The Girl in the Picture

by Denise Chong

  When Tung and Nu raised their new house, the Viet Cong noticed. It was a safe bet that such a big house, with a pillared veranda, surrounded by a fence with a wrought-iron gate, would abound in basics like rice and salt, and essentials like soap, bandages and medicines. The North Vietnamese imported these supplies from Communist China, but they did not make it far down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, so that southern guerrillas had to rely on local villagers. For the Viet Cong’s purposes, Tung’s house was also conveniently located at the edge of the town’s “safe” area, where visiting Viet Cong could melt back into the sanctuary of thick forest growth beyond.

  The night visitors always announced their arrival at the big house in the same way. Out of the darkness came a voice: “Mother, please open the gate.” The Viet Cong appealed to the peasants as either Mother, Uncle, Brother or Sister.

  Someone went quickly to unlock the gate, if not Nu or Tung, Great Uncle. Usually, it was a teenage boy standing there, looking horribly thin. “We are so hungry. Please, can we have some rice?”

  Sometimes, instead of seeking supplies, the night visitors came to shelter their wounded. “Mother, we have a package for you to keep,” would come the voice from the gate.

  Someone would lead them to the back door and through to the ham. The wounded, injuries wrapped in bloodied rags, would be lowered inside. If the required dressings or medicines were not on hand, Tung or Great Uncle made a trip to the market. The next evening, the Viet Cong would return for their own.

  Daylight announced a different routine. The government military and police would arrive to find traffic already backed up, waiting for them to remove barricades or defuse explosives, or set up detours. The police also conducted frequent roadblocks, suspecting all loads—from trussed-up pigs to tomatoes—of concealing weapons or supplies for the Viet Cong. It was the military who put up the propaganda signs that were everywhere in the south. On Route 1, east of the Caodai temple, there were two. One recited the four ways to say “No” to the Communists: deny them supplies, refuse to harbor them, isolate them with silence, and deny them means of livelihood. The other, accompanied by a drawing of a black-pajama-clad figure running in front of a building in flames, warned: “The Communists, the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese have killed Catholics and Buddhists and they will destroy your homes and your economy!”

  The military’s patrols through the footpaths of the hamlet, ostensibly to search for any Viet Cong hiding in peasant homes, were infrequent and casually conducted. On one of the rare times that soldiers did come down the footpath by the Caodai temple, the ham at Tung’s house harbored a wounded Viet Cong. Hearing the neighbors greet the approaching soldiers, Nu lined up the children at home, oldest to youngest, in front of the veranda. Two of them, Loan’s second-born and her own youngest, were still babes in arms. Nu suggested to the soldiers what they took to be obvious: “No Viet Cong would hide here. The children would be frightened and would cry!”

  Of her children, only Loan and Ngoc, the two eldest, were in the know about the night visitors. They too kept their silence, both outside and within the family. Talk might be overheard and repeated by the younger children. The risk of retribution was great from both sides. Should the government arrest one of the family as a suspected Communist, they would be better able to withstand interrogation and torture if they could truthfully deny knowledge of the activities or sympathies of other family members. Should they inform on the Viet Cong to the government, the consequences were unthinkable. In the jungle, the Viet Cong could not trouble with prisoners; execution was easier.

  THE AMERICAN PUBLIC WANTED TO GIVE Richard Nixon time to carry out his “secret plan” to end America’s war in Vietnam, but few knew that their president would be so single-minded about his own role in the war. He talked peace; he pledged to continue American troop reductions; and one of his first acts as president in 1969 had been to send his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to Paris, to meet representatives of the Saigon government and the Viet Cong. Privately, however, Nixon had no intention of being the first American president to lose a war. Nguyen Van Thieu, who, since 1967, had held the presidency in South Vietnam, continued to frustrate America’s efforts both to wage war and to seek peace. Nixon would remain convinced that the only way to force the North Vietnamese to negotiate for peace in the face of American troop withdrawals, and to buy time for the South Vietnamese to prepare to wage war without the Americans, was to make war audaciously, not wind it down.

