Anyway, in what I think was one of my finest hours, I told Rosenthal I did not know why I had not applied for a job. The truth seemed pointless. The gist of his message to me now was that The New Yorker was swell but there was nothing like the Times; I should go to North Vietnam, write for him, come back, and then we could talk about my joining the Washington bureau. Greenfield subsequently told me that if I agreed to file from the North, the Times would supply me with ten thousand dollars and a money belt that could be hidden. The cash was needed, he explained, because the North Vietnamese insisted that I pay one dollar per word for articles filed through their telegraph system that would be relayed by the Reuters news agency to New York, and read, so I assumed, by all along the way. It sounded mysterious and wonderful. But what would Shawn say?
Shawn was amazing. He urged me to go to work for the Times for the best of reasons: I had far too much energy for his magazine, he said, and he knew he would not be able to publish as much as I would write. I was worried about my brush with presidential politics and my obvious antiwar beliefs and asked him whether I would be okay at the Times. He said, “Yes. You will be fine there.” I knew what Shawn meant by the word “fine”: I was a reporter who believed in hard work and facts and understood the difference between a story and a nonstory. He also was convinced, as I was, that I could cope with the mechanics of writing on deadline for the Times.
So off I went to Hanoi in late February, money belt tucked away, via Bangkok and Vientiane, Laos, where I was to be met by a North Vietnamese official and put on one of the irregular flights from Laos to Hanoi. The flight on Air Lao from Bangkok was beyond chaotic: on an ancient DC-3 loaded with terrified goats and other animals, passengers scattered on the floor, and a balky engine—one of only two—that stopped running while climbing over a mountain range. My short layover in Vientiane turned into days of waiting because, as I later learned, there was turmoil among the leadership in Hanoi over the timing of my March visit. The buildup for an offensive was in the works, and there was worry that I might pick up on it. They had no need to worry. This ace New York Times foreign correspondent spent more than two weeks in the North without figuring out that the constant rolling of trucks going south had a particular meaning.
I had no expectation of a game-changing interview with Vo Nguyen Giap, the defense minister and commander in chief of the North Vietnamese army, or with Le Duc Tho, the senior Communist Party leader who was Henry Kissinger’s counterpart in the onetime secret Paris peace talks. Harrison Salisbury had been given no such access on his visit to the North, but he had been able to produce a series of vital stories about the war. My admittedly ambitious goal was to write about asymmetrical war—to try to explain how a small nation with no air force could stand toe-to-toe with mighty America and come out ahead.
My host was Ha Van Lau, a former army colonel whose importance, I would learn, was in the political sphere; he had been a delegate to the inconclusive Paris peace talks on ending the war. He dropped me off at my hotel, the Reunification. It was state run and had seen far better days, but its location—near a city park and the historic Hoan Kiem Lake—almost made up for the fact that it took hours to draw three inches of greenish water for a bath. I met my interpreter, whose English was superb, and my minder, a silent, hulking army officer I knew only as Major Bo; I constantly fantasized about his success in killing Americans in combat in the South. It was odd being with the enemy, and being in their control, and also depositing thousands of dollars in an account in a Hanoi post office and wondering whether my dollars—that is, The New York Times’s dollars—would buy bullets that perhaps could, in some future battle, kill my countrymen.
I was told to rest, that interviews and meetings would begin the next morning. No way. I grabbed the interpreter and we took off to explore the city. It was early March and Hanoi was shockingly serene, with few checkpoints or other signs of a war-dominated society. There were posters exhorting vigilance and promising victory, but the center city streets were full of bicycles, motorcycles, children, and beautiful Vietnamese women. I had been forewarned about the extent of Communist Party control, but with the help of my interpreter I was led to pockets of entrepreneurship in the fast-food industry that dominated Hanoi’s side streets. I saw no restaurants, but there were superb noodle soups available for sale all over. I wandered into a bookshop and encountered a young man on crutches with one leg missing. He told me he was a veteran of the famed North Vietnamese siege of Khe Sanh, in South Vietnam, where a group of American marines held out for six months in 1968 before retreating. We chatted and I was unnerved, truly rattled, to learn this young Vietnamese soldier knew the name of the marine lieutenant colonel who was in charge of a battalion that had trapped his unit in an ambush that cost him his leg. It was difficult to imagine Lieutenant Calley or one of his peers having any information at all about the other side. I filed a story early the next morning to the Times, via Reuters, about the one-legged soldier, and the editors there wisely decided it was not the kind of story with which I should begin my visit to Hanoi.
