To mark the OPC’s 75th anniversary, Dateline magazine has assembled a look-back through the decades with some of the best foreign correspondents and photographers in the business who have sent us their memories of the biggest stories of their respective eras. We’ve broken it down by decade: 1940s | 1950s | 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010-2013
Many of us who covered the Vietnam War found ourselves forever in the grip of Vietnam. No other story, no other war, quite measured up. The exotic charm and dangerous undercurrents of Saigon were seductive, the adrenalin-rush of survival, intoxicating. We hitchhiked around the country on military helicopters and roamed the battlefields without censorship. Seventy-three of our colleagues were killed in South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, yet, because we were young and often inexperienced in the unforgiving ways of war, we all, I think, expected to one day leave Vietnam safely and return home to the relative calmness of newsrooms and studios.
But the burden of Vietnam lingered for years in the American psyche, and journalists and others were left to ponder and debate what the lessons of Vietnam were. Perhaps Lawrence of Arabia gave us the best answer when he once said, speaking of another war, “Better to let them do it imperfectly, than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their war, and your time is short.” The quotation, framed, was found hanging on an office wall of the abandoned U.S. Embassy in 1975.
“The awful, awful tragedy of Vietnam is that it was an absolutely useless, futile, avoidable war,” the late Stanley Karnow, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of “Vietnam: A History,” said to me a few years ago. “Ho Chi Minh had a very narrow objective—to unify Vietnam. He wasn’t out to change the world or take over West Virginia.”
I covered the war for UPI from 1968-70 and when I returned to Vietnam in 1997 to take up residency in Hanoi on a four-year assignment as the Los Angeles Times‘ South East Asia bureau chief, I was stunned to discover how little I had known about Vietnam during the war. Its history, culture and language were pretty much a blank. I can only assume that naïveté was reflected in my wartime reportage, but I can say with certainty that never did I work harder or care more deeply about a story than I did during those early years in Vietnam.
We covered the war—but not the fighting men themselves— more critically than did Ernie Pyle and other journalists in World War II. We weren’t cheerleaders for a noble cause. Trust between the media and senior military officers was so frayed that journal ists were often accused of losing the war because they didn’t get on the bandwagon. The charge was as ludicrous as contending that journalists won World War II with positive coverage. But in no war since Vietnam have reporters had as much freedom as we did to get as close as we dared, to travel where we pleased, to write what we believed to be true, to spend as long as we wanted with specific U.S. units. (We didn’t use the word “embed” in those days.)
I’ve often wondered why so many of us could never escape Vietnam’s grip. I put the question not long ago to the late George Esper of The Associated Press, who spent nearly a decade in Vietnam. “I’ve searched for an answer why I stayed all those years,” he said. “What I keep coming back to was a young nurse from Upstate New York I saw on a fire base. It was monsoon season. We were under rocket attack. She was tending the badly wounded. Some died in her arms. And I said, ‘Wow, what a woman! Why are you here?’ and she said, ‘Because I’ve never felt so worthwhile in my life.'”
“That’s how I felt too. What we were doing was really important. On top of that, we were living this freewheeling, unstructured life with so much freedom and a go-to-hell attitude. It was a very good life, despite the war. It was exotic, sensual. I think that’s one of the reasons some people wanted to get lost in Vietnam and why some stayed in Vietnam, mentally forever.”
In April 1975 the Los Angeles Times sent me back to Saigon to help cover the last few weeks of the war. Long forgotten by then were words Ho Chi Minh had used to indirectly address the Amer ican people in the mid-1960s. “We will spread a red carpet for you to leave Vietnam. And when the war is over, you are welcome to come back because you have technology and we will need your help.”
In Saigon’s last desperate hours before Hanoi’s army marched into Saigon, U.S. pilots shuttling American and Vietnamese evacuees to Seventh Fleet vessels 50 miles offshore had noted with alarm that the red warning light on their control panels flashed repeatedly, indicating that North Vietnamese missiles had “locked” onto their helicopters whenever they were over land. But no SAMs were fired and no choppers were lost.
It wasn’t until several years later that it dawned on me: the Americans had left on Ho Chi Minh’s red carpet.