That night, however, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, without any warning, launched withering attacks in the ancient capital of Hue and in the second city of South Vietnam, Danang. Even though these two cities were in the five northern provinces where the truce had been cancelled by the Americans it was still quite a surprise. There had always been some skirmishes during truces in the past, but there were indications that these were major assaults.
Luckily for Reuters it was the first time we had based two reporters in Danang. Bruce Pigott and John MacLennan were both there because of the perceived threat to the lonely outpost of Khe Sanh. They started filing stories on the northern offensive late on Monday evening, including stories on Khe Sanh which was said by the Americans to be surrounded by North Vietnamese regulars hidden in the hills. Jim and I worked all next day taking stories from them by radiophone and adding quotes from the Follies briefers in Saigon.
I had expected to finish early that Tuesday night, and my girlfriend was waiting in the office, her white Mini-Minor parked outside ready to take us off to join the celebrations. There had been so many attacks in the north, however, that I had to write a nightlead summing everything up. I had just started this when, suddenly, Dinh* stood up from his desk at the office entrance and, solemnly, walked over to me. He had been unusually quiet this evening. ‘Gunsmoke, you tell Miss go home,’ he said gravely. I was used to bantering conversations with Dinh but this wasn’t the time and I asked him, politely, why he thought he could run my social life. He stood unsmiling looking down from too close to my desk. ‘Tonight the VC attack Saigon. She go home,’ he said. My girlfriend was a secretary at the British Embassy and she never appreciated my telling her that the Americans were losing the war. This had become a point of some friction. Her attitude was that the British Embassy was in close contact with the Americans and she believed the Americans were close to winning. Therefore, since what Dinh was saying was impossible, she believed we were just trying to get her out of the office. She walked out angrily, got in her Mini, and drove off home to the compound of units where British Embassy staff lived.
With the Hue citadel now under assault I was too busy to argue and knew I could patch things up later. I turned to Dinh and said, jokingly, ‘The VC to attack Saigon? That’s a bloody good story. I’ll put that in this nightlead here.’ Dinh, who was always giving me inside information and saying: ‘You can say government sources,’ or: ‘You can say informed sources,’ this time missed my three-quarter smile. He still looked very serious and said, ‘No background. No source. No report. But we must be ready. First with big story.’
Jim Pringle reacted in his usual way to serious news when I called him down. He stood, one arm leaning on the desk and the hand of the other opened palm outwards on his hip, and stared straight ahead through his thick glasses, lips pursed. We waited for his decision. Eventually Jim too decided that, although Dinh was almost invariably right, this was hard to believe. Even when the French were in Vietnam the Viet Minh never got within miles of Saigon.
And there had been no whisper of this from anyone else – American reporters or officials or other Vietnamese. Dinh alone claimed Saigon would be invaded, and during a truce. But, still, Jim decided we would have to act as if Dinh were right and stay in the office, just to cover ourselves.
Dinh would still not reveal his source but he said the attack would come at 1 a.m. Although I wanted to straighten things out with my girlfriend, I stayed on with Jim at the office just to see what would happen, if anything. Dinh went home to his family, saying he’d return after midnight. With a few hours to kill, Jim and I walked down Tu Do Street to the New York Times office to tell them we had heard Saigon might be attacked – hardly believing it ourselves. Tom Buckley got us a beer each out of their fridge: I think he thought we needed it. They clearly didn’t believe it, either – by then it was third-hand hearsay anyway – but they stayed talking to us until after midnight.
Jim and I walked back to the office even though it was after the midnight curfew. Occasionally we ignored it but Americans were never seen after that hour. Everything was as quiet as normal at this time of night in Saigon, with little movement and few lights. As we walked up the street alone in the dark I knew that Dinh was wrong, because otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to walk about freely. I knew there were hundreds of thousands of American and ARVN troops in camps in and around Saigon. Surely if the Viet Cong were ever going to enter the capital it would have happened a long time ago when the opposition wasn’t as strong.
