Death Zones and Darling Spies: Seven Years of Vietnam War Reporting

1. The People’s War

23 1 The People’s War Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning and losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, about 400 bce Our army is a people’s army because it defends the fundamental interests of the people, in the first place those of the toiling people, workers and peasants. North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap, 1959 The two-ton truck jostled me from side to side as it lumbered down the cinnamon-colored road, swooshing puffs of dust through the window and engulfing the armed escort vehicles behind us. The daredevil Vietnamese military driver and I were headed toward D-Zone, a vast jungled area controlled for decades by the Communist-led guerrillas fighting the U.S.-backed government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. Within a month of arriving in Saigon in February 1962, I arranged for my first patrol in South Vietnam to report on Diem’s government forces and their American advisors. I also caught my first glimpse into what the guerrillas called their “liberated zone.” 24 the people’s war I fiercely clutched my Yashica camera and a few other belongings, as we drew closer to D-Zone. Huge craters pockmarked the road that had been dug up by the guerrillas or their supporters from the surrounding villages. The craters served as a visible, jagged line showing that we were entering into the liberated zone where the guerrillas and their cadres governed. Liberated areas such as D-Zone served as essential safe havens for the guerrillas to rest, train, build up their forces, and conduct operations . A 1962 Communist document reminded its political cadres and armed guerrillas that a liberated area “is neither a temporary station nor a retreat . . . but is permanent, a flag flying for the Revolution.”1 The Communist-led Viet Cong, shorthand for Viet Nam Cong-San, 7. A Viet Cong provincial committee and Buddhist priest gaze silently in this photograph printed from a roll of film taken from a dead pro-Communist soldier in the mid-1960s. (Courtesy of James Pickerell) the people’s war 25 8. These youths, probably recruited by the Viet Cong, are shown in a photograph printed from a roll of film taken from a dead pro-Communist fighter in the mid1960s . (Courtesy of James Pickerell) which means “Vietnamese Communist,”2 were unlike fighters in conventional wars. These elusive guerrillas wore no distinctive uniforms, rarely carried their arms openly, and often commingled or even lived with civilians, making them hard to distinguish from friendly faces. They were, as a youthful Senator John F. Kennedy told Congress in 1954, after his visit to French Indochina, “an enemy which is everywhere and at the same time nowhere.”3 Our destination was Trung Lap, a Vietnamese government training camp only thirty-five miles northwest of Saigon, which housed Vietnamese Ranger units and thirteen U.S. Army advisors headed by Maj. Fred K. Cleary. Barbed wire encircled Trung Lap, which was in turn encircled by the Viet Cong liberated zone. A dozen wooden buildings including a mess hall, an open-air water tower, about ten tents for four 140-man companies of Vietnamese Rangers in training, and a bar (where I slept) 26 the people’s war dotted the barren land. Not a tree was growing near the buildings, and with the sun’s reflection off the parched rice land, the temperature was higher than in Saigon. I felt I had landed in the Sahara.4 I had asked for this patrol to gain a firsthand view of how U.S. advisors were working with South Vietnamese government troops. The U.S. military office that had accredited me had arranged it. To prepare for the patrol, I bought a canteen and military boots, helmet, and fatigues from the open-air, black market not far from my apartment. I had already decided against carrying any type of weapon that might misidentify me as a combatant. Besides, I sensed that U.S. gis expected femininity in the field and decided it was always more important to wear lipstick than a pistol.5 The patrol also gave me a snapshot of a microcosm of the war: on...