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IN 1973, the AP sends me back to Saigon from New York, where I have moved with my family after years of covering the war. I’m to write about how South Vietnam can survive alone without American troops and with cuts in Congressional funding. The attention of the American public and the government is centered on the Watergate scandal swamping President Nixon. Internationally, the Middle East shuttle diplomacy of Henry Kissinger is in the news. The Vietnam story, our new foreign editor, Nate Polowetzky, tells me, has moved to the back pages of America’s newspapers, “amidst the truss ads,” and he hopes I can stir up some editorial interest.
I take my wife, Nina, and our children, Elsa and Andrew, with me, to where they were born and where their relatives live in the shadow of an uncertain future. Saigon itself seems unwilling to face up to the consequences of a decade of inconclusive war and an ambivalent peace agreement. The morning traffic quietens for early afternoon siesta time, speeding up in the evening when the restaurants and nightclubs flourish. I get a first impression that an Indian summer has arrived in South Vietnam, a false peace like the one I read about in the 1930s in Europe that preceded World War II.
Deciding to take advantage of it, I rent a serviceable Chevy van and driver, borrow an interpreter from the AP bureau and head up national Route 1 as far as I can go. I take my 9-year-old son, Andrew along, so he can see where his dad spent much of the previous 10 years covering the war. Over the next two weeks, I interview Vietnamese provincial government officials, visit regional military headquarters and combat bases, and talk with local people. Andrew enjoys playing in the roadside dumpsites among the abandoned battle tanks and artillery pieces, and he shoots down imaginary enemy planes from rusting anti-aircraft guns.
We reach the old imperial capital of Hue, where white-flannelled tennis players are competing in the Northern Provincial Invitation Meet at the local Cercle Sportif club. Just 40 miles north up Route 1, opposite the ruins of Quang Tri city on the banks of the Thach Han River, I see a tent city, a forward command post of the enemy, flying clusters of Communist flags.
After traveling to other parts of the country, I begin to see that the communists are establishing a “third Vietnam” of interconnecting highways and embryonic towns in the third of the country that fell to them in North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive the previous year. It stretches 600 miles inside South Vietnam, from the 17th parallel border in the north to the Seven Mountains near the Gulf of Thailand to the south. The sites of battles I had covered in the Central Highlands and the northern border during the war are now in the enemy’s hands: Khe Sanh, the Ia Drang Valley, Dak To, firebases Duc Co and Kate, the Rockpile, and many others.
My analyses appear in the Asian editions of the Stars and Stripes military newspaper still available in Saigon, and displease Vietnamese officials including the information minister, Hoang Duc Nha, who calls me to his office for a dressing-down. Nha takes exception to a quote in my stories from Colonel Vo Toan, a regimental commander in the 1st Infantry Division at Hue. The quote: “If a major communist offensive begins I’ll be pushed away from the western defenses of Hue and into the city within 48 hours if the U.S. doesn’t send in B-52s, and I want everything else, F-4s, A-1s, the whole lot.” He is referring to the most effective ground support aircraft in America’s arsenal.
Nha is also uncomfortable with my quote from a longtime U.S. Embassy acquaintance in Saigon, Frank Scotton, well known for his insights on the war, who tells me the United States is not trying to win in Vietnam anymore, nor prevent the inevitable communist takeover. “Anti-communist Vietnam today is like ice in a river. You can walk across the ice right now, you can spin stones across it, but the river underneath is flowing swiftly and melting the ice,” Scotton says.
Nha scoffs. “You listen to people who don’t see the big picture,” he tells me. “We are confident we will survive.” Not known publicly at the time, and revealed during the South’s last desperate days in April 1975, was the reason for the Saigon government’s confidence. It arises from South Vietnam’s bitter opposition to the Paris peace agreement’s permitting North Vietnam to leave many of its combat units in the south. President Nixon, impatient to have President Thieu sign the agreement, applies pressure. Nha recalls in an interview for this book that Nixon writes “many letters” to Thieu, including one that threatens, “If you don’t sign it we will go it alone.”
