On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Viewing the television images, I was appalled by the sight of thousands of Vietnamese, many of whom had been employed in the U.S. war effort, clawing at the gates of the embassy compound, hoping to get aboard the evacuation helicopters. Graham Martin, the American ambassador, had managed to evacuate about 1,100 Vietnamese before orders came from Henry Kissinger, President Gerald Ford’s secretary of state, to break off the evacuation of the Vietnamese by the marine helicopters, so that priority would be given to Americans. At 5 A.M. on April 30, at the insistence of the president that he leave, the ambassador mounted a ladder to a helicopter, clutching the embassy’s American flag, reluctantly abandoning several hundred Vietnamese in the compound and thousands of others at the gates.

  In the afternoon of April 29, the two New York Times correspondents remaining in Saigon, Malcolm Browne and Fox Butterfield, heeding the order of the publisher, donned backpacks in the Times office and boarded a U.S. Army bus heading for an evacuation center at Ton Son Nhut Airport. Americans throughout Saigon were boarding buses even before the American radio station began playing Bing Crosby’s “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” the agreed signal for departure. The North Vietnamese were shelling the city as the Americans headed for the airport.

  Earlier, Browne had contrived to get those members of the Times’ Vietnamese staff who chose to leave and their families aboard the CIA’s leased Air America planes which were shuttling to Guam. President Nguyen Van Thieu had forbidden any Vietnamese emigration, but Browne and David Greenway of the Washington Post covertly loaded their Vietnamese employees and families into office cars and smuggled them past the guards at the Ton Son Nhut Airport. Browne’s Vietnamese wife, Le Lieu, a photographer, together with her two brothers and their children, left on April 28 on Air Vietnam’s last commercial flight.

  Browne had unexpectedly taken charge of the Saigon Bureau on March 20. On that day, inexplicably, and without notifying his colleagues, James Markham, the bureau chief, had decamped with his family to Hong Kong. (Markham later distinguished himself at posts in Europe and the Middle East, but in 1989 he committed suicide in Paris, where he had been serving as the Times bureau chief.) Fortunately, Browne was not a newcomer to Vietnam. He came to the Times in 1968 from the Associated Press after sharing the Pulitzer Prize with David Halberstam for their coverage of the downfall of the Diem regime. In 1972 he was expelled from Vietnam in retaliation for his articles exposing corruption in President Nguyen Van Thieu’s government. Browne had muscled his way back into Saigon to reinforce the bureau only a few days before Markham left.

  At Ton Son Nhut, Browne and Butterfield found that the runways had been shelled and were unusable for fixed-wing aircraft. The helicopter evacuation was in its last stage, with most of the 393 Americans and 4,000 Vietnamese to be lifted out already gone. Browne and Butterfield waited for four hours in a bunker before one of the marine choppers, which were landing at two-minute intervals, lifted them out. The helicopters were tracked by North Vietnamese antiaircraft, but their commanders, apparently on orders, refrained from firing at the craft. The chopper carrying the Times men landed on the Mobile, a U.S. Navy supply ship standing off the coast, in the center of a chaotic scene. There was not enough deck space on the evacuation ships to accommodate all the incoming helicopters. Crews were dumping South Vietnamese helicopters overboard rather than let any return to shore into the possession of the North Vietnamese. The sea was strewn with burning sampans and other boats set aflame as their refugee occupants boarded ships.

  Browne filed his last Vietnam dispatch from the Mobile’s radio. No better epitaph to the fall of Saigon could have been written than the lead of his story. The dispatch, which brought tears to my eyes, said: “Like a failed marriage, the Vietnamese-American relationship of the last generation has ended in a mixture of hatred and suspicion, coupled with a strong remnant of tenderness and compassion on both sides. The tens of thousands aboard the huge evacuation armada sailing away from Vietnam have told endless stories of heroism, loyalty and love in the last hours. But for millions of Vietnamese and not a few Americans, the dominant memory will be sorrow and betrayal and guilt.”

