The fall of Saigon

Murray Sayle

New York, New York Can it really, honestly, be ten years? So %...."we asked ourselves the other evening, as the prudent Perrier flowed like water in Frances Fitzgerald's well-appointed walk- up in the East Nineties, and memories of faraway places and absent friends swamped even her spectacular view of the East River by luminous Manhattan twi- light. Frankie (to her friends) is of course famous for writing The Fire in the Lake, the book which did much in the early Seventies to convince ever-confused American liberals that their country was backing the wrong side in the Vietnamese civil war, and then we had Gavin Young of the Observer, and Maynard Parker of Newsweek, and James Sterba of the New York Times, and William Broyles (Jr) who was, like my good self, briefly with News- week too, and. . . .

But I won't go on. Already it must be clear that we were not the kind of classy crowd who wait for other Spectator writers to finish their prison sentences. Rather we had a deeper and, perhaps more lasting bond: all of us had covered the war and could fairly be considered, as we used to say, old 'Nam hands, meaning that Viet- nam had been for all of us (weddings, divorces, babies etc always excluded) the most important event of our lives. Does this bring people closer than apres ski at Gstaad? I don't know, I've never been to Gstaad.

Just the same, the Indochina wars went on for a long time and, indeed, go on still, and so we had a lot of people and places to remember. Even the names sound like incoming: Khe Sanh and A Shau, Quang Tri and Pleiku, the Y Bridge in Cholon and Highway One through Go Dau Ha and the Parrot's Beak into Cambodia. With the anniversary at hand, however, the talk seemed to get back to the last days, either in Saigon, as then was, or Phnom Penh, wherever we happened to be (right up to the end it was possible to fly with an Air America rice-plane from Saigon to Phnom Penh, land in a lull in the incoming mortar fire, sprint to the passenger terminal, interview anyone foolish enough to be there and sprint back before the hastily- unloaded aircraft took off. This gave, according to the rules of our trade, a new and picturesque dateline, like the one that heads this piece, if not much illumination. However, as W. Shawcross observes, Cam- bodia was a sideshow.)

So here, without the interruptions of rival reminiscers, are one man's last days in Saigon. I first went to Vietnam in 1966 for the blessed Roy Thomson's Sunday Times, went again in 1967 and a lot of 1968, again in '69, '70 and '71, and covered the `cease-fire' of 28 January 1973 (the day after the ceasefire was actually one of the hottest of the war, as both sides fought to improve their part of the patchwork, and of course the fire never ceased after that). But then I joined Newsweek where, as one higher up in the hierarchy explained, `We're not interested in battles.' Did I really reply: `But Maynard, some of those battles might be important'? I doubt it. Americans in those dayg wanted to forget Vietnam as soon as was decently possible, and American publications were, on the whole, of a like mind. And so, as I recall, was I.

I had, in fact, already moved to Japan, with the idea of actually learning some- thing about an Asian society, in tranquilli- ty, without the constant distraction of peace plans, mortar duels, and the unex- pected arrival of persons from Pau Loc and other less happily named Vietcong strong- holds scattered through the Vietnamese countryside. Still, when the news reached Tokyo that the pretty mountain city Ban Me Thuot had fallen to the Vietnamese communists on 11 March 1975, and the whole military position in South Vietnam seemed to be crumbling, the mysteries of Japanese piano production temporarily lost their charm. Next day I was down at the South Vietnamese embassy getting a visa, and then ringing round to find, as we say in the trade, an outlet (that night Paul Leandri, the Saigon bureau chief of Agence France Presse, another old firm of mine, was summoned to the national police headquarters, questioned about a perfectly accurate story he had filed on a clash between Saigon troops and mountain tribesmen in Ban Me Thuot, and shot dead as he was leaving. It was clear which side, from the journalist's viewpoint, was the riskiest.)

