Eye on the Struggle

by James McGrath Morris

  Sylvester agreed that an effort should be made to get experienced correspondents to cover the war. “This would be the best of all possible solutions for the Negro media, as well as any other group with a special interest.” To that end he recommended that Martin and others “use every appropriate opportunity to urge major media and news agencies to assign mature and experienced correspondents to Vietnam to give them thorough firsthand coverage of the major United States/Government of Vietnam effort there.”

  It wasn’t long before Martin’s old boss at the Defender was on the phone to Payne.

  AFTER TWENTY HOURS OF FLIGHT, which included three breakfasts as the Pan Am jet chased the sun across the Pacific sky, Payne’s plane made its descent to Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat airport just before midday on December 24. “From the air,” Payne thought, “this country has a picture book look, green fields, peasants working with bullocks and water buffaloes.” But when the plane touched down, Payne spotted tanks, helicopters, gun carriages, camouflaged emplacements, and barbed wire. This was necessary security. A few weeks earlier a Viet Cong unit had come close enough to the airfield to lob shells at it. “Your first reaction is a sinking feeling at the pit of your stomach,” she said. “For one brief moment you want to chicken out and climb right back in that plane and fly off to the safety of your own turf.”

  A representative from the U.S. embassy met Payne’s plane. In the sweltering heat they drove into Saigon. “This is a fascinating Oriental city—incredibly alive and teeming and filthy,” she said upon getting her first view of Saigon. The car deposited Payne at the Hotel Excelsior, which would serve as her base for the next several weeks. Situated on Nguyen Hue Street (the Street of Flowers), the Excelsior resembled a concrete apartment building with narrow balconies looking down on the crowded street. It was unlike the ten-story-tall Caravelle Hotel, with its high-ceilinged rooms, where American correspondents usually lodged. But rooms were in short supply. Author John Steinbeck, who had come to write war dispatches for Newsday, had resorted to a bribe to get a room in the Caravelle the previous month.

  Print and broadcast reporters were increasingly making Saigon a destination. What had been a modest war three years earlier, involving only 15,000 American advisers and $500 million in aid, had grown into a major conflict with more than 400,000 American troops on the ground and billions of dollars in annual war expenditures. Back home the names of provinces such as Tay Ninh, Binh Dinh, Quang Ngai, and Dinh Tuong, cities such as Da Nang, Nah Trang, and Hue, and places such as the Mekong Delta were all becoming familiar to Americans whose nightly news filled television screens with scenes of war.

  Early the following morning, Payne went to the Caravelle Hotel to gather with other reporters and photographers for a ride to a Christmas show being put on by Bob Hope. The famous comedian and movie star was in his twenty-fourth year of bringing entertainment shows to American troops. While waiting for transportation, Payne spotted John Steinbeck and his wife, Elaine, among those milling around on the steps of the hotel. Their son was stationed in Vietnam. John Steinbeck got into a flag officer’s car and was driven off to join General Westmoreland on a tour of a Saigon outpost. Left behind, Elaine Steinbeck joined Payne and the other reporters on a beat-up bus and the group headed north to Di An.

  A CHRISTMASTIME TRUCE had begun, but as a precaution three armed soldiers on a jeep with a mounted gun escorted the bus. Rain during the night had turned the road into pasty red mud. After an hour of slow travel they reached Di An, the headquarters of the 1st Infantry Division. Here Payne met her first black soldier in the field, “a handsome Negro officer.” The two chatted at length. “I was to hear again and again his view that this war is different from any other because old color lines have been erased,” Payne said. “We’re in this together,” the soldier told Payne, “and the only thing that matters is the job to be done.”

  After a briefing by the general in charge, Payne’s group went outside to the Christmas show. Clad in military green, soldiers packed the field before them in the heat under a cloudless sky. Wounded soldiers in blue pajamas sat on wheelchairs or lay on gurneys, having been delivered by ambulances. “The 20,000 young men, a mosaic in black and white, were joshing one another and waiting like kids for Santa Claus,” she said. Bob Hope, along with comedian Phyllis Diller, with her trademark Medusa-like hairdo, triggered waves of laughter, and singer and former beauty queen Anita Bryant enlisted the men in singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Silent Night.” “I didn’t know whether it was sweat or tears I was wiping away,” Payne said.

