Chapter 25
The Lunar New Year
When Nick had first arrived in-country he stayed at the Caravelle. Not as classy as the French-colonial Continental across the square, but it had one enormous advantage as far as he was concerned: More often than not, things worked. Antique buildings may have quaint charm, but he saw nothing quaint about antique plumbing or rotary ceiling fans. The Caravelle was ‘50s modern and had air conditioning. Exterior decoration was a few glass bricks and neon letters announcing the hotel’s name and proclaiming the location of Air France’s office. Most of the press guys assigned to established bureaus had more permanent digs, but Nick’s paper was rotating someone in and out of Saigon for 60-day stints, and even those were periodic. So his editors weren’t about to take a lease on an apartment. “What the hell do ya want, permanent residence?” his editor, Harry, had asked when Nick had broached the subject. “Ya wanna feel settled, buy a farm. We ain’t providing a place for you to put up a geisha. Forget it, kid.”
Decent rooms and apartments were hard to come by because of the explosion of the American “presence” in Saigon, but Nick had kept on the lookout for cheaper quarters, or a villa to share, figuring if he could cut the hotel bills and thus the cost of keeping him there, the paper might let him stay longer. Through John Simenson, he finally landed a cot in one of the apartments UPI maintained as living quarters above its bureau down by the river. Once he got his foot in the door, so to speak, it was pretty easy to hang in. There was always one of the guys taking R&R to Hong Kong, or someone in the process of being rotated in or out from the States, or a reporter whose wife was coming over for a couple of months, so he would move out to an apartment that some other guy being rotated back was giving up.
Nick had been crashing in the UPI apartment for a little over two months, since just after Thanksgiving. He finally had his own little cubby-hole room after having had a bed of his own for a while, then moving to a couch, and on more than one occasion tossing a sleeping bag on the floor. It was nomadic and a little disorienting, but Harry was happy – Nick was keeping expenses down so Harry wasn’t getting flak from his bosses about letting Nick stay beyond his intended short tour.
Nick was jolted awake there on a night in late January. He had returned in the early morning hours exhausted from a quick trip to I Corps, the area around the Marine base at Da Nang, where the Viet Cong were raising some new hell, causing speculation that they were planning fresh assaults all over the country. For an instant, Nick couldn’t figure out what woke him. A dream, maybe, that he was back at the press camp in Da Nang listening to the mortars. He sat up, disoriented. He could hear sporadic fire in the distance, small arms. Then he felt the low scream of a 40 millimeter and the shudder of the ground as it hit. Shit, he thought, this isn’t Da Nang, I’m in downtown Saigon in the United Press apartment across from the Majestic Hotel. What the hell is going on?
The room was full of smoke. Bits of rock-like hail were raining down on him. Nick grabbed the pants he’d tossed at the foot of his bed hours before and pulled them on over his skivvies. Moonlight poured through a hole in the wall that hadn’t been there before he went to bed. Shaking debris out of his hair, he gingerly groped through the rubble on the floor for his boots, found them, crawled to a chair where he'd thrown his shirt and jacket before falling into bed, grabbed his notebook from a table and got the hell out.
There already were several people in the bureau office downstairs, and just as Nick arrived two MPs burst in.
“Douse the fucking lights,” ordered an immense black man whose face loomed in the glow from the streets as nothing more than two rows of giant gleaming teeth beneath a white steel helmet.
“What the hell happened?” asked John Simenson, barefoot, wearing nothing but jeans.
“Shelling. Viet Navy HQO just in back a here.”
The big MP barely had the words out of his mouth, and another explosion rocked the building. Everyone dropped, flattened on the floor.
“Shit,” Simenson yelled at the MPs from under a desk, “this is Tet, Viet New Year. What the hell happened to the truce?”
“Some fucking truce,” grumbled Nick.
“Don’t blame us, man, we just work here,” said the big MP, then he laughed as though he considered himself a real card.
“You and your damned sense a humor, Peterson,” snapped his partner, a scrawny sour-faced blond whose sharp, pinched features were nearly lost in the shadow cast by his oversized white helmet. “These turkeys don’t think that’s funny.”