My outlet turned out to be Weekend World, London Weekend Television's cur- rent affairs programme, for whom I had covered the Yom Kippur war in 1973 and the Vietnam 'ceasefire' the same year. I had some doubts about television as a medium for serious analytic reporting but not nearly enough to turn down their proposal: they were interested in a cover of whatever was going to happen in Vietnam. There was, as ever, a catch: because of visa problems, money problems, union prob- lems, programming problems and all the usual ills the box is heir to, a crew could not be spared. I was welcome to take a reel of one-inch-wide videotape a travelling LWT man had left at my house and do my best. But don't leave the tape behind. Those things cost money. So, tape in hand (they are about the size of a small portable typewriter, and twice as heavy), I arrived in Saigon, my passport reminds me, on 15 March 1975, the day the South Vietnamese strong man Nguyen Van Thieu ordered the whole northern tier of the provinces of South Vietnam aban- doned to the North Vietnamese. The withdrawal soon became a rout, and then a sauve-qui-peut, but Saigon at first looked much as ever: the gigantic `Pentagon East' at the airport, which once housed 118 American generals labouring towards some victory never defined, now sheltered a delegation of North Vietnamese and Vietcong installed under the 'peace agree- ment' of two years before, but the monu- ment to 'our glorious Allies, whose sacri- fices will never be forgotten' still stood at the airport gates, my cabbie was as cheer- fully rapacious as ever, and Saigon was, as usual, packed out.

In all the years before, I had always lodged at the Royale, a spectacularly dilapidated hotel familiale in an alley oppo- site the far more famous (and expensive) Caravelle. The Royale was much favoured by British correspondents, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the all-embracing house rule: 11 est formellement interdit d'introduire dans les chambres les filles publiques (boys ou boyesses). But the proprietor, an engaging Corsican named Jean Ottavi, had died the year before, a sub-plot needing to be tidied up before the final curtain, and the Royale was shuttered and barred against an uncertain future. I therefore checked in to the Palace, a new multi-storey monstrosity built on the pro- ceeds of corruption by a province chief to catch the American trade which had already come and, two years before, most- ly gone. At the Palace one could not only interview fines publiques but, under Sun- dries, put their services on the bill. They expected, I was told, a tip as well, but, as they say, that's show business.

I passed the first of my last nights comfortably enough on a mattress on the balcony of the 12th floor, driven out by the snoring of another newsman in the next room. This gave me an excellent view of the ghostly streets, emptied by the curfew, with occasionally the screech of jeep tyres and a crackle of gunfire as the military police hunted down deserters, gangsters, Vietcong sympathisers and others unsea- sonably abroad. Seven years before, at the height of the Tet offensive, Saigon had been under nightly rocket attack from the swamps towards the Cambodian border, friendly flares lit the ricefields out on the horizon, and the American equivalent of the NAFFI staged `Dancing by Flarelight' on the flat roof of the Caravelle. Now the horizon, grey on grey as straight as a ruler, showed not a glimmer of light, and the sleeping city displayed every symptom of that well-known journalistic complaint, un- easy calm.

Before what? One of my more pictures- que contacts in Saigon was Ted Serong, a retired Australian brigadier who had sol- diered in Vietnam and then returned as a freelance military adviser to anyone who wanted to engage him. Serong had turned his house in the Saigon suburbs into a kind of electronic observation post, complete with telexes, radios and a satellite recep- tion dish in his garden. The war, he told me on the phone, would resume at first light. While he was happy to give me a briefing, It would therefore have to be between four and five a.m., the only time he was free.

Suitably adjusted for jargon ('puppet troops', for instance, for 'Army of the Republic of Vietnam', and 'popular upris- ing' for 'panic-stricken flight'), Serong's account, delivered in the half-light by his swimming pool, tallied exactly with that Put out months later by the North Viet- namese general Van Tien Dung, showing how readily military men can agree on the technicalities of their trade. The strategic key to Indochina is the Annamite moun- tain chain, shared between Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Whoever holds these