  By the time Nixon entered office, thirty thousand Americans had died fighting the war; ten thousand more would die there during his first year as president. Though American public support for the war had already reached its high tide before he took office, he was able to play upon the ambivalence of what he called the “silent majority” that patriotically supported the president and felt alienated from the antiwar movement, regarding it as a home for agitators, even Communists. However, no matter where one’s sympathies lay, no American could fail to be stunned by the revelations in 1969 of American atrocities in Mylai village the year before. After a failed mission there to rout Viet Cong, an American infantry unit slaughtered as many as five hundred Vietnamese civilians, including children and babies. The massacre at Mylai exposed deep-rooted problems and deteriorating morale among American troops in Vietnam, one-third or more of whom were addicted to drug use.

  Nixon himself broke the biggest story of the Vietnam war since the Tet Offensive. On April 30, 1970, he went on national television to report that, four days earlier, he had sent American ground troops, together with South Vietnamese forces, into Cambodia to give chase to North Vietnamese Communists. Nixon claimed success in his purpose: to demonstrate America’s resolve as the world’s most powerful nation. In fact, North Vietnamese intelligence had anticipated the American-led assault into Cambodia in time for the Communist units to flee their jungle hide-outs. The uproar Nixon expected, even relished, from the antiwar movement came. The president had extended the ground war, and furor erupted on American campuses. Tragedy struck. At Kent State University, National Guardsmen fired on a crowd of students, killing four and wounding nine. The television footage and news photograph of an anguished teenager kneeling over a body brought home the senseless tragedy of a pointless war.

  Even returning Vietnam veterans joined in the campus and street demonstrations that followed. Congress acted, banning American troops from both Cambodia and Laos. With fewer options, Nixon’s professed policy towards the war became “Vietnamization”: handing America’s responsibility for fighting the Communists to the South Vietnamese.

  AFTER THREE YEARS IN OFFICE, NIXON had reduced American troop strength in Vietnam to one-quarter what it had been after his election. Casualities fell correspondingly. In one week in July 1971, the American weekly death toll in Vietnam fell to an all-time low of eleven, compared to more than three hundred when fighting was at its most intense. But as the number of American casualties in the ground war plummeted, South Vietnamese casualties began to soar. In the United States, war reporting fell from the front pages of newspapers and from nightly television newscasts: Vietnamese killing other Vietnamese evidently did not interest the American public.

  Foreign correspondents in Vietnam also recognized that it was time to move on. The heyday of covering the American war had been its earliest years when few abroad cared about what was happening and people needed to be told, and again during the Tet Offensive when, finally, the deaths and violence and inhumanity they had been documenting for years hit home with Americans. They had mourned colleagues killed on assignment and wondered each time, “Why them, and not me?” They left believing their days of reporting the war that continued with no end or solution in sight to be over.

  The job of following the war in Vietnam fell to those in military intelligence. In the fall of 1971, as the dry season approached, as usual, they went on heightened alert. In the south they were expecting some coordinated action from the Communists in early 1972, when the ground woul
d still be dry and easy for men and equipment to maneuver over. The following wet season would halt any broad action, as, once the rains start, usually by May, the ground is either under water or muddy. The Communists had launched no action in the south since the Tet Offensive. The questions on the minds of those in the South Vietnamese regime were whether, after the death of seventy-nine-year-old Ho Chi Minh in 1969, others would carry on his fight to unite the country, and whether the American air strikes over the Ho Chi Minh Trail had deterred the North Vietnamese from resupplying men and equipment to the south.

