CONCLUSION
THE FALL OF SAIGON, ending South Vietnam’s 20-year struggle for survival, comes with unforeseen suddenness, as I describe in the opening chapter of this book. An overwhelming blitz by the enemy, a chaotic scramble to evacuate by vulnerable Vietnamese and Americans still in the capital, then looting and a strange calm: All of this plays out before my eyes in a final, surreal day of this war.
The assault that brings this conclusion begins with an early morning bombardment of Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport on April 29, ordered by the commander of North Vietnamese military forces, General Van Tien Dung. His tanks then quickly roll in to take over the city. In the countryside, the few South Vietnamese military forces still reasonably well organized see further combat as pointless, either because of the overwhelming power of the communists’ heavy weaponry brought against them, or by the collapse of political will in Saigon.
Wire copy filed as an “Urgent” to New York by AP Saigon bureau chief George Esper on Apr. 29, 1975. It reads:
URGENT. Surrender (TOPS). (Saigon) - South Vietnam tonight announced its unconditional surrender to the Viet Cong. The announcement was made by President Duong Van “Big” Minh who said in a radio speech addressed to the Viet Cong: “We are here to hand over to you the power in order to avoid bloodshed.” He ordered the South Vietnamese Army to stop firing - and to remain in place.
(AP Corporate Archives)
Second wire copy filed as an “Urgent” from AP Saigon bureau chief George Esper on Apr. 29, 1975. It reads:
URGENT. Surrender (take 2). The surrender came only hours after Americans had left Saigon in an armada of helicopters guarded by some 800 Marines. The evacuating Americans had dodged random shots fired by bitter South Vietnamese soldiers and had fought off desperate civilians. Viet Cong gunners had sent rockets into Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut (Tahn Suhn Yuht) air base as a rear guard of American Marines had been evacuated from the rooftop of the abandoned US embassy in downtown Saigon. The shelling continued. And the Viet Cong claimed they had captured the big Bien Hoa (Byen Hwah) air base 15 miles north of the capital. Then came the announcement from Saigon: unconditional surrender.
(AP Corporate Archives)
Thirty-five miles north of Saigon, the high drama of the North Vietnamese military campaign unfolds at Lai Khe, home base of the 1st Infantry Division, President Thieu’s old outfit. The unit has guarded vulnerable Route 13, but is sidelined now because the lightning attack on Saigon comes from other directions. With his unit’s capabilities still intact, the division commander, Brigadier General Le Nguyen Vy, begins weighing his options, according to surviving officers I meet in Saigon a week or so later. His military command headquarters is not responding to his messages, however, and he is relying on Radio Saigon news broadcasts for tactical information. It was at this location, Lai Khe, where a brigade of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division was based during the American war, that I made the acquaintance of its innovative commander, Major General William DePuy, in 1966. His massive helicopter assaults on the enemy made military history. But there are no helicopters to assist General Vy today.
General Vy decides to regroup all units, in preparation to move the whole division south to Saigon to join in the fight. But by early morning of April 30 the fight is clearly over, as Saigon Radio reports communist troops moving toward downtown. At 7 a.m., General Vy calls a staff meeting. All are present except the deputy division commander, who has fled in an American plane. Vy turns the command of his division over to Colonel Tu Van, and tells them Saigon will soon fall, and adds, “As an officer of the South Vietnamese army I must act for the honor of the army, but you must protect the lives of the soldiers. Good luck to you all.” He returns to his quarters, lights a cigarette, takes his pistol and blows his brains out.
General Vy is buried with full military honors, the whole division assembled at the Lai Khe flagpole. A participating officer later tells me it was “a short but emotional service, his body buried, and the honor of the division is saved.” At 1 p.m. that day, after hearing of the government’s surrender, the division boards 200 trucks and drives over to the town of Ben Cat, newly occupied by the communists. The soldiers dismount, drop their weapons and take off their uniforms as about 50 enemy soldiers carrying Russian AK-47 rifles stand watching them. They stay for two days under guard at Ben Cat, and then all but the officers are released to their families.
