Saturday, April 5

SAM ESPOSITO HAD BEEN IN SOUTH Vietnam for thirteen years, arriving in 1963 with the same red Olivetti portable he used to type his term papers at Yale. At the time he showed up there were 3,200 American military advisors in-country under the newly organized Military Assistance Command—Vietnam, or MAC-V, which would remain in charge of a war that started out as a humanitarian effort with limited military involvement. As the government explained in a mimeographed press release: “The MAC-V mission in South Vietnam is to secure over ten thousand villages and hamlets in the country. As part of that mission the U.S. Army will build schools, provide water and other needed services to ward against insurgents and the spread of Communism in Asia.”

This supposedly altruistic plan did not last long. The South Vietnamese forces, under an oppressive “democratic” regime, proved too weak and inept to withstand their determined North Vietnamese enemies. Before long, the number of American soldiers in Vietnam grew into the hundreds of thousands as U.S. forces gradually took on the task of fighting a communist takeover.

In one of Sam’s earlier dispatches for the Legend, he wrote: “The danger is being presented here and in Washington as a domino effect, with military advisors claiming that if South Vietnam falls to the communists, so falls Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand to Communist rule.”

By 1967 a half million American servicemen were in Vietnam. As fighting intensified and many of those soldiers died, protests against the war increased at home. Ultimately, the war was viewed as a failed mission, unwinnable by American military power. The U.S. reversed course and started reducing its involvement. Every year fewer solders were sent to Vietnam. In 1973, the war was officially turned over to the South Vietnamese in a process called “Vietnamization.” With American boys no longer being sent to Vietnam, the home-front protests also stopped. Politicians declared the war over and Vietnamization a huge success, and said the world had been saved from the communist tide.

Two years after the official end of America’s involvement, Sam wrote a piece for the Legend’s Sunday Week in Review:

“Though Pentagon officials put the number of U.S. military in Vietnam at fifty, he wrote, there is not a single correspondent in the country who believes the number is anywhere near that low. For that matter, neither do the North Vietnamese, who claim there are thousands of Americans still fighting in Vietnam and are demanding they leave before they will even talk about a negotiated peace. Since I counted fifty U.S. servicemen at Le P’tit last Friday night, I’m guessing there are a few more American soldiers somewhere in-country. Perhaps they are on KP peeling onions at a secret mess hall.”

April 1975 was a sharp contrast to the war that began while Sam was at Yale in the 1960s. Back then there was no doubt—come up with an alternative or be drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam right after graduation. Sam, who was to graduate in 1962, was caught in that wave. He even wrote articles for the campus newspaper about how students weighed the options: “Enlist for two years and get it over with? Join the National Health Service? Defect to Canada? Poke out an eye? Act crazy? Get a deferment as a Conscientious Objector? These are all considered acceptable options by my fellow students. No one passed judgment on how to deal with—or dodge—the draft. Guys who volunteered for the Marines remain friends with classmates who fled to Canada or became conscientious objectors.”

Sam thought about going to graduate school, then maybe work on a doctorate, hoping by that time the war would be over. But he never got around to applying. He liked the idea of flying, but since he had 20/200 eyesight, it was a sure bet he could not avoid the draft by becoming a fighter pilot like the Naval Reserve Officer Training students on campus. He simply left things to chance.

Graduation day was gloriously sunny in New Haven. Sam’s parents drove from Norwalk to see him receive his diploma. President John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address. After the ceremony, Sam and his parents got to shake hands with the president. Then, Sam’s mother, who had promised his father not to mar Sam’s day, couldn’t hold it in any longer: “Sam, I’m sorry,” she said tearfully as she handed him a letter that had arrived from the local draft board that morning.

The decision had been made for him, so Sam resigned himself to a two-year stint in the Army. He dutifully appeared for his physical exam, where he was asked, “Did anyone ever tell you that you have a heart murmur?” Sam was reclassified 1-Y, which meant he could be called to fight only in a national emergency. The Army was out. Flying was out. Since he’d written a few articles for the school paper, Sam figured news writing was something he could do. So he went down to the UPI office in New Haven, where the bureau chief, Parker Reines III, offered him a job as a reporter for seventy-five dollars a week.