  At one point during the program, Hope was upstaged. High above, beyond the helicopters and fighter plans on patrol, a commercial jet leaving Vietnam streaked across the sky. “Suddenly Miss World, Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller, and the rest of the entertainment mighties faded into second spot as 20,000 pairs of eyes peered heavenward and we heard the chant, ‘Going home, boy, that’s where I want to be.’” The mass homesickness lasted only a few seconds and the show resumed. “But for that instant when the silver bird flew by,” said Payne, “they were kids longing for home and families.”

  As she left, black and white men perched on parked tanks wished her a Merry Christmas. “God bless you all,” said Payne, holding back further tears. The group found the bus mired in mud and the men put aside their C rations, which served as their Christmas dinner, to push the vehicle free. An hour later, on the same road, Viet Cong snipers killed three American soldiers and wounded eight.

  By the time Payne reached the hotel, it was too late to have dinner at the military mess hall. She took out a package of dried prunes and opened a packet of peanut butter crackers. This would be her Christmas dinner. “And I cried and cried while I was banging out my first story.”

  Recalling her impressions upon landing, driving into the city, and entering a war zone, Payne typed, “Happiness in Viet Nam is soaking your feet at night while you’re banging out your story and nibbling on dried prunes and wishing you could get up and go to the tap and get some nice cold clear water to drink; but remembering that you just better not. If you don’t want to end up with a war-torn stomach.”

  THE MILITARY PUBLIC RELATIONS staff was eager to take Payne on one of its well-rehearsed tours. The staff was intent on doing everything within its power to uphold the government’s contention that the war was being won and to sustain the public’s support back home. A journalist who had preceded Payne by a few months felt that reporters were often “overwhelmed by the help and hospitality they received from the American propaganda machine.” Payne put it more simply: “The Pentagon was very anxious for me to get some favorable stories.”

  Among her first stops was a visit to the USS Enterprise, the Navy’s nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, floating in the Gulf of Tonkin. To reach the ship, Payne caught a plane in Da Nang, 550 miles north of Saigon, for the hour flight out to sea. Once on board, Payne marveled at the floating city that held 5,200 personnel, squadrons of planes and helicopters, and a cavernous maintenance facility below deck. “I was the first woman correspondent to come on board,” Payne wrote home, “the captain ordered the royal treatment for me—plush quarters and all.”

  As was true for each visit to the various military installations, Ethel Payne’s interest remained only with African American soldiers. “I was there to see how black troops were faring,” Payne said. “So this was an important angle—I think the most important thing that I saw and that I reported on all through the war.” For her dispatches Payne settled on a style reminiscent of World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle, who focused on the lives of the soldiers and sent back dispatches written as letters rather than as news stories.

  Payne also used her reporting as a means to address the complaints of the servicemen. For instance, she heard sailors gripe about the lack of mail from home. “Just wandering the deck of the mighty United States carrier Enterprise, you pick up the names and addresses of all kinds of young men who find mail call a bit too lean,” she wrote in a dispat
ch. In her typical manner, she then published the names and addresses of dozens of lonely Navy men pining for letters.

  Back on dry land, she found servicemen feeling desolate from the lack of American-style entertainment. Only a small number of the troops were able to attend something like Bob Hope’s show, and the entertainer was having an increasingly hard time recruiting stars because they were not in sympathy with the war. “Some of the fellows are pretty bitter,” reported Payne. A mud-caked marine told her, “We’re over here doing a job to protect them, and they haven’t even got enough interest to walk through and shake hands. Who do they think they’re kidding about that wrong war stuff?”