The collapse of South Vietnam is noted for what didn’t happen as well as for what did. For weeks some American officials in Saigon are warning of a probable “bloodbath” against the population if vengeful communist soldiers are let loose, citing reports from the 16 provinces captured in the first six weeks of the offensive. Young embassy aides lobby journalists with tales of “horrendous crimes” and hand out pink copies of reports to Washington claiming the execution of 300 soldiers and policemen on the streets of Ban Me Thuot, and the wholesale killing of half-American babies in the coastal city of Nhatrang. The Saigon government will say only that it has “some confirming reports.”
But in an enterprising North Vietnamese initiative to discredit the accusations, several American journalists are invited to Danang where brutalities are allegedly being committed. A former AP senior executive, Dan De Luce, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his World War II reporting, and his wife Alma, a photographer, accept the invitation and fly in from New York. Their stories for the AP report on a calm Danang returning to normal. I challenge one persistent embassy official, whom I have known for 10 years, to tell me the truth. He acknowledges there is a political motive: “Well, honestly, we are making a lot of this issue because it can affect ongoing deliberations of the aid program here. We know some congressmen are already wavering to our side,” which is for the approval of a substantial financial package. The vigorous fear campaign helps panic Saigon’s already nervous population. Within a few weeks after the war’s end, at least 1,000 of the Vietnamese evacuees who fought their way out of the country on American aircraft and Navy transports are petitioning officials at the holding camps in Guam to return them home.
The North Vietnamese do have a punishing blueprint for their vanquished enemy, primarily an extensive program of re-education camps, which will eventually imprison hundreds of thousands of military and political opponents, sent to live precariously in remote parts of the country. Some remain incarcerated for years, including Brigadier General Ly Ba Hy, a 25-year veteran of the South Vietnamese army who, upon his release in 1987, writes a book titled, “My 4,584 Days of Re-education in Vietnam.” He will die in Paris in February 2015.
Another imprisoned officer is one I meet over the years, Major General Ly Tong Ba, the protégée of my friend the American warrior John Paul Vann. The Vietnamese officer’s outstanding generalship of the South Vietnamese 23rd Infantry Division contributes to decisive victory in the 1972 battle of Kontum, the same action where Vann is killed. In the defense of the western route into Saigon in the last days of the war in 1975, General Ba commands the 25th Infantry Division in a fight to the finish. His unit is relentlessly pounded by heavy communist artillery and tank fire, ominously echoing the enormous American Air Force B-52 bomber strikes used in his defense of Kontum three years earlier. I learn later from officers in Saigon that Ba ordered his headquarters’ unit at Cu Chi to hold, allowing a retreat of his surviving few hundred soldiers in the last hours of the war. He is caught about to escape across a nearby river as surrender is being announced in Saigon. The victorious communists do not view him with the same unabashed adoration felt for him by Vietnamese who seek to find honor in their defeat. General Ba is sent to imprisonment in a distant re-education camp, where for 13 years political cadres endeavor to quell his spirit. He is finally released in March 1988, white haired and weak but, according to his friends, unbroken. Within a year he arrives in the United States; he’ll die in February 2015 in Las Vegas with family around him.
The abuses of the re-education camps help fuel the unremitting bitterness of the vast majority of America’s Vietnamese veterans, who see April 30 not as the day of liberation as celebrated by the communist victors but as a date in a Black April that ruined their lives.