  Days before the fall of the city, the cry of betrayal was sounded by President Thieu. As the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon, Thieu appealed for further American military aid, but President Ford was unable to make good on Nixon’s promises of additional support. The Congress balked at Ford’s request for $722 million in aid. On April 21, appearing on Saigon television to announce his resignation, President Thieu said: “The United States has not respected its promises. It is unfair. It is inhuman. It is not trustworthy. It is irresponsible.” He made no reference to the fifty-eight thousand American soldiers who had died in support of a succession of failed Saigon regimes, confining himself solely to a last call for more aid and resumption of bombing by B-52s in support of retreating South Vietnamese troops. Thieu’s image recalled for me the parade of South Vietnamese leaders I had known, beginning with Bao Dai in 1950, who had been unable, despite massive American support, to rally their people against an enemy who promised their troops little more than freedom from foreign invaders. When the Paris cease-fire accord collapsed in 1973, Thieu commanded an army of about a million troops armed with American weapons and supported by an unopposed air force. What was lacking was competent, incorruptible leadership which could inspire and marshal the South Vietnamese armed forces. The U.S. Senate in early April called for the replacement of Thieu by better leadership, but the collapse of the South Vietnamese government came more swiftly than anyone in Washington, including the CIA, had anticipated.

  The issue of betrayal was also raised in Laos, as it was in Phnom Penh, by Lon Nol in 1970 when he was told that American ground troops would be withdrawn from Cambodia, leaving his slender forces to face the more powerful Khmer Rouge and North Vietnamese. In Laos, following dissolution of the Royal Lao Government, headed by the neutralist prime minister, Souvanna Phouma, the United States terminated its aid programs and in effect abandoned its most loyal allies, the Hmong hill people. The CIA had employed the Hmong to battle the Pathet Lao and disrupt Communist traffic from North Vietnam through Laos down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and through Cambodia into South Vietnam. Following withdrawal of the American missions from Vientiane, the Hmong chief, General Vang Pao, fled with more than ten thousand of his people to the town of Long Cheng. They assembled there, as Sucheng Chan recounted in his book Hmong Means Free, believing the CIA would airlift them to safe havens. In recruiting the Hmong, the CIA had assured Vang Pao that the United States would safeguard his people. However, only a single C-130 transport was sent to the Long Cheng assembly area by the American military command in the Philippines. Vang Pao and several hundred of his people escaped, but many thousands of others at Long Cheng and elsewhere in the country were left behind to face the retribution of the Pathet Lao.

  In Saigon, before noon on April 30, 1975, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) 203rd Armored Regiment broke into Saigon, and one of its tanks, flying the flag of the National Liberation Front, crashed through the front gate of the Presidential Palace. The National Liberation Front (NLF) flag was flown by the North Vietnamese to posture the Vietcong, their allies in the South, as the victors. That afternoon Duong Van Minh, who had been president of South Vietnam for only three days, surrendered in a radio broadcast. The North Vietnamese triumph brought forth media comment about the military genius of General Vo Nguyen Giap. There was reason enough to be in awe of Giap’s victory against great odds and the inspirational leadership of his mentor, Ho Chi Minh, who had died in 1969. Little mention, if any, was made of Mao Zedong’s role. There was symbolism in that the North Vietnamese tank that crashed through the gate of the Independence Palace was a Soviet-designed T-54, handed over to the North Vietnamese by the Chinese. It was a symbol in steel of Mao’s indispensable contribution to Giap’s victory.

  With their occupation of Saigon, as in the cities of Cambodia and Laos, the Communists began almost at once ro
unding up hundreds of thousands of people who had served or befriended the Americans. Le Duan, the hardcore Marxist successor to Ho Chi Minh, instituted a purge which eventually would consign about 400,000 South Vietnamese to harsh reeducation camps. The crackdown targeted South Vietnamese soldiers and officials, Western-influenced intellectuals, students, businesspeople, and others suspected of being ideologically opposed to the regime. More than a million Vietnamese, including a half million of Chinese origin, would flee the country during the years 1975 to 1989.

