APPENDIX B
from the AP Corporate Archives
[transcription begins on page 210]
The “Vietnam Diary” dispatches from Peter Arnett and George Esper (page 1 of 3), sent as the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on Tuesday, Apr. 29, 1975. Original wire copy. (AP Corporate Archives)
The “Vietnam Diary” dispatches from Peter Arnett and George Esper (page 2 of 3), sent as the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on Tuesday, Apr. 29, 1975. Original wire copy. (AP Corporate Archives)
The “Vietnam Diary” dispatches from Peter Arnett and George Esper (page 3 of 3), sent as the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese on Tuesday, Apr. 29, 1975. Original wire copy. (AP Corporate Archives)
[Eds: (sic) in a transcription indicates a spelling or grammatical error in the original document]
VIETNAM DIARY
Peter Arnett and George Esper, “Vietnam Diary”, Apr. 29, 1975. Wirecopy, Various Wires, Oversize Folder. AP Corporate Archives, New York.
Saigon (AP)—Tuesday, April 29. [1975]
4:00 a.m.—The day begins early, the thumping of rockets at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut air base. It is a replay of 1968 when the communist command’s Tet Offensive similarly obliterated part of the city and the best vantage point in town was again the Caravelle Hotel where in the pre-dawn hours newsmen again counted the rockets exploding with bright balls of fire. There is a new twist this time, brilliantly yellow path burned by the Strela missile, a hand-fired Soviet-built weapon that downed three aircraft in full view of the newsmen.
8:45 a.m.—They’re pulling the plug. The U.S. Embassy has quietly passed the word that all Americans will leave today ending 30 years of American involveement (sic) in Vietnam. The Embassy staff and the few military people left had no choice. They had to go. Newsmen did have the choice and a handful remained to see the last few hours of the country that had flowered just briefly on the international scene.
Noon—The mad evacuation scramble starts. Associated Press photographer Neal Ulevich had to be summoned from the post and telegraph office where he was sending radiophotos of the rocketing of the airport. He did not have time to check out of his hotel room and left with only his cameras. Another AP staffer, Carl Robinson, barely had time to locate his newly adopted Vietnamese daughter. Old Indochina hand Ed White, who has covered Vietnam for the AP off and on since 1962, crammed himself into a crowded bus and said, “This is not the way I wanted to leave Indochina.”
4:00 p.m.—This was the last chance for those Vietnamese who wanted to go to go. Rumors had it the Viet Cong would be in the city by morning. Streets around the U.S. Embassy became clogged with the last desperate Vietnamese trying for a new life in the United States as against the regimented life they had been led to expect under communism.
In the haste to leave what was valuable yesterday was worthless today. The owner of a local American restaurant gave AP reporter Matt Franjola, who stayed on, his Jeep. Another AP reporter who stayed, Peter Arnett, was presented with a diplomatic licensed car by a departing Japanese friend. Newsmen who had departed without time to pay their hotel bills offered those staying behind all the possessions in the rooms if they would pay the rent.
Nightfall: the worst fears start to be realized. Shooting breaks out in the streets around the AP office in downtown Saigon as drunken soldiers shoot off their weapons. Suddenly all power is cut. Communications with our New York office are broken. It is raining heavily outside. You can’t see a thing. Are the Viet Cong in town already? One wonders. Did they cut the power? The lights soon go on again. The soldiers go home to sleep it off. We file our night report and the first day without the Americans is over.
Endit.
Arnett/Esper
Peter Arnett’s analysis (page 1 of 14) of the battle of Dak To, filed Nov. 25, 1967. Original typescript copy. (AP Corporate Archives)
DAK TO RECONSTRUCTION
Peter Arnett, [Dak To Analysis], Nov. 25, 1967. Typescript copy, Saigon Bureau Records, Box 36, Folder 619. AP Corporate Archives, New York.
(Editor’s note: The B[attle of Dak To was one of] the fiercest of the Vietnam War. An Associated P[ress correspondent wh]o spent ten days at the battle scene reconstructs the action [and] discusses enemy and Allied tactics.)
By Peter Arnett
Associated Press Writer
Dak To, Vietnam, Nov. 25 [1967] (AP) – The communists picked the time and the place for the bloody battle of Dak To.
From the time the first enemy shots were fired from a bamboo thicket at U.S. infantrymen on November three, to the painful scramble to the top of Hill 875 by weary U.S. paratroopers on Thursday, the communists made it clear they were at Dak To to fight.
It was the nearest thing to a set piece battle yet seen in the Vietnam War. It may still not be over.
Yet after 21 days of bloody fighting, Allied commanders still privately confess themselves mystified as to the enemy’s real intentions at Dak To.
