by Jon Swain
Jacqueline
I feel good that
at least now I have a place
to begin to settle down
and simply wait for the start
of a routine
and the rapid passing of time
and the days and the weeks
that it will all
spill into . . .
THERE ARE SOME cities that burn into our consciousness the moment we arrive. Saigon in 1970 was such a place. It was only a hundred miles distant, but a whole world away from the capital of Cambodia. The massive US involvement made it the middle of the world. From Phnom Penh, the airplane rose quickly above the clouds, too high to make out the ground; but, as it descended, less than an hour later, the suffering landscape of South Vietnam was piteously visible. Bomb craters littered the green rice fields and clustered like a terrible pox around the waterways; here and there, the earth was torn out to accommodate giant military bases.
Then the Air Vietnam jet hit turbulence and was tossed up and down like a yo-yo. I later found that planes almost always did so in the final stages of their approach to Saigon; as if the airspace around the wartime capital of South Vietnam were controlled by a malevolent genie.
Suddenly we were through the fortress of clouds. I saw the grey elbow of the Saigon river along which the city spreads, watchtowers, buildings, hangars, supply depots, a church; and we were skimming along the runway of the busiest airport in the world, taxiing past row upon row of fat-bellied troop-carriers, helicopters, fighter-bombers, all the glittering, hi-tech machinery that made the Vietnam war.
I stepped onto the hot tarmac of Tan Son Nhut air base to the ear-splitting howl of jet fighters. These jets had an aura of aggression, with their pointed noses painted as sharks hurtling down the runway, bombs tucked under wings, afterburners aglow. The energy of the war was awesome. As time went by, it would become infectious, even obsessive. I did not realise then, as I collected my bags and headed into town, tired and crumpled by the journey and the baking heat, that this was to be my home for much of the next four years. Welcome to the Republic of Vietnam.
Saigon, the once languid Paris of the Orient, was a frenzied place by comparison with the Phnom Penh I had left behind. Americans were everywhere. The streets stank of exhaust fumes, choked by an endless torrent of motor bikes, army lorries, cars, jeeps, cyclos, buses, American embassy cars and little blue-and-yellow Renault taxis like Noddy cars, a throwback to pre-war times. Its pavements round the old French opera house, the centrepiece of the city, were crowded with girls in aó dàis, street-hawkers, beggars, orphans. Amid the din of traffic and the raucous blare of juke-boxes rose the whining plaintive cry of the beggar children: ‘Hey you, Jo. You Number One. You gimme money.’ It was clear that the price of American intervention was terrible; not just in terms of human lives, but also on Vietnamese culture and the fabric of Vietnamese society.
At noon, the mood changed, the cacophony ceased. The steel shutters clanged down. The shops closed. It was the hour of le déjeuner followed by la sieste. The streets slumbered in sunstruck silence until three o’clock, when the clamour resumed. For a short while, the magic charm of old Saigon reasserted itself.
I slipped into a restaurant and asked for a table. ‘Avec plaisir, Monsieur,’ said the old waiter. The cultural collision between America and the old Vietnam of French days never ceased to bewilder and fascinate me. I knew which I preferred. I ached to see a white képi bobbing down the street instead of an American baseball cap, to hear Edith Piaf and Juliette Greco instead of Baby Huey and the Mamas and the Papas.
I was not involved in as much ground combat with the Grunts – American ground troops – as with the South Vietnamese army (ARVN). By now, President Nixon’s programme of de-Americanising or Vietnamising the war was well advanced; US combat troops were being phased out of battle. There were still tens of thousands of support troops, but with anti-war feeling building in the US orders were to keep US casualties to a minimum. Also, I liked to be with the ARVN. I could never forget that Vietnam was their country, and that this was their war, and I developed a terrific admiration for some of their units – the Airborne; the First Infantry Division; the Marines, whose soldiers at the front invariably made me welcome and shared their food. On the other hand, I spent a lot of time riding on US choppers – ferried in and out of firebases and landing zones, both hot and cold, by the First Air Cavalry (Airmobile) – until sitting on the cramped and juddering floor of an open-sided Huey carrying heavily armed GIs on operations became second nature. As a result, there are few more emotive sights in the world for me than a line of Hueys on a mission silhouetted against the stunted trees and the sky, and no more emotive sound than the rhythmic ‘whap-whap’ of their rotor blades beating the air. Even today, the sound gives me the shivers.
