Saigon Has Fallen

by Peter Arnett

  The fight for Hill 724, the first of the Hill fights, took place November eight. Two Fourth Division infantry companies lost ten killed and 47 wounded in that battle.

  By November 12 American forces had lost 96 men killed and 498 wounded as against 635 enemy reported dead, and the battle was considered over by the senior American commanders.

  The second and bloodiest stage began five days later.

  This stage was preceeded (sic) by a daring series of mortar attacks on the Dak To airstrip that had become a jucier (sic) target each day. Two C-130 transport planes worth nearly three million dollars each were destroyed. An ammo dump with 1,200 tons in it blew up.

  General Peers moved in a brigade of reinforcements from the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division just to be on the safe side. A task force of two Vietnamese airborne battalions moved up.

  Three days later and just a few hours after the enemy was said to have withdrawn back across the Cambodian border, the North Vietnamese 24th and 174th regiments moved into Dak To for the attack. The second stage of the battle had begun.

  Hill 1338 was fought over November 17. The Vietnamese task force spent three days conquering Hill 1416 (the numerals indicate the hill heights in meters). Hill 882 was taken November 18. The next day the bitter 110-hour fight for Hill 875 began.

  “This is submarine warfare,” said Lt. General William B. Rosson, senior U.S. commander in the central highlands, referring to the subterranean nature of the communist positions.

  The Allied commanders professed to be satisfied with the heavy contact. “The enemy’s only choice is to die or retreat,” said Brig. General L.H. Schweiter, commander of the 173rd brigade. This remark came back to haunt Schweiter when he had to leave scores of his own wounded in the jungle for fifty hours under enemy mortar fire on Hill 875 before he could get them out.

  The enemy tenacity in the Dak To hills astounded the American soldiers and their commanders. General Peers commented, “The enemy has shown outstanding morale and discipline. He stood his ground.” One paratrooper commented, “They fight like they’re all John Waynes, three clips each and making every bullet count.”

  At all times the enemy did have the choice of dieing (sic) or retreating. In none of the battles was he surrounded. He could have melted away into the inpenetrable (sic) jungle at any point.

  Why did he stay and fight? Certainly it was not for the nobbly (sic) hills of Dak To. These are absolutely lacking in strategic value. The communists seemed bent on staying and fighting to the last man, taking as many Americans as possible with them.

  Under these circumstances, the conquering of a hill became less a victory than an engineering process, the methodical destruction of the bunkered hill tops with endless air strikes and artillery barrages.

  This proved eventually effective on all the hills with the exception of 875 where a U.S. paratroop battalion was pinned down with numerous dead and wounded, unable to overrun the enemy positions and unable to evacuate its wounded.

  By Thanksgiving Day the stubborn Hill 875 was taken and the second phase of the Dak To battle appeared over. The latest casualty count is 285 U.S. dead, 18 missing presumed dead, and 988 wounded. Enemy dead was placed at 1,455, probably an accurate body count according to newsmen who were at the scenes of many of the battles.

  The four communist regiments are now reported regrouping on the Vietnamese side of the Cambodian border. No immediate threat of battle renewal is seen, but a new enemy offensive could be launched there in a few weeks, according to General Rosson.

  That means that the three U.S. brigades now committed to Dak To will probably stay there, possibly one objective of the communists who are thought anxious to suck American troops out of the populated regions into remote corners. By this means, pacification work will slow down, as in the first corps region.

  What else has the battle of Dak To meant?

  If the enemy objective was indeed to overrun Dak To and eventually cut Vietnam in two parts, he has certainly failed in his mission. But if this was not his mission, if he had much more moderate aims, then he might have had more success.

  The loss to the communists in Dak To was in manpower, a commodity they don’t seem to be lacking. The Ho Chi Minh trail is believed clogged with infantry replacements.

  There is no evidence that senior enemy officers were killed or captured in the fight, meaning that the four regiments might soon be ready to fight again.

  Under these circumstances, the war of attrition that the Allied commander, General William C. Westmoreland, says he is fighting in Vietnam could prove disastrous in the view of many American officers who have been involved in the Dak To hill fighting.

