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THE FALLOUT from the murders of two presidents, Ngo Dinh Diem and John F. Kennedy, just weeks apart in November 1963 is plunging South Vietnam into a political and military tailspin that seriously undermines America’s 10 years of nation building.
The Vietnamese generals who successfully conspired to overthrow their president are becoming popular celebrities, enjoying their success in the nightclubs of Saigon and inviting the American press corps to party with them. But squabbling behind closed doors over the choice of a successor ends not with equanimity but with the seizure of power in late January by a young field commander, General Nguyen Khanh, who arrests the others and expresses a fierce anti-communism.
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson is determined to provide strong support to South Vietnam and, as he says to an aide, “not be the first American president to lose a war.” Even though American Embassy officials see the goateed General Khanh as a lightweight, Johnson has little choice but to give his official approval to the new regime, as he does to the nine successor governments and juntas that pass through Saigon in the next 19 months of political upheaval.
The communist insurgents ratchet up their war tactics with bold frontal attacks against formerly secure targets, taking immediate advantage of the disarray spreading in the South Vietnamese military as officers loyal to the previous regime are purged and as provincial officials are replaced.
In less than five years, the shadowy communist organization called the South Vietnam National Liberation Front expands from a handful of members to a position of America’s No. 1 shooting enemy, known as the Vietcong. It has grown to an estimated 300,000 active members. Occasional front supporters may number 4 to 5 million.
The widening war has many fronts, and with little or no cooperation from officials it is difficult for reporters to cover because we are barred for the time being from riding helicopters into battle areas. I settle on a practical if unorthodox approach. When I hear rumors of significant actions, I watch for the early morning airlifts of soldiers out of the Tan Son Nhut helicopter base and determine the general direction. I give chase in my Karmann Ghia automobile along the main highways as long as the helicopters are in view above me. I then take side roads to where I anticipate there is action. I keep trying until I see bodies of soldiers on the road and wounded being treated. My arrival in a white sports car invariably causes more incredulity than alarm, and I usually get the story.
My companion on these adventures is often our photographer Horst Faas, a beefy, amiable German with a steely determination to shoot the most explicit photos of the war. Horst often works alone.
On a late spring afternoon the door of our Saigon office bursts open and Horst comes in. His shirt and trousers are muddied, his hair ruffled. He explains that he’s been riding with a Vietnamese armored cavalry troop on the Plain of Reeds, a desolate place at the southern tip of the country dominated by the communists. An American adviser in Horst’s vehicle called in airstrikes on a village to prevent guerrillas escaping, causing civilian casualties.
Thirty minutes later, Horst comes out from our toilet that serves as his darkroom. He is holding a bunch of damp black-and-white prints. He lays them on a table with the comment, “It’s the worst I’ve seen in three wars.” They show horrible things, the civilian losses in sharp focus. In one photo, a farmer clasps his 2-year-old son in his arms, the child’s clothes burned off by napalm, his scorched skin hanging. In another photo, a peasant holds the body of a similarly disfigured child up to soldiers, who peer indifferently from the top of an armored personnel carrier. Other pictures are equally upsetting.
By chance we are being visited by the general manager and chief executive of The Associated Press, Wes Gallagher. It takes a lot to shock him, a veteran newsman chosen by the nation’s most important newspaper, television and radio owners to run AP, the cooperative that is the basic news provider to much of America. Although Horst’s pictures shock him, Gallagher allows us to distribute them, anyway.
But he tells me, “Every picture editor in America will want to know how such a thing could happen when American servicemen are involved.” He says we must present the context, noting that government officials in Washington may accuse us of bias. I write an accompanying story pointing out instances of communist atrocities and observing that with both sides building up their arsenals the war has entered a new phase of violence and brutality. Napalm, the jellied gasoline that spreads a wall of fire on exploding, is in routine use.
Gallagher has some important information for us. He senses from his contacts in Washington, D.C., that President Johnson is more likely than the slain President Kennedy was to send American combat troops to fight in South Vietnam. Accordingly, he is planning to beef up our bureau with more permanent staffers.
A distinguished reporter in World War II, Gallagher offers me some friendly advice for the future. “Get along with the generals and the top sergeants and be polite and you’ll do fine. It’s your personal demeanor they will judge you on, and not your stories.” I respect Gallagher’s opinions as much as I am impressed with his striking bearing. But as for his advice? Well, I’d tried that already in Saigon, and it didn’t work.
Gallagher is prescient. Lyndon Johnson does indeed commit American combat troops to South Vietnam, in March of 1965, when it becomes clear South Vietnam’s military forces are being defeated on the battlefield. With the arriving Marines and Army units comes a swarm of reporters and photographers from newspapers and television networks.
