee with his wife and eight children. Others remember the pirates with bitterness. Tran Thi Qui tells me she was on boat KGO 480 that left Soctrang the previous November. They were attacked by pirates six times during the seven-day journey, she said, “and the last band took everyone’s clothing because there was nothing else left to steal.”

  A former pop singer, Thanh Tuyen, had a safer journey. She serves coffee for two dollars a cup in her shack beside the beach. Popular in Saigon for her 1977 hit song, “Heat Up My Revolutionary Fires, Darling,” she fled to find a more appreciative audience than the rustic cadre who sipped tea and giggled at her rarely permitted public performances at home.

  With the permission of the Malaysian authorities, the refugees established a primitive government on the island, including a judicial system. In the early a
fternoon we watch Dr. Trong Buu Hoa, the camp commander, receive a couple at his shack he calls City Hall, where he declares them married. He offers to write a certificate, but it’s useful only as a souvenir and they don’t bother. He says he has married a dozen so far. “It’s not the Vietnamese way, it’s the refugee way,” he explains. Where does a couple go for a honeymoon on such a crowded island? Dr. Hoa points to a flat rock, the “lovers’ rock,” 600 feet up the hill. And he said there is also the deep water of the bay beyond where people frolic.

  The boat people who stream from Vietnam to neighboring countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and even as far as Australia, 8,000 miles away, come from many strata of society. They include members of the old military who are viewed as pariahs in the new Vietnam, politicians in a one-party state, businessmen denied bank financing, disaffected youth, and farmers and fishermen who get entangled in the bureaucracy of a government-controlled economy. Up until a few months ago no one lived on Bidong. The Malaysian government decided to dump unwanted arrivals here rather than on the mainland. With bitter humor the refugees call it “Bidat,” which means terrible in Vietnamese. Many will stay for a year or more. Only a few hundred have left so far, even though officials from the American and Australian embassies visit to seek suitable candidates for resettlement. Bidong is low on the list because of the priorities given to older camps farther down the Malaysian coast.

  As Adams and I prepare to depart Bidong on the last ferry of the day, we hear the tune of a familiar hymn, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” being sung in Chinese. We head up to what someone tells us is the Catholic church, a large crude structure on the hillside. Branches form the frame; two hand-hewn posts support what passes as the altar. A khaki-colored plastic tent is the roof; sugar and flour bags are the walls. A rough wooden cross stands on the nearby headland. A children’s choir is practicing hymns for the Sunday service. Nearby there’s a simple painted sign, “Bidong, a way station to a better life.”

  In April 1979, four other reporters and I return to Vietnam with United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim on an official visit to Asian capitals. We use a luxury jet aircraft from the fleet of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to make the trip, and arrive in Hanoi to a changed world. Two months earlier the Chinese army invaded the northern border in retaliation for Vietnam’s overthrow of the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia in 1978. In six determined drives into Vietnam with troops supported by armor and artillery, the Chinese caused considerable damage, particularly to the border towns of Langson and Dong Dang.

  In my first story for the AP this time from Hanoi, remembering my visit there in 1972 during the American air war, I write, “The clock is turned back seven years. It is a time of war. But the enemy is not the United States; it is Vietnam’s longtime ally, China, now being called an aggressor in newspapers and street posters.” I see that the curbside air raid shelters, filled in when the Saigon regime collapsed in 1975, have been redug and are ready for use. Two wall-sized posters have been painted side by side in a Hanoi street. One shows an American pilot with bowed head walking at the point of a gun held by a young woman. It is labeled “1972.” The other portrait shows a Chinese soldier with a peaked cap also walking at the point of a gun held by a woman. It is labeled “1979.” Beside each are dozens of pictures of war damage and dead and wounded in the same years. In a visit in 1977, I had noticed that attractive Reunification Park was a popular locale for young lovers, but on this visit I see groups of young boys and girls practicing weapons maintenance and military drills. An official guide explains, “We are training everywhere in the parks and the fields to be prepared against the Chinese.” In 1972, similar drills were held in the park to prepare for an American invasion.

  I see something similar when the U.N. secretary-general visits Saigon a few days later. As in Hanoi, people here see the American war passing quickly into history, unlike in the United States, where emotions are continuing to run high at this time. One explanation is the single-mindedness of purpose that characterized the war against the Americans. The Vietnamese authorities are now alerting the population to the new enemy, China. I ask a young man, Le Manh Minh, exercising in a park, what he thinks about the American war. “It was a bad war, but our enemy is China now.”

