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Mint
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Mint
The Vietnam war made American culture bolder and more varied
The images of the fall of Saigon, on April 30th 1975, are indelible. A helicopter takes off from the roof of an apartment building, leaving behind a long line of would-be evacuees. Victorious North Vietnamese soldiers roll into the city in tanks, on their way to sack the United States embassy and raise their flag over the presidential palace. Vietnamese civilians rush onto packed boats in terror. America's involvement in Vietnam began with realpolitik and ended in shame. It started covertly in 1954, soon after the Viet Minh, a nationalist, communist guerrilla group, terminated French colonial rule and Vietnam was cleaved in two. It grew into a war that killed almost 60,000 American soldiers and over 3m Vietnamese civilians and soldiers. America's performance in the two world wars allowed the country to think of itself as benevolent and invincible. Vietnam put that myth to rest. The war haunted American politics for decades, but 50 years on, and with veterans' average age now 72, its salience is fading. H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas, says, 'To my students, the Vietnam war might as well be the civil war." But his students still live in a culture dramatically changed by that war. It permanently altered American film, music, television and—most importantly—Americans' relationship to their government. Read what The Economist thought about the fall of Saigon in 1975 In 1954 America was at peak self-confidence. The second world war wreaked devastation, but America had emerged as a geopolitical and industrial power. The ructions of the 1960s were still a decade ahead; the Depression's privations were 15 years in the past. Polls taken in 1958 showed that 73% of Americans trusted their government to do the right thing. So when President Dwight Eisenhower sent Edward Lansdale, an air-force officer, to help the government of South Vietnam in its struggle against the communist north, it raised little public outcry. Few Americans could even find Vietnam on a map. Many were introduced to it by a popular book called 'Deliver Us From Evil" (1956). The author, Tom Dooley, an American naval medic who worked in Vietnam, described a grisly roster of horrors visited on innocent Vietnamese Christians. He cast American capitalism and compassion as the only things that could save millions of Vietnamese from communist brutality. (After Dooley's early death from cancer in 1961, it emerged that he had worked with the CIA and fabricated his stories of communist atrocities.) Dooley's sensationalised narrative suited Americans' self-image as benign, conquering heroes. Popular Westerns such as 'Shane" (1953) and 'The Magnificent Seven" (1960) depicted Americans as civilising folk who stood up for the downtrodden. Epic films such as 'Spartacus" (1960) depicted combat as noble and righteous, with clear battle lines and starkly defined good guys and baddies. Meanwhile, America's involvement in Vietnam was deepening. In 1960 America had 700 military 'advisers" helping the pro-Western government of South Vietnam; by the end of 1964, that number had grown to 23,000. It was still too little. And so America began drafting young men to go to Vietnam. The horror, the horror Two things were notable about America's military strategy. First, it was not working. In early 1965 McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, told President Lyndon Johnson that America could either negotiate a settlement between North and South Vietnam, or increase military pressure on the north. And second, it was largely kept from the public. Soon after Bundy's memo, Johnson secretly authorised systematic bombings of the north and sent two Marine battalions to guard the bases from which American planes took off. The first glimmers of public discontent emerged in American music. In 1963 Bob Dylan condemned the 'Masters of War" who 'hide in your mansion while the young people's blood/Flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud". Nina Simone complained in 1967 about a government that would 'raise my taxes, freeze my wages/And send my son to Vietnam". In the 1960s protest songs were rarely mainstream hits, but David Suisman, a music historian at the University of Delaware, notes that this was the start of what came to be known as 'alternative music": styles with strong niche appeal and even stronger political messages. Genres such as folk stood apart from—and often in opposition to—mainstream music, which at the time was dominated by anodyne love songs. Hip-hop and punk were the inheritors of that legacy. The brutal images Americans saw on their televisions every night fuelled such discontent. Unlike the feel-good newsreels broadcast in the second world war, coverage of Vietnam was not sanitised. New technology, in particular lightweight cameras and sound equipment, enabled journalists to go into the field and show people what was happening. This permanently changed the media's wartime role; the public now expects to see combat footage and sceptical reporters. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the army let journalists 'embed" themselves with combat units. It took longer for the war to arrive in cinemas, but when it did, film-makers were unsparing in their depictions. 'The Deer Hunter" (1978) showed the war's effects on three friends from an insular steel town in Pennsylvania. Francis Ford Coppola's magnificent 'Apocalypse Now" (1979) portrayed the corrosive insanity of the war's senseless violence and the lies upon which it rested. And in Stanley Kubrick's 'Full Metal Jacket" (1987), the war was nothing more than a charnel house. Ever since, American films have largely eschewed the tidy morality and view of combat that defined pre-Vietnam war movies. Even the last 'good war"—the second world war—had its shine removed in 'Saving Private Ryan" (1998): the combat scenes were shockingly violent and confusing. 'Jarhead" (2005) and 'Warfare" (2025), about the fighting with Iraq, depict war as dreary and fundamentally pointless. 'American Sniper" (2014) told the true story of a veteran who fought in Iraq and was murdered by another officer with PTSD; it showed how war hangs over soldiers long after they return home. Many of these changes were welcome. Combat is brutal and war is rarely a Manichean struggle between heroes and villains. Films that reflect such complexity are richer than those that ignore it. Protest songs can be trite, but American music is better today than it was in the 1950s for having multiple genres and voices. And a sceptical press serves its watchdog purpose better than a pliant, credulous one. Underlying all of these cultural changes has been a profound social one. In 1971 the Pentagon Papers, high-level government reports on the war, were leaked, revealing the depth of officials' dishonesty about their motives and efficacy in Vietnam. A poll taken that year showed that 71% of Americans believed the war had been a 'mistake". By 1974 barely more than one-third of Americans trusted their government to do the right thing. Aside from a brief post-9/11 spike, America's government has never regained the trust of a majority of its citizens. Today only 22% trust it, and it seems unlikely to win back Americans' confidence soon. Correction (April 28th 2025): In an earlier version of this article, we misidentified the building from which a helicopter carrying evacuees took off. It was an apartment building, not the American Embassy. This has been updated. Sorry. 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Time of India
04-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Ho Chi Minh's triumph and Vietnam's history of hunger
Last week marked the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the biggest political triumph of a chef. Ho Chi Minh , who led Vietnam's long freedom struggle, started by working in ship kitchens to see the world. There are unverified claims that he trained with the famous French chef Auguste Escoffier and at the Parker House Hotel, where the Boston cream pie was invented. #Pahalgam Terrorist Attack India much better equipped to target cross-border terror since Balakot India conducts maiden flight-trials of stratospheric airship platform Pakistan shuts ports for Indian ships after New Delhi bans imports from Islamabad Ho's years abroad led him to the global communist movement. He returned home in 1941 to lead the Viet Minh movement for inde pendence from France. In 1944-45, Vietnam suf fered a terrible famine, partly caused by France's prewar decision to force Vietnamese farmers to switch from rice farming to cash crops like cotton and jute. When the war started, food resources were already under strain and then the fall of France aligned its colonies with Japan, who extorted rice to support its war effort. In the ensuing famine, thousands died — and the Viet Minh gained much support for its resistance to the Franco-Japanese regime. This was a direct cause for the war that broke out in 1946, which ended with French defeat and Vietnam divided between the Viet Minh controlled north and a Western-aligned south. The communists instituted land reforms which didn't help the food situation. In 1957, the writer Nguyen Tuan disguised criticism in a disquisition on pho , the iconic Vietnamese soup. Erica J Peters, in her paper on how food came to express wider anxieties, writes: 'He wondered what pho would be like, if people had to start making it with broth made from rat meat.' And noting heavy imports from Russia, he wondered if 'people might find themselves eating canned pho '. Nguyen's essay was to seem grimly prescient when Vietnam found itself on Cold War frontlines. The Russian backed north invaded the south, and the Americans pushed back in an anti-communist crusade. Starving the north was a key strategy, including by spraying herbicides like the notorious Agent Orange to destroy crops. Another tactic was to bomb signs of mass cooking, like trails of smoke or fire at night. The north Vietnamese retreated to the jungle, living off wild foods and any animals they could catch. Cooking was done in ingenious stoves designed by Hoang Cam, a military cook. The fire was lit in a well ventilated, covered hole, and smoke lead off through long tunnels where it came out under damp leaves, tur ning into undetectable steam. South Vietnam faced a very different food situation. American food flooded the market, a surplus from military supplies that was encouraged to lure local opinion through their stomachs. Unfortunately, as Vu Hong Lien points out in Rice and Baguette , her history of Vietnamese food, after almost a century of French rule and cooking, American food was not appealing: 'While the old French cans of beef bourguignon, cassoulet or even plain cannellini beans had been treasured as a treat for all, the new tins of baked beans and frankfurters were viewed with horror by adults, but welcomed by children…' Americans also disliked Vietnamese ingredients such as nuoc-mam , a strong smelling fermented fish sauce, which led to the decision to substitute it with soy sauce in rations for south Vietnamese soldiers. 