Looking Back: TIME Correspondents Recall the War

A quarter of a century of war has produced untold volumes of newspaper articles, magazine stones and books. It has also produced a flood of memories for the 33 reporters and editors who at one time or another covered the Viet Nam War for TIME from Hong Kong and Saigon. The following mosaic, drawn from correspondents' vignettes, testifies to the infinite variations of tragedy in war and, in the case of Viet Nam, the seemingly infinite duration:

As far back as June 1948, Indochina was engulfed in war.

Only then it was the "Red Berets," France's paratroopers, and the white-hatted Foreign Legionnaires who were fighting the Viet Minh. In those days a town called Dong Dang, on the China border, was of particular interest to the French. It was a central supply point for the Viet Minh.

I hitched a ride there one day with a French pilot--one of a bunch with great joie devivre who never took off without their morning coffee and cognac. A big sign with a picture of Mickey Mouse holding a rifle stood in the center of town. It pointed left to Paris (12,672 kilometers) and right to Peking (2,971 kilometers). Past that sign came an unending stream of peasants trudging back to China after selling their farm produce in the markets. The French were convinced that the Chinese peasants were smuggling in weapons, but were unable to stop the flow.

It was at Dong Dang that the Japanese had begun their invasion of Indochina in 1940. At that time the French government fired off an urgent plea to Washington for help. But President Franklin Roosevelt fired back: "The United States will not go to war for any Ding Dong." An apocryphal story, surely, but one that summed up America's hands-off policy in Indochina for a few more years at least.

-Roy Rowan

THE streets of Saigon were filled with joy and vengeance on Nov. 1, 1963--the day that South Vietnamese generals stormed Ngo Dinh Diem's presidential palace and sent him to his grave. First came the long night of siege and the thunder of tanks in battle at the palace walls. Then came the final rush through the grounds by Diem's once faithful soldiers. As the battle subsided, I caught the first glimpse of a white flag waving tentatively from a first-floor palace window. In a minute or so the air was filled with silence--and with the awful smell of burned powder and oil and tank drivers' bodies. At first cautiously, then freely, the rebels began to stand up; a chorus of cheers welled up from the thousands in nearby streets. Western-style, they fired their guns into the air and rushed toward the battered fortress. In the next hour or two, the mob of soldiers, joined by thousands of citizens, sacked that palace with a thoroughness rarely seen.

Other mobs formed and swirled through the city. One of them, about 5,000 strong, tore off the head of a huge statue they thought to be a likeness of Madame Nhu, Diem's sister-in-law. They wheeled it through the streets, then joyously rolled it up and down the steps of the National Assembly over and over again. Up the street, another group heaved rocks into the bookstore owned by one of Diem's brothers, tossed the books and religious objects into the gutter and put the torch to the pile of rubble. The people danced, chanted and shouted around the bonfire, which burned for hours. "

Murray Gart

CHRISTMAS Eve 1963, somewhere south of My Tho in the Delta with a South Vietnamese night patrol, before the civilized days of holiday ceasefires. The Viet Cong open up from a stand of bamboo. We all hunker down in a paddyfield until we are waist deep in water, and press against a low dike. Tracers skim over our heads. We hunker down farther. Midnight arrives. Still hunkered down. The two American advisers with the patrol start singing Silent Night ever so softly. One starts to cry. The other growls, "Aw, shit." We hunker down still farther as the fire continues. At dawn helicopters come over, the Viet Cong run away, and we emerge from the water, covered with leeches. "Merry Christmas," says the American who cried.

-Lee Griggs

IN March 1965 I was covering an ARVN operation at the mouth of the Mekong River with a platoon of Vietnamese Rangers. A massive operation had been mounted to try to drive guerrillas out of lush, head-high brush and a maze of tunnels. We walked all morning through a swamp but did not see a single Viet Cong. In the afternoon, a U.S. gunship lifted us over the area for a panorama. Columns of smoke, black and white and tinged with red, ringed the swamp from brushfires and burning villages. The flames were pale in the tropical glare. From one cluster of huts a burst of rifle fire zinged past the helicopter. Our chopper crew answered with a brace of rockets. Some huts disintegrated.