mountains, therefore, can readily cut Viet- nam into segments anywhere he chooses, by striking out from the foothills to the South China Sea, nowhere more than 50 Miles away and in many places five or less. The territorial integrity and independence of Vietnam therefore require control of Laos and Cambodia, the complete and entire reason why these wretched countries are effectively ruled by Vietnamese today, and will surely be until Vietnam itself once more comes under alien rule, the only Possible candidate on historical precedent Dieing China. ,I3ut that lies in the future. In General I 11. teu's day South Vietnam looked rather !Ike a golf club, with most of the population in the head, Saigon and the Mekong Delta, and a long narrow shaft running up to the handle, the region of Danang and Hue, the latter being the former capital of the whole Country and thus reverberating in Viet- namese ears much as 'Verdun' does in French. Roughly down the crest of the mountains ran (and still runs, apparently, In case it should ever come in handy again) the famous Ho Chi Minh Trail, one of the more remarkable pieces of military en-

gineering of our time, complete with underwater bridges, flashing decoy lights and tunnel truck-shelters. In February 1971 the South Vietnamese with American air support (useless in the mountains) tried and failed to .cut it across the narrow waist of southern Laos.

This meant that the North Vietnamese were in a position to impose perpetual war on the South, the very situation from which the Americans had folded their tents and noisily crept away. The only prospect of a decision favourable to South Vietnam was therefore a direct counter-invasion of the north, impossible without American help, and with it sure to bring in the Chinese as MacArthur's victorious approach to the Chinese border in Korea had, 25 years earlier. The long-term prospects of South Vietnam were therefore bleak, and, with three-quarters of the population in the Delta and four-fifths of their military assets far away in the north, holding a long porous flank, the South's disposition of forces was such that a hasty retreat would be the only possible reply to the North's next offensive when, inevitably, it came.

Serong had therefore advised the South Vietnamese to withdraw south to the 13th parallel, just above Ban Me Thuot, and shorten their front drastically while they still had the liberty to do so. Thieu pre- pared such a plan, but did not circulate, much less activate it, for fear of further weakening morale — and, as the Saigon government correctly estimated, any voluntary surrender of territory to the North would be interpreted in the United States as evidence that support for the regime was slipping if it ever really existed, and that Thieu could therefore be dumped with even less ceremony than had pre- viously been contemplated. So, when Ban Me Thuot fell, his hand was forced — and the murder of my French colleague, inex- cusable on any count, at least had a reason of sorts behind it. 'The game is up,' said Serong, winding up his briefing. 'I give them a month, maybe less, unless the Americans intervene at the last minute.'

Which of course did not happen. All American military force was withdrawn from Vietnam, faithfully and gratefully after the 1973 'peace agreement', and all means all. The only exception was the tiny guard of Marines at the Saigon embassy and a smaller one at the consulate in Danang. Guarding embassies is a treasured perk of the US Marine Corps and there is such a guard, for instance,at the embassy in London. No other country uses soldiers as diplomatic doormen, for the excellent reason that it blurs the civil status of diplomats (the British embassy in Saigon was guarded by ever-useful Gurkhas, in plain clothes). Not an American bomb was dropped, not a single shot fired to resist the final Northern conquest of South Vietnam.

But the embassy Marines got themselves on television, and so the legend of a rout of Americans lives on, nowhere, of course,

more sturdily than in Hanoi and Harvard. Still, there had been an elephantine military presence in South Vietnam and,

like crumbs in a breadbin, there were remnants all over the place — missionaries, 'advisers' (real ones, although no one took much notice of these generally elderly retired colonels), CIA men posing as aid workers, aid workers suspected of being CIA men, civilian contractors, husbands of Vietnamese wives and a few vice-versas, teachers, adventurers and, in general, old 'Nam hands of one sort or another. . . . Besides, the US government had indicated that it felt responsible for a class of person, never defined, who had been 'closely connected with the American presence'. If they were to be evacuated, even as far as Saigon, who was going to do it in the absence of American military aircraft? At this point enter Edward J. Daley, the Falstaff who seems to surface in every historical drama. Rarely sober (the distil- lers finally won the war of attrition last year), Ed was a down-to-earth Irish- American who had made a fortune as the boss of World Airways of Oakland, Cali- fornia, mostly on military charters flying troops to and from Vietnam. Ed arrived the day after I did with two Boeing 727 airliners complete with stewardesses and a personal four-man bodyguard armed with sub-machine-guns which Ed called by the curious code-name 'the hambones'. The purpose of his trip, he said, was humanita- rian, as no doubt it was, although he also had an initial contract for 20 flights to bring refugees from Da Nang to the brief and comparative safety of Saigon.