Also in the mix: an accompanying cadre of military officers and civilian officials intent on shaping the news coverage to the needs of the Johnson administration. In earlier wars, strict censorship on the battlefield molded the message to the home public. The Johnson administration, already meeting criticism at home about the fighting, is unwilling to admit that the commitment to Vietnam is as consequential as earlier conflicts.
Meanwhile, Gallagher declares a war of his own, criticizing political interference in reporting foreign wars. In a speech to a group of newspaper editors in 1965, he observes that government officials frequently cite what they call “the national interest” in trying to discourage the reporting of unpleasant news from Vietnam and other troubled areas. He asserts, “We are not a vehicle to serve ‘the national interest’ as defined by politicians, but to publish the truth as we see it.”
I am invariably polite to the arriving American officers and soldiers that I cover, as Gallagher has suggested, and I’m not a confrontational person, anyway. That is not being said about my reporting. The commanding officer of the U.S. Marine Corps, General Wallace Greene, flatly denies an exclusive story I write on Aug. 20, 1965, about a column of mechanized Marines badly mauled during the first amphibious landing of the war.
The mission of Supply Column 21 is to reinforce a Marine battalion farther inland, but the swampy paddy fields bog down three of the heavy armored vehicles. Concealed communist soldiers dressed in black pajama uniforms and camouflaged helmets rise out of hedges and swamps, close enough to lob hand grenades and fire anti-tank shells at the stranded Marines. The terraced paddy fields make maneuvering difficult for the two tracked vehicles still mobile, and when one is knocked out the survivors lock themselves in the remaining one. When I step off a rescue helicopter with photographer Tim Page we see American bodies half submerged in the swamps and badly wounded Marines desperate for medical attention. As we try to help, the survivors tell us their stories, of the death struggles of brave young men, of the fear of injury or capture as projectiles slam against the only shelter they have. I file my story that evening with my photographs. Newspapers play it big, some using many of the photos, because of the premonition of things to come.
Marine Corps spokesmen insist on the broader success of the mission, to secure territory to the south of the planned air base at Chu Lai. Officially, Supply Column 21’s travails never happened. General Greene’s criticism is so damaging that Gallagher invites him to a conference at AP headquarters in New York. He shows him all my pictures. He reads him my story. The general finally believes.
Months later the AP sends me a letter written by Corporal Frank Guilford of Philadelphia, one of the Marines I quoted. He writes that my story had worried his wife but that he was glad I had arrived at the scene and written my account “because American soldiers are not receiving enough credit for their sacrifice in Vietnam.”
My Marine story foretells the struggle American soldiers will have in the heavily populated rice farming regions in South Vietnam, where local communist guerrillas fight to defend their villages. I write a series of stories a few months later portending the greater struggle American forces would face against North Vietnamese regular troops in the border regions where 300-foot-high triple-canopy jungles and high mountains define the battlefields.
I see Neil Sheehan, formerly my UPI competitor and now with The New York Times, boarding a transport plane for Pleiku in the early hours of Nov. 15, 1965, at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport. We are heading for the same location, a remote battle scene hundreds of miles away in the mountains along the Cambodian border. We’ve heard the same sketchy reports that the first major battle between American troops and the North Vietnamese army is raging in a place called Ia Drang.
We hitch a jeep ride to the Pleiku base of the U.S. 1st Cavalry Division’s 3rd Brigade, and watch medical evacuation helicopters arriving with wounded soldiers. We ride back with one of them to the pickup point, a cramped landing zone called X-Ray hidden among the trees in the Ia Drang valley. We see organized mayhem. Wounded are being carried on stretches to our helicopter. We hear shouts of “incoming” as shells explode nearby. I see Joe Galloway, a reporter from UPI running toward the chopper we have just left. He throws a thumbs-up as he clambers aboard and heads off to file his exclusive stories of the first day’s battle.
There is still plenty for Sheehan and me to see. I find Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore, the commander of the embattled unit, the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment, squatting beside a tree and barking orders into his phone. He confirms that the communist attack is continuing, and he’s identified the North Vietnamese 304th Infantry Division as one of the enemy units. He worries that one of his infantry companies is missing behind enemy lines. He’s calling for more ammunition. He doesn’t have much time to talk with me, but he’s already said enough. I join a patrol probing enemy positions through the tree lines to the west. I interview wounded soldiers waiting for rescue. By late afternoon I leave to file my story from a communication center at Pleiku and return in the morning with photographer Rick Merron.
