7
BY THE FALL OF 1967, the hope of quick American military success in South Vietnam “has died along with the nearly 13,000 Americans soldiers already killed.” The observation is from an AP analysis I write about the growing stalemate on the battlefield. It can be broken, I argue, only by bringing in more American troops or by revitalizing the dispirited South Vietnamese army. The 400,000 American soldiers already in combat “could be tied down for a decade just holding the lid on communist forces now active all over the country.”
The Associated Press looks to me, by now its longest-serving reporter in Vietnam, to write such assessments of the war. The American military high command often disagrees with them, as it does in this case. Not for the first time, I’m called in by Barry Zorthian, the normally affable former U.S. Marine colonel sent to Saigon in 1965 by President Johnson to manage press relations. He says his superiors in Washington are not happy with my latest story. “Damn it, Peter,” Zorthian says, thumping his fist on his desk. “You write these analyses without including our side of the story. That’s unfair.”
I remind him that his side of the story is given every afternoon in the official Saigon press briefings, regularly attended by other AP staffers, and is sometimes useful but more often not, justifying the sobriquet given by the attendees, “The Five O’clock Follies.” And there are the well-covered press conferences hosted by Defense Department, State Department and White House officials in Washington, invariably optimistic about Vietnam. I tell Zorthian my stories are fed into the mix along with all the others, and it’s just too bad he’s held accountable for the most critical of them. “Well, we don’t like what you do,” he says.
In April 1966, I have a run-in with Zorthian over what I see as unnecessary roughness by an American military policeman during a Buddhist protest demonstration in Saigon directed against the policies of Prime Minister Nguyen Cao Ky. Stones are flying and voices raised as the protesters square off against Saigon police near an important pagoda. A nervous American MP emerges from the ranks and demands that I and several other western reporters leave the scene. I assert that he doesn’t have authority over us, a view backed up by my colleagues including Bob Schieffer, at that time reporting for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The MP draws his .45, waves it around, and then points it directly at me as I continue to protest his commands. The tension is worsened by photographer Eddie Adams, an AP colleague sometimes prone to mischief, who starts calling out loudly, “Shoot him. Shoot him. It’ll make a better picture.” The MP is looking increasingly rattled. He backs off and we continue covering the story.
Eddie got a dramatic picture of the MP in action against us. The next morning, I go to Zorthian’s office to complain. He says he’s already heard from the State Department and that Secretary Dean Rusk saw the picture in The Washington Post and ordered that such things not happen again. Zorthian says his office is considering laying charges against me, anyway.
“What’s the charge?” I ask in surprise.
His lips curl. “Assault against a peace officer with a deadly weapon.”
“What deadly weapon?” I demand.
He responds with bemusement, “A pen and pencil.”
My news coverage of the war depends not on the usual press briefings and insider background sessions with top officials. I rely on the generosity and the collaboration of Americans in the field who have read my stories over the years and trust me. I spend much of my time with combat units, chronicling the endeavors of the officers and ordinary soldiers sent to do battle in an environment uniquely hostile to the American military experience, and against an implacable, always threatening enemy.
I also visit civilian officials in the beleaguered provincial towns where they direct American aid programs and have valuable insights into the local people. The best is John Paul Vann, the gutsy former lieutenant colonel I first met in 1962 when he was a military adviser in the Mekong Delta. He was let go by the Defense Department, partly for his critical outbursts to me and other reporters over South Vietnamese military incompetence in the battle of Ap Bac in January 1963, the first major action of the war. Before he left the Army, though, he submitted a blistering critique of the Pentagon’s assistance program, calling its claims of success “a bright shining lie.” The phrase became the title of Neil Sheehan’s Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Vann, published in 1988.
When Vann returns to Vietnam early in 1965 as the senior civilian adviser in Hau Nghia province, I get in touch and he offers to drive me around his domain. Positioned to the west of Saigon, his province is one of the most insecure places in the region. Vann runs a pacification program that tries to unite all government security efforts. He picks me up in his jeep at a small Italian-style eatery near our office run by a young Vietnamese woman who affectionately bids him farewell. Vann is bursting with energy, his narrow face burned by the sun, his hair crew cut, his accent decidedly Texan.
Vann says he is happy to be back even as a civilian, and we clear Saigon’s suburbs and head into what American military personnel are beginning to call “the boonies.” I see a few old French concrete outposts along the highway, manned by local militiamen who, Vann says, rarely go outside because communist guerrillas are everywhere. We turn into a narrow roadway and pass abandoned paddy fields and flattened farmhouses. Vann reaches into the glove compartment and hands me three or four M26 fragmentation hand grenades. I hold them carefully in my lap. “If we hit a roadblock that I don’t recognize, throw a hand grenade or pass one to me and I’ll do it,” he says breezily. “I’m the big man around here.”