  Payne decided to take a survey of the servicemen with whom she talked about what kinds of entertainers they wanted to see. In order of preference, the men selected Nancy Wilson, Sammy Davis Jr., Anita Bryant, Patti Page, Ramsey Lewis, the Supremes, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, and Harry Belafonte. “A note to the State Department,” added Payne. “It’s a long, lonely war, and as a matter of morale, couldn’t you cut some red tape and get some more warm bodies, preferably feminine, over here to relieve the monotony?”

  Saigon hardly offered the men much. Payne found the city depressing, dirty, and lacking in suitable company for the young black soldiers, who were of an age that they could have been her children. “Loneliness over here is an occupational disease, along with malaria and dysentery.” The fraternizing between soldiers and Vietnamese women reminded Payne of her years in Japan. She also found self-segregation of the kind she saw when she stopped in Germany during her 1955 round-the-world trip. The Khanh Hoi neighborhood had been nicknamed “Soulsville” by the black soldiers, who claimed it as their turf even though they were not barred from other places. “It’s just more comfortable,” a private first class from Alabama told her, “and besides, ain’t it got a railroad track down the street just like back home.”

  While Vietnamese and Cambodian women willing to fraternize were in plentiful supply, including the prostitutes in Loop Alley, whose services cost a dollar, the black soldiers Payne encountered were desperate for the company of black women. “When a colored girl from the states makes an occasional visit here, she is greeted with joyful whoops by the GIs, who just want to touch her skin.”

  EVERY REPORTER WHO DID A TOUR of Vietnam eventually spent time in Da Nang. Payne was no exception. The city, situated on the South China Sea north of Saigon, was the home of the war’s busiest air base, actually one of the world’s busiest airports for a while. In 1967, the city was also the base of operations for major units of the Army and Marines. “This is where the heavy casualties have been made and the field hospitals are full,” Payne wrote incautiously to a sister.

  For Payne’s tour of Da Nang, her military handlers had arranged a trip to Tuy Loan, a small hamlet about five miles from the base that was regarded as a model of pacification. Under a gray sky above and muddy roads beneath, marines in a light truck picked up Payne from her base quarters. At the gate, the guards warned that the road ahead was being cleared of enemy combatants and it might be best to wait. Payne’s driver checked his watch and concluded that the road would be clear by the time they reached it. The marines in the back of the truck took up their positions, rifles at the ready.

  As they drove along, thoughts raced through Payne’s mind. “Well, old girl,” she said to herself, “you wanted to see the war and this is it; but why didn’t you make out your will and tell the family where the insurance policies are?” She looked at the blue haze on the mountain and the green of the rice paddies they passed. “Wish my knees would quit shaking and that fluttery feeling around my heart would go away,” she thought. “What’s that behind the bushes on the right? I wonder if the V.C. got us if they would be kind to a colored lady?”

  “Are you okay?” asked one of the marines, who put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Just fine,” replied Payne.

  “Don’t you worry, ma’am,” he said. “The marines never let a lady down.”

  At last, after dodging nothing more dangerous than a bullock-drawn cart and a group of barefoot peasants, they reached Tuy Loan. Greeting her was Lance Corporal Lorenzo Forest, a nineteen-year-old black marine from Memphis who, along with an integrated group of nine other marines, had been living in the village for several months. Forest took Payne on a tour, explaining along the way that they had been working on civil projects ranging from installing new sewer lines to building a makeshift hospital. To furnish it with light and heat, the men had cut wooden barrels in half, sunk them into the ground, and filled them with manure and night soil treated with a chemical. The fumes from the mixture were used to generate power.

  Payne was charmed by Forest and his work. She described him to readers as “one of the extraordinary persons who gives you the feeling that despite the mistakes, the political and military blundering and the agony of conflict, somehow, there is a real purpose here, a communication which transcends the evils of hate and the barriers of language and custom.”