The choppers were the workhorses of the US army and their crews among the heroes of the war. They flew in almost all weather, every day, in and out of battle zones, without question, without drama. The drill was to hurry out to the helicopter pad early in the morning, to hitch whatever rides were going. The pilot and co-pilot sat in the nose of the ‘bird’ and a door-gunner sat on each side, armed with an M60 machine gun.
The GIs, counting days until they went home, could never understand why British reporters were in Vietnam, let alone wanted to be there. ‘Goddamn, you volunteered to be in ’Nam,’ they said. ‘You must be a crazy son of a bitch.’
There was little time to get acquainted with Saigon, to discover its ways and secret places, its underlying anguish; or, indeed, to recall Cambodia. In early 1971, the Pentagon decided to launch a ground assault on the Ho Chi Minh trail, in which ARVN troops with US logistical, artillery and air-support would cut the North Vietnamese supply lines by capturing the strategically important trail-town of Tchepone inside eastern Laos. Codenamed Lam Son 719, it was the biggest airmobile operation in history; and it ended in disaster, despite the massive US support.
Days beforehand, long columns of US military transport, deuce-and-a-half trucks, M60 tanks, armoured cars and men, all poured one way, to the border with Laos where the North Vietnamese army lay among the hills, waiting for the assault. Ambushes were common on QL9, the Yellow Brick Road linking Quang Tri, the rear logistics base, with the forward combat base at Khe Sanh reactivated specially for the occasion. The American armoured convoys drove along it at speed, whirling huge dust clouds behind. The dust-choked soldiers, eyes covered by sand-goggles, fingered ‘peace’ signs in the air.
Standing on a low hill overlooking Khe Sanh one day, I saw scores of helicopters lined up – Hueys, twin-rotored Chinooks, Cobra gunships. Then the rockets came in with a whoosh and the helicopters were ‘scrambled’, swarming into the sky like locusts. A French reporter, who had been a paratroop captain at the siege of Dien Bien Phu, shook his head in amazement at this display of American strength. ‘If only . . .’ he said. In 1954, at the time of Dien Bien Phu, the French Corps Expéditionnaire in Indo-China had but four helicopters to its name.
Tragedy struck once again; in a sudden but not totally unexpected way. Larry Burrows, perhaps the most brilliant war photographer of his generation and a man with a gentle and chivalrous nature; Kent Potter, my opium-smoking companion from Cambodia; Henri Huet, a gifted French photographer; and Keisaburo Shimamota of Japan, together with several senior South Vietnamese officers, were shot down on a reconnaissance mission over Laos. The leading helicopter, carrying the officers, was hit by anti-aircraft fire. Instead of turning away in a safe circle, the pilot of the second helicopter continued on the same course into a hail of 50-calibre machine-gun fire and was shot down with all the photographers on board. The helicopter was seen to be hit, to burst into flames, crash, explode and burn. That evening the mood in the press hut was sombre.
The Pentagon had explicitly prohibited journalists from flying in and out of Laos as passengers aboard US helicopters; justifying the ban by citing a law forbidding the US military from flying civilians across an inte
rnational boundary without that country’s permission. In reality, it was to maintain the fiction that Lam Son 719 was an all-ARVN operation, with the Americans providing just logistics and air support, the Pentagon being anxious to prove that ‘Vietnamisation’ of the war was successful. So the photographers’ deaths were blamed, by the American press in particular, on the poor quality of the ARVN helicopter pilots. At that night’s press briefing, Colonel Hien, the chief South Vietnamese spokesman, was subjected to a barrage of abuse and insults. It was not his fault. He was as saddened as anyone and did not deserve the tongue-lashing.
