by Michael Herr
Just in the regular course of things, a lot of correspondents took close calls. Getting scratched was one thing, it didn’t mean that you’d come as close as you could have, it could have been closer without your even knowing it, like an early-morning walk I took once from the hilltop position of a Special Forces camp where I’d spent the night, down to the teamhouse at the foot of the hill, where I was going to have some coffee. I walked off the main trail onto a smaller trail and followed it until I saw the house and a group of eight giggling, wide-eyed Vietnamese mercenaries, Mikes, pointing at me and talking very excitedly. They all grabbed for me at once when I reached the bottom, and as it was explained to me a moment later, I’d just come down a trail which the Special Forces had rigged out with more than twenty booby traps, any one of which could have taken me off. (Any One Of Which ran through my head for days afterward.) If you went out often, just as surely as you’d eventually find yourself in a position where survival etiquette insisted that you take a weapon (“You know how this thang works ’n’ airthang?” a young sergeant had to ask me once, and I’d had to nod as he threw it to me and said, “Then git some!”, the American banzai), it was unavoidable that you’d find yourself almost getting killed. You expected something like that to happen, but not exactly that, not until events made things obvious for you. A close call was like a loss of noncombatant status: you weren’t especially proud of it, you merely reported it to a friend and then stopped talking about it, knowing in the first place that the story would go around from there, and that there wasn’t really anything to be said about it anyway. But that didn’t stop you from thinking about it a lot, doing a lot of hideous projecting from it, forming a system of pocket metaphysics around it, getting it down to where you found yourself thinking about which kind of thing was closer: that walk down the hill, the plane you missed by minutes which blew apart on the Khe Sanh airstrip an hour later and fifty miles away, or the sniper round that kissed the back of your flak jacket as you grunted and heaved yourself over a low garden wall in Hue. And then your Dawn Patrol fantasy would turn very ugly, events again and again not quite what you had expected, and you’d realize that nothing ever came closer to death than the death of a good friend.
In the first week of May 1968, the Viet Cong staged a brief, vicious offensive against Saigon, taking and holding small positions on the fringes of Cholon and defending parts of the outlying areas that could be retaken only from the Y Bridge, from the racetrack grounds, from Plantation Road and the large French graveyard that ran for several hundred yards into a grove and a complex of Viet Cong bunkers. The offensive’s value as pure revolutionary terror aside (those results were always incalculable, our good gear notwithstanding), it was more or less what MACV said it was, costly to the VC and largely a failure. It cost the Friendlies too (between Saigon and the A Shau, it was the week that saw more Americans killed than any other in the war), a lot more damage was done to the city’s outskirts, more homes were bombed out. The papers called it either the May Offensive, the Mini-Offensive (you know I’m not making that up), or the Second Wave; it was the long-awaited Battle of Algiers-in-Saigon that had been manically predicted by the Americans for practically every weekend since the Tet Offensive had ended. In its early hours, five correspondents took a jeep into Cholon, past the first files of refugees (many of whom warned them to turn back), and into a Viet Cong ambush. One of them escaped (according to his own story) by playing dead and then running like an animal into the crowds of Cholon. He said that they had all yelled, “Bao Chi!” a number of times, but that they had been machine-gunned anyway.
It was more like death by misadventure than anything else, as if that mattered, and of the four dead correspondents, only one had been a stranger. Two of the others were good acquaintances, and the fourth was a friend. His name was John Cantwell, an Australian who worked for Time, and he had been one of the first friends I’d made in Vietnam. He was a kind, congenial mock-goat whose talk was usually about the most complex, unimaginable lecheries, architectural constructions of monumental erotic fantasies. He had a Chinese wife and two children in Hong Kong (he spoke fluent Chinese, he’d take it through the Cholon bars for us sometimes), and he was one of the few I knew who really hated Vietnam and the war, every bit of it. He was staying only long enough to earn the money to settle some debts, and then he was going to leave for good. He was a good, gentle, hilarious man, and to this day I can’t help thinking that he wasn’t supposed to get killed in Vietnam, getting killed in a war was not John’s scene, he’d made no room for that the way some others had. A lot of people I had liked a lot, GI’s and even some correspondents, had already died, but when Cantwell got murdered it did more than sadden and shock me. Because he was a friend, his death changed all the odds.
In that one brief period of less than two weeks it became a war of our convenience, a horrible convenience, but ours. We could jump into jeeps and minimokes at nine or ten and drive a few kilometers to where the fighting was, run around in it for a few hours and come back early. We’d sit on the Continental terrace and wave each other in, get stoned early and stay up late, since there was no question of 5:30 wakeups. We’d been scattered all over Vietnam for months now, friends running into friends now and again, and this put everyone together. There was no other time when that was needed so badly. A day after John and the others died, a strange, death-charged kid named Charlie Eggleston, a UPI photographer, got killed at the Cemetery, reportedly while returning fire at a Viet Cong position. (He willed everything he had to Vietnamese charities.) A Japanese photographer was killed later that same day, a Brazilian lost a leg the day after that and somewhere in there another correspondent was killed; by then everyone had stopped counting and worked at keeping it away. Again in the Cemetery, a bullet tore through Co Rentmeister’s hand and lodged under the eye of another photographer, Art Greenspahn. A Frenchman named Christien Simon-Pietrie (known as “Frenchy” to his movie-warped friends) was hit above the eye by some shrapnel from the same round which crippled General Loan; not a serious wound but one more out of too many, more than correspondents had ever received at one time. By the fifth day, eight had died and more than a dozen others had been wounded. We were driving toward the racetrack when an MP stepped in front of our car to ask for identification.