  Forest and the others told her about the need for medicine and supplies at the hospital. As when the loneliness among sailors prompted her to publish a list of men in need of pen pals, Payne now convinced her editors in Chicago to publish an “Open Letter” to readers. “Dear Folks at Home,” she wrote. “Sometimes the war in Vietnam seems very far away and incomprehensible . . . To the men who are involved there is no doubt about their purpose. They only wish you could see for yourself so that you could have a better understanding.” She then listed items in short supply from toothbrushes to baseball equipment and urged that readers send them to an FPO address in San Francisco.

  IN ITS EFFORT TO ENSURE a favorable portrayal of the war in the press, the military had no lack of similar projects to show Payne. She was introduced to black doctors tending the wounded at the Third Field Hospital, nicknamed “the Walter Reed of Vietnam”; a Tuskegee graduate with a degree in agronomy who was working to curry favor with farmers of Dinh Tuong province by helping expand the productivity of the rice paddies; and an integrated military medical team who were treating leprosy, tuberculosis, and other diseases found among the inhabitants of Pleiku, a strategically important town in the central highlands inhabited by an ethnic minority known as the Montagnards, or Degar.

  The military hit pay dirt in their efforts to gain favorable coverage when they took Payne to Hill 10 southwest of Da Nang. There she spent time with the members of the 1st Platoon of Lima Company, who had been holding the hill for ten weeks to deny the enemy a route to the air base. “Looking at all these fresh young faces and seeing the comradeship of Negroes and whites together, all Americans, I wondered if the American people back home can really comprehend and appreciate what is going on here, if they realize that this is more than just guns and blood being spilled against a cunning adversary,” she wrote in her dispatch.

  “It is the battle,” she continued, “to restore human dignity, to know that in this family of man, there is a responsibility as brothers, regardless of skin color or language and custom.” The squad leader told her how the Vietnamese, particularly the children, appreciated any help or kind gesture from the troops. “It came to me that the way to understand what is going on here is to become involved. After all, it’s our war too.”

  As the days of her departure from Vietnam neared, Payne boarded a helicopter for a trip to Song Be, the site of an earlier major battle near the Cambodian border. When the helicopter cleared the air corridor out of Saigon, a message came over the radio that her trip would be cut short so as to return to Saigon by 4:30 that afternoon. Her request for a much-sought-after interview with General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of the U.S. forces, had been granted.

  That afternoon Payne was escorted through a maze of passages in the highly fortified command center to a waiting room outside Westmoreland’s office. She passed the time examining a photographic map of Saigon on the wall until the office door flew open and in walked the general, apologizing for having kep
t her waiting. “He is the epitome of the professional soldier in bearing and decorum,” Payne said, “but he has a warm courtliness which puts visitors at ease.”

  Westmoreland and Payne sat down, and she handed him a typed list of questions she had brought with her. With military precision and curtness, Westmoreland proceeded to answer them one by one.

  How do you find the performance of Negro soldiers? “I have a great admiration for the Negro troops,” replied the general. Are there special discipline problems with Negro troops? “I deal with American troops, and race, color, or creed is no consequence to me.” Are Negroes court-martialed at a higher rate than whites? Don’t know, but an aide can get you the answer. What about decorations? Can you give an estimate of the number of awards given to Negro soldiers? Don’t know, but will ask an aide. And so it went until the general reached the end of her list.

  The interview ran on page one. The Pentagon’s military war might have been going badly, but on this day its public relations machine scored a victory.

  CHAPTER 27

  PLAYING INTO THEIR HANDS

  ETHEL PAYNE HAD GONE TO VIETNAM TO SPEND TIME with black soldiers and report on how they were faring. Race, not war, was on her mind at each stop. At the end of nine weeks in Vietnam, after meeting hundreds of servicemen, Payne decided that most black soldiers preferred to push to the back of their minds civil rights and other issues, including the war itself. “Like every other soldier on the line, the immediate and overriding concern is how to stay alive,” Payne wrote in a long report called “How Negro Troops See War.” Soldier after soldier told her that American segregationist practices did not follow them across the ocean. “When you are in combat, you’re equal in everything,” a black soldier outside Da Nang told her. “You live together. You sleep together. You eat the same things. You fight the same way. You stink the same way.”