Anyway if something were going to happen the Americans would have known about it for sure and there would be signs of extra defence. And I remembered Dinh had received a Christmas card from President Thieu: he had good contacts, yes, but they were on the wrong side. Maybe he had succumbed to VC propaganda. A week ago American intelligence had revealed at the Follies that Khe Sanh was under threat. Surely they would know if Saigon were similarly threatened.
Back at the office we rang Dinh and told him not to bother coming in unless something happened. When he agreed, any last nagging doubts I had left disappeared. Nothing was going to happen. Still, Jim and I waited until well after one o’clock, just to be sure.
There wasn’t a sound in Saigon. About 2 a.m. Jim offered to drive me the two blocks home to the two adjacent flats Bruce Pigott had arranged near the office so we would be within easy reach if something broke. I said I had better go to the British compound. Jim didn’t really like the idea but, seeing I was going to find my own way there, he offered to take me. He drove slowly through the dark streets the three kilometres to the unit block of several storeys. The compound was opposite a large US transport depot; and the only people we saw on the journey were a few Americans there who were smoking behind the sandbag bunkers which for many years had guarded it – although never a shot had been fired.
Jim dropped me off and I stood facing the huge solid-steel gates with spikes on the top which barred the way into the compound. The entry was seldom locked, however, and I pushed the gate open and went through. To my regret, I didn’t even bother shutting it. Casually I made my way through the parked cars inside and up the few flights of stairs.
My girlfriend was lying on the bed in her flat, apparently asleep. As I’d been working for most of the last 18 hours, my clothes felt stuck to my body and I decided to have a shower. This would wake my friend up, I hoped, so we could resolve our differences there and then. I got out of the shower and was getting dressed when I heard some explosions and gun-fire, and then a louder explosion just outside. A window in the flat went white as I looked out the bathroom door, and it fell in as if someone had thrown a bottle of milk at it.
Immediately my girlfriend rolled over and said coolly, as if she had believed Dinh all along, ‘It’s started, hasn’t it?’ Only then I realised Dinh had been right. I rushed out to the balcony and looked down over the side at the spike gates I had come through. Men in old clothes with guns were coming out of a manhole in the ground on the other side. They were firing and US troops were firing back. There was a large block of apartments on a triangular block nearby and a European girl over there who had also rushed out on her balcony was hit by a bullet and, I found out later, died. As soon as I glimpsed what was happening I headed back inside, where my friend’s flatmate was now awake and crying.
I knew I had to get to the office. For the first time, Saigon was under Viet Cong attack. This was the big one: poor Jim was alone with the biggest story in history and I wasn’t there to help him. But at least he was in the office, as his flat was upstairs, and he would immediately start filing stories.
How could I get out? Down the stairs and back out through the steel gate? No way. It was like making a decision not to attend your own wedding. Jim would just have to cover this on his own, at least until daylight. Gun-fire had hit cars in the grounds of the compound and I soon began to worry whether we were safe where we were. Even if the Viet Cong had no intention of entering this compound, those outside migh
t be forced in, make a rush up the stairs and break into the flats for hostages. So I locked the plywood-and-cardboard front door and the bedroom door and the bathroom door, and the three of us sat on the floor between the bath and the toilet. This was to protect us from rockets or mortar explosions, although I knew the Viet Cong could get straight in if they wanted.
The flatmate was still upset. It wasn’t so much the gun-fire outside that worried her, she said, but the exploding rockets. I didn’t say anything, but the rockets only meant there were Viet Cong as far as 15 kilometres away. The gun-fire meant heavily armed men downstairs who could easily end up in this bathroom with us before the night was over … particularly as I had left the steel gate invitingly ajar.
My girlfriend was probably the least concerned: the main thing troubling her was that I looked like winning the argument about how the war was going, and in a rather convincing way. She sat with elbow on toilet seat and condemned the British Embassy people who had obviously not known what they’d been talking about.
