3
JUST THREE BLOCKS separate the AP bureau from the military censor’s office at the post and telegraph building in the square opposite the old Roman Catholic cathedral, and I walk quickly, trying to suppress my sense of anticipation. I am holding a four-page news story, the first substantial account of the war that I have written since my arrival a few weeks earlier. It is about my three days with the U.S. Marine Corps’ 163rd helicopter squadron recently assigned to the Mekong Delta town of Soctrang. They’re a friendly bunch, and the commander, Colonel Robert Rathbun, provides a tent for my use. The outfit’s mission is to ferry South Vietnamese troops in and out of action in the nearby mangrove swamps that are a stronghold of Vietcong guerrillas.
At the censor’s office I hand my story over to a young uniformed Vietnamese officer, who glances briefly at me before taking it carefully in his hand and laying it on his desk. I can sense his distaste.
He takes up a fountain pen with a thick nib that bleeds black ink on the typewritten onionskin pages each time he strikes out a line. He strikes out many lines, 18 of the 23 lines on the first page, 16 on page two, all of page three and 13 lines on page four. He carefully stamps each page with a large official seal that he signs with a flourish, approval for the communication clerks at the post office to send out what’s left of my story. He hands the pages back to me with a tight smile. I turn and leave. My story is dead in the water.
American officials in Saigon and Washington publicly insist they have no role in censorship of the western media in South Vietnam. No, they leave it to their Vietnamese allies.
You don’t question the censor around here. No explanations. I assume that my story had too much information about American military men enthusiastically helping Vietnamese troops fight their war, too much detail about how difficult the task was against an implacable enemy. Both American and Vietnamese officials prefer to downplay all these points.
I attend airport departure parties for two popular reporters expelled for upsetting the authorities. François Sully of Newsweek, who knows Vietnam well, reported that the increasing American undertaking is beginning to mirror the failed efforts of the French forces a decade earlier. Jim Robinson of NBC, an experienced reporter, mentioned in a story that President Diem is a boring interview. I sign a telegram sent by the Saigon press corps to President Kennedy to intervene in such expulsions, to no avail.
At a press conference in Saigon, Admiral Harry D. Felt, the commander in chief of American Pacific forces, bridles at a question I ask about the increasing combat role of American soldiers sent here as advisers. He snarls at me, “Get on the team,” the comment later quoted by historian Stanley Karnow in his book “Vietnam, A History,” to show how officials wanted reporters to emphasize the positive. AP headquarters advises us that Washington is becoming highly critical of our reporting from Saigon and wonders why our stories are “about 180 degrees” from briefings given AP reporters at the Pentagon and State Department.
I talk to Mal Browne about the state of play. He says that we should report anything that we see, including arms shipments, troop deployments and operational activities, because “if we can see them, so can the enemy.” And we should quote informants whom we consider reliable “because they are the experts who know what’s going on better than we do.”
Very soon I’ll recall Mal’s advice at an isolated community in the Mekong Delta fringed with palm trees, where water buffalos outnumber humans and rice fields stretch to the horizon. In Vietnamese, its name is Ap Bac. Translated the name means northern hamlet, but in the history of the American war it means turning point.
Our office phone rings, the sound harsher than usual because I’m still getting over a lengthy New Year celebration. It is Jan. 3, 1963. I pick up the phone and hear the voice of a crew chief friend from an American Army Aviation company based at Tan Son Nhut airport. He’s breathless with the news that eight U.S. helicopters operating with South Vietnamese forces south of Saigon have been hit, with a least four crewmen wounded. I drive to the airport in my newly acquired white Karmann Ghia sports car, an inexpensive luxury purchased from a Chinese businessman down on his luck. I talk with pilots of helicopters returning from the mission.
I learn that 14 of the 15 American helicopters participating in the operation were hit with a devastating wall of ground fire from concealed communist guerrillas at Ap Bac. Five of the ships are down. Three Americans are dead, two of them crewman and the third an Army captain advising the ground troops. I’m told maybe 100 Vietnamese soldiers are dead. I phone the information to Browne.
He picks up the phone to call our Tokyo bureau that has direct communications with New York. He sees that this story is worth risking bypassing censorship, that the battle may well erase any doubt that America is at war in Vietnam, and it is a story that must be told. Browne begins dictating, “In the costliest defeat for the American support effort in Vietnam, communist gunners today shot five American helicopters from the sky and turned back hundreds of South Vietnamese soldiers attempting to capture a tiny hamlet in the Mekong Delta.” Browne’s story hits the front pages of America’s newspapers. Our New York editors demand a quick follow-up story.