  Some Western and Eastern European reporters, photographers, and media technicians stayed on in Saigon for the Communist occupation. But Westerners were not permitted to remain long enough to witness the purges. In Cambodia, all AP correspondents were recalled before the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, but in Saigon three AP men—Peter Arnett, George Asper, and Matt Franjola—were given clearance by Wes Gallagher, president of the AP, to remain for the entry of the Communists. “From our point of view it was worth the risk,” Gallagher said. Western correspondents were permitted by the North Vietnamese briefly to file reports but then were ordered to shut down their transmitters. After a twenty-five-day hiatus, eighty-three of those who stayed on, including the AP reporters, left on an Ilyushin transport painted with Hanoi’s yellow-starred flag. It took them to Vientiane and connections home. They were permitted to carry out their files and film.

  The fall of Saigon was the last act in the coverage of the Indochina wars by American correspondents that began when I arrived in Saigon in February 1950. In America’s Vietnam War, correspondents did not suffer military censorship of their dispatches like I did during the French Indochina conflict. But there were similar problems for correspondents in both wars in terms of instances of official denial of information and distorted press releases. American correspondents learned early on in the Vietnam War that they could not always rely or trust the information imparted to them in the briefings by American and Vietnamese officials in Saigon. The daily press briefings staged by the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) were dubbed by cynics among the correspondents as the “Five O’Clock Follies.” Correspondents found nothing more damaging to the credibility of the briefing officers than the dubious “body count” statistics, the number of Communist soldiers said to have been killed, which were cited. The “body count” was put forward as proof that General Westmoreland’s “War of Attrition” was being conducted successfully.

  In January 1968, when I visited the Saigon Bureau for the last time, then as foreign editor, I found that some correspondents were skipping the briefings, which they termed useless. The “Follies” were terminated, after an eight-year run, in February 1973. The AP Saigon Bureau chief, Richard Pyle, who covered the war for five years, then publicly characterized the Follies as “the longest-playing tragicomedy in Southeast Asia’s theater of the absurd.” But later he told me: “Whatever their failings, limitations and drawbacks, they provided the only opportunity to get United States and Vietnamese officials, military and diplomatic, on the record, and to confront and challenge them in real time with contradictory information.”

  The correspondents learned early on that they would have to go into the field if they were to get the straight facts. Making up for the vagaries of the “Follies” briefings, the military did provide transport to take correspondents just about anywhere they wanted to go. Horst Faas, the AP photographer who won two Pulitzer Prizes for his work, commented that he was grateful to the American military for making it easy to get around but noted the drawback: “It was easy to get killed.” According to AP records of casualties among the correspondents of the fifteen countries who covered the war from 1965 to 1975, the toll was thirty-three killed or missing and presumed dead in Vietnam, four in Laos, and thirty-four in Cambodia. The list included twenty Americans.

  Many American military officers left Vietnam blaming the news media for undermining the war effort by fueling the antiwar movement in the United States with critical reporting. After the war, when I lectured at West Point, I heard cadets voicing that same opinion. I saw no basis for the allegation, and army historians in later years did not give the complaint much weight. The Pentagon was impelled by its Vietnam experience to institute a number of training programs for officers designed to improve relations with the media and facilitate coverage of military operations. Stung by the heated disputes with the press during the Iraq Gulf War in 1991, the Pentagon experimented in the second Iraq War with the “embedding” of correspondents in front-line units. Restrictions were imposed on the correspondents where unit commanders deemed there were security risks either by their presence or in the transmission of dispatches during combat situations. There was a virtual embargo on the transmission of photographs of the bodies of soldiers killed in action. But embedding gave many correspondents a valuable close-up of what the troops faced.

