Connecting the Fall of Saigon

Paul Shane <[email protected]> Connecting April 30, 2015 Paul Stevens <[email protected]> Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 8:08 AM ReplyTo: [email protected] To: [email protected] Having trouble viewing this email? Click here Connecting April 30, 2015 Click here for sound of the Teletype The fall of Saigon A North Vietnamese tank rolls through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, April 30, 1975, signifying the fall of South Vietnam. (AP Photo/Frances Starner) Colleagues, Today is the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon ‐ a signature event in the history of the United States and one of those events seared into our country's collective memory. Newspapers and broadcast stations have been presenting numerous stories on the anniversary of the April 30, 1975, capture of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, by the People's Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (also known as the Viet Cong). It marked the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a transition period leading to the formal reunification of Vietnam into a socialist republic, governed by the Communist Party of Vietnam. Today's issue of Connecting doesn't attempt to match all the stories in the media about that eventful day, but instead brings you the recollections of Connecting members who responded to my call for their stories. Enjoy, and remember, and be proud of your journalist colleagues who covered the war. Paul 'A circuit to anywhere' (EDITOR'S NOTE: This was excerpted from the book, "Breaking News: How the Associated Press has covered war, peace and everything else". Richard Pyle was AP's Saigon bureau chief from 1970‐73 and is the last survivor of the seven who were Saigon bureau chiefs.) By RICHARD PYLE (Email) In the cluttered Associated Press bureau overlooking Saigon's main square, three newsmen were facing the crisis of their lives. After fifteen years of war, South Vietnam was disintegrating under enemy attack, and the risks for foreign journalists ranged from losing their communications to the outside world to becoming casualties themselves. All military and government switchboards were dead, and AP's radio‐teletype link to New York could fail momentarily. Bureau Chief George Esper, famous among colleagues for his prowess with Vietnam's erratic phone system, was desperately trying to keep a line open, "a circuit to anywhere," as he would later put it. It was Wednesday, April 30, 1975, and Saigon was gripped by dread. The day before, a three‐hour artillery attack battered Tan Son Nhut Airport, site of the former U.S. military headquarters called Pentagon East, triggering an emergency evacuation called "Operation Frequent Wind." Through the night, relays of U.S. Marine Corps helicopters had lifted thirteen hundred Americans and five thousand six hundred Vietnamese and "third country" citizens from the roof of the United States embassy to safety aboard U.S. warships in the South China Sea. Top government officials had fled, and most foreign correspondents had joined the evacuation. Esper (left) and colleagues Peter Arnett and Matt Franjola were among a few staying behind to cover the end of the second Indochina war, known to the Vietnamese as the "American war," in which more than three million people died. The Saigonese had always feared a bloodbath if the North won. Now, that moment was at hand, and the city was on the edge of chaos. As looters ransacked the deserted U.S. embassy a few blocks away, the first North Vietnamese troops crashed their Soviet‐built tanks through the gates of the presidential palace and hoisted a victory flag. By midmorning, many residents had retreated indoors to await Hanoi's conquering army and an uncertain future. Walking the tree‐lined boulevards, Arnett and Franjola found a virtual flea market of military uniforms and boots, discarded by soldiers and policemen who had donned civilian garb or run off in their underwear. Meanwhile, Vietnamese families filled the dingy corridor outside AP's door in the thick‐walled Eden Building. "They had mistaken our activity for authority, and believed we could provide them sanctuary," Arnett wrote later. In deciding to stay, the journalists were banking on assurances by the National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong, that, barring a battle for Saigon, a Communist takeover would not endanger foreigners. "We assumed the worst that could happen to journalists would be interrogation and maybe house arrest," Esper recalled. Actually, most foreign reporters were expelled within a few days; Esper was ordered out after five weeks. In 1993, he opened AP's first postwar bureau in Hanoi. But during those days the Communists were taking control of Saigon, there were no