Nha tells me after the war, “This was when we became pragmatic. We’re not dumb enough to stand in front of a steamroller. If we don’t agree, we’ll have to get out, and then someone else will become president. But we still love our country, we can still do something. We can ride on the steamroller not under it.” The threat is cushioned by Nixon reminding Thieu of the $1 billion shipment of military hardware the he’d rushed to Saigon a month or so earlier. Nixon also makes a commitment to have American military forces re-enter the war if the North Vietnamese launch an overwhelming invasion.
Nha’s comments are confirmed in an interview I have with Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker after the war, who tells me, “Thieu received assurances which I gave him personally, written assurances from the president, that in case of a violation of the Paris Agreement by the other side we would come to their [South Vietnam’s] assistance. As a result of these commitments, the South Vietnamese signed the Paris Agreement.”
By mid-1973 the U.S. Congress is asserting a role in the war. The War Powers Act of 1973 becomes law despite Nixon’s veto, the legislation imposing restrictions on the executive branch and requiring consultation with Congress on future war actions.
Congress also orders the bombing of Cambodia to end on Aug. 15. I travel to Phnom Penh from Saigon to cover the story, and drive with colleagues 20 or so miles into the countryside. We walk through tangled underbrush to a grassy patch on the southern bank of the Mekong River, and wait. Early afternoon we hear the planes before we see them, two U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom jets flying out of a base in Thailand. As they dive toward the village, we see far across the broad river, the sun glinting on silver wings. We see flames and smoke arise from the village, but the aircraft are already climbing and on their way before we hear the bursting bombs. I’d seen a lot of American airstrikes and I would see a lot more in the future. But this is the last I’ll see launched in Southeast Asia in the 20th century. In Saigon, Hoang Duc Nha is alarmed by the news. “To us it was a signal. I tell my president, ‘Hey, this is the beginning. Put it together with Nixon’s Watergate crisis and the unsympathetic view of Congress toward us. We have to be worried.’” Thieu assures him he has confidence in the future.
Nha, who spent much time in the United States in the 1960s, senses America has lost desire to worry about Vietnam. Through 1974, as bloody skirmishes increase in the countryside between the opposing forces, Nha says he counsels his colleagues on the National Security Council to rethink the strategy of trying to hold provinces from the north to the south. Better to consolidate in a more defensible position. They see him as a Cassandra, a persistent bearer of bad news. Thieu moves him out of the government, but remains his friend. Looking back, Nha says, “Our top officials saw America as the big brother riding the B-52s to save us, the little brother.”
President Gerald Ford assumes the presidency in August 1974, after the resignation of Nixon. The communists launch an offensive against the important province of Phuoc Long north of Saigon to test America’s intentions. By Jan. 7 the provincial capital of Phuoc Binh has fallen after three weeks of fighting, with the South Vietnamese defenders, by accounts, acquitting themselves well. Ford’s response, the resumption of reconnaissance flights over the north, prompts President Thieu to complain to friends, “He sends doves, not B-52s.”
Ambassador Graham Martin flies back to the United States to try to explain to Congress the gravity of the situation. He runs into another visitor, Tran Van Lam, the president of the South Vietnamese Senate, who is not well received by the Congress. The senator returns to Saigon and tells President Thieu not only was it highly unlikely there would be any supplemental aid, it was unlikely they would receive any aid at all in the next fiscal year, beginning in June.
Graham Martin worries that Thieu’s stubborn confidence will crack. “If you try to stiffen someone’s back by giving them assurances you yourself do not believe, you are getting nowhere,” Martin tells me. He explains to Thieu the deterioration of the climate in the United States, trying to be as realistic as possible. But he sees that the Vietnamese leader still has not lost faith in a last-minute American rescue of South Vietnam with its air force armada.
In an interview in London after the war for a television documentary I was working on, Thieu remembers thinking, “The United States had kept 300,000 troops in Europe for 30 years after the war, had kept 30,000 troops in Korea for 20 years after that war. And now we had let all American troops withdraw. We just asked for help to fight the war. Instead of maintaining half a million troops in Vietnam it would be 20 times less expensive for the American people. What more could they ask from a small nation?”