We arrive at his headquarters, a decrepit former post office in a desolate town that was vacated for a year or so before the government set up authority again. Vann is a great source for a reporter to have. He believes strongly in the mission to maintain an independent South Vietnam, but he disagrees with the massive military buildup and the use of overwhelming firepower to win the war. He’s an expert in military tactics and also tuned in to the intricacies of Vietnamese politics. He works tirelessly to turn American attention toward rebuilding the South Vietnamese military and government rather than continuing all-out war. He believes in the tired phrase “winning the hearts and minds of the people,” and begins attracting converts to his views. One of them is Daniel Ellsberg, the former Robert McNamara whiz kid who becomes his friend. They plot to try to persuade the secretary of defense to change destructive military policies. Within a year, Vann is chief of the pacification effort in 12 provinces. He’s willing to brief me anytime I’m interested. There is a condition. “Don’t ever quote me,” he says. “Remember what happened the last time.”
I never know in advance what will trigger an irate pushback from the military. I write an unflattering assessment of General Westmoreland for the papers of Jan. 27, pointing out that in the three years he has been in Vietnam the war has changed dramatically, that it is 58 times more costly per day, and that American casualties have increased fiftyfold. I quote critics who complain the four-star general has displayed a ruthless ambition, shoring up his base of power by calling for more and more troop deployments when his job had originally been to build up Vietnamese capability to fight their own war. There is no pushback. Then comes the tennis story.
A visiting AP staffer, Kelly Smith, on a break from her coverage of the White House, is offered a “Day with Westmoreland” story by the general’s PR people. Our charming visitor makes the most of it, a breakfast-to-dinner marathon with the trusting general. Some editor in New York suggests we compare the general’s day to a typical American combat soldier’s experience. On the morning that Kelly is watching Westmoreland shave in the bathroom of his comfortable downtown Saigon home, I am awakening in the midst of an unshaven grunt company from the U.S. 25th Division in the boonies west of Saigon. By evening, after a day of sniper fire has wounded several soldiers, I close my notebook, climb on a medical evacuation helicopter and head home.
Kelly and I compare notes and sit down to write a long feature for Sunday newspapers. Our narrative includes the information that as helicopters are preparing to ferry out wounded from my unit in my day, in Kelly’s day Westmoreland is settling into his late-morning workout with his tennis pro at the Cercle Sportif, the former French country club in Saigon. The Saigon high command gets its hands on an advance copy of our story and demands a revision, insisting that the general’s tennis game is no one’s business but his own. We leave it to AP editors to decide. The tennis stays put.
Two weeks later, I’m waiting with other reporters at an official welcoming ceremony at the U.S. 9th Infantry Division base at My Tho for visiting Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Westmoreland is standing in front of me. He turns, scowling. “Well, you’ll be happy to know that I’ve resigned my membership of the Cercle Sportif,” he says. I express surprise and mention that just the previous week, at my wife Nina’s suggestion, I’d joined the club so that my young son can go swimming. “Well,” the general grunted, “maybe they gave you my membership.”
Westmoreland travels to Washington in November at the request of President Johnson, who is eager to quiet public anxieties about his Vietnam policies. In interviews and press conferences, the general expresses confidence that the war will soon be concluded, that he sees “the light at the end of the tunnel.” Even as he reassures officials in Washington that all is well and that the communist forces are on the run, North Vietnamese military planners are launching the first of a series of major assaults that within three months will test the resolve of the United States to the breaking point, bring down a president and place the future of South Vietnam in grave doubt.
The enemy picks the time and place for the first battles, the remote valley of Dak To, tucked between two mountain massifs near the Cambodia-Laos border. I fly in an Air Force transport plane packed with combat reinforcements to Pleiku, and hitch an onward ride in an army helicopter to Dak To, landing near a press camp prepared by the 1st Cavalry Division. I throw my pack into a large tent lined with canvas bunks and woolen blankets. The outdoor privies are starting to smell. I join an AP reporting team already assembled there. It is mid-November. By this time, American spokesmen are estimating that 12,000 communist troops have been steadily digging bunkers and protective tunnels in the surrounding mountains, the largest enemy concentration in the whole war so far. I watch with awe as the skyline erupts all around me with fiery red explosions and purple, yellow and white smoke from artillery barrages and airstrikes. America is throwing everything at the mountains. Some colleagues are reporting that the communists have walked into a trap and will be pulverized by American firepower. Maybe it’s the other way around, in the view of a few.