'This calamitous decision, made by a US officer who believed fish sauce would spoil easily in the field, was a disaster for Vietnamese morale,' she writes. Such American mistakes in the field, coupled with growing resistance to the war back home, led to the chaotic departure 50 years back. Those who couldn't leave then took to small boats, seeking refuge anywhere they could. Some landed up in India, drawn to Pondicherry by old French colonial links. In the early'80s, I remember eating delicious Vietnamese rice rolls and fragrant soup in a simple café there, that doubled up as a laundry. Sadly, they didn't stay, moving on to other countries, a diaspora created by the hungers of history.
San Francisco Chronicle
29-04-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
As communist troops streamed into Saigon, a few remaining reporters kept photos and stories flowing
BANGKOK (AP) — They'd watched overnight as the bombardments grew closer, and observed through binoculars as the last U.S. Marines piled into a helicopter on the roof of the embassy to be whisked away from Saigon. So when the reporters who had stayed behind heard the telltale squeak of the rubber sandals worn by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in the stairs outside The Associated Press office, they weren't surprised, and braced themselves for possible detention or arrest. But when the two young soldiers who entered showed no signs of malice, the journalists just kept reporting. Offering the men a Coke and day-old cake, Peter Arnett, George Esper and Matt Franjola started asking about their march into Saigon. As the men detailed their route on a bureau map, photographer Sarah Errington emerged from the darkroom and snapped what would become an iconic picture, published around the world. Fifty years later, Arnett recalled the message he fed into the teletype transmitter to AP headquarters in New York after the improbable scene had played out. 'In my 13 years of covering the Vietnam War, I never dreamed it would end as it did today,' he remembers writing. 'A total surrender following a few hours later with a cordial meeting in the AP bureau with an armed and battle-garbed North Vietnamese officer with his aide over warm Coke and pastries? That is how the Vietnamese war ended for me today.' The message never made it: After a day of carrying alerts and stories on the fall of Saigon and the end of a 20-year war that saw more than 58,000 Americans killed and many times that number of Vietnamese, the wire had been cut. The fall of Saigon ended an era The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 was the end of an era for the AP in Vietnam. Arnett left in May, and then Franjola was expelled, followed by Esper, and the bureau wouldn't be reestablished until 1993. The AP opened its first office in Saigon in 1950 as the fight for independence from France by Viet Minh forces under communist leader Ho Chi Minh intensified. The Viet Minh's decisive victory over the U.S.-supported French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 marked the end of French Indochina and sparked major changes in the region with the partitioning of Vietnam into Communist North Vietnam and U.S.-aligned South Vietnam. The official U.S. military engagement began in 1955 and slowly escalated. Malcolm Browne took over as AP bureau chief in Saigon in November 1961 and was joined in June 1962 by Arnett and photo chief Horst Faas. The trio soon won consecutive Pulitzer Prizes: Browne in 1964, Faas in 1965 and Arnett in 1966 — the first of five the AP would receive for its coverage from Vietnam. Four AP photographers were killed covering the war, and at least 16 other AP journalists were injured, some multiple times, as they reported from the front lines, seeking to record the news as completely and accurately as possible. From the start, a lot of the reporting contradicted the official version from Washington, revealing a deeper American commitment than admitted, a lack of measurable success against the Viet Cong guerillas, and a broad dislike of the ineffective and corrupt American-backed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Arnett said. That prompted managers in New York to wonder why the Saigon staffers' stories were sometimes '180 degrees' different from those AP reporters wrote from press conferences at the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and the White House, he recalled. 