In Saigon immediately after the war’s end, the authorities allow us visiting newspeople to move around freely for a few days. Then they begin tightening controls, opening up international communications but restricting travel and closely censoring our stories. All bookstores and magazine stalls close after a government order prohibiting the sale or possession of any literature published under the former regime, a tit-for-tat response to the prior banning of all pro-communist literature. I notice that many soldiers are moving into houses around the city center, particularly those left behind by the evacuees. Sixteen soldiers occupy a house owned by my departed Vietnamese in-laws, where I had lived off and on for the previous 14 years. The soldiers’ leader explains, “Our policy is to cohabit with the people.” Then he asks that I give up my room. My days here now are clearly winding down. I present my white Karmann Ghia sports car, which served me well in covering the war in the early years, to our loyal office assistant, Huan, an eager, diminutive man who is not evacuated with the rest of our local staff. That’s because it turns out he is a polygamist, with two families, one separate from the other, and he can’t decide which one to take.
Along with most of the press corps, I leave on May 24 on a Russian-built Ilyushin aircraft with Hanoi’s yellow-striped red flag painted on the tail. The night before my departure, I am summoned to the Saigon Giai Phong (Liberation) newspaper, the only publication now allowed in town. The editor greets me warmly and says, “I have read your dispatches while I was in the jungle, Mr. Arnett. I welcome you to the new Vietnam. Everything is perfect, isn’t it?” His comments have the moral certainty I’ve found in the views of most of the communist officials I’ve met in my three-week stay in the new Vietnam. I don’t argue with him. The days of arguing in South Vietnam seem over for good.
I believe I’ve put Vietnam behind me when I return to New York City in May 1975, and the AP gives me many other interesting assignments, including several weeks in India in 1976 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is drawing criticism over her repressive rule. But Vietnam will keep tugging me back, like a boat trying to put out to sea while still tied to the dock. The election of Jimmy Carter as America’s 39th president in 1976 comes as Americans are endeavoring to recover from the war and from the Watergate scandal, and he quickly moves with a new initiative to end what he describes as the “Vietnam malaise.” In a foreign policy speech early in 1977, he says, “For too many years we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is sometimes best quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence.”
Carter appoints a presidential commission to Vietnam in March 1977, less than two months after he takes office, its purpose to pursue rapid diplomatic relations with the former enemy and begin resolving a growing controversy over American servicemen still missing in the old war zones. Heading the commission is the president of the United Auto Workers union, Leonard Woodcock, a senior statesman of the American labor movement, also noted for his resistance to the Vietnam War (which had earned him ninth place on President Nixon’s infamous enemies list). Also included in the commission is Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, whom I had first met in a hotel room in Saigon in December 1962, where we discussed the problems of the Ngo Dinh Diem regime. I am one of five reporters chosen to go along on this trip with the commission, the first American journalists to visit Vietnam since the war ended nearly two years earlier.
We leave Washington, D.C., on a presidential jet on March 13, arriving in Hanoi 13 hours later. Word reaches us that if our motorcade gets bogged down in traffic on our way into town it will be a sign of the Vietnamese government viewing the commission with disfavor. We roll straight through. The atmosphere in Hanoi is very different from that on my trip in late 1972, when I visited with an anti-war group and U.S warplanes were still bombing the outskirts of the city. The few people we saw on the streets then were poorly dressed and slight of build. This time I see a city rejuvenating with busier streets and more food in the stores. Peace has clearly brought its bonuses to the victorious north. We are housed at a new five-story hotel on Ngo Quyen Street, much to the envy of resident diplomats who are living in the ancient Unification Hotel around the corner. They tell us our accommodation is the most comfortable in town.
Woodcock is matched against the deputy foreign minister, Phan Hien, in his negotiations, a five-day marathon that he later describes as the toughest in his career. He brings a unique perspective to the talks, a private citizen rather a professional diplomat. He tells us over a beer the first evening that, “if a State Department official had been here with me he would have died a thousand deaths. I emphasized that our two countries were meeting as equals. I told him that this is the best group they would ever get from America, with men of stature like Mike Mansfield. I told him that if they closed the door on us then it might take 10 more years before we are back.”
