assignmentS in VIETNAM

      Not even half a century has been long enough for me to forget many of my experiences as a journalist covering the war in Vietnam – some of them good, others painful.. 

      A decade of fighting there caused a staggering loss of lives. The toll for combatants was estimated at 58,000 Americans, 200,000 South Vietnamese and one million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. In addition,  there were as many as two million civilian deaths.

      Perhaps my most vivid memories are tied to the “Tet Offensive” launched in 1968 by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops. At that point. I'd been in Saigon two years, reporting on the war for United Press International.

      Like many people in Saigon, I was asleep when the  fighting began January 30 before dawn. The sound of gunfire woke me quickly, and at first I thought the noise was from firecrackers exploding to celebrate Tet, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year. 

      There had been previous terrorist incidents in Saigon. One was only a few blocks away from my office, when a Viet Cong fighter detonated two bombs – destroying a floating restaurant and killing nearly 50 people. But that was before I came to the city. I'd never heard anything there like this and I considered it a relatively safe haven. 

      On this morning, Saigon turned into a combat zone even though Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops had said they'd respect a two-day cease-fire for the Tet holiday. When I got to my office, the bureau chief was taking calls from reporters in the field. Their accounts of combat were urgent.

      About 20 Viet Cong got to the U.S. embassy grounds, but Marine guards killed most of them and none reached the main building offices.

      Nearby, the South Vietnamese Navy headquarters was attacked.

      About the same time, two American soldiers hurried into our bureau, seeking shelter after their truck convoy was ambushed. As they dropped to the floor to take cover, one of them shouted that people in the office were “crazy” to keep working despite all the shooting. 

      Although the Communists were defeated in Saigon in a few days, fighting continued elsewhere in the country. It took U.S. and South Vietnamese forces nearly three weeks to regain control of some locations, including the old imperial city of Hue. 

      By some estimates, as many as 30,000 Communist-led troops died. Use of long-range artillery and U.S. air power to dislodge them also caused many civilian casualties.

      About five weeks later, I traveled south to the Mekong Delta to assess damage in that rice-growing region. Some civilians  told me about getting caught in the middle of a firefight when U.S. infantrymen tried to recapture the city of Ben Tre from the Viet Cong. 

      By the time that battle was over, authorities said some 1,000 civilians were dead – more than all of the American, South Vietnamese, and Viet Cong military casualties.

      I also went to visit an ethnic Cambodian hamlet that was almost leveled as U. S. Army helicopters fought Viet Cong invaders. Residents fled and were afraid to return.

Such situations were all too common.

      The estimated number of refugees in South Vietnam was more than 2 million before the Tet Offensive and 50 percent higher after it.

      Although the attackers sustained heavy losses and failed to provoke a “general uprising” among South Vietnamese people, the Tet Offensive was a turning point.

      The scale of assaults on provincial capitals, major cities, district capitals and villages weakened claims by the top American commander, Gen. William Westmoreland, that U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were winning the war. 

      And intense fighting continued on other fronts. One key battle was at the U.S. Marine garrison at Khe Sanh, where defenders endured 77 days of artillery shelling.

      American casualties rose. The total during a single week in February was a record 543 deaths.

      Then came March. With antiwar sentiment growing at home, President Lyndon Johnson halted U.S. bombing in Vietnam north of the 20th parallel. In addition, he surprised almost all Americans at the end of the month by announcing that he wouldn’t seek reelection.

      In May, the Viet Cong assaulted Saigon a second time, and several of my colleagues were killed. One of them, the photographer Charlie Eggleston, was shot by a sniper. A likable guy, he was usually in front of the rest of us.

      A day earlier, some Viet Cong troops attacked a group of journalists – three Australians and one from Britain. They were unarmed and riding in a "mini-moke" vehicle in the Cholon district of Saigon.