The initial Allied reasoning, that the communists planned to [page 2 missing]…
[…]The officer was referring to the American casualties taken in capturing the hill, merely one of a thousand knolls that dot the Dak To area. Unofficially, the 173rd airborne brigade took nearly 150 men killed and almost 300 wounded on the hill, at best a one to one ratio with enemy casualties.
Asked if he felt the objective was important, a senior paratrooper officer commented, “Well, it sort of commands the valley, so in a conventional war it would be important. But this isn’t a conventional war, so I guess it means nothing.”
The nature of the terrain was a major advantage for the communist forces. Each year the enemy’s November offensive, launched as the highlands begin drying out from the monsoon, have been steadily shifting north into the jungled hills.
Under the shelter of the triple canopied jungles, the communists can busily build extensive bunkers and trench systems, forcing American troops to rout them out one by one in the worst possible terrain.
The communists must have been working over the Dak To hills for at least three months, and possibly longer, senior American officers believe. The bunker systems stretch across numerous hills, some having caverns with woven bamboo walls and elevated log floors.
One or two turns were in each entrance to seal out napalm, considered the ideal anti-bunker weapon until the Dak To battle. Now it has been shown that in the end, only hand to hand fighting can rout an enemy who digs deep enough.
Twenty or thirty men at the most would conceal themselves in the bunkers. The main ground fighting would be done by flanking forces who would melt into the jungle after the initial infantry clash, leaving those in the bunkers to fight to the end. This accounted for the few bodies found in the bunker systems at the end of the fights.
Each hill top bunker system around Dak To probably took two weeks to construct, U.S. engineers figured, and they were built to withstand the severest Allied bomb onslaught.
From the nature of the hill top emplacements and their number, American intelligence officers believe that the North Vietnamese intended to stand and fight in the lonely Dak To hills and had laid the groundwork well. The enemy has used the Dak To region freely since 1964 when the first North Vietnamese infantry regiments were clandestinely slipped into the south. The district town of Tou Morong and the special forces camp of Dak Sut, both to Dak To’s north, were wiped out in 1965.
Two enemy regiments—the 174th and the 24th—were known to be somewhere in the hills, and the U.S. Army’s 173rd airborne brigade chased after them during July, August and September this year. The paratroopers left Dak To early October, confident they would not need to return.
In November the 173rd brigade has been the most severely punished of the three American brigades in the Dak To fight.
American intelligence keeps a close watch on enemy troop activity, but is limited by the scarcity of population in the hills. Two enemy regiments—the 32nd and the 66th—dissappeared (sic) from the Cambodian border opposite Pleiku mid-1967 and the search went out for them.
Airforce (sic) planes using infrared cameras, helicopters carrying “people sniffers”, and long range infantry patrols searched far and wide. The new locale of the lost regiments was eventually determined—the tangled hills around Dak To.
Enemy pressure on the Montagnard villages near Dak To mounted. Special Forces patrols reported seeing communist troops entering the Dak To bowl.
The U.S. Fourth Division, commanded by Maj. General William R. Peers, began to move. For months Peers had been waiting for a sign that the communists wanted to fight. He had it now.
The battle of Dak To was on.
The battle has been fought in two parts.
The first part was between November three and November twelve and saw clashes between two American infantry brigades (the 173rd and the First Brigade, 4th Division) and the North Vietnamese 32nd and 66th regiments.
An indication of the battles to come was a tough fight November six when a 173rd company lost 26 killed and 37 wounded on a ridge southwest of Dak To. A total of 84 enemy dead were reported in that battle.
The fight for Hill 724, the first of the Hill fights, took place November eight. Two Fourth Division infantry companies lost ten killed and 47 wounded in that battle.
By November 12 American forces had lost 96 men killed and 498 wounded as against 635 enemy reported dead, and the battle was considered over by the senior American commanders.
The second and bloodiest stage began five days later.
This stage was preceeded (sic) by a daring series of mortar attacks on the Dak To airstrip that had become a jucier (sic) target each day. Two C-130 transport planes worth nearly three million dollars each were destroyed. An ammo dump with 1,200 tons in it blew up.
General Peers moved in a brigade of reinforcements from the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division just to be on the safe side. A task force of two Vietnamese airborne battalions moved up.
Three days later and just a few hours after the enemy was said to have withdrawn back across the Cambodian border, the North Vietnamese 24th and 174th regiments moved into Dak To for the attack. The second stage of the battle had begun.
Hill 1338 was fought over November 17. The Vietnamese task force spent three days conquering Hill 1416 (the numerals indicate the hill heights in meters). Hill 882 was taken November 18. The next day the bitter 110-hour fight for Hill 875 began.