'We had a strategic advantage because we were 12,000 miles away from our administration critics, with our boots on the ground," said Arnett, 90, who lives in California today. "Within a year, our reporting was vindicated.' At the height of the war there were roughly 30 staffers assigned to the bureau, divided between news, photos and administration, and the AP made regular use of freelancers as well, usually photographers. It was a diverse group that included people from 11 different countries, including many local Vietnamese. During upticks in the fighting, staffers would rotate in from from other bureaus to help. When the U.S. government took umbrage with AP's coverage in 1966 and claimed its staffers were young and inexperienced, AP's General Manager Wes Gallagher penned a salty reply, noting their combined decades as reporters. "Three covered World War II and Korea. Two, Pulitzer Prize winners Peter Arnett and Horst Faas, have been in Vietnam four years each, which is longer than Ambassador (Henry Cabot) Lodge, General (William) Westmoreland and nine-tenths of the Americans over there,' Gallagher wrote. In an attempt to manage the news reports out of Vietnam, the U.S. established a daily news conference in Saigon to feed information to the growing American press corps. They came to be colloquially known as the 'Five O'clock Follies' because, as Esper reflected, 'they were such a joke.' Esper said in a 2005 interview that sometimes he'd show up to evening briefings the same day he had covered a battle firsthand and was left puzzled by the official version. 'I'm thinking to myself, 'Is this the same battle I just witnessed?'" said Esper, who died in 2012. 'So there was some confrontation at the 'follies' because we would question the briefer's reports, and they also withheld tremendous amounts of information.' Esper said it helped that Gallagher took a personal hand in Vietnam coverage, frequently calling and visiting in support of his journalists. 'He took a lot of heat from the Pentagon, from the White House, but he never faltered,' Esper said. 'He always said to us: 'I support you 100%. You know the press is under scrutiny, just make sure you're accurate, just make sure your stories are fair and balanced,' and we did.' Reporting from the streets and rooftops In 1969, the American commitment in Vietnam had grown to more than a half million troops, before being drawn down to a handful after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords in which U.S. President Richard Nixon agreed to a withdrawal, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves. By 1975, the AP's bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerrilla force in the south pushed toward Saigon, most staff members were evacuated. Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering — and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute. 'I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,' Esper said. 'I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second guessing myself.' On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP's building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away. After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6:30 a.m. to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of U.S. Marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy — the last American evacuees. He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast. Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the U.S. Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building — a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated. 'On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the Embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,' Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day's events. 'Together we carry it back to the AP office.' At 10:24 a.m. Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered and immediately filed an alert. 'Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,' Arnett said, citing AP's biggest rival at the time, United Press International. 'In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.' Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square. 'He was waving his arms, 'fini, fini,' you know, 'it's all over, we lost,' Esper remembered. 'And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I'm going to die on this final day.' Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head. Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed. Stories flow as Saigon falls Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office. ''George,' I shout, 'Saigon has fallen. Call New York,'' Arnett said. 'I check my watch. It's 11:43 a.m.' Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy. It was about 2:30 p.m. when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a longtime member of the Viet Cong. 'I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,' Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. 'You have no reason to be concerned.' As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell. The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans — we're all the same,' Esper said. 'People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I'm tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that's the way the war ended for me.'