So I dutifully did my thing, following the schedule of interviews, museum visits, and historic sights that had been prearranged. Westerners were rare in Hanoi, and I was quickly spotted while waiting for my morning pickup by a group of neatly dressed teenagers walking to a nearby school. A ritual evolved: They would walk by and say, with smiles and giggles, “Good morning, sir,” and I would wish them a very good day. I made it a point, when possible, to be outside at the right time every morning. I was determined to strike out on my own, despite my shadows. I felt no one would interfere with me; I was, after all, the American reporter who wrote about My Lai. So I got a list of the diplomatic missions in Hanoi and began making visits. The Indian ambassador had served in Beijing and Moscow and was delighted to give me his take on the North, the prospects for the war, and the Paris talks. He had a superb cook and a supply of something even more important—novels by V. S. Naipaul. Jean-Christophe Öberg, the Swedish ambassador, was a scholar on Southeast Asia and provided the background and context every foreign correspondent must have—especially those who parachuted into a crisis, as I had—to judge the claims of his hosts. Öberg, who died in 1992, also had a feel for day-to-day life in Hanoi and told me at a lunch of his soccer-loving son’s despair over the fact that he had joined a local schoolboy Vietnamese team, only to discover a curious form of diplomatic immunity: Every one of his shots on goal, no matter how weak, would be untouched by the opposing goalkeeper. Both Öberg and the French ambassador urged me not to be taken in if, as I expected, I was allowed to interview American prisoners of war. They had good reason to believe that some of the prisoners at the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison had had very bad times.
I had a raucous dinner with a detachment of Canadian soldiers who were assigned to Hanoi as part of a moribund peacekeeping mission. Early the next morning I somehow managed to stagger back to my hotel, having gotten drunk, watched bad pornography, and learned nothing about Hanoi or the war. I had a meeting that morning, and Ha Van Lau laughed when he saw me and asked, in English, “How was your night?” I mumbled an answer and he said, “You know the Canadians are more Yankee than the Yanks.” I’d like to think that the Vietnamese’s careful watch on me had been aimed solely at protecting me from the unruly Canadians, but of course it was more than that.
My first published piece in the Times described a newly opened war museum in Hanoi that depicted the failed South Vietnamese invasion of Laos in early 1971 as a turning point in the Vietnam War, a victory that was seen as a “test case” against the Nixon administration’s policy of Vietnamization—the turning over of the war to the South Vietnamese army. I was able to check the heavily propagandized presentation with an unnamed “Western diplomat” who was quoted as agreeing that the victory came at “a critical time” for the Hanoi government. The byline on my dispatch described me as a freelance journalist who was currently in North Vietnam.
The storie
s flowed over the next few days as I began to move around, always under the watchful eye of the silent Major Bo. I traveled ninety-five miles east, to the heavily bombed city of Hon Gay, a major coal-mining site, and was told how local villagers had ingeniously found uses for the precious aluminum and other metals from the airframes and engines of the downed American aircraft. The materials were used to repair bicycles, make kitchen utensils, and even fashion decorative jewelry. After much persistence, I was taken to the infamous Thanh Hoa Bridge that had survived being targeted by U.S. planes for the past five years, with horrific losses on both sides. I was urged to get to the bridge by officials in Washington who told me that as many as one hundred American planes were shot down while trying to score a direct hit. The bridge, a key relay point from north to south, was riddled with shrapnel holes and blackened from bomb blasts on the afternoon I was given a tour, but it was still in daily use. I had learned about the bridge, and its almost mythic invincibility, while reporting for the AP.
On one of my trips to the east from Hanoi—a horrid ride along a much-bombed road laden with huge water-filled craters—I witnessed asymmetrical war at work. U.S. Navy pilots had bombed a railway line near Haiphong an hour or so before we drove there, and work crews had filled in the craters and were beginning to lay new track, which had been stockpiled every few miles or so. My fellow Americans would fly through heavy anti-aircraft fire to demolish rail lines that, even if successfully struck, would need to be attacked again in subsequent days.
It was on this dark day that I finally resolved my impasse with Major Bo. While waiting for the road to be cleared, I began taking photographs of the far-off Annamese Mountains, a low-lying range that extends from Laos to the South China Sea. I heard Bo say something to the interpreter, and both men cracked up with laughter. What’s so funny? I asked. My interpreter said it was nothing. I asked again and he shrugged and remained silent. I went into a tirade about being on my own with no knowledge of Vietnamese and very little French and I had to have confidence in him. He shrugged and said, “Major Bo says you are a very, very shitty photographer.” I had to laugh; he was of course right, and it was good for me to learn that the strong, silent major had a sense of humor—and for him to know that my temper tantrums were little more than my way of coping.
I came to grow fond of the Reunification, whose rickety furniture, ancient toilet, and bed covered by mosquito netting had me fantasizing about Vietnam in the ethereal days of Graham Greene and French intrigue. The only other guests when I arrived were a Chinese delegation and a few Russians. A few days after my arrival, I came down to breakfast to find Pete Seeger, the famed antiwar folksinger, and his wife, Toshi, sitting nearby. I did not know him, but we had something in common: My wife had been a counselor at an upstate New York camp that offered needy New York City children a chance to spend a few weeks in the woods in the summer. Seeger lived near the camp, for which he had a great affection, and often led the campers in song. The next morning I came down to find Seeger telling all the waiters and the kitchen staff, via his interpreter, about an amazing handmade musical instrument he had seen, and played, the prior afternoon. It was shaped something like a flute, he said, but with a much different sound. None of the workers had any idea what he was talking about, so Seeger replicated the sound with his voice. It was a moment of pure musical genius, viewed by half a dozen awed—no, actually stunned—Vietnamese. And me.