“Listen,” he said, “I saw those four other guys and I never want to see any more like that. You know those guys? Then what the fuck do you want to go in there for? Don’t you people ever learn? I mean, I saw those guys, believe me, it ain’t worth it.”
He was firm about not letting us through, but we insisted and he finally gave up.
“Well, I can’t really stop you. You know I can’t stop you. But if I could, I would. You wouldn’t be driving up to no shit like those four guys.”
In the early evenings we’d do exactly what correspondents did in those terrible stories that would circulate in 1964 and 1965, we’d stand on the roof of the Caravelle Hotel having drinks and watch the airstrikes across the river, so close that a good telephoto lens would pick up the markings on the planes. There were dozens of us up there, like aristocrats viewing Borodino from the heights, at least as detached about it as that even though many of us had been caught under those things from time to time. There’d be a lot of women up there, a few of them correspondents (like Cathy Leroy, the French photographer, and Jurati Kazikas, a correspondent of great, fashion-model beauty), most of them the wives and girls of reporters. Some people had tried hard to believe that Saigon was just another city they’d come to live in; they’d formed civilized social routines, tested restaurants, made and kept appointments, given parties, had love affairs. Many had even brought their wives with them, and more often than not it worked out badly. Very few of the women really liked Saigon, and the rest became like most Western women in Asia: bored, distracted, frightened, unhappy and, if left there too long, fiercely frantic. And now, for the second time in three months, Saigon had become unsafe. Rockets were dropping a block from
the best hotels, the White Mice (the Saigon police) were having brief, hysterical firefights with shadows, you could hear it going on as you dropped off to sleep; it was no longer simply a stinking, corrupt, exhausting foreign city.
At night, the rooms of the Continental would fill with correspondents drifting in and out for a drink or a smoke before bed, some talk and some music, the Rolling Stones singing, “It’s so very lonely, You’re two thousand light years from home,” or “Please come see me in your Citadel,” that word putting a chill in the room. Whenever one of us came back from an R&R we’d bring records, sounds were as precious as water: Hendrix, the Airplane, Frank Zappa and the Mothers, all the things that hadn’t even started when we’d left the States. Wilson Pickett, Junior Walker, John Wesley Harding, one recording worn thin and replaced within a month, the Grateful Dead (the name was enough), the Doors, with their distant, icy sound. It seemed like such wintry music; you could rest your forehead against the window where the air-conditioner had cooled the glass, close your eyes and feel the heat pressing against you from outside. Flares dropped over possible targets three blocks away, and all night long, armed jeeps and massive convoys moved down Tu Do Street toward the river.
When we were down to a hard core of six or seven, we’d talk tired, stoned talk about the war, imitating commanders who were always saying things like, “Well, Charlie’s dug in there pretty good, but when we can get him out where we can see him we find we’re getting some real decent kills, we got Charlie outgunned for sure, only thing is we can’t kill him if we can’t see ’cause Charlie’s always running. Come on, we’ll take you up and get you shot at.” We talked about a discotheque we were going to open in Saigon, the Third Wave, with a stainless-steel dance floor, blow-ups of the best war photographs on the walls, a rock group called Westy and the KIA’s. (Our talk had about as much taste as the war did.) And we’d talk about LZ Loon, the mythical place where it got dark so fast that by the time you realized that there wouldn’t be another chopper in until morning, you’d already picked a place to sleep for the night. Loon was the ultimate Vietnam movie location, where all of the mad colonels and death-spaced grunts we’d ever known showed up all at once, saying all the terrible, heartbreaking things they always said, so nonchalant about the horror and fear that you knew you’d never really be one of them no matter how long you stayed. You honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Few people ever cried more than once there, and if you’d used that up, you laughed; the young ones were so innocent and violent, so sweet and so brutal, beautiful killers.
One morning, about twenty-five correspondents were out by the Y Bridge working when a dying ARVN was driven by on the back of a half-ton pick-up. The truck stopped at some barbed wire, and we all gathered around to look at him. He was nineteen or twenty and he’d been shot three times in the chest. All of the photographers leaned in for pictures, there was a television camera above him, we looked at him and then at each other and then at the wounded Vietnamese again. He opened his eyes briefly a few times and looked back at us. The first time, he tried to smile (the Vietnamese did that when they were embarrassed by the nearness of foreigners), then it left him. I’m sure that he didn’t even see us the last time he looked, but we all knew what it was that he’d seen just before that.