This time I’m not interested in the big picture because we learn there is concern about the fate of three paratrooper companies from the 2nd Battalion of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. We’re told they’re outflanked to the west and the east near the crest of Hill 875, a pointed knob of triple-canopy jungle and scrub poking up from the valley floor. The brigade is immediately sending a relief mission of three paratrooper companies from the 4th Battalion. They’ll be moving on foot through the jungle, and three journalists from our number are invited to go. We are warned it is extremely dangerous, much of the trip will be at night, and that we will be offered no special consideration. I pull rank by asserting that I’m the senior reporter there, and working for the world’s biggest news organization. I get to go.
The next 36 hours are the most dangerous in my life. There are 500 of us in the relief party, at the beginning slogging up a ridgeline overgrown with thick bamboo trees and low underbrush. By afternoon the landscape changes into high forest with towering teak and mahogany trees. At dusk, we are still two miles from ascending Hill 875. As darkness falls we move single file, holding hands along a narrow trail to avoid getting lost. The enemy knows we are coming, and hidden gunners occasionally open up with antitank guns. The shells tear over our heads and explode in the trees around us with balls of fire. We scatter until it’s over, and then move on.
By midevening we are on the slopes of Hill 875 and use hanging vines to help pull ourselves up. In the moonlight we see shapes of dead bodies, and a soldier near me yells out, “We’ve killed a lot of gooks,” until we approach closer and see they are the bodies of dead Americans wearing only their skivvies—their uniforms, boots and weapons carried off by the enemy. Near the crest we come upon the main group, and gasp at what we find. Mounds of dead paratroops lie spread-eagled where they have fallen. Behind pitiful barricades of tree branches hide the wounded.
I find an open patch of dirt and borrow a soldier’s entrenching tool and start digging a shallow foxhole to spend the night. But the metal strikes at human flesh, a body buried there by a bomb explosion earlier in the day. I recoil in horror and step back on something soft and find it is a detached arm from another corpse. I look about me in the moonlight and feel ill. I have been proud of a certain professional detachment, but now I feel ashamed of my neutrality, useless with my notebooks and cameras and water bottles. I don’t even carry a gun, so I am just one more liability for the surviving defenders.
But I can write their story. Following a somber day of interviews and self-reflection, I leave on a medical evacuation helicopter. At the Dak To airstrip I sleep under the wing of a transport plane scheduled to leave at dawn for the coastal base of Qui Nhon. When we land I run to the communication shack and plead with a technician to help me. On the phone, he gets my pal Ed White, who is manning the day desk in Saigon. I type furiously, then hand the technician the first long paragraph:
War painted the living and the dead the same gray color on Hill 875. The only way to tell who was alive and who was dead amongst the exhausted men was to watch when the enemy mortars came crashing in. The living rushed unashamedly to the tiny bunkers dug into the red clay of the hilltop. The wounded squirmed toward the shelter of trees that had been blasted to the ground. Only the dead didn’t move, propped up in the bunkers where they had died in direct mortar hits, or face down in the dust where they had fallen to bullets.
Within an hour Ed White has the whole story. He quickly sends it on its way via telex to AP New York, and thence to America’s newspapers, whose editors will decide if the fate of those on Hill 875 merits the attention of an anxious country. I’m sure of one thing: Barry Zorthian’s superiors in Washington won’t be pleased.
Ten weeks later, firecrackers pop and paper dragons dance from their strings. The year of the dragon is here. It is Tet 1968, the Vietnamese New Year, a time to celebrate for the war-weary people of Saigon, me and my family among them. Something is wrong, though, as I try to sleep. The fireworks’ crack seems much more intense than usual, more like the snap of passing bullets. Passing bullets? I spring wide-awake at a sound I do recognize, that of a 50-caliber machine gun firing nervous bursts.
I open my balcony door overlooking Rue Pasteur in the heart of Saigon. I see it’s a nervous sentry at the entrance to the old Gia Long Palace across the street. Then the phone rings. It’s Ed White. “Hey man, they’re here, the communists, all over the city. Get your butt down to the bureau.” I push my wife and two children into our thick-walled bathroom and toss in a mattress for extra protection.
I walk quickly to our bureau three blocks away and try not to appear excited. No point in being mistaken for an enemy combatant. I hear heavy gunfire now, from the presidential palace four blocks to the east, from the U.S. Embassy a similar distance to the northeast. I soon learn that the communist guerrillas are emerging from their exile in the swamps and jungles to invade South Vietnam’s cities and towns in an attempt to force America to change its war policies. Forty targets of significance are hit hard across the country.