The chopper dropped me on a sandbar sticking into the rich brown river. I rejoined the Rangers, and we walked into a fishing village. On the sand in the shade of a palm grove lay an old woman, her black pajama suit scorched and tattered. Her face was burned red as a boiled lobster, the skin flayed back to the bone. She must have been caught by a great tongue of flame, possibly from a napalm bomb--or perhaps from an incendiary rocket fired from our helicopter. A youth who might have been her grandson was spooning water between the burned, dying lips. I knelt beside them. I shall never forget the look of hatred in his eyes--or lose my own feelings of guilt by association. "

John Shaw

IN May 1966 the Saigon government of Air Vice Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky sent crack Vietnamese marines and airborne troops into Danang to quell a budding rebellion by militant Buddhists. On the second day of the battle between loyalists and rebel forces, we were following government tanks and marines as they swept block after block clean of rebel snipers and machine-gun nests.

During a lull, we ducked inside a shattered shop to catch our breath. Across the street, three Vietnamese marines emerged from an alley and cuffed a man in Vietnamese army green across the street into our shop. The marines were angry. They yelled at the prisoner, pushed him around and threatened him with their rifles. The man was frightened but calm; he obviously thought the Ranger patch on his sleeve assured his safety. Just then a battered civilian car clanked up, and a sweating Vietnamese marine lieutenant jumped out. The marines chattered excitedly. The lieutenant listened impassively. The prisoner waited. I stood directly beside him, but I never saw the lieutenant's gun. A pistol shot cracked, the prisoner sagged and fell, breath rattling, a tiny hole in his shirt pocket. Holstering his .45, the lieutenant began to explain --in good English--that the fallen Ranger had pitched a grenade at his marines. He deserved to die. The prisoner lay on the ground amidst the debris of battle--spent brass, empty ration cans, cabbage leaves, broken glass. He was still alive, his eyes open but no longer seeing. One marine took off his own tattered boots and began to strip the dying man of his. Five minutes later the prisoner died, expression frozen, feet bare. The marines began to move out, one of them in a fresh pair of boots.

-Karsten Prager

WE took a sort o communion one night in the Que Son valley. It was a few weeks before Christmas 1967, and some of the guys in Charlie Company were thinking about getting home for the holidays. We had been humping through the woods and the paddies all day, looking for North Vietnamese troops but not finding them. Then, just before dark, we walked into an ambush--a North Vietnamese battalion dug in in an arc around us. By nightfall a fourth of the company was dead or wounded, and we were pinned down, taking mortars and automatic-weapons fire.

One of the youngsters who died that evening was called "Doc." No one remembered his full name; because he was a medic, they had all called him Doc, and that was good enough. He had crawled out into the enemy's field of fire to drag one of the wounded into the hedgerow that was shielding the company, and he was killed by a burst from an AK-47. Men rarely cry in a spot like that, but some of them did then. That is how much they loved Doc.

Helicopters managed to bring in more ammunition and to evacuate the dead and wounded; but because of the mortars, they could not risk bringing in food, which had a lower priority. After dark, we began to think about how hungry we were. Then someone remembered that Doc's mother had sent him a can of Almond Kisses from Barton's in New York. It still was in his pack.

At first it seemed ghoulish to me, sitting there in a hole in the ground eating a dead man's Almond Kisses. But none of Doc's buddies thought of it that way. For them the cellophane-wrapped candy was a Eucharist. It was Doc. And in a way, he was Still with them. "

DonSider

I had been "in country" for about a week when I saw my first American dead. It was a bright, sunny afternoon on a branch of the muddy Mekong. I was on one of the Navy's small converted landing craft used as staging points in the watery interior. Suddenly a sailor casually noted, "There's a floater off the stern. Hell, where's the boat hook?"