Winnipeg Free Press
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
As communist troops streamed into Saigon, a few remaining reporters kept photos and stories flowing
BANGKOK (AP) — They'd watched overnight as the bombardments grew closer, and observed through binoculars as the last U.S. Marines piled into a helicopter on the roof of the embassy to be whisked away from Saigon. So when the reporters who had stayed behind heard the telltale squeak of the rubber sandals worn by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in the stairs outside The Associated Press office, they weren't surprised, and braced themselves for possible detention or arrest. But when the two young soldiers who entered showed no signs of malice, the journalists just kept reporting. Offering the men a Coke and day-old cake, Peter Arnett, George Esper and Matt Franjola started asking about their march into Saigon. As the men detailed their route on a bureau map, photographer Sarah Errington emerged from the darkroom and snapped what would become an iconic picture, published around the world. Fifty years later, Arnett recalled the message he fed into the teletype transmitter to AP headquarters in New York after the improbable scene had played out. 'In my 13 years of covering the Vietnam War, I never dreamed it would end as it did today,' he remembers writing. 'A total surrender following a few hours later with a cordial meeting in the AP bureau with an armed and battle-garbed North Vietnamese officer with his aide over warm Coke and pastries? That is how the Vietnamese war ended for me today.' The message never made it: After a day of carrying alerts and stories on the fall of Saigon and the end of a 20-year war that saw more than 58,000 Americans killed and many times that number of Vietnamese, the wire had been cut. The fall of Saigon ended an era The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 was the end of an era for the AP in Vietnam. Arnett left in May, and then Franjola was expelled, followed by Esper, and the bureau wouldn't be reestablished until 1993. The AP opened its first office in Saigon in 1950 as the fight for independence from France by Viet Minh forces under communist leader Ho Chi Minh intensified. The Viet Minh's decisive victory over the U.S.-supported French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 marked the end of French Indochina and sparked major changes in the region with the partitioning of Vietnam into Communist North Vietnam and U.S.-aligned South Vietnam. The official U.S. military engagement began in 1955 and slowly escalated. Malcolm Browne took over as AP bureau chief in Saigon in November 1961 and was joined in June 1962 by Arnett and photo chief Horst Faas. The trio soon won consecutive Pulitzer Prizes: Browne in 1964, Faas in 1965 and Arnett in 1966 — the first of five the AP would receive for its coverage from Vietnam. Four AP photographers were killed covering the war, and at least 16 other AP journalists were injured, some multiple times, as they reported from the front lines, seeking to record the news as completely and accurately as possible. From the start, a lot of the reporting contradicted the official version from Washington, revealing a deeper American commitment than admitted, a lack of measurable success against the Viet Cong guerillas, and a broad dislike of the ineffective and corrupt American-backed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Arnett said. That prompted managers in New York to wonder why the Saigon staffers' stories were sometimes '180 degrees' different from those AP reporters wrote from press conferences at the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and the White House, he recalled. 'We had a strategic advantage because we were 12,000 miles away from our administration critics, with our boots on the ground,' said Arnett, 90, who lives in California today. 'Within a year, our reporting was vindicated.' At the height of the war there were roughly 30 staffers assigned to the bureau, divided between news, photos and administration, and the AP made regular use of freelancers as well, usually photographers. It was a diverse group that included people from 11 different countries, including many local Vietnamese. During upticks in the fighting, staffers would rotate in from from other bureaus to help. When the U.S. government took umbrage with AP's coverage in 1966 and claimed its staffers were young and inexperienced, AP's General Manager Wes Gallagher penned a salty reply, noting their combined decades as reporters. 'Three covered World War II and Korea. Two, Pulitzer Prize winners Peter Arnett and Horst Faas, have been in Vietnam four years each, which is longer than Ambassador (Henry Cabot) Lodge, General (William) Westmoreland and nine-tenths of the Americans over there,' Gallagher wrote. In an attempt to manage the news reports out of Vietnam, the U.S. established a daily news conference in Saigon to feed information to the growing American press corps. They came to be colloquially known as the 'Five O'clock Follies' because, as Esper reflected, 'they were such a joke.' Esper said in a 2005 interview that sometimes he'd show up to evening briefings the same day he had covered a battle firsthand and was left puzzled by the official version. 'I'm thinking to myself, 'Is this the same battle I just witnessed?'' said Esper, who died in 2012. 'So there was some confrontation at the 'follies' because we would question the briefer's reports, and they also withheld tremendous amounts of information.' Esper said it helped that Gallagher took a personal hand in Vietnam coverage, frequently calling and visiting in support of his journalists. 'He took a lot of heat from the Pentagon, from the White House, but he never faltered,' Esper said. 