  My return to Saigon is a poignant one. I invested years of my life covering the Vietnam War story. The city looks the same on the surface, but there are changes. John F. Kennedy Square beside the cathedral is now Paris Commune Place. The National Assembly Building has returned to its original purpose, an opera house. And all the bars have closed. I run into Huan, our office boy at the AP Saigon bureau during the war years. He is a street photographer now, working for a hole-in-the-wall photo shop to support his two families. Huan says local officials are trying the confiscate the sports car I gave him four years earlier. He begs me to send him the ownership papers that I had long ago lost.

  There is a brass plaque recently placed on the front wall of the abandoned U.S. Embassy building, the scene of so much mayhem four years earlier as the last Americans scrambled onto helicopters to avoid the approaching communist military tsunami. The plaque reads: “On April 29, 1975, top American and puppet government leaders departed by helicopter from this building and thereby put an end to the American war of aggression in Vietnam.”

  The U.N.’s Waldheim finds on this visit that the Vietnamese are not interested in his offer to help resolve the differences with China, with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong telling him, “We can handle them ourselves.” Waldheim again tries a mediator role eight days later when we fly on to Beijing and he meets with the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who had earlier ordered the military invasion of his neighboring fellow communist nation. I photograph them together at the Forbidden City, where previous Chinese emperors had ruled in splendor. There stands Deng, the diminutive Chinese revolutionary who has outlived and outmaneuvered Mao Zedong, and the tall, elegant Austrian aristocrat who runs the U.N. Deng is smiling confidently. He is launching his far-reaching plans for the economic transformation of China. As for Vietnam, he tells Waldheim, “I admire my brother revolutionaries, but they need to be taught a lesson occasionally.” The U.N. leader nods diplomatically, realizing there is nothing much he can do about it.

  Years later, in the 2000s, when I’m teaching journalism at Shantou University in southern China, I take a dozen of my best students on a three-week educational visit to Vietnam where they see cities bursting with fevered economic development and modern skylines, just as in their cities back home. Vietnam is now an economic tiger, its Marxist yoke thrown over for capitalism. With diplomatic relations having been reopened with the Hanoi government by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and with its big neighbor China continuing to growl menacingly, the U.S. military, once the enemy to Vietnam, is looking more like a partner.

  With my students, I plan to visit some of the old Vietnam battlefields, because I’ve talked to my senior classes about press coverage of the war. In an exhausting, long, hot day north of Hue spent mostly walking, I first take my students to the Truong Son National Cemetery, where 10,000 North Vietnamese soldiers are buried, many of them killed defending the Ho Minh Trail infiltration route during the American war. A mile or so farther east, on a small hill amid tangled prickly vines, rotted sandbags and bits of rusted metal and garbage, is the old U.S. Marine firebase of Con Thien.

  We trudge along a narrow trail, careful not to stumble on unexploded shells, which have killed or injured many local farmers. We arrive at the one surviving feature of the old base, a square strongpoint of crumbling concrete, its outer walls pockmarked with shell and bullet holes, and inside, as centipedes and spiders run for cover, we see on the moss-covered walls scribbled American names and patriotic sayings.

  Con Thien was tactically important because it was located a little more than a mile away from the Vietnamese demilitarized zone and overlooked communist activities just across the border. In an imprompt
u classroom beside the old, battered building, I tell my students how for a whole year from early 1967 the communists threw artillery shells, rockets, and human wave attacks against Con Thien; in one action alone 44 Marines died, along with more than 100 North Vietnamese. I tell them of the harrowing three days I spent there in a visit, cringing in foxholes as the battle raged. Con Thien held throughout the onslaughts.

  My students, young women all, look attentively at me, some wearing the colorful clothes modeled on the then-popular American TV shows “Sex and the City” and “Gossip Girl” that they watch on the Internet in their dorms. They are looking now at me, at an aged war reporter in baggy clothes, telling war stories again, and wiping sweat from his face with a handful of disintegrating Kleenex tissues. One of them, Hewitt, who is wearing a T-shirt stamped with the phrase “Scary Random Bombing,” asks me, “You mean to tell us that young American boys came all this way to this place to fight and die. Why?” I offer no quick answer to her question. And in thinking about it later I realize I had no answer that would have made any sense to them.

  Acknowledgements

  This writing assignment has been one of the most satisfying in my 55-year career as a journalist, and for that I have to thank the Associated Press news organization and publisher RosettaBooks. They asked me to write this personal account of the Vietnam War to resonate with a younger audience far removed from that era, and to recall for my own generation the drama and controversy we lived through for the many years that war lasted. It was a challenging task, one I undertook knowing that the Vietnam War still stirs argument in the United States, but a task made easier by the enthusiasm of management and staff in both the Associated Press and RosettaBooks.