The stubborn bravery of the cavalrymen at landing zone X-Ray was well worthy of acclaim, and the American high command quickly proclaimed it a great victory. But more was to come. On Nov. 17, the North Vietnamese ambushed and overran a marching column of the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry in the same area. Of the 500 Americans in the column, 150 were killed, 50 wounded and only 84 could be immediately returned to action. My colleague Merron interviewed the survivors, who told harrowing tales of the brutal slaughter, with the hidden enemy jumping down from trees to attack, and soldiers fleeing in panic.
The commander of American Forces in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, preferred the narrative of glorious victory to any suggestion of defeat. He phoned our bureau chief, Edwin White, and demanded that we stop interviewing “ordinary soldiers in battle because they are not in a position to see the big picture and may be emotionally affected by the action.” White tells me to ignore the call. Westmoreland did not have a veto power on what we wrote. To me, the point of view of the ordinary soldier was the key to many of my best stories.
Back home in Saigon, the phone beside my bed is ringing in the half light of dawn. The night man in our office is calling. He has a message for me from New York. I’ve won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. That makes three for the AP in three years. Malcolm Browne shared the prize with The New York Times’s David Halberstam in 1964; Horst Faas won for photography in 1965, now me in 1966.
My wife, Nina, is awake and questioning. Our son, Andrew, 18 months old, starts bawling. I tell her the news and we hug. I’d married Nina two years earlier after meeting her when she returned to her native Vietnam from a two-year postgraduate course in library science at the University of North Carolina. It was love at first sight for me. Nina puts up with my dangerous professional life, aware that journalists are being killed in combat, including Huynh Thanh My, a talented young Vietnamese AP photographer newly married with a baby on the way, who was killed the previous summer.
Nina understands what it’s all about. Her family fled south to Saigon from the communists in 1955. Her brother-in-law is an officer in the South Vietnamese army. I’ve convinced her journalists have a necessary role to play in telling the truth about war, no matter the risk.
I leave my apartment and walk on clouds down Rue Pasteur to our new office. On the way, I’m stopped by the brilliant New York Times correspondent Charles Mohr, who I suspect was also entered in the Pulitzer Prize contest. He shakes my hand and offers to buy me lunch.
Nina and I fly to New York to attend the 50th anniversary celebration of the Pulitzer Prize in the grand ballroom at the Plaza Hotel. We are on the stage with the year’s other winners, and I look out to the sparkling black-tie audience filled with as many Pulitzer winners in all categories as the organizers had been able to round up. Afterward, I pose for a photograph with the legendary AP winners from two previous wars. I am the new kid on the block.
Wes Gallagher pulls me aside to tell me that President Johnson has been complaining about my reporting, bringing it up to newspaper editors invited to visit the White House. He says he met with the president. I try to imagine the standoff between the most powerful man in America and one of the most influential news executives. They are matched physically, with maybe an advantage for Gallagher with his menacing bushy black eyebrows shading piercing gray eyes. Gallagher tells me the conversation.
“Mr. President, I understand you have been critical of some of AP’s stories from Vietnam?”
“Oh, no,” the president replies, patting Gallagher on the back.
Gallagher: “Well, I just wanted you to know, Mr. President, that the AP is not against you or for you.”
The president: “That’s not quite the way I like it.”
Gallagher pulls me closer. “I want you to keep doing what you’re doing, Peter,” he says. “But I have a warning. Stick to the facts and the truth at all times. If you make a mistake, even a little one, I can’t protect you.”
A U.S. civilian pilot in the aircraft doorway tries to maintain order as panicking South Vietnamese civilians scramble to get aboard during evacuation of Nha Trang, Apr. 1, 1975. Thousands of civilians and South Vietnamese soldiers fought for space on the aircraft to Saigon as communist forces advanced following the fall of Qui Nhon, to the north.(AP Photo)
South Vietnamese Marines leap in panic aboard a cutter from an LST in Danang Harbor in Da Nang, Vietnam, Apr. 1, 1975, as they are evacuated from the city. (AP Photo)
Vietnamese boat people try to escape from Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, to a U.S. Navy ship, Feb. 8, 1975. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
U.S. Navy personnel aboard the USS Blue Ridge push a helicopter into the sea off the coast of Vietnam in order to make room for more evacuation flights from Saigon, Apr. 29, 1975. (AP Photo)
Mobs of Vietnamese people scale the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon trying to get to the helicopter pickup zone, just before the end of the Vietnam War on Apr. 29, 1975. (AP Photo/Neal Ulevich)
Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, burns himself to death on a Saigon street Jun. 11, 1963, to protest alleged persecution of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government. (AP Photo/Malcolm Browne)
New York Times reporter David Halberstam, center in glasses, defends bloodied Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, far left, as plainclothes Saigon police agents beat several members of the Western press corps in a Saigon alleyway, Jul. 7, 1963. (AP Photo/Malcolm Browne)