  One of the few surviving officers of the Second Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade, that fought on Hill 875, said that it would take two months to get his battalion back in fighting trim. Several other U.S. units were similarly hard hit.

  Many American soldiers were outspokenly angry about having to fight in the tangled terrain of Dak To. “Why not bring in B-52s to knock this place down,” one paratrooper asked as he fought his way up Hill 882.

  Asked why he was carrying the fight into Dak To, General Peers commented to newsmen, “Why give the enemy another 15 miles of sanctuary?”

  Senior Americans believe Dak To is another harbinger of the fights to come. The DMZ was the first, Dak To the second. Already enemy units are reported digging in in the hills of Quang Duc province due north of Saigon.

  This could become another region for costly “submarine war.”

  Endit Arnett

  Peter Arnett’s story (page 1 of 8) on the mutiny of A Company, filed Aug. 24, 1969. Original typescript copy. (AP Corporate Archives)

  Breaking Point

  Peter Arnett and Horst Faas, “Breaking Point,” Aug. 24, 1969. Typescript copy, Saigon Bureau Records, Box 52, Folder 912. AP Corporate Archives, New York.

  (Editor’s note: Associated Press photographer Oliver Noonan died while covering a U.S. infantry company in the first day of a battle in the foothills of central Vietnam. AP newsmen Horst Faas and Peter Arnett later covered the same action while looking for Noonan’s body. Here is their report of what happened to the outfit that Noonan was with.)

  by Horst Faas and Peter Arnett

  Song Chang Valley, Vietnam, Aug. 24 [1969] (AP) – All men have a breaking point and nearly all soldiers of “A” Company broke Sunday morning.

  “I am sorry sir, but my men refuse to go—we cannot move out,” reported Lt. Eugene Shurtz Jr. to the battalion commander over a crackling field telephone.

  At dawn, A Company of the battle-worn Third Battalion 21st Infantry of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade had been ordered to move once more down the jungled, rocky slopes of Nui Lon Mountain into a deadly labyrinth of North Vietnamese bunkers and trench lines. For five days in a row they had obeyed orders to make this same push. Each time they had been thrown back by invisible communist soldiers who had waited through the rain of bombs and artillery shells for the Americans to come close to die in accurate crossfire.

  In each assault Americans of A Company died, many attempting to drag wounded from under the enemy guns. Some still lay where they had died in front of the enemy positions.

  Now it was Sunday, the sixth day of their battle. They wound (sic) not go back down the hill.

  The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Robert C. Bacon, had been waiting impatiently for A Company to move out. Bacon had taken over the battalion only three days earlier after the former commander was killed. The battalion was still trying to reach the wreckage of the helicopter in which his predecessor, Lt. Col. Eli P. Howard, 41, of Woodbridge, Va., Associated Press photographer Oliver Noonan, 29, of Norwell, Mass., and six other men had perished.

  This Sunday morning Col. Bacon was personally leading three of his companies to the helicopter wreckage.

  He paled as the lieutenant’s voice matter-of-factly told him that the soldiers of A Company would not follow his orders.

  “Repeat that pl
ease,” the colonel asked without raising his voice. “Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?”

  The lieutenant’s voice from the bomb-scarred hill came back, “I think they understand—but some of them simply had enough—they are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Vietnam—they want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.”

  The colonel asked, “Are you talking about enlisted men or are the NCO’s (platoon and squad leaders) also involved?”

  The lieutenant replied, “That’s the difficulty here—we’ve got a leadership problem—most of our squad and platoon leaders have been killed or wounded in the past days.”

  A Company at one point in the fight was down to 60 men—half of its assigned combat strength.

  Faced with the alarming situation, the colonel had recourse to severe measures—but instead he said quietly, “go talk to them again and tell them that to the best of our knowledge the bunkers are now empty—the enemy has withdrawn. The mission of A Company today is to recover their dead. They have no reason to be afraid. Please take a hand count of how many really do not want to go.”

  The lieutenant came back a few minutes later, “They won’t go, Colonel, and I did not ask for the hand count because I am afraid that they all stick together even though some might prefer to go.”