“This is submarine warfare,” said Lt. General William B. Rosson, senior U.S. commander in the central highlands, referring to the subterranean nature of the communist positions.
The Allied commanders professed to be satisfied with the heavy contact. “The enemy’s only choice is to die or retreat,” said Brig. General L.H. Schweiter, commander of the 173rd brigade. This remark came back to haunt Schweiter when he had to leave scores of his own wounded in the jungle for fifty hours under enemy mortar fire on Hill 875 before he could get them out.
The enemy tenacity in the Dak To hills astounded the American soldiers and their commanders. General Peers commented, “The enemy has shown outstanding morale and discipline. He stood his ground.” One paratrooper commented, “They fight like they’re all John Waynes, three clips each and making every bullet count.”
At all times the enemy did have the choice of dieing (sic) or retreating. In none of the battles was he surrounded. He could have melted away into the inpenetrable (sic) jungle at any point.
Why did he stay and fight? Certainly it was not for the nobbly (sic) hills of Dak To. These are absolutely lacking in strategic value. The communists seemed bent on staying and fighting to the last man, taking as many Americans as possible with them.
Under these circumstances, the conquering of a hill became less a victory than an engineering process, the methodical destruction of the bunkered hill tops with endless air strikes and artillery barrages.
This proved eventually effective on all the hills with the exception of 875 where a U.S. paratroop battalion was pinned down with numerous dead and wounded, unable to overrun the enemy positions and unable to evacuate its wounded.
By Thanksgiving Day the stubborn Hill 875 was taken and the second phase of the Dak To battle appeared over. The latest casualty count is 285 U.S. dead, 18 missing presumed dead, and 988 wounded. Enemy dead was placed at 1,455, probably an accurate body count according to newsmen who were at the scenes of many of the battles.
The four communist regiments are now reported regrouping on the Vietnamese side of the Cambodian border. No immediate threat of battle renewal is seen, but a new enemy offensive could be launched there in a few weeks, according to General Rosson.
That means that the three U.S. brigades now committed to Dak To will probably stay there, possibly one objective of the communists who are thought anxious to suck American troops out of the populated regions into remote corners. By this means, pacification work will slow down, as in the first corps region.
What else has the battle of Dak To meant?
If the enemy objective was indeed to overrun Dak To and eventually cut Vietnam in two parts, he has certainly failed in his mission. But if this was not his mission, if he had much more moderate aims, then he might have had more success.
The loss to the communists in Dak To was in manpower, a commodity they don’t seem to be lacking. The Ho Chi Minh trail is believed clogged with infantry replacements.
There is no evidence that senior enemy officers were killed or captured in the fight, meaning that the four regiments might soon be ready to fight again.
Under these circumstances, the war of attrition that the Allied commander, General William C. Westmoreland, says he is fighting in Vietnam could prove disastrous in the view of many American officers who have been involved in the Dak To hill fighting.
One of the few surviving officers of the Second Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade, that fought on Hill 875, said that it would take two months to get his battalion back in fighting trim. Several other U.S. units were similarly hard hit.
Many American soldiers were outspokenly angry about having to fight in the tangled terrain of Dak To. “Why not bring in B-52s to knock this place down,” one paratrooper asked as he fought his way up Hill 882.
Asked why he was carrying the fight into Dak To, General Peers commented to newsmen, “Why give the enemy another 15 miles of sanctuary?”
Senior Americans believe Dak To is another harbinger of the fights to come. The DMZ was the first, Dak To the second. Already enemy units are reported digging in in the hills of Quang Duc province due north of Saigon.
This could become another region for costly “submarine war.”
Endit Arnett
Peter Arnett’s story (page 1 of 8) on the mutiny of A Company, filed Aug. 24, 1969. Original typescript copy. (AP Corporate Archives)
BREAKING POINT
Peter Arnett and Horst Faas, “Breaking Point,” Aug. 24, 1969. Typescript copy, Saigon Bureau Records, Box 52, Folder 912. AP Corporate Archives, New York.
(Editor’s note: Associated Press photographer Oliver Noonan died while covering a U.S. infantry company in the first day of a battle in the foothills of central Vietnam. AP newsmen Horst Faas and Peter Arnett later covered the same action while looking for Noonan’s body. Here is their report of what happened to the outfit that Noonan was with.)
by Horst Faas and Peter Arnett
Song Chang Valley, Vietnam, Aug. 24 [1969] (AP) – All men have a breaking point and nearly all soldiers of “A” Company broke Sunday morning.
“I am sorry sir, but my men refuse to go—we cannot move out,” reported Lt. Eugene Shurtz Jr. to the battalion commander over a crackling field telephone.