I figure that the authorities will close all access to Ap Bac, or try to. I call a reporter friend from Stars and Stripes, Steve Stibbens, who often hangs out at our office, and I ask him to help. Next morning, Steve arrives at our office in his U.S. Marine uniform, and David Halberstam of The New York Times and I climb in behind him in his jeep. We head south down Route 1 into the Mekong Delta. Halberstam and I try to look suitably official as our driver negotiates military roadblocks and checkpoints with a smile and a salute, his uniform his passkey.
Beyond the province capital of Tan An, we bounce over a muddy track to an airstrip alongside a flooded paddy field at Tan Hiep. There is chaos. Trucks and jeeps, engines running, compete for space at the edge of the small runway where Vietnamese soldiers watch as helicopters come and go. I see a familiar face, Colonel Daniel Boone Porter, amongst the American and Vietnamese officers who seem to be arguing with each other.
Porter is the senior American adviser for the delta region. Friendly in previous visits, he is unhappy today. He tells me that at Ap Bac for the first time the Vietcong guerrillas have stood their ground and fought back when attacked by government troops, fighting strongly rather that striking quickly and melting away into the countryside. Porter shakes his head and says, “We had superior forces and superior firepower. We advisers were hoping for a confrontation like this to prove that our tactics would work. They didn’t.”
Halberstam and I hitch a ride on an American helicopter that is surveying the battlefield. Down below is a scene of carnage. We see dead bodies in the mud. Bits of downed helicopters are strewn in the rice fields. Deep tracks on the ground lead to the wreckage of armored personal carriers destroyed in the fighting. The village itself is in ruins. In all, 65 government troops were killed in addition to the American dead. The Vietcong slipped away during the night, dragging their own dead with them.
Returning to Tan Hiep, I see an honor guard drawn up for senior officers, including General Paul D. Harkins, in charge of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, an impressive-looking veteran of World War II. He is usually impatient with reporters. I ask him what is happening and he says with a straight face, “We’ve got the Vietcong in a trap and we’re going to spring it in half an hour,” and he turns away.
I seek out an American officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, whom I know to be a straight shooter. He is the senior adviser to the Vietnamese 7th Division that launched the Ap Bac operation. Vann is a wiry, compact Texan with a hair-trigger temper and a reputation for bravery. He invites Halberstam and me to talk out of earshot of the others. Vann is very angry.
He ridicules General Harkins’s statement of a few minutes earlier. He launches into a fierce attack on the performance of the Vietnamese soldiers he had been advising for months. “It’s a damn shame,” he says, that such a debacle could happen after all the efforts by the United States to equip and advise them.
Vann is red-faced now, stamping his feet and drawing the attention of bystanders some distance away. The Vietcong are escaping, and the Vietnamese officers he is advising don’t seem to care. Vann’s answer, he tells me, is to mobilize his own 60-man American advisory staff, the office workers, the cooks, the maintenance staff and the drivers, led by his military advisory team. “We’ll get ’em ourselves if the Vietnamese can’t do it,” Vann exclaims as he walks away to issue orders.
I return to Saigon that evening and file my detailed story to New York via phone call to the Tokyo bureau. Again we bypass censorship. A few of our colleagues have been expelled for doing much less, but I figure that with all of the resident western press corps filing Ap Bac stories the same way as we did, the government will be hard-pressed to punish us all.
AP New York congratulates us on our enterprise and advises that our stories on Ap Bac have received smash play in America’s newspapers. I sense that our eyewitness reports from this distant Cold War outpost will raise less concern from our superiors in the future.
Saigon youths join Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) troops on May 4, 1975, waving weapons and PRG flags on Tu Do Street in Saigon, Vietnam. (AP Photo/Matt Franjola)
North Vietnamese troops in the AP Saigon bureau, Apr. 30, 1975, describe their route into the city to Matt Franjola, Peter Arnett, George Esper, and an unidentified AP staffer. (AP Photo/Sarah Errington)
A North Vietnamese tank rolls through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon on Apr. 30, 1975, signifying the fall of South Vietnam. (AP Photo)
Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) forces enter Saigon and are seen parked outside the Independence Palace on Apr. 30, 1975, minutes after the unconditional surrender of Vietnam. (AP Photo)
Defeated South Vietnam President Duong Van Minh (middle) walks out of Independence Palace after surrendering to PRG forces in Saigon on May 1, 1975. (AP Photo/Billy)
Celebration in Hanoi of the final victory of North Vietnam over South Vietnam. Several thousand marchers filled in the square in front of the Opera house carrying banderoles on May 4, 1975. (AP Photo)
More than ten thousand people gather in front of Independence Palace in the biggest rally since the PRG takeover of Saigon to attend a ceremony where the Saigon Military Administrative Committee is introduced on May 7, 1975. (AP Photo/Manh Hung)