  The colonel then said, “Leave these men on the hill and take your [illegible] element (command post) and move to the objective.”

  The lieutenant said he was preparing to move and asked, “What do we do with the ammunition supplies? Shall we destroy them?”

  “Leave it with them,” the colonel ordered.

  Then Colonel Bacon told his executive officer, Maj. Richard Waite, and one of his seasoned Vietnam veterans, SFC Okey Blakenship of Panther, West Virginia, to fly from the battalion base “LZ Center” across the valley to talk with the reluctant troopers of A Company. “Give them a pep talk and a kick in the butt.”

  This was the first time the men of A Company faced a field grade officer since the death of their former battalion commander on the first day of the battle.

  They stood tired, bearded and exhausted in the tall blackened elephant grass. Their uniforms were ripped and caked with dirt.

  “One of them was crying,” said Sgt. Blakenship.

  Then the soldiers told the two emissaries why they would not move.

  “It poured out of them,” the sergeant said. They told how they were sick of the endless battling in torrid heat, the constant danger of sudden firefights by day and the mortaring and the enemy probing at night. They said they had not enough sleep and that they were being pushed too hard, they hadn’t had mail, they hadn’t had hot food, the little things that had made the war bearable for them.

  Helicopters brought in the basic needs of ammunition, food and water at a tremendous risk because of effective enemy ground fire. This was not enough for these men—they sensed that they were in terrible danger of annihilation and would go no further.

  Maj. Waite and Sgt. Blakenship heard them out, looking at the men of A Company, most of them a generation apart, draftees 19 and 20 years of age with fear in their eyes.

  Blakenship, a quick-tempered man, began arguing with the soldiers.

  “One of them yelled to me that his company had suffered too much and that it should not have to go on,” Blakenship recalled. “I answered him that another company was down to 15 men still on the move—and I lied to him—and he asked me, ‘why did they do it?’”

  The sergeant said he answered, “Maybe they have got something a little more than what you have got.”

  “Don’t call us cowards, we are not cowards,” the soldier howled, running toward Blakenship with his fists raised.

  Blakenship turned his back and walked down the bomb-scarred ridge line to where the company commander waited.

  The sergeant looked back and saw that the men of A Company were stirring. They picked up their rifles, fell into a loose formation and they followed him down the cratered slope.

  A Company went back to the war.

  End it/Faas/Arnett.

  About the Author

  Peter Arnett started as an intern at his local newspaper at age 18, but knew even then his interest was in covering the world. Less than a decade later, he was traveling the globe for The Associated Press, the first of several major American news organizations he would work for. His Vietnam War coverage for the AP won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1966. Arnett joined CNN at its birth in the early 1980s, earning a television Emmy for his live television coverage of the first Gulf War from Baghdad in 1991. Born in New Zealand in 1934, he later became an American citizen and now lives in Fountain Valley, CA.

  Peter Arnett poses in 1963 with gear that he carries out in field while covering the Vietnamese army. (AP Photo)

  Saigon Has Fallen

  Copyright © 2015 by Peter Arnett

  All rights reserved.

  First edition published 2015 by Rosetta Press

  One Exchange Plaza, Suite 2002,

  55 Broadway, New York, NY 10006

  www.RosettaBooks.com

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7953-4641-5

  Cover design by Brehanna Ramirez

  Typography by Jay McNair

  All archival material courtesy of Associated Press Corporate Archives, New York, NY

  Cover photograph: A U.S. Marine helicopter takes off from helipad on top of the American Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam, Apr. 30, 1975 (AP Photo/Phu).

  Frontispiece photograph: People try to scale the 14-foot wall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, trying to reach evacuation helicopters, as the last of the Americans depart from Vietnam, Apr. 29, 1975. (AP Photo/Neal Ulevich, File)

  Ch. 2 photos: “Saigon AP: A Short Guide to News Coverage in Viet Nam” by Malcolm Browne, 1963. Malcolm Browne Papers, Box 3. AP Corporate Archives, New York.

  Ch. 10 photos: George Esper, [South Vietnam Surrender], Apr. 29, 1975. Wirecopy, Various Wires, Oversize Folder. AP Corporate Archives, New York.