Knowing the dead photographers, I felt they would not have reproached the South Vietnamese. A photographer in wartime knows that his job might entail the sacrifice of his life. He knows the perils of death just as closely as a soldier; and in Vietnam, without question, a photographer faced danger far more often than the average US soldier. The majority of the half-a-million GIs serving in Vietnam at the peak of the American presence were supply soldiers or clerks, REMFs – Rear-Echelon Mother-Fuckers – in the jargon of the combat troops. Larry, Kent, Henri and Shimamota were not demoralised by the dangers inherent in their profession – far from it – and were prepared to take their chances with the South Vietnamese in the field. None of them would willingly give up a seat in a helicopter; they were too absorbed in photographing the war to feel afraid.
Nonetheless, their deaths were incredibly sad and the ugly aftermath left a bitter taste. I think even the hardest-bitten of us could not keep aloof from it. I remember sitting disconsolatedly on my bunk wondering who among us would be next. In Vietnam, when American GIs lost best buddies they used to say, ‘it don’t mean nothin’, by which they meant, of course, it meant everything. We said the same that night, for our dead friends meant the world to us.
In the aftermath of the crash, having verified there were no survivors, the Americans put an airstrike directly on the spot where the helicopters went down, to prevent secret military documents falling into enemy hands. Searches after the war have found no trace of wreckage or of our photographer friends whose graves are now the jungle.
American pilots also made potentially lethal errors, of course, as I found when I flew on the last US helicopter back to Quang Tri combat base one evening. Rising from the runway out of Khe Sanh, it picked up ground fire. Then, flying a course down QL9, the winding dirt road which snakes round the mountains and past the infamous Rock Pile, a jagged hill the site of many ambushes, the pilot became lost in the gathering gloom. The first I knew was when he thwacked the helicopter down hard in a field, borrowed my Zippo lighter and studied his map. The door gunners gripped their M60 machine guns and stared intently into the inky darkness. Our ears strained for sound; we were in hostile territory; every second on the ground felt too long.
Airborne again, I felt at once a weird sensation stab my stomach. The pilot was suffering from vertigo; he had lost his bearings. The controls were no longer solid in his hands; the helicopter was thrashing about in the sky, yawing, beginning to slip out of control. It could only be a matter of seconds before we crashed or were shot down. The machine lurched, then dropped towards the earth. I was sitting next to the open door looking down, sensing the ground coming up to meet me, my fingers digging into the seat, my body tensing for the crash. But at the last moment a searchlight caught us in its beam, the pilot regained control and we were guided down to Cam Lo, the most northerly firebase in South Vietnam, seconds from disaster for we were about to crash or fly across the border into North Vietnam. After this experience, I did not really mind whose helicopter I travelled in – South Vietnamese or American.
It was easy to disparage and make jokes about the Americans. Few had any concept of the values of the country in which they fought. They denigrated the Vietnamese as yellow ‘gooks’. But their energy was inexhaustible. In those days, the atmosphere in the warrant-officers’ club of the Air Cavalry at Quang Tri combat base was often moving and emotional.
The helicopters, flying hundreds of sorties daily in and out of Laos, had shown an acute vulnerability to the heavy anti-aircraft fire put up by the NVA. They were being tested, for the first time, in what amounted to the lethal environment of a ‘medium intensity’ war. The US army was losing scores of them, so many that it was running out of trained helicopter pilots to keep the machines in the air. But the generals saw Lam Son 719 as a rehearsal for a future war in Europe against the Soviet Red Army; the pilots and their machines were expendable.
Every week brought a fresh batch of clean and innocent-faced young men to Quang Tri, replacements scarcely out of flying school in the US. There was an initiation rite before they joined their unit. The newcomers were put on stage in the warrant-officers’ club. The air was loud with shouts and singing of ‘You’re Going Home in a Body Bag’ to the tune ‘Camptown Races’. They were then bombarded with beer and Coke cans and debagged. Sure enough, the day after the celebrations one or two of them were indeed shipped home in plastic body bags when the helicopters they were piloting disappeared over the mountains of Laos.