The Vietnamese official tells him, “You will not be disappointed.” By week’s end the remains of 12 missing Americans pilots are handed over to the commission, a few of the 795 servicemen still listed as missing by the Defense Department. Hanoi also agrees to set up an office to receive information about the missing servicemen, but on an understanding that the group will take back home the Vietnamese view that American aid and reconstruction for the war-torn country are required as “a question of humanitarian principle.” Unlike in my last days in Saigon in May 1975, officials here are cooperative, my stories moving swiftly to New York without censorship.
Meeting with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong just prior to our departure, Woodcock again plays the concerned private citizen, and tells him, “Speaking personally as an American, we being here is like rolling the clock back to 1945, a time when the United States based its policies on the support of allies in Europe rather than the aspirations of people here. Now we can start over again.”
We fly out of Hanoi to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where a big C-141 StarLifter aircraft is waiting to load the remains of the recovered servicemen. Watching the uniformed aircrew reverently loading the steel caskets into the interior of the plane is Dr. Roger Shields, a consultant to the Pentagon on POW affairs. He tells me, “I’m remembering something from four years ago, when we were welcoming the released American prisoners of war arriving here at Clark. They were alive and joyful that day, they were going home. And so these boys are going home, too.”
President Carter never does get his Vietnam policy off the ground. His administration tries hard, withholding its veto on Vietnam’s admittance to the United Nations, but both houses of Congress flatly refuse to provide aid to the Hanoi government. And the missing prisoner of war question blows up into a passionate political issue that takes years to resolve. The man who led the Vietnam mission, Leonard Woodcock, in 1979 becomes the first American ambassador to a China under communist rule.
Vietnam fades as an American foreign policy issue, but the human suffering cannot be ignored. Thousands of discontented Vietnamese take to the seas beginning two years after the war, seeking refuge in any other country that will take them. They are the boat people whose privations on their long voyages in often unseaworthy ships shock the world. Their suffering is worsened by the depredations of Thai pirates, who emerge from the thousands of legitimate fishing boats in the Gulf of Thailand to brutally rape, steal from and kidnap as many as 30 percent of the seafarers, according to United Nations estimates.
In 1978, AP photographer Eddie Adams and I set out on a four-continent assignment to write about the world’s 10 million homeless people. On the advice of a human rights activist friend, we travel to the Malaysian island of Bidong, once a paradise with blue waters, white sandy beaches fringed by coconut palms, topped by a verdant hillside. We were told it was a haven for boat people. What we find is a tropical Skid Row, home to 30,000 desperate Vietnamese on a 100-acre slice of land that has been reduced to a living hell. A putrid odor assails us as we step off the ferry boat from Kuala Terengganu, the nearest mainland port two hours away. We are told there are no toilets on the island other than what nature provides on the rocks, hillsides and low-tide beaches.
We see the latest arrivals, a small red boat with 11 bedraggled people on board trying to land at the beach, but Malaysian marine police will not let them in immediately. Watching them, Nguyen Phong Lau, 33, who says he is a former interpreter for the U.S. Provost Marshals in Saigon, recalls his own arrival there on the evening of Jan. 9. “When me and the 60 others on the boat land at the beach we are set upon by young Malaysians armed with knives, who take everyone’s wallets and watches and most of the food. And then they tried to push us back into the water until police arrived to help.”
Rutted dirt paths lead from the filthy beaches through a shantytown of small dwellings made of cardboard boxes, straw mats and tree branches. The people we see, particularly the many children, look thin and unhealthy. We are told there are 2,500 orphans on the island. The Reverend Nguyen Xan Bao of the Christian Reformed Church holds classes for several hundred of them, and he explains why there are so many. “Their mothers in Vietnam told them to go down to the beach and play. You might get a trip to America, they are told, and they hitch rides from passing boats.” Dr. Nguyen Van Hong, 34, is a general practitioner who also helps with social services. His office has lost its wooden back wall since there was no other available material to build a coffin for an old man who had died of asthma. Dr. Hong says people here are on the verge of starvation.