We sat on the floor for the next few hours and talked and worried and tried to cheer each other up, but for most of the time we listened to the sounds of battle all over the city. A claymore mine blew up the Philippine ambassador’s house next door, a rocket exploded far away, bursts of gun-fire now very close, again further away. The fighting didn’t cease for a moment. As there was no way I could make it to the office in the dark, I tried to convince myself that Jim would realise it was impossible and not be cursing me for not coming.
When the fighting seemed to die down a bit at first light, I borrowed the keys to the Mini and crept down the stairs. I was worried that the first thing the Americans opposite would do when I gently pulled open the gate to drive the car out would be to open fire. Nervously I poked my head around the gate, which now had holes in it and, in order to impress upon them that I was not a Viet Cong, I held my long fairish hair out on both sides as far above my head as I could pull it in a part hands-up position, waved, and then gave them the thumbs-up sign. They were only across the road but they made no sign back. They just sat behind their rifles. To the right on my side of the road in the gutter were three dead Vietnamese in old workers’ shirts and shorts. They seemed to carry no equipment – something I’d noticed before about killed Viet Cong – not even ammunition. One of them was half out of a manhole.
I had to assume that the lack of fire meant I was OK. Getting into a civilian car and heading for the city centre in the midst of panic was not a good idea, I learned later, because the Viet Cong had launched their offensive in civilian cars. They’d done this to catch the Americans by surprise because there were always a few people who broke the curfew, particularly during a truce. I started the engine and headed for the office. The first thing I noticed was that I was the only one out driving on the normally crowded roads; but most worrying of all was that the guards who always sat in the little guard-boxes outside important buildings on the way were all absent.
It seemed everyone had melted away, and I began to realise the magnitude of what was happening. My imagination started up quickly. Would I drive around a corner and run into a battalion of Viet Cong – me with only a few days to go in Vietnam? As I approached the Presidential Palace, which I had to pass to reach the office from this direction, I came upon barbed-wire road blocks, Americans behind them with flak jackets and rifles pointed upwards from the waist, a sure sign that the safety catches were off.
Immediately I jumped out of the car so they could see who I was. ‘The VC are in town,’ they told me. ‘Get out.’ I tried a side-street and was amazed to find they hadn’t blocked that one too. Arriving outside the Reuter office, I knew I had now to face the most difficult task so far that day: to explain to Jim why I’d left him, on this of all nights, with no help. He was bound to go crook – and I couldn’t blame him.
He didn’t see me at first as I opened the grenade door which, for once, was closed: he was sitting well back in the office typing furiously. He looked up without a hint of recognition, as if I weren’t a colleague. I was hoping he would say ‘Is that you Hugh?’ but he just looked. ‘Listen Jim,’ I said, ‘there was just no way I could get here. I was pinned down all night at the compound.’
‘It’s been terrible Hugh,’ Jim said at last, and I realised more than ever what was upon us. Pringle was tired, exhilarated by the story, and also, if it were possible, scared. He had seen the Viet Cong running past the office as they launched their attacks on the palace and the American Embassy, both one short block either side of our office. He had seen the bullets bouncing off the footpath outside. He had had to telex the stories himself because the Vietnamese telex-operator in the office that night wouldn’t come out from under the stairs. And, to top it all, I had not been there during this night of need. ‘Get down to the American Embassy Hugh. The Viet Cong have got it,’ he said, and I headed for the door, pleased to be escaping but half scared at what might happen next. Pringle relented as I reached the grenade door, ‘Watch the sniper across the road Hugh.’ ‘This is a good way to start work on a Wednesday morning,’ I muttered, and set off out of the office the short distance to the besieged embassy.