Complete surprise, that’s what John Paul Vann tells me at his Bien Hoa headquarters later in the day. Only once before in Vietnam’s history of frequent violent conflict has the sanctity of Tet been so blatantly violated. In the late 18th century, General Nguyen Hue stole upon a Chinese garrison holding Hanoi that was lulled into believing that Tet meant truce. The unsuspecting Chinese were annihilated.
I fly with a few news colleagues on a government-organized trip to the provincial capital of Ben Tre in the central Mekong Delta, which we hear was the subject of a repulsed communist attack. I had been there before and while the others are loading into a bus for a visit to downtown, I hitch a ride with Major Chester L. Brown, an Air Force officer who had flown me around in his tiny L-19 spotter plane on my previous visit. He warns I will be shocked at what I see, that Ben Tre is in ruins, and that many people have died.
“It is always a pity about the civilians,” he says. “In the mass confusion of this kind of thing, the people don’t know where the lines are, they don’t know where to hide, and some of the weapons we were using were area weapons instead of against specific targets, and that way people get hurt.”
He drops me off at the American military advisory compound; it and the governor’s headquarters look like the only places undamaged. I bring up Major Brown’s remarks with an Army major I had met before. He thinks about it for a minute and mentions that when the town seemed about to be overrun by communist attackers, he ordered in the heavy firepower. “We had to destroy the town in order to save it,” he says.
By the time the bloody battles of Tet 1968 are over, the authorities report that 3,000 South Vietnamese and American soldiers have been killed, along with 8,000 civilians. Some 40,000 communist soldiers are claimed killed, if true virtually wiping out the local communist guerrilla organizations. Westmoreland claims a major victory, maybe true enough if Vietnam’s war is based solely on a high attrition rate, the ratio of our dead to theirs. But the war has become a political struggle, and much of the American public turns against it for two main reasons, the steady diet of optimism fed to it by the Johnson administration that is so dramatically challenged by the Tet attacks, and Westmoreland’s request for another 206,000 American soldiers even as he declares a mighty victory.
President Johnson has his back to the wall. He is still unforgiving of critical news stories and distressing photographs that in previous wars would have been stopped by the censorship he was politically afraid of implementing in this war. He calls the AP personnel chief, Keith Fuller, to the White House. Fellow Texans, they chat over a lunch of hamburgers in the Oval Office. The president tells Fuller he decided to pull his information specialist Barry Zorthian out of Saigon, “because he has been there too long.” Then, as Fuller later tells me, Johnson asks, “Now hasn’t that Australian Pete Arnett been there too long, too?”
The president decides in March 1968 that he’s through with the Vietnam War. His popularity is crashing. There are the strong showings by competing Democratic politicians in the presidential primaries. He stuns the nation by announcing he won’t run for a second term, and calls for negotiations with the North Vietnamese.
Westmoreland will soon leave, a rotation determined months before but interpreted by many as a rebuke for the Tet Offensive surprise. He becomes chief of staff of the army, a prestigious appointment, but he finds it difficult to shake off the growing controversies over the war. After he retires, in 1973, he agrees to let me accompany him and his son, Rip, for a few days for a story as they drive around South Carolina, seeking votes for his candidacy in the Republican primary contest for the governorship. I note that Westmoreland is a man who, in his bemedaled army dress uniform and manly bearing, has become as familiar to Americans as any other person, but in his civilian clothes, pushing open a door at McDonald’s looking for votes, he is not recognized. Westmoreland is good-humored about it all, and after he loses sends me a note of thanks for my tongue-in-cheek story about his campaign.
The general also agrees to a two-day television interview I conduct with him for a Canadian documentary on Vietnam, and I see him at a few of the military-media conferences on war reporting being held around the country at that time. I have a final meeting, a year or so before his death in 2005, when I’m in Charleston, South Carolina, speaking at a charity event organized by an acquaintance, John Winship. He suggests I visit his friend, and I agree. We drive to Westmoreland’s home at an upscale retirement community in a suburban neighborhood. We’re met at the door by his wife, Kitsy, and she chats for a moment about a meeting we had in Saigon early in the war. Her husband sits in the bright sunlight of a room with a wall full of windows, white haired now and frail looking. He nods to me, squinting a little, seeing a familiar face from a long-ago war that is fading slowly from memory. I thank him for phoning his old friend Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, in 1991, praising my live coverage of the Gulf War from Baghdad, even though he’d also expressed reservations about what I’d done in Saigon.
“Peter,” he says, “I think your reporting from Vietnam was OK. But I’ll never forgive you for that tennis story.”