“The Embassy and Tan Son Nhut is both under attack,” said the big black guy. “We was on our way there, but got ambushed. That's why we come in here.”
“You was on your way to which, the Embassy or the airport?” asked the UPI deskman in knee-jerk, reportorial fashion – a little snide, yet forever seeking clarification, make sure you got the facts straight, even if you won't need them.
The MPs ordered the reporters to secure the bureau, got them moving to pull down the iron grating across the front of the building and haul a couple of heavy office desks over to barricade the front door.
“Christ,” said Nick, “maybe the shellings I went to check out yesterday around Da Nang weren’t just isolated incidents. I also heard reports that the truce had been broken in II Corps in the Central Highlands. Maybe the whole damned south is under attack!”
“See, I told ya, Peterson,” said his partner, the dour MP, “Clark Kent and the boys here is scared. You shouldn't be funning with ‘em.”
“Fuck you,” said Peterson, as the same words echoed in Nick’s mind. But he had more important things to worry about than this slack-jawed, slow-witted asshole from Lower Slobovia. Nick just hoped he never ran into the creep in a dark alley some night, or some day in the outer office of a general he was trying to interview. Hard to tell sometimes who was on whose side in this goddamned war, he thought, as he watched the bureau guys set up a single, shaded lamp and test their telex to see if they could get through to New York. He knew there was no way they were going to tie up that single line to let him send to his paper in Chicago. Besides, what the hell would he file? He hadn't a clue what was going on. But he had to start finding out. It was about one or two o’clock in the afternoon back in the States and he had only a few hours to meet his early deadline. The UPI guys were already moving a bulletin that Saigon was under attack. Presumably, AP had as well, which meant alarm bells would soon be ringing on every wire machine in every news office in America. It went from here to the UPI office on 42nd Street in New York, or to AP in Rockefeller Center, then NY would start sending, and those bells would start to ring.
Nick started up the Tu Do for the Embassy at a dead run, but soon slowed to a trot and then a fast walk. Jeez, he thought, the United States Embassy under attack? Those MPs were pretty excited, they probably had it wrong. The streets seemed like any other night at – he looked at his watch, again – 3:30 in the morning. Actually, maybe it wasn’t as noisy and active as usual. Some of those GI bars normally went all night. But a lot of things were shut down because of Tet; Vietnamese gone to their families in the countryside, GIs on R&R because of the truce. Shit, another Pearl Harbor? Catch everyone asleep at the switch? He passed the Caravelle and the Continental. He noticed several room lights flick on in both of the hotels, but the streets were deserted and the quiet was starting to feel eerie. The occasional short bursts of small arms fire felt almost reassuring. At least he wasn’t in some “On The Beach” nuclear dead zone, or the only human survivor of an alien space invasion. He had been on the street about five minutes and had passed only one Vietnamese on a bicycle and a Jeepload of MPs when he heard heavy shelling from the direction of the presidential palace. At almost the same time he saw tracers in the sky over in the direction of the airport. What the hell was going on? The tracers could almost be Tet fireworks.
He took a right just beyond Cathedral Square. He saw a strange dark mass up to his left a block ahead at the corner of Hai Ba Trung and Thong Nhat, the street the four-acre U.S. Embassy compound faced. He stopped in his tracks to reconnoiter and figure what his next move should be – it was to get behind the nearest tamarind tree and then try to adjust his focus in the dark to make some judgment about what the mass was. The blob seemed to move as separate pieces and then reform as a mass, sort of like an amoeba or sea jelly. As Nick inched closer from tamarind to tamarind, he realized the pieces were people, but Viet Cong? ARVN? What? Just then the sound of a grenade exploding came from the direction of the Embassy compound, followed by about 30 seconds of rifle fire. He hugged a tree and waited.
He inched closer. By the time he could discern that the sounds were English, the argot was also clear: journalese! He moved over to join them.