  The answers came on March 30, 1972. That day, Hanoi gave the order to Communist mainforce troops, concealed and coiled in their southern hiding places since the previous November, to attack. Dubbed by the Americans the Easter Offensive, the scale of the Communist onslaught was awesome. It would break over three weeks and in three successive waves: from the demilitarized zone into the northernmost provinces of South Vietnam; across the central highlands to the coast; and, in the biggest surprise to southern military intelligence, advancing from Cambodia to within sixty miles north of Saigon, to the provincial capital Anloc.

  The aim of the Communists was political: to put on an impressive display of military strength that would force concessions from the Americans in the peace process. The offensive was a test of the South Vietnamese forces as, by this time, the American presence on the ground in combat troops and advisers had all but evaporated. By the spring of 1972, scheduled American troop withdrawals had cut the total at year’s end in 1971 by half, leaving fewer than seventy thousand in Vietnam. Of those, only six thousand were combat troops, with severely restricted duties. Of the remainder, only a few were advisers—spread thinly, with only one or two at the provincial level, and rarely any below at the district level—leaving mainly aviation and supply and support personnel.

  In their counteroffensive, the South Vietnamese relied on American air support to make the difference. Nixon did not disappoint: one day after the Communist offensive began, he ordered massive retaliatory B-52 bombing strikes in North Vietnam and the mining of its main port, Haiphong.

  The Communists were ready for battle; the passing days and weeks in hiding had only heightened the desire of northern soldiers to, if necessary, die for their cause. In contrast, the largely untried and undisciplined South Vietnamese command and infantry, without American combat troops to steel their nerve, proved unable to stand up to the Communists’ attack. The Communists had planned for the usual quick strike and withdrawal, but to their own surprise, in the first two waves of assault, they were able to hold territory and to launch a sustained attack. In the northernmost provinces, the South Vietnamese command preferred to retreat rather than fight. Thousands of soldiers, joined by terrified civilians, fled south along the coastal route, taking relentless fire from North Vietnamese artillery and American warships alike. In the highlands, government forces failed to go to the support of local self-defense forces. But for the Communists’ stopping short, the South Vietnamese might well have lost half the country.

  The only place government troops put up a strong resistance was at Anloc. The Communists, hindered by American bombing strikes from resupplying their troops, resolved to lay a bitter siege. It was not until mid-May that it appeared that the government garrison there was going to hold. But the siege dragged on, fighting spilling over from Anloc, depending on where retreating Communist soldiers surfaced to attack, creating so-called “hot spots.” By June, military intelligence in the south could only guess what the Communists were going to do with their divisions in Anloc: pull back to Communist headquarters astride the Cambodian border; amass for a major drive on Saigon; or tie up government forces to deter them from their ultimate responsibility, that of defending approaches to the capital.

  AS THE EASTER OFFENSIVE BROKE, THE only daily foreign journalistic presence on the ground in Saigon was provided by the two main competing wire services, the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI). However, head offices had pared back regular staff. Ready to pick up the slack were the freelancers and stringers referred to as “Saigon-hires,” including those foreigners who came to Vietnam because they hankered for an Asian adventure and those who had come to work at aid and other jobs during the American era and chose to stay.

  Early on in the offensive, according to playback reports (which report the use of wire service material by subscriber newspapers), it was apparent that the AP bureau in Saigon was losing ground to UPI on the picture side.To bolster its coverage, the AP head office in New York sent in Horst Faas, its chief photographer in Southeast Asia, based in Singapore. The German-born Faas was among the handful of correspondents who had covered the Vietnam war in its earliest days. Having already made his reputation as a combat photographer in the Congo, he had come to Vietnam in 1962. He would stay until 1970 and win a Pulitzer prize, America’s highest journalistic honor, for his work there.