Three flights were accomplished in mounting scenes of disorder at. Da Nang when the US Embassy cancelled the rest. Daly decided to continue anyway, taking personal command. While one of the 727s circled Da Nang the other landed. Armed Vietnamese soldiers mobbed it and fought their way aboard, heroically resisted by Ed, the pilots and the screaming stewar- desses. One man had his leg broken in efforts to close the door, and six soldiers climbed into the wheel wells, where one was crushed in attempts to get the wheels up. As the aircraft struggled off the ground a soldier threw hand grenades at it, evidently hoping it would stop and pick him up. In all 330 people got on the plane, intended to carry a maximum of 112. Three of them were women with children, three terrified old men, and the rest soldiers, who tamely surrendered their weapons the moment they thought they were safe in Sam's bosom. One soldier asked a steward- ess when the next flight was going back to pick up his wife and children. There were no more flights out of Da Nang.

After a few, or more, slugs of bourbon to steady his nerves, Ed summoned the press to the posh dining-room of the Caravelle to relate his exploits. His speech got less and less coherent and a group of Australians started to laugh at some un- fathomable private joke. Furious, Ed drew a revolver, waved it muzzily around and shouted: 'I'll shoot the next son-of-a-bitch who interrupts me.' Don't bother. We're leaving,' said Tony Clifton of Newsweek, one of the offenders. 'Not because we're afraid of you, Ed, or because you're drunk, but because you're such a fucking bore.' At this the conference broke up, leaving Ed alone with his Old Grandad and his glory.

But I mustn't bad-mouth Ed, because he • solved my immediate technical problem. In a shuddering, hungover talk next morning, Ed revealed himself a loyal son of Mother Church who had in fact contributed a million or so dollars to equipping a televi- sion studio to make religious broadcasts for the Catholic faithful, It had to be around Saigon some place. Indeed it was, at the convent of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with nuns to work the lights and a Vietnamese cleric who understood how the control panels functioned. Credit was arranged (and later honoured) at the local headquar- ters. of the order, in Hong Kong, and from this unlikely base I covered the last days of that phase of the never-ending war.

As a sighting shot, as it were, I inter- viewed some brother journalists, among them the omnipresent Dick West of this organ. Then I had a relay of Vietnamese politicians, elderly men of finely shaded centrist opinions who offered British view- ers, mostly in French, wildly irrelevant peace plans. Air-Marshal Nguyan Cao Ky, the former prime minister, was busy (pack- ing?) but sent his chef de cabinet. President Thieu was similarly unavailable, but a spokesman came in his rapidly deterioriat- ing place.

Casting the net wider, or trying to, I called on the Vietcong compound at the airport to.find a press conference going on,

with the head of the delegation, Colonel Vo Dong Giang, being notably interviewed

by Hunter S.Thompson of Rolling Stone

who had just turned up, his first time in Vietnam, to cover what were every minute looking more and more like Saigon's last days. Both men were in uniform, Colonel Giang in the Vietcong combat outfit of harsh metallic green with the red tabs of his rank, Hunter S. in the tennis shoes, scruffy jeans and T-shirt of the peace movement.

No, the colonel emphatically did not think that drug-taking would be permitted after liberation, nor was he willing to take his

chances in the streets of Saigon down to the studio, although he was sure that the refugees pouring into the city were a 'general popular uprising'. Hunter S. said he was ready to sing 'By, bye, Miss American pie', an offer I turned down. I don't smoke, either.

