Tuesday, April 29, 3pm. We’re 19 hours from communist victory, the fall of Saigon, the actual end of the Vietnam war, and photographer Hugh Van Es is gazing, lazily at first, out the front window of the United Press International bureau.
“Holy heck,” shouts Van Es suddenly and pivots and runs for the table where he has scattered his cameras, ready for something like this. Of course, as anyone who knew the talented and flamboyant Dutchman, “heck” is not the actual word used.
In any case, maybe 400 metres or so straight ahead, an Air America helicopter has landed on the roof of the water pumping room atop the Pittman apartments, and dozens of people are pushing their way onto a shaky ladder to the aircraft.
And just like that, out the front window of our office, Van Es snaps one of the easiest photos of his life. It is “the” photo of the end of the Vietnam war, symbolising the final, shambolic evacuation-retreat of almost all of the last Americans and their friends, especially 135,000 Vietnamese. It is the biggest organised air-and-sea evacuation anyone can remember, then or since. And I decided to watch it, report it and stay around in Saigon to be present at the actual history-making moment.
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While most of the huge press corps and all US officials clambered onto planes and helicopters during the last, frantic day of Saigon — it was renamed Ho Chi Minh City on May 1 — small groups stayed behind, including me, four non-Vietnamese and a few local employees who saw no profit in starting a new life in America.
I’m often asked, “Why?” Here’s the Reader’s Digest version. I was the bureau chief of one of the top news agencies in the world, and our 10,000 clients — newspapers, magazines, radio and TV stations — deserved a reporter’s account of what was about to happen in Saigon and the rest of South Vietnam.
The real version, as always, was more complicated and boiled down to something perhaps as banal. I had spent nearly 10 years in Vietnam, with some time in Cambodia and other Asian wars. I wanted to see and record the end.
I have tritely explained this to a few friends this way: If the basketball game is in overtime or the football game is in the last five minutes of golden-goal extra time, do you get up and leave so you can get your car and beat the traffic home?
It was hardly a decision made lightly, but in the end it was fairly easy. Viet Cong and North Vietnamese peace negotiators based in Saigon from 1973-75 told me there was no way to guarantee my safety, but also that the orders to troops would be to treat all foreigners with respect, with no shoot-on-sight. My family was safe in Hong Kong. The Saigon telephone circuits we depended on to get stories out were up and manned (and remained that way until hours after the city fell).
The last helicopter went off the roof of the US embassy early on Wednesday morning. The first North Vietnamese Army soldiers entered Saigon a few hours later. They had maps, orders where to go. Some staged an impromptu victory parade down the (in)famous Tu Do street, where one of them mistook my microphone for a weapon during a brief, tense couple of minutes. Two hours later, a brief and noisy final firefight broke out in front of the presidential palace.
In that melee, an NVA soldier leapt on and stole my prized, chopped motorcycle, the last act of war or the first act of post-war Vietnam, take your pick.
I remained in Vietnam for four months until I was informed by communist authorities that, while they were not expelling me, they could no longer guarantee my safety.
The day after the Sept 2, 1975, celebrations of (North) Vietnam’s independence day, I was seen aboard a charter flight to Bangkok for a family reunion, the end of one saga and the beginning of yet another. n
Alan Dawson was the UPI bureau chief in Saigon from 1973 to 1975.
Still seeking a narrative
“Revisionist history” is one of those phrases often said with a sneer, written as a four-letter word. But in itself, it’s not wholly negative. And while it’s often said that the winners write the history of every war, neither the Communist Party of Vietnam nor even the Vietnamese themselves have very much to say about the course of their second-last war, the one before Cambodia ended two millennia without peace for that resilient nation.
The effort to settle on just what happened in Vietnam is as far from being settled as it was during the war itself.
Many of the participants of the US war in Vietnam are celebrating this week’s 40th anniversary of the end of that conflict, marked by the panicky evacuation and the communist capture of Saigon on April 30, 1975. More than two dozen journalists are having yet another reunion. The Hanoi government even paid for the trips of about 10 of them.
Revising the history of the Vietnam war is a constant topic, but it appears that we are a long way from agreeing on “the narrative” of just what occurred.
For the past several months, those who are absolutely certain about what happened in Vietnam have argued their cases using either a new and strident book, or a new and one-faceted documentary movie.
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse backs the corps that want Vietnam history to read that the United States launched evil violence with the intent to conquer Vietnam by killing as many people as possible. Its supporters argue, literally, that it is “the most important book written” on the Vietnam war.
Last Days of Vietnam is a documentary movie by Rory Kennedy, nominated for an Oscar two months ago. Its strongest fans argue that the tale of a compassionate, sacrificing effort to get as many vulnerable Vietnamese people out of the path of the advancing communists in March and April, 1975, is the perfect metaphor for a war launched with good intentions, often badly managed. This view is that while there is much to criticise, the war had many positive results, not least — as the late Lee Kuan Yew argued often — that it gave a very shaky Southeast Asia a chance to develop and become communist-proof.
Kill Anything That Moves was published in late 2013, and quickly became a major point of discussion. It is not a best-seller, although it is well read and distributed. It is familiar enough to Vietnam watchers and academics that it is known by its acronym.
The thesis of KATM is that the United States set out deliberately to kill as many civilians as possible in the war in South Vietnam, and succeeded fairly well. The author spent no time in Vietnam, but even a cursory reading of the book establishes he was meticulous as he dug through archives for man-months if not years. It’s by far the greatest collection of terrible events ever compiled, and I say that after tours of every book and war crimes museum in Vietnam.
Two points about this book and the fight to decide what the histories of the Vietnam war will say: First, there’s really nothing new in KATM. The problem is that virtually everything he writes about second-hand was reported first-hand. If nothing else, they appeared in a sprightly “news” paper called Overseas Weekly, which thrived on exactly the violence that KATM depicts — rapes, mini-massacres, assaults, courts martials.
Even the title is a retread, a black-humour phrase uttered often by jaded GIs hunting both the North Vietnamese army but particularly the Viet Cong guerrillas. While frequently used ironically, it certainly occasionally happened.
Turse’s dark compilation of war crimes, atrocities and bad things is no fun read (nor is combat a fun activity, even its boring lulls). But examination of his worst-scenario cases of the individual events he dissects make clear that “kill anything that moves” is an exaggeration, to be polite: an exceedingly rare event in his own, cherry-picked history of Vietnam-era combat.
Killing? Yes. But killing “everything”? It turns out that the book title is as sarcastic as the GIs who coined the phrase in the first place.
The My Lai massacre of 1968 was, and still is, the first and prime and most shocking example of a Vietnam war crime specifically because it was a rare event. One can argue after finally completing Turse’s tome that there were “other My Lais” or even, as the researcher-author himself claims, there were a lot of My Lais.
The bald fact is that in eight years and millions of US servicemen (and a tiny few servicewomen) and hundreds of millions of expended rounds of ammunition from M16 bullets to bunker-buster bombs, the casualties don’t add up to genocide or anything like it.
And do not lose sight of the fact that the report of My Lai and every single case in KATM is generated, revealed and put in the public domain by the army and US government. What kind of genocide is that?
The problem with Turse’s revisionist history is clear: It’s false in fact and message. The book itself is a work, a compilation of public documents presented in a unique way. But it says pretty well nothing about “the Vietnam war”, even though it covers the conflict’s entire time period.
Kennedy’s film, however, is no historical standard. It is just as false in fact and message. Everything in Last Days In Vietnam certainly occurred, just as all of Turse’s regurgitated crimes.
It's as facile and misleading to claim America’s war effort was big-hearted and successful as to claim it was genocidal and without a geopolitical background. n