  It was newsmen like Faas who early on in covering the war had seen the advantage of hiring Vietnamese: they came cheap and spoke the language, they had the contacts, and they knew the terrain. In Saigon they ran errands on motorbikes and worked in the darkrooms, and on the battlefield they carried television equipment and shot photos. They shared responsibilities with the writers. Just as no reporter left the office without a camera round his neck, when the “shooters” came back in, the writers relied on them for their observations and notes. Faas’s Vietnamese freelancers were busiest during the frenzy of the Tet Offensive. Stringers were hiking up to the AP’s office on the fourth floor of the Eden Building on Rue Pasteur (the South Vietnamese had renamed it Nguyen Hue Boulevard, but some names from the French era persisted), bringing in as many as eighty to one hundred rolls of film a day. From those rolls, Faas might have bought three or four pictures, or more typically one. He had so many Vietnamese stringing for him then that the Saigon press corps called them “Faas’s army.” The name suited: he himself was every bit the general—a big man, weighing more than two hundred pounds, with an appropriately gruff manner.

  On the evening of June 7, more than two months into the Easter Offensive, Faas was having a routine chat with one of the AP’s staff photographers, asking where he was planning to go for the next day’s pictures. The photographer was twenty-four-year-old Huynh Cong Ut, better known as Nick Ut. Nick knew where he didn’t want to go—back to Anloc. Because fighting had cut the highway, the only way to get there was by helicopter. Every combat journalist, even the most hardened, had an almost morbid fear of chopper travel. Nick was superstitious; on his last ride to Anloc, he had counted one too many thirteens: the helicopter’s number was 113, and there were thirteen passengers on board. As the pilot dodged anti-aircraft fire, Nick had looked down at the landscape strewn with rotting human carcasses and pitted with gaping bomb craters and prayed to Buddha. Not even animal life can survive here, he’d told himself. The pictures he brought back revealed the grimness of life under siege: South Vietnamese soldiers, out of food and water, sustaining themselves on Vietnamese snake liqueur.

  Nick had another idea. He wanted to go up Route 1, to check out what he’d heard on the grapevine about a hotspot of fighting up there. A friend, Le Phuc Dinh, a cameraman for NBC, had heard from a district military chief that fighting near Trang Bang had cut the highway for the past two days. The chief, a Major Cuong, was known among the foreign press: he was savvy enough to blow his own horn, and they regarded him as a seasoned military man, because most of the districts in Hau Nghia that his “Ruff Puffs” had to defend were hard-core Viet Cong. “You ought to come up here tomorrow,” he had told Dinh, “because there’s going to be a big fight.”

  “Okay,” Faas told Nick, “you go take a look there tomorrow.”

  Nick arranged for the AP driver to swing the van by the office the next morning after curfew lifted, at six. Going by car wasn’t Nick’s preferred mode of travel. His Honda motorscooter could be pushed to speeds of fifty miles an hour, could weave in and out of traffic, past
slow-moving oxcarts, could detour easily where roads were cut. But Nick didn’t know what awaited up Route 1, and riding on a motorscooter made one an easy target for a sniper.

  Even as he waited curbside, Nick’s thoughts were turning to the end of that day’s work, to being back in Saigon in time to change his clothes and meet up with his girlfriend, go out with her to dinner and a club, try to forget what he would have seen that day.

  A PORTRAIT OF ONE OF NICK’S OLDER brothers, Huynh Cong La, hung on the wall above the dryer for photographic negatives in the AP office. The entire AP bureau had turned out, along with many of the Saigon press corps, to La’s funeral in 1965. La had been hired by Faas in 1963 at the age of twenty-six. The handsome La had already made a name in movies, in particular for directing and acting in the film Eye of the Lover (he got his nickname, My, from his movie-star fans). From the start, Faas recognized La as a gifted photographer, and saw that his intelligence and charisma, and his better-than-average ability in English, allowed him to move with ease among the American and South Vietnamese military commands.

  Some time after the funeral, La’s widow, nineteen-year-old Arlette, went to Faas and asked if the AP could do something for La’s kid brother. She’d brought Nick along. He was almost seventeen, and a dropout after six years of schooling. Faas took one look at the short, skinny kid she had brought along, and thought he looked to be about ten.