LETTERS Tanked up
Sir: I don't recall seeing Taki around, but I covered the fall of Saigon for the Observer and watched James Fenton, whom he was abusing in last week's column (High life, 21 May), climb on to the communist tank that was the first to enter the presidential palace. I think there may even be some film of the event taken by the great Australian cameraman Neil Davis, who was killed a few years later during a coup in Bangkok.
As I remember it, the tank approached the gates, a gardener wearing a straw hat hurried down to unlock them, and the T-54 proceeded into the palace grounds chewing up some ornamental flower beds on the way. It was followed by a curious crowd of Saigonese, most of them mounted on Japanese mopeds, and a few reporters. A little while later some suicidally brave South Vietnamese paratroopers opened up on the North Vietnamese troops from a position they were holding near the cathe- dral.
I didn't attempt to get on the tank because I had little sympathy with the regime that sent it there. But James Fen- ton, who often reported from the sharp end of things, never made any secret of his Trotskyite views. This had not stopped him from writing sympathetically in the kind of good reportage The Spectator often carries about the plight of Lon Nol's soldiers fight- ing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The same theme ran through some very moving poetry he published on the war.
And why does Taki go on about homo- sexualists? Is it the Greek thing? Surely not. Just wondered.
Colin Smith PO Box 827, Nicosia, Cyprus
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