I cut through the park opposite Reuters to get to the right side of the road. I could have been off for a stroll on a warm sunny morning under a clear blue sky, except for the echoing explosions and bursts of gun-fire. When I rounded the old red-brick cathedral the street outside the embassy looked like a movie set. There was an outdated black Citroen parked right outside with rows of bullet holes running in short bursts diagonally up the sides like in an Eliot Ness production; a Vietnamese was slumped at the wheel, dead. There was another shotup car further down the road and also an American military police jeep, its glass shattered by bullets. In the side of the high white masonry wall that surrounded the six-storey embassy building, a small hole had been blown as an easy entry into the fortress, hitherto believed impregnable.
There was no sign of the Vietnamese guards – their small sentryboxes outside were deserted. Opposite the embassy the street was lined with large trees – behind every one of which there was an American. Many were in pyjamas, sometimes blue flannelette pyjamas, which stuck out untidily from under flak jackets. Their wearers were aiming M-16s at their own embassy. The white front of the building was chopped up in three places where it had been hit by some sort of projectile.
Except for the sniper who was thought to be in a partially built building away to my right, being on the embassy side of the road was the safest place to be: all the buildings either had high brick walls or were built right on the footpath so anyone in the embassy couldn’t hit this position. And the American troops lining the road on the other side, including those lying under shot-up cars, would presumably stop anyone from coming out of the grounds to fire.
I crept down along the fence past MPs on the pavement reloading their rifles from tins of bullets. Nearby two of them lay dead, face down on the road. They had been shot when stopped by a Vietnamese who turned out to be a Viet Cong.
Despite all the soldiers and guns it was now very quiet in this street, as if the movie projectionist had turned off the sound. I wasn’t sure how far to go but I had to get as close as possible, absorb what was going on, and race back to the office and write a story. Against my wall right next to the embassy driveway a cluster of Americans were peeping around the corner, rifles raised from the elbow and held ready to fire. One of them turned to me and told me to get out of the area because there were Viet Cong everywhere, and snipers, and mines. A couple of officers I spoke to told me the Viet Cong were in the embassy building itself, though they didn’t know how many.
The Viet Cong had surprised the guards by arriving in civilian cars. A soldier told me that a Viet Cong had got the two MPs by stopping them after the curfew and asking for a smoke. I was up against the wall staring straight ahead at the bullet-riddled Citroen as sporadic firing again started from both sides.
One of the group of US soldiers I was with nea
r the entrance, the biggest of them, picked up an M-60 30-calibre machine-gun and, firing from the hip, dashed through the entrance saying, ‘I’m going in to get those mother-fuckers.’ But he made it only two metres into the embassy grounds. After he’d fallen I could still see his boots on my side of the entrance – but I didn’t look around the post. Concentrated firing did not break out because the Americans had no targets to shoot at. Ironically, their embassy was too well set up as a fortress to be easily recaptured. No-one knew where the four Vietnamese national policemen were who were supposed to be guarding the building, but two of the three marine guards had been wounded and they had retreated to the top floor, fighting as they went.
More US soldiers fought their way in and soon dragged the dead fellow out by the ankles. For an hour he lay on the pavement while fighting went on around him. The Viet Cong were fighting on American soil, at the embassy, for the first time in the war. MPs told the reporters near the gate to clear out. ‘There are mines all around here,’ one said. The soldier said the Viet Cong were holding the first five floors of the building.
I crept back to the office, keeping close to the wall, to start helping Pringle compete with the other news organisations: the Viet Cong were in the American Embassy; the Americans were behind every tree fighting to get their fortress back; there were still some Americans alive inside; a soldier tried to storm his own embassy with a machinegun. And it wasn’t even breakfast time.
By now Dinh had managed to make it to the office – a very hazardous thing for a Vietnamese to do with fighting going on all over the city and the Americans ready to shoot any Vietnamese not in ARVN uniform. This was lucky for me because Pringle was still upset that I had not arrived during the night. Dinh smiled at Jim and shook his head and said: ‘No. No, Jim, he cannot to do.’ Dinh had had to pass the British compound to get to the office, so he was able to tell Jim about the dead bodies outside the units.
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