We see Vuong Kiet Khiem scaling up the hillside with his ax and his three oldest children. He is looking for the tough stumpy trees that can be sold to make crude furniture. He’s a 39-year-old Chinese-Vietnamese merchant expelled from Saigon for no reason, he says. He paid 50 ounces of gold, all the money he possessed, to flee with his wife and eight children. Others remember the pirates with bitterness. Tran Thi Qui tells me she was on boat KGO 480 that left Soctrang the previous November. They were attacked by pirates six times during the seven-day journey, she said, “and the last band took everyone’s clothing because there was nothing else left to steal.”
A former pop singer, Thanh Tuyen, had a safer journey. She serves coffee for two dollars a cup in her shack beside the beach. Popular in Saigon for her 1977 hit song, “Heat Up My Revolutionary Fires, Darling,” she fled to find a more appreciative audience than the rustic cadre who sipped tea and giggled at her rarely permitted public performances at home.
With the permission of the Malaysian authorities, the refugees established a primitive government on the island, including a judicial system. In the early afternoon we watch Dr. Trong Buu Hoa, the camp commander, receive a couple at his shack he calls City Hall, where he declares them married. He offers to write a certificate, but it’s useful only as a souvenir and they don’t bother. He says he has married a dozen so far. “It’s not the Vietnamese way, it’s the refugee way,” he explains. Where does a couple go for a honeymoon on such a crowded island? Dr. Hoa points to a flat rock, the “lovers’ rock,” 600 feet up the hill. And he said there is also the deep water of the bay beyond where people frolic.
The boat people who stream from Vietnam to neighboring countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and even as far as Australia, 8,000 miles away, come from many strata of society. They include members of the old military who are viewed as pariahs in the new Vietnam, politicians in a one-party state, businessmen denied bank financing, disaffected youth, and farmers and fishermen who get entangled in the bureaucracy of a government-controlled economy. Up until a few months ago no one lived on Bidong. The Malaysian government decided to dump unwanted arrivals here rather than on the mainland. With bitter humor the refugees call it “Bidat,” which means terrible in Vietnamese. Many will stay for a year or more. Only a few hundred have left so far, even though officials from the American and Australian embassies visit to seek suitable candidates for resettlement. Bidong is low on the list because of the priorities given to older camps farther down the Malaysian coast.
As Adams and I prepare to depart Bidong on the last ferry of the day, we hear the tune of a familiar hymn, “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” being sung in Chinese. We head up to what someone tells us is the Catholic church, a large crude structure on the hillside. Branches form the frame; two hand-hewn posts support what passes as the altar. A khaki-colored plastic tent is the roof; sugar and flour bags are the walls. A rough wooden cross stands on the nearby headland. A children’s choir is practicing hymns for the Sunday service. Nearby there’s a simple painted sign, “Bidong, a way station to a better life.”
In April 1979, four other reporters and I return to Vietnam with United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim on an official visit to Asian capitals. We use a luxury jet aircraft from the fleet of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to make the trip, and arrive in Hanoi to a changed world. Two months earlier the Chinese army invaded the northern border in retaliation for Vietnam’s overthrow of the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia in 1978. In six determined drives into Vietnam with troops supported by armor and artillery, the Chinese caused considerable damage, particularly to the border towns of Langson and Dong Dang.
In my first story for the AP this time from Hanoi, remembering my visit there in 1972 during the American air war, I write, “The clock is turned back seven years. It is a time of war. But the enemy is not the United States; it is Vietnam’s longtime ally, China, now being called an aggressor in newspapers and street posters.” I see that the curbside air raid shelters, filled in when the Saigon regime collapsed in 1975, have been redug and are ready for use. Two wall-sized posters have been painted side by side in a Hanoi street. One shows an American pilot with bowed head walking at the point of a gun held by a young woman. It is labeled “1972.” The other portrait shows a Chinese soldier with a peaked cap also walking at the point of a gun held by a woman. It is labeled “1979.” Beside each are dozens of pictures of war damage and dead and wounded in the same years. In a visit in 1977, I had noticed that attractive Reunification Park was a popular locale for young lovers, but on this visit I see groups of young boys and girls practicing weapons maintenance and military drills. An official guide explains, “We are training everywhere in the parks and the fields to be prepared against the Chinese.” In 1972, similar drills were held in the park to prepare for an American invasion.