'He always said to us: 'I support you 100%. You know the press is under scrutiny, just make sure you're accurate, just make sure your stories are fair and balanced,' and we did.' Reporting from the streets and rooftops In 1969, the American commitment in Vietnam had grown to more than a half million troops, before being drawn down to a handful after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords in which U.S. President Richard Nixon agreed to a withdrawal, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves. By 1975, the AP's bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerrilla force in the south pushed toward Saigon, most staff members were evacuated. Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering — and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute. 'I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,' Esper said. 'I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second guessing myself.' On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP's building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away. After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6:30 a.m. to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of U.S. Marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy — the last American evacuees. He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast. Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the U.S. Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building — a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated. 'On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the Embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,' Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day's events. 'Together we carry it back to the AP office.' At 10:24 a.m. Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered and immediately filed an alert. 'Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,' Arnett said, citing AP's biggest rival at the time, United Press International. 'In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.' Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square. 'He was waving his arms, 'fini, fini,' you know, 'it's all over, we lost,' Esper remembered. 'And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I'm going to die on this final day.' Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head. Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed. Stories flow as Saigon falls Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office. ''George,' I shout, 'Saigon has fallen. Call New York,'' Arnett said. 'I check my watch. It's 11:43 a.m.' Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy. It was about 2:30 p.m. when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a longtime member of the Viet Cong. 'I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,' Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. 'You have no reason to be concerned.' As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell. During Elections Get campaign news, insight, analysis and commentary delivered to your inbox during Canada's 2025 election. The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans — we're all the same,' Esper said. 'People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I'm tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that's the way the war ended for me.' ___ Komor, the retired director of AP Corporate Archives, reported from New York.
The Independent
29-04-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
As communist troops streamed into Saigon, a few remaining reporters kept photos and stories flowing
They'd watched overnight as the bombardments grew closer, and observed through binoculars as the last U.S. Marines piled into a helicopter on the roof of the embassy to be whisked away from Saigon. So when the reporters who had stayed behind heard the telltale squeak of the rubber sandals worn by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops in the stairs outside The Associated Press office, they weren't surprised, and braced themselves for possible detention or arrest. But when the two young soldiers who entered showed no signs of malice, the journalists just kept reporting. Offering the men a Coke and day-old cake, Peter Arnett, George Esper and Matt Franjola started asking about their march into Saigon. As the men detailed their route on a bureau map, photographer Sarah Errington emerged from the darkroom and snapped what would become an iconic picture, published around the world. Fifty years later, Arnett recalled the message he fed into the teletype transmitter to AP headquarters in New York after the improbable scene had played out. 'In my 13 years of covering the Vietnam War, I never dreamed it would end as it did today,' he remembers writing. 'A total surrender following a few hours later with a cordial meeting in the AP bureau with an armed and battle-garbed North Vietnamese officer with his aide over warm Coke and pastries? That is how the Vietnamese war ended for me today.' The message never made it: After a day of carrying alerts and stories on the fall of Saigon and the end of a 20-year war that saw more than 58,000 Americans killed and many times that number of Vietnamese, the wire had been cut. The fall of Saigon ended an era The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975 was the end of an era for the AP in Vietnam. Arnett left in May, and then Franjola was expelled, followed by Esper, and the bureau wouldn't be reestablished until 1993. The AP opened its first office in Saigon in 1950 as the fight for independence from France by Viet Minh forces under communist leader Ho Chi Minh intensified. The Viet Minh's decisive victory over the U.S.-supported French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 marked the end of French Indochina and sparked major changes in the region with the partitioning of Vietnam into Communist North Vietnam and U.S.