It was the unusual and moving custom to turn the names of the dead and missing in action upside down on a roll of honour fixed to the wall. Each evening when we returned from the field, we looked at the list with a shiver of recognition. I asked a passing pilot how he felt. He said he could not understand why so many of his buddies were dying in Laos when officially the US was not at war there. Neither could I. At such times, Quang Tri emitted all the daredevil atmosphere, good comradeship and sense of duty of a fighter-pilot squadron during the Battle of Britain. It was at those times that I came to realise how cruel this war was for the young men of America.
If you are able,
save for them a place
inside of you
and save one backward glance
when you are leaving
for the places they can
no longer go.
Be not ashamed to say
you loved them,
though you may
or may not have always.
Take what they have left
and what they have taught you
with their dying
and keep it with your own.
And in that time
when men decide and feel safe
to call the war insane,
take one moment to embrace
those gentle heroes
you left behind.
One morning, a helicopter dropped three of us on a section of the Ho Chi Minh trail captured by South Vietnamese parachutists. The track was narrow and winding, camouflaged for about a kilometre by a lattice of creepers and vines. Patches of harsh sunlight broke through in narrow beams. But for the most part we were cloaked in darkness – an eerie feeling. It was as if we were travelling through an underground tunnel.
Finally, we clambered up a hill, into the open. Very high up, a formation of B52 bombers flew from the east, threads of vapour trailing from all eight engines. Across the valley, clouds of dust rose hundreds of feet, blotting out the sky; the ground trembled, and the landscape was filled with rolling thunder. The B52 raids made Laos the most bombed nation in history; 2,093,100 tons of bombs, more than were dropped on Nazi Germany. I thought of the pilots and aircrews heading back to Guam who would never see the consequences of their raids and I wondered about their feelings.
After a month, the South Vietnamese forces were cruelly routed, despite the massive US air cover. Of the 17,000 strong invasion force, 5000 were killed or wounded. Nearly 200 Americans died. The South Vietnamese pulled out in panic, sometimes hanging on, in desperation and haste, to the helicopter skids. Inevitably their grip weakened, they slipped and plunged to their deaths in the hills below. Hundreds of dead were left behind, as well as machinery and equipment.
This mountain of war debris is still there, decaying slowly in the clammy jungle heat, the flotsam and jetsam of a tragically misconceived campaign to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail and seize North Vietnam’s own heavil
y defended backyard.
Sometimes a group of us would cadge a lift in a US Marine Corps helicopter to Da Nang, headquarters of the 1st Marine Division, for a day’s relaxation. We stayed in Da Nang press club, next to the famous museum of Cham art, ate T-bone steaks, watched a movie, drank, spent an hour or two being pleasured at the Pink House, looked out for a pretty woman on China Beach, rolled in the surf. Once, we watched a USO show for officers. Korean go-go dancers in little purple panties gyrated in front of an all-male audience. Suddenly there was pandemonium; shouts, screams, a battle for the exits, acrid smoke. A couple of CS gas grenades had burst among us. The culprit was an angry GI, bitter at his exclusion from the party. Next time, he said, it would be a fragmentation grenade. The military police were not amused.
The paradox of Vietnam was that there was not another country on earth under the shadow of such misery. Most American soldiers found it the most wretched experience of their lives, and for the Vietnamese the suffering was terrible, a tyrant from which there was no escape. The huge American military effort was prolonging the war. Yet the war provided a magnificent arena for adventure. The truth of Michael Herr’s remark in Dispatches that Vietnam was what we had ‘instead of happy childhoods’ was, for me, exact. Those deadly but exhilarating toys of war – the helicopters, the gunships, the jet fighters – gripped our imagination. We could experience them all. Great swathes of Vietnam were free fire zones where the Americans killed anything that moved. But Vietnam was an adventure playground for journalism, a place for a young man to test and be tested in the most exotic environment imaginable. The proximity of death amid such beauty seemed to give, to me at least, a quality to life unattainable elsewhere.