I see something similar when the U.N. secretary-general visits Saigon a few days later. As in Hanoi, people here see the American war passing quickly into history, unlike in the United States, where emotions are continuing to run high at this time. One explanation is the single-mindedness of purpose that characterized the war against the Americans. The Vietnamese authorities are now alerting the population to the new enemy, China. I ask a young man, Le Manh Minh, exercising in a park, what he thinks about the American war. “It was a bad war, but our enemy is China now.”
My return to Saigon is a poignant one. I invested years of my life covering the Vietnam War story. The city looks the same on the surface, but there are changes. John F. Kennedy Square beside the cathedral is now Paris Commune Place. The National Assembly Building has returned to its original purpose, an opera house. And all the bars have closed. I run into Huan, our office boy at the AP Saigon bureau during the war years. He is a street photographer now, working for a hole-in-the-wall photo shop to support his two families. Huan says local officials are trying the confiscate the sports car I gave him four years earlier. He begs me to send him the ownership papers that I had long ago lost.
There is a brass plaque recently placed on the front wall of the abandoned U.S. Embassy building, the scene of so much mayhem four years earlier as the last Americans scrambled onto helicopters to avoid the approaching communist military tsunami. The plaque reads: “On April 29, 1975, top American and puppet government leaders departed by helicopter from this building and thereby put an end to the American war of aggression in Vietnam.”
The U.N.’s Waldheim finds on this visit that the Vietnamese are not interested in his offer to help resolve the differences with China, with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong telling him, “We can handle them ourselves.” Waldheim again tries a mediator role eight days later when we fly on to Beijing and he meets with the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who had earlier ordered the military invasion of his neighboring fellow communist nation. I photograph them together at the Forbidden City, where previous Chinese emperors had ruled in splendor. There stands Deng, the diminutive Chinese revolutionary who has outlived and outmaneuvered Mao Zedong, and the tall, elegant Austrian aristocrat who runs the U.N. Deng is smiling confidently. He is launching his far-reaching plans for the economic transformation of China. As for Vietnam, he tells Waldheim, “I admire my brother revolutionaries, but they need to be taught a lesson occasionally.” The U.N. leader nods diplomatically, realizing there is nothing much he can do about it.
Years later, in the 2000s, when I’m teaching journalism at Shantou University in southern China, I take a dozen of my best students on a three-week educational visit to Vietnam where they see cities bursting with fevered economic development and modern skylines, just as in their cities back home. Vietnam is now an economic tiger, its Marxist yoke thrown over for capitalism. With diplomatic relations having been reopened with the Hanoi government by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and with its big neighbor China continuing to growl menacingly, the U.S. military, once the enemy to Vietnam, is looking more like a partner.
With my students, I plan to visit some of the old Vietnam battlefields, because I’ve talked to my senior classes about press coverage of the war. In an exhausting, long, hot day north of Hue spent mostly walking, I first take my students to the Truong Son National Cemetery, where 10,000 North Vietnamese soldiers are buried, many of them killed defending the Ho Minh Trail infiltration route during the American war. A mile or so farther east, on a small hill amid tangled prickly vines, rotted sandbags and bits of rusted metal and garbage, is the old U.S. Marine firebase of Con Thien.
We trudge along a narrow trail, careful not to stumble on unexploded shells, which have killed or injured many local farmers. We arrive at the one surviving feature of the old base, a square strongpoint of crumbling concrete, its outer walls pockmarked with shell and bullet holes, and inside, as centipedes and spiders run for cover, we see on the moss-covered walls scribbled American names and patriotic sayings.