* * *

Reines wore bow ties and walked with a walrus tusk-handled cane. He had been bureau chief since 1955. Reines criticized Sam mercilessly. “Too many adjectives,” he would say. “You buried your lead. Percent is one word, not hyphenated. It’s police, not THE police.”

When Sam got a break from reporting, he read the news copy that came by Telex over the international wire. Increasingly the news was about Vietnam. On June 2, the South was winning. On June 3, South Vietnam was losing a key battle over some peninsula he couldn’t pronounce. A week later it looked like the war was spreading to Laos. He had to check the atlas to find out where Laos was.

He learned that South Vietnam reports of minor victories were doctored. In one case, sixty captured North Vietnamese Army regulars turned out to be women and children. During that time Viet Cong became a new term in his vocabulary, synonymous with assassinations, killing rampages, and torture. Twelve thousand American military advisors were being sent to help the South Vietnamese fight them.

“Advisors my ass,” Reines would sneer when he saw the reports. “They’re kids who still need advice from their mothers, and they’re going to get killed.”

* * *

A few days before Thanksgiving in 1963, Sam ran into Billy Freda, a kid from his neighborhood. Billy was home after a one-year tour in Vietnam and Sam wanted to know what it was really like over there.

“Come on,” he said to Billy. “Let’s take a drive over to Temple Street. We’ll hit Mory’s for a couple of beers then maybe Pepe’s for a slice later.”

While they sat and drank at one of the old carved-up wood tables in Mory’s, all Billy wanted to do was reminisce about the time Norwalk beat West Haven by one point in the biggest game of his high school basketball career. But after a few beers he opened up and began to talk about his time in Vietnam.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, Sam,” he said. “We got these ‘Ricans in our unit. I mean had them in our unit. They’re all KIA now. Anyway, because they’re built small, Sarge sends them down into these tunnels where we think the gooks are hiding.” Billy’s eyes widened as he went on, “Then the Viet Cong sets booby traps all over the place. They bury sharpened bamboo stakes in a pit—punji sticks, they call them—and cover the pit with a burlap bag and dead leaves. One of my buddies fell into one on patrol. They had to amputate both his legs. It wasn’t the wound—they could have fixed that. It was the infection. Those little fuckers coated the stakes with their own shit.”

Sam let Billy ramble on, recounting one war story after another.

“So let me see if I’ve got this right,” Sam said. “They’ve got guys in pajamas fighting us on the ground with sharpened sticks straight out of the Stone Age, while the Russians are giving their pals—the North Vietnamese—radar-controlled surface-to-air missiles and MiG-15s. On top of this, the North Vietnamese Army is invading through Laos and Cambodia, carrying weapons on bicycles and elephants.” The incongruity was lost on Billy.

“Here’s how I see it, Sam. Do we want to fight them over there or fight them over here? I say over there is better and I’m going back for a second tour. I’ll be fighting to save your ass from the commies. So this round’s on you, Sam!”

“Sure. Beer’s on me. And if I see the Western Union guy on our street, let’s hope he’s not visiting your mom.”

“Sam, I gotta go back. I have to. I feel like shit in the States. All my friends are gone. When I’m there, man, I feel right. Like how I felt when we beat West Haven by one point with one second on the clock. And Billy Freda scores the winning point.”

* * *

Two days later—at precisely 1:30 in the afternoon on November 22, 1963—the office walls shook as every Teletype machine in the UPI bureau sprang to life simultaneously. First, the machines’ alarm bells alarm went off, warning everyone something big was coming. Then the machines started typing, rhythmically beating out news reports faster than any human could type, churning through the rolls of copy paper that hung above each machine.

Sam ripped the copy out of the nearest machine. It read:

“Dallas, Texas … President John F. Kennedy has been shot during a motorcade near Dealey Plaza …”

Then every phone in the bureau began to ring. Newspaper editors who relied on UPI for their international news demanded to know: “Is it true?” One editor called to say he was holding the front page for confirmation.

Minute by minute the calls came in. A half hour passed. Then one of the machines typed out: “Kennedy pronounced dead by doctors at the Memorial Hospital …”

Kennedy’s assassination, seeing Billy, and listening to Reines natter on about police versus the police hit Sam all at once. He blurted: “I am going to die if I don’t get the fuck out of here!”

That day, Sam bought a one-way airline ticket to Saigon.