And then I saw it--the bloated body of a huge Negro, floating face up in his fatigues with bandoleers of ammunition still looped around his shoulders. He had been shot the day before during a combat assault against some forgotten bit of swamp. Almost in shock, I helped drag the corpse on board and into a body bag. The only other corpse I had ever seen was that of a distant and elderly relative in an open-casket funeral service in Virginia. The nonchalance of the sailor was almost as dissonant as the confrontation with the dead man. I soon learned that in war it was the only reaction one could afford.

-Bill Mormon

IN early February 1969, the 19-year-old son of the Time-Life bureau's maid was killed in battle. I attended the funeral with another correspondent, driving to the maid's home in the heart of Saigon. There we found the dead son laid out in Vietnamese burial clothes, with a smiling picture of him in his new ARVN uniform at the head of the coffin. Burning joss and flickering candles contributed to the heavy, almost mystical atmosphere of the tiny apartment.

After a brief ceremony, the coffin was carried to a hearse for the clanging procession to the cemetery. At the tomb, food was placed on the coffin, in accordance with Buddhist ritual, to sustain the soul on its otherworld journey. During the graveside ceremony, the audible and visible anguish of the family increased. Meanwhile, unobserved hungry children deftly stole the food off the coffin, while tanks rolled by in the distance. The mother's moaning intensified. Suddenly, other women shrieked and pulled her to the ground, grabbing at her arms. She had begun slashing her tongue with a razor blade to inflict physical suffering on herself, and they were trying to stop her. We left the funeral and drove back to Saigon, hardly speaking.

-Burt Pines

BY the summer of 1971, most of the fighting was being done by the South Vietnamese. But for the G.I.s in the rear areas, there was another enemy to fight: hard drugs. To find out why, I invited a "closet" addict from Army headquarters in Saigon to come over and talk. Blond, gangling and obviously underweight, my guest slouched into a chair, pulled a vial of heroin from his baggy fatigues, tapped some of the white powder into a cigarette paper and lit up. At college in Ohio he had majored in engineering, been on the debating team, the basketball team, and had been active in peace groups. Now he was "fighting" a war he could not believe in at a ten-hour-a-day desk job that took him three hours a day to do.

He told me he had snorted two caps of heroin his first afternoon in the country--his first hard drugs ever--and had taken a hit every day since. He wanted to get off the habit, but somehow could not, despite his complaints of constipation, cramps and constant vomiting. Although he had been in Viet Nam only nine months and was in his early 20s, he seemed spent--almost middleaged.

"I was sitting on top of this roof at Long Binh, sunning," he told me, "and I looked down on the ground around me, and all I could see was the garbage. The flies were swarming all over the place. I thought, Christ, this place is a dump. And then I noticed that the flies were all around me as well. I was too stoned to swat them away. I suddenly realized that I had become part of the garbage." When it was time to go, he scooped up his vial, nodded, and shuffled off with his head bowed. It was obvious to me that there were many more casualties from the war than those expressed by the number of dead, wounded and missing.

-Jon Larsen

ONE night in December of 1971 a steamy rain was peppering down on Hue. It was dark, and curfew had sounded. Across the Perfume River, the blasted and decaying ruins of the old Citadel, former home of a unified Viet Nam's last imperial family, loomed black and miserable in the rain. A few Vietnamese stragglers were hurrying home through the dark streets. On one street, a stooped old woman carrying a basket was chanting into the darkness that she had duck eggs for sale. Occasionally, a door would open silently and a shadow would beckon to the old woman.

My interpreter and I stopped to talk with her about the war. "I had to leave the farm and come to the city because of the war," she said. "What do I have here? Nothing. All I can do now is sell eggs at night and maybe get robbed by bandits." She smiled ironically; her gums were stained red by betel nut, and her teeth were lacquered black in the old style. The woman hated the war as though it were a living thing. Her three sons had been killed in it--one by the French, one by the Viet Minh, the last by American bombs.

-Stan Cloud

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