The Dalai Lama's Secret and Other Reporting Adventures: Stories from a Cold War Correspondent

23. Reporting Vietnam

244 23 REPORTING VIETNAM dusty, very dusty, as the armored personnel carriers churned through the ill-kempt trees of an abandoned rubber plantation and out into fields where rice would be planted when the monsoon rains soon arrived. Truckloads of American soldiers followed them, together with a gaggle of journalists. We were looking for Communist forces fighting the American-backed South Vietnamese government. Units of the North Vietnamese Army, known as the NVA and sometimes mixed with or disguised as indigenous southern Viet Cong guerrillas, were known to be operating from here in northeastern Cambodia. We had just crossed the border into a country that theoretically was neutral in the Vietnam War but in fact had been dragged by geography into a key wartime role. Instead of enemies to fight, however, all we saw as we plowed through the countryside and small villages were peaceful peasants. They greeted us with palms pressed together in front of their faces, the namaste welcome showing that we had left the cultural area of Vietnam’s Chinese-influenced Buddhism and entered a land of Indian-influenced Buddhism. The enemies had withdrawn before this American incursion. Although they had taken with them much of the military supplies brought down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and stockpiled here to support Communist warriors in Vietnam, some munitions were captured. After two early May 1970 days with the U.S. 11th Air Cavalry Division, walking and hitching rides to interview ordinary soldiers and their officers, I caught a military plane back to Saigon to send several reports to the Washington Star. Then, after I had spent several more days of reporting from Saigon on what was officially termed an “incursion” into Cambodia, my editors asked me to go down to Indonesia to cover a diplomatic gathering on the Cambodian situation. Thus ended another of what became numerous reporting visits to the Vietnam War between January 1970 and November 1974. Reporting Vietnam 245 When the Star hired me in May 1969 to become its Hong Kong correspondent , the understanding was that my reporting would primarily focus on China, then in the throes of the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” I was, however , also expected to provide periodic reporting on the Vietnam War and also the less-noted conflict in Laos between the American-backed government and the North Vietnamese-backed Pathet Lao. Although I was several times in jungles where there was some shooting in my general direction, I was not expected to be out with troops covering day-to-day combat. Instead, my job was to provide broad perspective on the changing Vietnamese situation in terms of military, political, and economic developments, while sometimes also writing daily stories on major events. 246 The Dalai Lama’s Secret and Other Reporting Adventures The Star had received reporting from Vietnam in the 1960s from two successive correspondents, Dick Critchfield and Don Kirk. In the aftermath of the Communists’ January 1968 Tet Offensive and the beginning of President Richard M. Nixon’s drawdown of U.S. forces in Vietnam, however, the editors decided to realign coverage by their single correspondent in Asia. Don was unwilling to return to Washington to work for the paper and quit to become a freelance journalist while working on a book. After I had worked for the Star in Washington for five months, getting to know the paper and its personnel, Monica and our sons and I arrived in Hong Kong at the end of 1969. We were still getting settled, and I was beginning to explore the resources in the British colony for reporting on China, when my editors had a panic attack about Vietnam. Coming up on January 30, 1970, was the second anniversary of the Tet Offensive, which had shaken the American position there and eroded U.S. determination to keep trying to build up a South Vietnamese government able to resist North Vietnam’s military determination to reunify the country under its control. Apprehensive that something dire might happen on the anniversary, the editors asked me in late January to go report on the situation in Saigon. It had been seven and a half years since my first visit to Saigon. On the way back to India in July 1962 from a home leave, I had stopped there out of curiosity about the small-scale guerrilla war. As it mounted in intensity, it...