Historic dates, like birthdays, slip by
unnoticed until someone reminds me. Don North, a
television correspondent in "the old days" in
Vietnam, has forwarded to me his account of
covering the Tet offensive when it broke out 40
years ago on January 31, 1968, in Saigon (now Ho
Chi Minh City) and provincial centers across the
land we knew as "South" Vietnam.
Which
reminded me: I was in a bunk in the US Marine
Press Center in Danang, the commercial and
military enclave up the coast, on the morning of
January 30, the day before Tet, when we heard
rockets exploding and small arms fire crackling
down the street. The rockets were all "incoming".
A clutch of journalists gathered in the
central court yard of the
press
center, asking our marine minders what was going
on. They reported a firefight a mile or so away.
The enemy, they said, had been repelled. We could
walk down there, with marine escorts, and see for
ourselves.
We set off, accompanied by a
couple of marine escorts, with a sense of
adventure. The war had come to us. We didn't have
to board helicopters for flights to jungle bases
under fire. That was a special relief for me since
I had broken my right arm just above the wrist a
couple of days earlier in a freak accident at Khe
Sanh, the town a few miles from the Lao border
near the line with "North" Vietnam.
The
accident had happened this way: cargo pallets
piled high with ammo, C-rations and other stuff
rolled out of the ends of the big C-130 cargo
planes while they slowly taxied on the runway. We
were supposed to run behind the planes while they
were still taxiing and jump on when we wanted to
leave Khe Sanh, where I'd spent a night or two as
North Vietnamese gunners rocketed intermittently
from ridgelines.
The planes had to take off
in a hurry and never halted completely. We were told
to wait until the last pallet had rolled off. No sooner
had I clambered aboard, however, than I saw
an ammo pallet coming toward me. I climbed onto the
pallet, tumbled out with it and landed on my hand
on the runway. I always figured a broken arm was a
pretty lucky break, considering some of the
alternatives.
With my arm in a cast,
provided the day before after a long wait at the
marine medical center in Danang by a US Navy
doctor rightly more interested in a steady stream
of marine wounded, I joined the journos running
down the road from the press center.
A
South Vietnamese army major was standing beside
his jeep, grinning broadly, saying "very lucky,
very lucky". His good luck was that he was alive,
unscathed, while his driver lay slumped over the
wheel, killed by gunfire through the windshield.
On the side of the road, I saw a man on his back
on the ground, a black-clad North Vietnamese
soldier. South Vietnamese soldiers were looking at
him with detached interest. He had a sucking open
chest wound from which he would die in minutes.
More bodies lay in neat rows by an intersection
where the South Vietnamese had dragged them.
South Vietnamese soldiers rather than
marines seemed to have the scene in hand. I have a
memory of John Wheeler, then an ace Associated
Press correspondent, talking about the need to
"count the bodies". Back at the Press Center, my
right hand protruding from a sling, I could hardly
write. John Laurence, the CBS correspondent, drew
a star on the cast and happily offered to type as
I dictated. The story made the front page of the
next day's Washington Star, the Washington Post's
afternoon competitor, destined to go out of
business a few years later.
The Star had
hired me a few months earlier as "Asia
correspondent", mostly covering Vietnam, and the
paper's hereditary publisher, Newbold Noyes, was
by coincidence on swing around the region.
"Newbie" shared the view of the Pentagon and the
White House that cynical young correspondents were
undermining the "war effort" by all their negative
reporting. He could hardly have picked a more
opportune moment to see his views tested under
fire. We didn't know it that day, but the attack
on Danang was the opening of the offensive that
was to break out as South Vietnamese set about
celebrating Tet, the lunar new year holiday.
Years later, in 1995, on the 20th
anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the South
Vietnamese surrender on April 30, 1975, I
revisited Danang and the citadel at Hue and asked
a Vietnamese guide, a veteran of the North
Vietnamese offensive, why the soldiers from the
North had attacked Danang first. He said with
disarming frankness that orders had been confused,
the date was read or relayed incorrectly and the
North Vietnamese had jumped off too soon. The
North Vietnamese were repelled at Danang the day
before the Tet offensive opened in earnest
elsewhere.
We got the news of the attack
on the US Embassy in Saigon, and on provincial
capitals, at the marine press center the next
morning. Ed Behr, the Newsweek correspondent,
announced, "They're attacking everywhere," after
calling a colleague in Saigon. The marines
organized a briefing at the headquarters of III
MAF, Third Marine Amphibious Force, in charge of
the marine's two divisions in I Corps, the
northern provinces.
The briefer said
there'd been fighting at Hue but the marines were
on the way to rescue the South Vietnamese First
Division.
The First Division's commanding
general had told me two weeks earlier the North
Vietnamese were in nearby hills but his men were
ready. Intelligence was disturbingly vague.
Outside the city, marines on patrol had said, "The
VC [Viet Cong] are everywhere." In the compound
for CORDS - Civil Operations for Revolutionary
Development Support - across the river from the
Citadel, earnest US aid types had heard the
reports but were confident they were getting
somewhere.
When I went to the air base at
Danang in hopes of boarding a US Air Force flight
to Phu Bai, the base town a few miles south of
Hue, a young airman told me nothing was flying and
"Hue isn't ours." I could hardly believe him.
"What do you mean?" I asked. "Well, the North
Vietnamese have captured the city," was his
laconic response.
We soon learned what the
marine briefer had neglected to report, that the
enemy held the vast Citadel east of the river
where the elite of Hue had lived from the days of
dynastic rule over Vietnam before the French
colonial era. By now a number of the US aid people
whom I'd met had been killed along with several
thousand Vietnamese.
Anxious to get to the
heart of the fighting in and around Saigon, I
hitched a ride with a US Army general who had an
extra seat in his personal plane. I remember him
telling me how moved he was by the fighting spirit
of "our young soldiers". He seemed pretty sincere,
but I would have liked to have asked a year or two
later how he felt as US forces bogged down in
serious morale problems, worsened by drugs, mostly
marijuana but also heroin, for sale outside US
bases.
Once in Saigon, I had to figure out
which way the war was going, not altogether clear
as the North Vietnamese faded under heavy fire,
and also deal with the specter of my publisher and
employer, "Newbie" Noyes.
Newbie had just
arrived on a US military jet and was confident by
the time he'd had his first military and
diplomatic briefings, arranged in advance in
Washington as a tribute to his VIP status, that he
knew all about everything. Mostly, he accepted the
view of General William Westmoreland, the US
commander, that "we're winning" and disdained my
less than laudatory comments as the complaining of
"a very cynical young man" - a label he bestowed
on me while regaling me with food and drink in the
Caravelle Hotel dining room.
"Newbie,"
though, was a temporary nuisance. As a VIP, he got
offered a flight to Phu Bai at the rear of a C130
laid on for Walter Cronkite and Cronkite's
producer, Jeff Gralnick. The flight was scheduled
the very morning on which Newbie was to leave for
the next stop on his magical mystery tour - I
think Bangkok.
Not exactly an image of
journalistic aggressiveness, Newbie wasn't
flexible enough to change his schedule. Instead,
he relinquished his seat to me, giving me the
chance to listen to Cronkite expressing his first
veiled misgivings about the war.
The top
US information honcho, Barry Zorthian, was also on
board - eager to massage Cronkite's ego though a
little disappointed to see me in place of Noyes,
on whom the administration counted for editorial
sympathy. Cronkite was surrounded by fawning US
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