  The American correspondents whom I observed as a reporter in the field or worked with as an editor served the public extraordinarily well, courageous and faithful in their reporting. It was certainly true of the Saigon Bureau chiefs of the Times, including such correspondents as Charles Mohr; A. J. Langguth, later author of the prizewinning book Our Vietnam; Peter Grose, later a distinguished biographer of Allen Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; Johnny Apple, later a brilliant chief Washington correspondent; Gene Roberts, later national editor and managing editor; Craig Whitney, later an assistant managing editor; and Malcolm Browne. Not the least among the many outstanding correspondents was Tom Johnson, our only black reporter, who told the story of the commitment of black servicemen better than anyone else. There was no lack of excellent news coverage and analysis by the press corps as a whole. Television images brought home graphically, at times better than print, the horrendous nature of the war. Together with the shocking accounts of the sufferings of the Indochinese peoples, the correspondents portrayed passionately the heroism and self-sacrifice of American troops in combat.

  Many Vietnamese see parallels between their war with the United States and the struggle in Iraq. This was apparent when Audrey and I returned to Vietnam in 2005, revisiting Hanoi, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), and the battlegrounds I knew. For almost four decades I had shied away from revisiting Vietnam. When I left the country in 1966, I said in bitterness I would never return. Revisiting would resurrect too many painful memories of the suffering and the dead—and the anguish of knowing that the Vietnam War could have been averted. But I was moved to return out of the desire to learn how the Vietnamese people were faring and also somewhat curious as to how they were viewing the invasion of Iraq in the context of their experience.

  We arrived in Hanoi as the Vietnamese were marking the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war with the United States. We were immediately seized upon by newspapers and television, eager for our recollections of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese look back on 1945 as a time when war with the United States might have been averted. I had just published a historic novel, Fatal Crossroads: A Novel of Vietnam 1945, whose plot recalls the unanswered appeals of Ho Chi Minh to President Truman for cooperation in bringing about Vietnamese independence. It also recalls the support given to Ho’s guerrillas in operations against the Japanese by agents of the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

  I found criticism of the United States muted as the Vietnamese marked the anniversary of their victory. The government was seeking to divert the people from brooding about the past to the promise of a rewarding future. But the memorials to be seen in virtually every hamlet inevitably revived memories. Americans were grieving for more than 58,000 service people killed in the Vietnam War, and the search was going on for the remains of some 1,500 still missing. The Vietnamese grieve for nearly 4 million civilian and military dead. Some 300,000 of their soldiers are still missing and mourned spiritually by their families as souls wandering endlessly, since they have not, in keeping with ancestral religious custom, been accorded traditional burial rites.

  Vu Xuan Ho
ng, a prominent member of the National Assembly, spent considerable time with us in Hanoi extolling the development of closer relations with the United States. Since the death of Le Duan in 1986, Communist strictures had been gradually relaxed, and the country moved to a largely free market economy. America has become Vietnam’s leading export market. Tacitly, the government is cultivating the United States as a counterweight to China, its historical adversary. Vu cited his government’s cooperation with the United States in counterterrorism. U.S. Navy ships were calling at Vietnamese ports. American nongovernmental organizations were at work in the country removing the many unexploded bombs and in other aid projects. Hundreds of thousands of American tourists were being warmly welcomed annually. But when asked about the invasion of Iraq three years earlier, Vu darkened and had this to say: “The Vietnamese people are very negative about the invasion. We are a small country and we know the consequences of war—what it is like to be bombed. We are against a big power invading a small country. The Iraqi people should solve their own problems. They have their own culture and religion, and their own dreams. Perhaps democracy or maybe they will continue to fight among themselves. The Americans better heed the resistance. Sooner or later they will have to withdraw.”

  EPILOGUE

  LESSONS OF THE ASIAN WARS

  Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

  —GEORGE SANTAYANA, philosopher and poet

  From 1946 to 1975, the United States suffered in Asia some of its worst political, diplomatic, and military reverses. Those defeats stemmed in great part from policy missteps by the American presidents who were in office during the Chinese Civil War, the French Indochina War, the Korean War, and the American military interventions in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. I cite some of the most costly mistakes in this epilogue, persuaded that there are lessons to be derived which can be useful in coping with other confrontations such as those involving Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea, and Cuba. I review also the mixed history of how the press covered government decision making during those three decades to underline how profoundly the performance of the news media affects national security.