HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — A band of media veterans of the Vietnam War returned to old Saigon for their fourth reunion since the conflict ended 35 years ago, mixing nostalgia and war stories with sightseeing in the fast-modernizing city that now boasts a host of top designer boutiques like Cartier and Armani.
Many had silver hair and new wrinkles. A few walked with canes, but despite the passing years the curiosity and enthusiasm of the former reporters, photographers and TV correspondents was undiminished.
The reunion was tied to the April 30 anniversary of the fall of old Saigon in 1975 and began two days earlier with cocktails and dinner on the roof of the Majestic Hotel. Carl Robinson, who worked for AP during the war and organized the reunion with his wife Kim-Dung, said 70 people attended, including spouses, partners and guests.
At dinner, there was a toast to “absent friends,” a list that grows longer as the years pass.
This year, the media veterans paid special tribute to Dutch photographer Hugh Van Es who took the most famous image of the fall of Saigon — a group of people scaling a ladder to a CIA helicopter on a rooftop — and died in May 2009. They also toasted AP’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Horst Faas, who helped organize the 20th, 25th and 30th reunions but was unable to travel to this one on doctor’s orders.
Day 2 began with a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels which the Viet Cong dug to smuggle people and goods in from North Vietnam. Not too many of the “Old Hacks” slithered through the tunnels, which are truly claustrophobic not to mention the wear and tear on aging knees and hips. But they remain a visible reminder of the tenacity of the opponents of the United States and the South Vietnamese governments, and the hardships they were willing to endure.
There was a race to get back to Ho Chi Minh City through awful traffic to get to the Caravelle Hotel in time for a truly memorable evening featuring an exhibition of war photos, many provided by AP photographer Neal Ulevich. His display of headshots of many members of the Saigon press corps had the media veterans standing around trying to guess who those young faces were.
For the first time, the reunion participants were trailed by a group of young Vietnamese journalists. And for the first time, the Vietnamese government officially acknowledged our presence, inviting some of us to sit in the official reviewing stand at the April 30 Reunification Day Parade and hosting a dinner on May 1 with half a dozen media veterans who covered the war from the other side.
The reunion officially ended with a luncheon cruise along the Saigon River after the parade, past fast-rising modern apartment buildings and some dense foliage where the Viet Cong used to hide, and a farewell dinner at Maxim’s Restaurant.
But the post-reunion dinner on May Day at a restaurant and art gallery on the river hosted by the Vietnamese government proved truly memorable because of the opportunity to meet our media counterparts from the North including Xuan Phuong, a former correspondent and producer with Vietnamese Television who worked clandestinely in the war that ousted the French colonialists in 1954 and then in what she called “the American war.” She recalled staying underground at night in the late 1960s and early 1970s and coming up during the day to film.
Now 81 years old, Xuan owns an art gallery and runs an organization promoting art. As a sign of the change in U.S.-Vietnamese relations, she proudly told me that her grandson studied at the University of California at San Diego and was now attending New York University.
Journalists from both sides are “now in the same circle,” Xuan said. “The past is away. Now we can raise a glass and say ‘cheers’ together.”
For the Western media veterans, lots of glasses were hoisted, and lots of war stories recounted. There was even a celebrity guest, actor George Hamilton, a close friend of war photographer Sean Flynn — son of Hollywood star Errol Flynn — who went missing in Cambodia in 1970.
Hamilton and former UPI reporter Perry Deane Young, also a friend of Flynn’s, came to Ho Chi Minh City from Cambodia where they attended a reunion of war correspondents and a memorial tribute to the dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen who died covering the five-year conflict there, which ended in 1975 with the takeover by the brutal Khmer Rouge.
The “Old Hacks” were prime story material for the young Vietnamese journalists, starting with a feature on Carl and Kim Dung’s love story, interviews with Pulitzer Prize winners Peter Arnett and Nick Ut, and a feature on AP’s Edie Lederer, the only female war correspondent at the reunion. The most moving story was a front-page piece on the visit by Russell Burrows and his family to the now grown-up girl on crutches whom his late father, Larry Burrows, had photographed during the war.
“I think it’s important psychologically to come back,” Robinson said. “It’s just an amazing place. This reunion has been more magical, and you just want to keep doing it.”
Former ABC-TV correspondent Don North called the media veterans of Vietnam “one of the most exclusive clubs in the world” because members covered a story “that was the defining event of our generation.”
“Being a reporter in Vietnam was probably the best thing I will do in this life,” he said.
Simon Dring, who worked for Reuters, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and the BBC, said returning was “a bit of a trip down memory lane.”
“There’s got to be a little nostalgia. But we have to keep looking forward,” he said. “It gives you a chance to look at Vietnam through new eyes, not just through memories of the ’60s.”
For Al Rockoff, who was a soldier in Vietnam and Cambodia and returned as a freelance photographer, the reunion was a good time “to reconnect with people you don’t see so often.”
Former Time magazine photographer Tim Page echoed Rockoff, saying “I think we come back because of our friends, more than the war itself. I’m an obsessive. Vietnam’s my second home, or is it Cambodia that’s my second home? I don’t know.”
Will there be another reunion?
“There was talk that this was the last reunion,” Arnett said. “Rubbish! They’re still doing D-Day reunions and that took place 30 years before the fall of Saigon . I will come as long as I’m still alive.”