* * *

Word of Sam’s arrival in Vietnam preceded him. To Sam’s surprise, Reines didn’t hold his abrupt departure against him. Reines secretly admired and envied Sam and took it upon himself to cable the UPI bureau chief in Saigon, saying, “Keep an eye peeled for a skinny young man with horn-rimmed glasses. He’s a little green but he’s a damn good writer. He should be—I taught him!”

The cable worked. Sam got a job as a UPI stringer earning eighty bucks a story, “More if we run one of your pictures,” he was told.

Sam Esposito’s byline started appearing weekly, then a few times a week, then daily. He was a rising star among a growing number of in-country correspondents. As an accredited correspondent, he was issued a MAC-V press pass, which enabled him to hop on any Huey helicopter any time and go anywhere with the army. He never hung back. He saw Vietnam being scorched with napalm. He watched as the Air Force sprayed miles upon square miles with the defoliant Agent Orange. He rode out on missions with scared kids, and rode back with blood-spattered soldiers—some of them in body bags.

It didn’t take long for Sam’s skepticism to grow. In one of his dispatches he wrote: “Here’s how I view the war at this point. South Vietnam’s government is corrupt. The Viet Cong are vicious murderers—a street gang with a devotion to Ho Chi Minh that rivals religious fanaticism. North Vietnam’s Army seems to thrive on punishment—no matter how many bombs the B-52s drop on them, no matter how often U.S. soldiers defeat them in battle or how high the body count, they just keep coming. Meanwhile, our military releases unrealistic body-count numbers claiming hundreds of enemy killed every day. All this while the diplomats sit around in Paris talking and wringing their hands.”

* * *

In time, Sam made a name for himself among the Saigon press corps for calling out the military on their exaggerated body counts and official action reports that turned out to be bullshit. Meanwhile, as more American boys died in Vietnam, college students back home were chanting “Hell no, I won’t go!” By 1966, the Washington Legend decided it needed a seasoned correspondent in Vietnam to dig beneath the daily press briefings and Pentagon blather. The paper sought out Sam and made him its Saigon bureau chief.

With this new responsibility, he reported with even greater vigor. Though his coverage included mentions of VC and North Vietnamese atrocities, he focused more on excesses by the U.S. military, on their inability to win over the “hearts and minds” of Vietnam’s population, and on the fact that they could demonstrate no clear measure of victory. His reporting won Sam the intense ire of the president.

Once, while sitting in Le P’tit, Sam ran into a former White House newspaper correspondent who had arrived in-country the previous day and was assigned to cover the deteriorating situation in Vietnam. He described how Sam’s columns were getting a lot of attention in the Oval Office.

“Man, are you pissing off Nixon!” he said. “He calls your stories ‘Esposito neg-atorials.’”

“I like that,” Sam responded. “Negatorial has a nice ring.”

“Wait, it gets better. So I’m interviewing Nixon and right away he says something like ‘I can’t wait to get that bastard Yalie fuckin’ cocksucker reporter friend of yours. Even George Bush can’t rein that fucker in, and he practically owns Yale and could probably get Esposito fired from half the newspapers in the country. But not the Legend. Who’s running that rag now? Charlie Waverly’s widow? Who the fuck does she think she is?’ he says. ‘Who the fuck does Esposito think he is?’

“Then right in front of me—because he knows I’m going to Vietnam and will play this back to you—he turns to his chief of staff—his buddy Haldeman—and says, ‘I want a dossier on Esposito. Give me everything you can get on that prick! Everything!’”

“I’ve heard that he’s not too happy,” Sam smiled.

“Yeah, well, watch your back, Sam. Nixon never forgets an enemy. He’ll get you if you’re not careful.”

But the angrier Nixon got at Sam, the more Sam investigated, the more his stories appeared on page one, above the fold, and the more Americans became disenchanted with a war that had by this point dragged on longer than any war in the nation’s history.

Fortunately for Sam, the Legend’s biggest competitor, the Washington Post, exposed a seemingly small-time burglary at an apartment and office complex called the Watergate that eventually implicated the Nixon Administration for its political dirty tricks. Two years later, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign, becoming the only president in U.S. history to have done so.

Gerald Ford was sworn in as president. Now all eyes were on him to end the Vietnam War.