At dawn, A Company of the battle-worn Third Battalion 21st Infantry of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade had been ordered to move once more down the jungled, rocky slopes of Nui Lon Mountain into a deadly labyrinth of North Vietnamese bunkers and trench lines. For five days in a row they had obeyed orders to make this same push. Each time they had been thrown back by invisible communist soldiers who had waited through the rain of bombs and artillery shells for the Americans to come close to die in accurate crossfire.
In each assault Americans of A Company died, many attempting to drag wounded from under the enemy guns. Some still lay where they had died in front of the enemy positions.
Now it was Sunday, the sixth day of their battle. They wound (sic) not go back down the hill.
The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Robert C. Bacon, had been waiting impatiently for A Company to move out. Bacon had taken over the battalion only three days earlier after the former commander was killed. The battalion was still trying to reach the wreckage of the helicopter in which his predecessor, Lt. Col. Eli P. Howard, 41, of Woodbridge, Va., Associated Press photographer Oliver Noonan, 29, of Norwell, Mass., and six other men had perished.
This Sunday morning Col. Bacon was personally leading three of his companies to the helicopter wreckage.
He paled as the lieutenant’s voice matter-of-factly told him that the soldiers of A Company would not follow his orders.
“Repeat that please,” the colonel asked without raising his voice. “Have you told them what it means to disobey orders under fire?”
The lieutenant’s voice from the bomb-scarred hill came back, “I think they understand—but some of them simply had enough—they are broken. There are boys here who have only 90 days left in Vietnam—they want to go home in one piece. The situation is psychic here.”
The colonel asked, “Are you talking about enlisted men or are the NCO’s (platoon and squad leaders) also involved?”
The lieutenant replied, “That’s the difficulty here—we’ve got a leadership problem—most of our squad and platoon leaders have been killed or wounded in the past days.”
A Company at one point in the fight was down to 60 men—half of its assigned combat strength.
Faced with the alarming situation, the colonel had recourse to severe measures—but instead he said quietly, “go talk to them again and tell them that to the best of our knowledge the bunkers are now empty—the enemy has withdrawn. The mission of A Company today is to recover their dead. They have no reason to be afraid. Please take a hand count of how many really do not want to go.”
The lieutenant came back a few minutes later, “They won’t go, Colonel, and I did not ask for the hand count because I am afraid that they all stick together even though some might prefer to go.”
The colonel then said, “Leave these men on the hill and take your [illegible] element (command post) and move to the objective.”
The lieutenant said he was preparing to move and asked, “What do we do with the ammunition supplies? Shall we destroy them?”
“Leave it with them,” the colonel ordered.
Then Colonel Bacon told his executive officer, Maj. Richard Waite, and one of his seasoned Vietnam veterans, SFC Okey Blakenship of Panther, West Virginia, to fly from the battalion base “LZ Center” across the valley to talk with the reluctant troopers of A Company. “Give them a pep talk and a kick in the butt.”
This was the first time the men of A Company faced a field grade officer since the death of their former battalion commander on the first day of the battle.
They stood tired, bearded and exhausted in the tall blackened elephant grass. Their uniforms were ripped and caked with dirt.
“One of them was crying,” said Sgt. Blakenship.
Then the soldiers told the two emissaries why they would not move.
“It poured out of them,” the sergeant said. They told how they were sick of the endless battling in torrid heat, the constant danger of sudden firefights by day and the mortaring and the enemy probing at night. They said they had not enough sleep and that they were being pushed too hard, they hadn’t had mail, they hadn’t had hot food, the little things that had made the war bearable for them.
Helicopters brought in the basic needs of ammunition, food and water at a tremendous risk because of effective enemy ground fire. This was not enough for these men—they sensed that they were in terrible danger of annihilation and would go no further.
Maj. Waite and Sgt. Blakenship heard them out, looking at the men of A Company, most of them a generation apart, draftees 19 and 20 years of age with fear in their eyes.
Blakenship, a quick-tempered man, began arguing with the soldiers.
“One of them yelled to me that his company had suffered too much and that it should not have to go on,” Blakenship recalled. “I answered him that another company was down to 15 men still on the move—and I lied to him—and he asked me, ‘why did they do it?’”
The sergeant said he answered, “Maybe they have got something a little more than what you have got.”
“Don’t call us cowards, we are not cowards,” the soldier howled, running toward Blakenship with his fists raised.
Blakenship turned his back and walked down the bomb-scarred ridge line to where the company commander waited.
The sergeant looked back and saw that the men of A Company were stirring. They picked up their rifles, fell into a loose formation and they followed him down the cratered slope.
A Company went back to the war.