A few days later, March 16, was the fourth anniversary of the My Lai massacre, an event about which I had repeatedly refused to do a talk for the North Vietnamese radio network. Seeger told me at breakfast that he had been asked to discuss his feelings about the war in a radio interview that day. He asked for my advice. I told him his critical views on the Vietnam War, and all wars, in fact, were well known, and if he wanted to do a sing-along on the radio, he should go right ahead. But he was not going to affect the course of the war by telling the North Vietnamese public he was against it. Moreover, thousands of young Americans, many of whom shared his views on the war, were killing and being killed a few hundred miles to the south, and inevitably he would be accused of backing the wrong side. I felt bad, I added, about telling someone who always stood up for what he thought was right not to do a crummy radio interview. He told me a few days later, with a touch of resentment—aimed at me, or so I thought—that he had not done the interview. I never saw him again.
I did not make page 1 of the Times until I had left Hanoi and was en route home via Bangkok, but there my byline was, along with the same “Special to The New York Times” tagline that the dispatches of all of the newspaper’s foreign correspondents were given, over a long story about the status of American prisoners of war that included interviews with two Americans, one of whom told of steadily improving treatment and an end of isolation. I was careful to note that even the sophisticated Ha Van Lau “did not seem to realize that interviews with a few selected pilots in a less than open atmosphere fell short of demonstrating the adequacy of treatment.”
I understood what the routine byline meant: Abe Rosenthal had decided to hire me, albeit without formally doing so and without discussing any of the usual stuff, like where I would work and how much money I would be paid. I knew without his saying that he wanted me to go to Washington to write stories that would make a difference.
I returned to the Times office in New York, dropped off a few rolls of film, agreed that I was to start my career in the Times Washington bureau on May 1, and wrote a long story, datelined from Hanoi, that was published in late March. I had spent more than fifteen hours discussing Hanoi’s view of the Paris peace talks with Ha Van Lau and Hoang Tung, editor of the North’s official newspaper who had been a revolutionary since the age of seventeen. There was no pretense that I was being given a new peace proposal; I was being provided instead with a firsthand account—Ha Van Lau had been a delegate to the talks—of the back-and-forth in the talks with the American delegation, headed by Henry Kissinger. The basic thrust was that the South Vietnamese government, headed by the former South Vietnamese army general Nguyen Van Thieu, had to go before any serious talks could take place. The interviews gave me a superb understanding of the other side’s basic demands.
My second book on the My Lai massacre, titled Cover-Up, was published in early April 1972 by Random House. The two-part serialization in The New Yorker had focused on the cover-up as it took place in the hours and days of the massacre, as thoroughly explicated by the Peers inquiry, but I had done scores of interviews for my book in an effort to describe what the officers in charge of the inquiry were unable to see—the day-by-day disconnect between Samuel Koster, the general in charge of the division, and the men in the field doing the killing:
High-ranking Army officers traditionally pride themselves on the quality of the meals served at headquarters….Nothing was spared to make General Koster’s mess an excellent one….[D]inner was an elaborate affair, served by uniformed GIs wearing white waiter’s coats. There was wine, engraved china with the Americal Division emblem, a well-stocked bar, and excellent French food on occasion. Steak and lobster were often served. Up to fifteen officers would attend, including Koster, his deputy commanding generals, the key headquarters staff, and occasional guests—very often Red Cross nurses. After dinner the dining hall was darkened and those officers who chose to stay were treated to private screenings of movies….The normal work schedule of General Koster and his key aides, like that of their social life, seemed to have little relationship to the realities of the guerrilla war going on a few miles away. Koster lived in an air-conditioned four-room house on a hill at division headquarters….[H]e was served by a full-time enlisted aide and a young officer. A few yards away was a fortified bunker with full communications in case of attack. Most of his workday was spent in a helicopter visiting the brigades and battalions under his command….Even with these visits, the general was far removed from the problems and fears of the “grunts,” the ground soldiers…under his co
mmand. When problems and complaints did arise, they often would be deliberately withheld from the general by his aides.
I also tracked down those witnesses, now out of the army, whose testimony before the Peers Panel had unsettled the investigators. Among them was Father Carl E. Cresswell, an Episcopal minister in the Americal Division at the time of the My Lai massacre who subsequently resigned his commission. He told the panel, “I became absolutely convinced that as far as the United States Army was concerned there was no such thing as murder of a Vietnamese civilian. I’m sorry, maybe it’s a little bit cynical. I’m sure it is, but that’s the way the system works.”
Cresswell was still angry when he and I talked more than a year later at his parish in Emporia, Kansas, and he told of being assigned in late 1967 to an infantry brigade that was en route to the war by ship. The ship was slowed by heavy rains, and the colonel in charge of the voyage called out to Cresswell at one point, in front of other officers, and said, “Hey, Father. Why don’t you ask your boss to do something about this?” The officers laughed, Cresswell recalled, and he responded, “I’m not sure God is in that much of a hurry for us to get to Vietnam to kill people.” There was silence and that evening Cresswell’s place at the colonel’s dining table was removed.
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