The next few days are a blur, a war movie without a plot. A South Vietnamese pilot interrupted our breakfast by flying over the presidential palace and near- missing it with four 750Ib bombs, then flying off to the north. 'It's coup time,' said my recently snoring colleague, sagely dip- ping his croissant in his cafe creme. There was a ghastly plane crash in the ricefields just outside the city, a huge C-5 loaded with refugee children, in which more than a hundred of them died. The then plain David English of the Daily Mail turned up in a natty TV suit to collect another

planeload of orphans, this time successfully (the Mother Superior of the orphanage later told me that she had unloaded all her unwanted Cambodians on the innocent foreigner). I did not understand then and still do not the passion for evacuating children. The many crimes committed by both sides in Vietnam were all politically motivated, and those in pre-political age groups were far safer than their elders, whoever finally won.

For honour's sake I visited the front, in a jeep I purchased with Julian Manyon of Thames TV and some other colleagues for $25 each (the owners, a middle-class fami- ly, were not going anywhere, and certainly not by jeep). The ARVN 18th division was still gamely holding Xuan Loc, the last substantial town on Highway One before Saigon, against three North Vietnamese divisions. We could get no closer than Hung Nghai, a village seven miles to the west, where the North Vietnamese were moving to cut the highway. We arrived to the music of incoming and saw, from a friendly ditch, the last South Vietnamese reserves being thrown in, small men jam- med into trucks going grimly forward to defend a cause already lost (later their commander, General Le Minh Dao, told his captors that he thought his men had been sacrificed as 'a shield to cover the retreat of the Americans and Mr Thieu'). Without my Sacred Heart studio I could do little but take notes, and the artillery barrage creeping along the road said that it was time to go. Out of some bushes slunk an apologetic man naked apart from underpants — a deserter who had thrown away his uniform. It seemed reasonable to let him ride under our feet on the floor of the jeep until we were out of the battle zone, the risk being his not ours if the military police stopped us. But they had other things to do.

Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April, and the last planes out stopped at Saigon. I saw Don McCullin of the Sunday Times at the airport (or was it Phillip Jones-Griffiths?) but the South Viet- namese, suspicious of journalists in all forms, would not let them land. Looking back, I note that the three photographers outstanding even among the brave com- pany who covered the war, McCullin, Jones-Griffiths and Larry Burrows of Life, who was in Laos, were all British. Back at the Palace (the hotel) I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times which began, as I recall: 'We guessed there was something like this at the end of the tunnel.'

Thieu resigned, in a long, rambling harangue bitterly attacking the Americans. 'You have let our combatants die,' he said. 'This is an inhumane act by an inhumane ally.' My own time was clearly getting short; without the tape and/or my good self, London Weekend had no on-the-spot programme. I booked out on Air France and invited a Vietnamese friend, an elec- trical engineer as apolitical as it is possible for a Vietnamese to be, for a farewell drink which would clearly have to last for a long separation. (We have, indeed, lost touch.) The atmosphere at the Palace was dis- tinctly far from sympa, a non-stop party with drunken singing from the rooms, the squeals of Sundries and a jukebox endless- ly warbling 'By the mime I get to Phoenix'. My friend and I repaired to a nearby bar packed with Vietnamese civi-

lians, soldiers and their exquisite girl- friends. As we walked in an ARVN officer — he must have taken me for an American — stood up, shouted something I did not catch, and threw a glass of beer at me. The beer splashed my ostentatiously civilian shirt and the glass shattered against the wall near my head. I was not in a mood to debate the politics of the situation with him, and I can't say I blamed him either. We went back to the Palace where I was, more or less, among my own kind. Next morning, video tape in hand, I caught the last Air France flight out. Artillery was loud in the distance and it would, clearly, soon be ranging the airport. The man ahead of me was clutching an umbrella- stand made out of a hollowed elephant's foot, a memento to bring hack, whenever it rains in Omaha or old hands meet in Manhattan, the flavour of that extraordin- ary time.