That was also the week that Page came back to Vietnam. A Scrambler to the Front by Tim Page, Tim Page by Charles Dickens. He came a few days before it started, and people who knew about his luck were making jokes blaming the whole thing on his return. There were more young, apolitically radical, wigged-out crazies running around Vietnam than anybody ever realized; between all of the grunts turning on and tripping out on the war and the substantial number of correspondents who were doing the same thing, it was an authentic subculture. There were more than enough within the press corps to withstand a little pressure from the upright, and if Flynn was the most sophisticated example of this, Page was the most extravagant. I’d heard about him even before I came to Vietnam (“Look him up. If he’s still alive”), and between the time I got there and the time he came back in May, I’d heard so much about him that I might have felt that I knew him if so many people hadn’t warned me, “There’s just no way to describe him for you. Really, no way.”
“Page? That’s easy. Page is a child.”
“No, man, Page is just crazy.”
“Page is a crazy child.”
They’d tell all kinds of stories about him, sometimes working up a passing anger over things he’d done years before, times when he’d freaked a little and become violent, but it always got softened, they’d pull back and say his name with great affection. “Page. Fucking Page.”
He was an orphan boy from London, married at seventeen and divorced a year later. He worked his way across Europe as a cook in the hotels, drifting east through India, through Laos (where he claims to have dealt with the Spooks, a little teen-age espionage), into Vietnam at the age of twenty. One of the things that everybody said about him was that he had not been much of a photographer then (he’d picked up a camera the way you or I would pick up a ticket), but that he would go places for pictures that very few other photographers were going. People made him sound crazy and ambitious, like the Sixties Kid, a stone-cold freak in a country where the madness raced up the hills and into the jungles, where everything essential to learning Asia, war, drugs, the whole adventure, was close at hand.
The first time he got hit it was shrapnel in the legs and stomach. That was at Chu Lai, in ’65. The next time was during the Buddhist riots of the 1966 Struggle Movement in Danang: head, back, arms, more shrapnel. (A Paris-Match photograph showed Flynn and a French photographer carrying him on a door, his face half covered by bandages, “Tim Page, blessé à la tête.”) His friends began trying to talk him into leaving Vietnam, saying, “Hey, Page, there’s an airstrike looking for you.” And there was; it caught him drifting around off course in a Swift boat in the South China Sea, blowing it out of the water under the mistaken impression that it was a Viet Cong vessel. All but three of the crew were killed, Page took over 200 individual wounds, and he floated in the water for hours before he was finally rescued.
They were getting worse each time, and Page gave in to it. He left Vietnam, allegedly for good, and joined Flynn in Paris for a while. He went to the States from there, took some pictures for Time-Life, got busted with the Doors in New Haven, traveled across the country on his own (he still had some money left), doing a picture story which he planned to call “Winter in America.” Shortly after the Tet Offensive, Flynn returned to Vietnam, and once Page heard that, it was only a matter of time. When he got back in May, his entrance requirements weren’t in order, and the Vietnamese kept him at Tan Son Nhut for a couple of days, where his friends visited him and brought him things. The first time I met him he was giggling and doing an insane imitation of two Vietnamese immigration authorities fighting over the amount of money they were going to hold him up for, “Minh phung, auk nyong bgnyang gluke poo phuc fuck fart, I mean you should have heard those beastly people. Where am I going to sleep, who’s got a rack for Page? The Dinks have been mucking about with Page, Page is a very tired boy.”
He was twenty-three when I first met him, and I can remember wishing that I’d known him when he was still young. He was bent, beaten, scarred, he was everything by way of being crazy that everyone had said he was, except that you could tell that he’d never get really nasty again when he flipped. He was broke, so friends got him a place to sleep, gave him piastres, cigarettes, liquor, grass. Then he made a couple of thousand dollars on some fine pictures of the Offensive, and all of those things came back on us, twice over. That was the way the world was for Page; when he was broke you took care of him, when he was not he took care of you. It was above economics.
“Now, would Ellsworth Bunker like the Mothers of Invention?” he’d say. (He wanted to rig loudspeakers around the Lower House and along the park facing it and play the freakiest music he could find as
loud as the equipment would permit.)
“On your head, Page,” Flynn would say.
“No. I ask you, would William C. Westmoreland dig the Mothers or wouldn’t he?”
His talk was endlessly referential, he mixed in images from the war, history, rock, Eastern religion, his travels, literature (he was very widely read and proud of it), but you came to see that he was really only talking about one thing, Page. He spoke of himself in the third person more than anyone I ever knew, but it was so totally ingenuous that it was never offensive. He could get very waspish and silly, he could be an outrageous snob (he was a great believer in the New Aristocracy), he could talk about people and things in ways that were nearly monstrous, stopping short of that and turning funny and often deeply tender. He carried all kinds of clippings around with him, pictures of himself, newspaper stories about the times he’d been wounded, a copy of a short story that Tom Mayer had written about him in which he got killed on an operation with the Korean Marines. He was especially vain about that story, very proud and completely spooked by it. That first week back, he’d had things brought around to where he could remember them again, remembering that you could get killed here, the way he almost had those other times, the way he had in the story.