guarantees of safety from what the AP men considered a greater peril: embittered South Vietnamese seeking revenge for what they saw as an American betrayal. Near the war memorial in Lam Son Square, a distraught police colonel accosted Esper, shouting and waving his pistol. As Esper edged away, expecting a fatal bullet, the man cried "Fini! Fini!" saluted the statue, and shot himself in the head. In New York, AP General Manager Wes Gallagher watched the Saigon situation with growing concern for the staff's safety. Eventually, he ordered everybody out except Esper and Arnett. "We knew others were leaving, and some probably thought we should leave, too, but Gallagher gave us the option of staying, and we took it,'' Esper would say later. "We had spent too many years in Indochina with the AP to just give it up.'' In a decade as an AP field reporter and main lead writer, Esper had scored a series of scoops and produced more than twice as many words as any other journalist in Vietnam, banging out daily war roundups that appeared in hundreds of papers. New Zealand‐born Arnett, who in thirteen years in Vietnam had earned a Pulitzer Prize and a reputation for tough‐minded reporting, had rushed back to Saigon from New York when it became clear that South Vietnam was crumbling. Franjola had come to Saigon after fleeing the Khmer Rouge takeover of neighboring Cambodia, then volunteered to help cover the story, and insisted on remaining as the third man. As the situation worsened, Esper helped expedite the departure of AP's staff and the Vietnamese employees who feared Communist retribution. An hour before the end on April 30, Gallagher messaged AP Saigon that yet one more helicopter evacuation was possible and asked: "Any of you want to leave if it works out?" "Thanks for your offer," Esper replied. "We want to stay." For years, it had been a wry joke among AP's Vietnam staffers that when the Communist forces captured Saigon, they would find George Esper on the telephone. On this turbulent day, that prophecy was fulfilled. The last three staffers in the AP Saigon bureau‐Matt Franjola, left, Peter Arnett, rear, and George Esper, bending over map ‐ with two North Vietnamese soldiers and a member of the Viet Cong on April 30, 1975, the day the government of South Vietnam surrendered. One of the soldiers is showing Esper the route of his final advance into the city. (AP Photo/Sarah Errington) As Esper worked to open a line to any other AP bureau, three Vietnamese walked in. Two were armed and wore the khaki‐green uniform of the North Vietnamese People's Liberation Army. Esper and Arnett recognized the third as Ky Nhan, a long‐time AP photo stringer who now revealed that for many years, he also had been a Viet Cong agent, spying on Vietnamese and foreign journalists. "I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office. You have no reason to be concerned," he declared. Nodding toward the soldiers, he continued: "I have told them about the AP, that you are all good people, and they come here to visit you as friends." (At a Saigon press reunion in April 2005, a former NVA soldier told AP staffers his mission in 1975 had been to assure the safety of foreign journalists.) The soldiers in the AP office said nothing, but one unshouldered his AK‐47 assault rifle and laid it on the wooden counter that divided the news desks from the public area. As if to match the peaceful gesture, Esper put down his phone and shook hands with the visitors. While Franjola chatted with them in Vietnamese, Esper brought out Coca‐Colas and leftover pound cake from the office refrigerator. The soldiers accepted the offering, but, like honest cops on duty, declined Arnett's offer of a drink of cognac. They took family photos from their packs and showed them around. Then Esper turned to business, interviewing the two twenty‐five‐year‐old sergeants. On a wall map, they helpfully traced the route their tank brigade had taken into Saigon that morning. Esper began punching the story, the first interview with the conquerors of Saigon, into the transmitter. The soldiers, who probably had never seen a teletype machine, watched in silence as the story clacked off to New York. "For ten years, I had written about the faceless, nameless Communist troops," Esper wrote later. "Finally we were face to face. It struck me that they were no different from the South Vietnamese or, for that matter, my fellow Americans, all of whom had been killing each other." The helicopter evacuation had been fraught with its own perils. By prearrangement, the broadcast of Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" on U.S. Armed Forces Radio was the secret signal for foreigners to gather at designated pickup points for buses to take them to the airport.

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