Con Thien was tactically important because it was located a little more than a mile away from the Vietnamese demilitarized zone and overlooked communist activities just across the border. In an impromptu classroom beside the old, battered building, I tell my students how for a whole year from early 1967 the communists threw artillery shells, rockets, and human wave attacks against Con Thien; in one action alone 44 Marines died, along with more than 100 North Vietnamese. I tell them of the harrowing three days I spent there in a visit, cringing in foxholes as the battle raged. Con Thien held throughout the onslaughts.
My students, young women all, look attentively at me, some wearing the colorful clothes modeled on the then-popular American TV shows “Sex and the City” and “Gossip Girl” that they watch on the Internet in their dorms. They are looking now at me, at an aged war reporter in baggy clothes, telling war stories again, and wiping sweat from his face with a handful of disintegrating Kleenex tissues. One of them, Hewitt, who is wearing a T-shirt stamped with the phrase “Scary Random Bombing,” asks me, “You mean to tell us that young American boys came all this way to this place to fight and die. Why?” I offer no quick answer to her question. And in thinking about it later I realize I had no answer that would have made any sense to them.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
THIS WRITING ASSIGNMENT has been one of the most satisfying in my 55-year career as a journalist, and for that I have to thank the Associated Press news organization and publisher RosettaBooks. They asked me to write this personal account of the Vietnam War to resonate with a younger audience far removed from that era, and to recall for my own generation the drama and controversy we lived through for the many years that war lasted. It was a challenging task, one I undertook knowing that the Vietnam War still stirs argument in the United States, but a task made easier by the enthusiasm of management and staff in both the Associated Press and RosettaBooks.
The Associated Press I know well, having covered the Vietnam War for the news organization from 1962 to the Fall of Saigon in 1975. It never let me down in all those years, and in this project, too, the editorial, photographic and research staff willingly provided the necessary assistance to meet our tight deadlines. The AP’s Digital Publishing Specialist Peter Costanzo was my primary contact and he was unfailingly supportive. I relied on Chris Sullivan, editor of AP’s National Reporting Team, for daily commentary and consultation as we moved through the assignment chapter by chapter. Valerie Komor, Director of Corporate Archives, has long been a custodian of the reportage and memorabilia of her news organization’s Vietnam era, and her help—along with the expert assistance of Processing Archivist Francesca Pitaro—was invaluable.
I am thankful for the enthusiasm and commitment of the staff and management of RosettaBooks, the leading independent ebook publisher, which worked with the Associated Press in bringing this project quickly to fruition. CEO Arthur Klebanoff, well experienced in handling earlier historical works on the Vietnam War, was personally involved from the beginning. I appreciated his insights and encouragement, as I did with Rosetta’s associate publisher-at-large Roger Cooper who, in early discussions, inspired me to weave my own experiences into the historical fabric of the Vietnam War. Essential to the project’s completion were others in the experienced Rosetta team: production manager Hannah Bennett, production editor Jay McNair, and design associate Brehanna Ramirez.
Particularly helpful to me in this project were acquaintances in the Vietnamese diaspora who settled in the United States after the communist victory ended their hopes of establishing a democratic South Vietnam. A friend of many years, Nguyen Ngoc Linh, provided me valuable insights into the difficult readjustment required by those who appreciated America’s open arms in welcoming them here, but still dream of what could have been in their former homeland. The Information Minister at a critical time, Hoang Duc Nha, provided me with a vivid account of his dealings with Henry Kissinger and President Nguyen Van Thieu which helped clarify the political confusion of the last years of the war.
My own family, long accustomed to my absences at war fronts over the years, encouraged me from the beginning to accept this project, knowing that of all the conflicts I have covered, the Vietnam War was the most influential personally and historically. My son Andrew, a journalist himself, made perceptive appraisals of the written material I emailed him regularly, while my wife Nina and daughter Elsa were closer at hand and always supportive.