-aligned South Vietnam. The official U.S. military engagement began in 1955 and slowly escalated. Malcolm Browne took over as AP bureau chief in Saigon in November 1961 and was joined in June 1962 by Arnett and photo chief Horst Faas. The trio soon won consecutive Pulitzer Prizes: Browne in 1964, Faas in 1965 and Arnett in 1966 — the first of five the AP would receive for its coverage from Vietnam. Four AP photographers were killed covering the war, and at least 16 other AP journalists were injured, some multiple times, as they reported from the front lines, seeking to record the news as completely and accurately as possible. From the start, a lot of the reporting contradicted the official version from Washington, revealing a deeper American commitment than admitted, a lack of measurable success against the Viet Cong guerillas, and a broad dislike of the ineffective and corrupt American-backed South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, Arnett said. That prompted managers in New York to wonder why the Saigon staffers' stories were sometimes '180 degrees' different from those AP reporters wrote from press conferences at the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon and the White House, he recalled. 'We had a strategic advantage because we were 12,000 miles away from our administration critics, with our boots on the ground," said Arnett, 90, who lives in California today. "Within a year, our reporting was vindicated.' At the height of the war there were roughly 30 staffers assigned to the bureau, divided between news, photos and administration, and the AP made regular use of freelancers as well, usually photographers. It was a diverse group that included people from 11 different countries, including many local Vietnamese. During upticks in the fighting, staffers would rotate in from from other bureaus to help. When the U.S. government took umbrage with AP's coverage in 1966 and claimed its staffers were young and inexperienced, AP's General Manager Wes Gallagher penned a salty reply, noting their combined decades as reporters. "Three covered World War II and Korea. Two, Pulitzer Prize winners Peter Arnett and Horst Faas, have been in Vietnam four years each, which is longer than Ambassador (Henry Cabot) Lodge, General (William) Westmoreland and nine-tenths of the Americans over there,' Gallagher wrote. In an attempt to manage the news reports out of Vietnam, the U.S. established a daily news conference in Saigon to feed information to the growing American press corps. They came to be colloquially known as the 'Five O'clock Follies' because, as Esper reflected, 'they were such a joke.' Esper said in a 2005 interview that sometimes he'd show up to evening briefings the same day he had covered a battle firsthand and was left puzzled by the official version. 'I'm thinking to myself, 'Is this the same battle I just witnessed?'" said Esper, who died in 2012. 'So there was some confrontation at the 'follies' because we would question the briefer's reports, and they also withheld tremendous amounts of information.' Esper said it helped that Gallagher took a personal hand in Vietnam coverage, frequently calling and visiting in support of his journalists. 'He took a lot of heat from the Pentagon, from the White House, but he never faltered,' Esper said. 'He always said to us: 'I support you 100%. You know the press is under scrutiny, just make sure you're accurate, just make sure your stories are fair and balanced,' and we did.' Reporting from the streets and rooftops In 1969, the American commitment in Vietnam had grown to more than a half million troops, before being drawn down to a handful after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords in which U.S. President Richard Nixon agreed to a withdrawal, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves. By 1975, the AP's bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerrilla force in the south pushed toward Saigon, most staff members were evacuated. Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering — and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute. 'I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,' Esper said. 'I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second guessing myself.' On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP's building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away. After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6:30 a.m. to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of U.S. Marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy — the last American evacuees. He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast. Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the U.S. Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building — a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated. 'On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the Embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,' Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day's events. 'Together we carry it back to the AP office.' At 10:24 a.m. Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered and immediately filed an alert. 'Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,' Arnett said, citing AP's biggest rival at the time, United Press International. 'In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.' Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square. 'He was waving his arms, 'fini, fini,' you know, 'it's all over, we lost,' Esper remembered. 'And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I'm going to die on this final day.' Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head. Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed. Stories flow as Saigon falls Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office. ''George,' I shout, 'Saigon has fallen. Call New York,'' Arnett said. 'I check my watch. It's 11:43 a.m.' Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy. It was about 2:30 p.m. when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a longtime member of the Viet Cong. 'I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,' Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. 'You have no reason to be concerned.' As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell. The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home. 'I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans — we're all the same,' Esper said. 'People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I'm tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that's the way the war ended for me.' ___