      One Viet Cong officer drew his pistol and shot two wounded men in the group, despite shouts by Australian Michael Birch that all of them were “bao chi, bao chi!”-- meaning “press, press!” Frank Palmos, a freelance Australian journalist and the only survivor, said the Viet Cong commander “seemed to enjoy” shooting the wounded men.

      Years later, the Communist government issued an official  statement of “profound regret," saying it was “clearly a case of mistaken identity.” It clearly was no such thing.

      After that incident, I began carrying a pistol in my pocket. It was one of the dumbest things I did during the war. If I were captured, I might've been regarded as a combatant and shot even though I never practiced with the gun. 

      During one of the war’s worst rocket attacks, I found many wounded civilians on the outskirts of Saigon. No ambulance driver dared to go there, so I started shuttling victims to a safer place where they got medical help. That was one of the better things I did during the war.

      Later that month, I had to cover the aftermath of a  mortar attack that killed two teenage girls and wounded 24 other civilians. It demonstrated that, despite major setbacks, the Viet Cong still could fire rockets and mortar shells across the Saigon River and into the city. 

      South Vietnamese officials speculated that the enemy  troops took actions like that to show they were a force to be reckoned with at peace talks taking place in Paris.

      On yet another occasion, I encountered a convoy of South Vietnamese refugees hit by a North Vietnamese artillery strike during the Communists’ so-called Easter Offensive. There were no survivors as far as I could tell. 

      Many of the dead were on the ground, others were slumped over in vehicles. I didn’t linger to take a count.

I’ve never wanted to flee a place so much in all of my life.

      As the war dragged on, efforts to negotiate an end to it continued until January 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Under terms of that agreement, the United States would stop its direct involvement in the war and North Vietnam would accept a cease fire.  Both sides agreed to keep the 17th parallel as the dividing line until the country could be reunited.

      But the hostilities continued despite the accords, and  by early 1975, North Vietnamese troops were prevailing.

As April drew to a close, Saigon was surrounded. Planes and helicopters could not land at Tan Son Nhut airport.

      U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin didn’t acknowledge publicly that the fall of Saigon was inevitable, but I found out that embassy officials already were getting some of the Americans and endangered Vietnamese citizens out of the country. 

      Panic was spreading..

      I'd been around long enough to know and sympathize with many South Vietnamese. I understood the fears of some and naïve hopes of others. I wanted to help friends leave Saigon. 

      The signal to start an emergency evacuation came late in the morning on April 29, when a radio network broadcast a recorded message including an excerpt from the song “White Christmas.” Americans began making their way to more than a dozen specified locations including the U.S. embassy.

      I had moved from my apartment to the Continental Hotel, where  I sat near a phone and waited to hear from people needing help. It was a tense time.

      I had some success. I arranged a way out for a former high-ranking South Vietnamese official after hearing that he faced a slow death in a “re-education camp” unless he escaped. I also managed to assist one of my friends, a university professor, who wanted to get out. 

      But my former interpreter rejected my advice to leave, saying he thought the Communists wouldn’t harm him when they saw that he was a relatively poor man with a simple home and few possessions. Sadly, he was  wrong. Because of his work for a U.S. journalist, he was beaten badly by Viet Cong interrogators. 

      One Vietnamese man planned to leave, but changed his mind after hearing a rumor that Communists agreed to join a coalition government, headed by a retired South Vietnamese general. I doubted that would ever happen.

      I spent most of the day in the compound of the U.S. Embassy, watching as Vietnamese crowds outside were  begging Marine guards to let them enter. I saw a few who had worked with Americans, and helped them go inside. 

      Despite the chaos, dozens of Marine helicopters were able to take more than 1,000 Americans plus some 5,000 Vietnamese from Saigon to U.S. Navy ships off the coast.

      I wanted to wait until the very end, but a U.S. official warned that I'd be left behind if I didn't go right away. So I  went up to the embassy roof and boarded one of the last helicopters out of Vietnam. 

      Within hours, North Vietnamese troops, some riding on tanks, had taken over Saigon.

Dan Southerland was a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and the Washington Post, and executive editor of Radio Free Asia