Several of his colleagues, along with some MPs, were not exactly what you’d call pinned by fire; but in effect they were held down because they couldn't get any closer than this street corner, about a hundred yards from the Embassy entrance, without some sniper taking a pot shot. Nobody seemed to know what was going on. He was told a small hole had been blasted in the Embassy compound's eight-foot-high concrete wall. He could barely make out what the MPs said was a bullet-riddled black Citroen wrecked in the street just beyond the Embassy gate with a dead Vietnamese at the wheel. An abandoned Jeep was in the street nearby.
“Why the hell is everybody standing around a half a block away?” Nick asked.
“In the interest of your health, Mac,” said one of the MPs, hanging back at the corner with the reporters. “The Cong's inside the Embassy, but we can't tell in the dark where their snipers are to take them out.”
The thumping sound of an approaching chopper turned all heads skyward. The reporters watched as a Huey made several passes at the Embassy’s roof-top helipad but each time was driven back by automatic weapons fire of snipers guarding the approach.
A few derring-do types talked half-heartedly about trying to scale the compound’s walls to take a look at what was going on inside, but the general feeling was that if the MPs were holding off until dawn before they made an assault on the Embassy gates, maybe it would be just as well for the reporters to sit back on their pencils and let the pros do the assault number.
Nick was impatient with the commando posturing. What they really needed to worry about was getting their own jobs done. They had few hard facts beyond knowing for sure that the Embassy was under siege, and the filing situation was a nightmare. Most of the print guys generally filed through Reuters, which fortunately was close by, just back across Cathedral Square. Nick didn’t need to be told by those who already had been over there that the place was awash with screaming maniacs. Not only was the Reuters wire clogged and the lineup to file long, but many of the guys around had the same near-impossible task as Nick did, of having to be both legman and rewrite.
Some outfits had several guys on the job plus a stringer or two, which meant two or three reporters could be out picking up information and feed it back through a runner to the guy back at Reuters who could both write the new stuff up and stand in line to file. But man, Nick thought, it was him against the world. No way to phone stuff in, no way to do anything but try to cover all the bases himself, figure out what was going on here, then back to Reuters, then cool his heels standing in line there.
Nick was pondering this as he made his way across Cathedral Square. He hated like hell to leave the Embassy corner. He was sure as soon as he left, the MPs would make their assault on the compound and he would miss the whole thing. But he simply had to get a few graphs off to his office to let them know they could count on his getting some kind of eyewitness account to them, at least for the later editions.
He finally got something filed through the Reuters mess while keeping a sharp eye out for any Vietnamese hanging around who might be able to at least do some running for him – he’d never dare hope to find one competent to string. On the whole, the Vietnamese stringers weren't much good, anyway. You really couldn't rely on their information being accurate; a lot of them were inclined to sit around talking to each other at the Pagode café, swapping rumors. A number of American press guys had gotten stung more than once by two or three Vietnamese sources all corroborating the same so-called fact, when, in fact, the information had been generated on the Pagode grapevine.
Nick felt relieved as he made his trip back across Cathedral Square to see from a block away that his competitors were still all hanging at the Hai Ba Trung corner – at least the Marines haven’t stormed the Bastille without me as witness, he thought. Marines, Christ, he wondered, where are they? Speculation back in the Reuters line was that the Marine guards inside the compound must have been killed. It was hard to tell just how big a war he was in, but in the predawn dark, the city still seemed pretty quiet despite the periodic explosions of grenades and rifle fire. Back with the little group in front of the Embassy, the consensus was that only a few VC sappers had stormed the U.S. compound through the hole blown by a bazooka and that this almost surely had to be a limited action.
As daybreak Wednesday, January 31, 1968, approached, relief and Angela arrived about the same time. The minute Nick spotted that long-legged graceful stride, he knew who it was long before he could distinguish her from any other shadowy figure in combat polyester.
Jesus, he thought, she’s the answer to my prayers!
“I figured you could use a legman,” she said as she walked up. “Sorry I took so long. With all the Tet firecrackers we’ve been hearing for days, it took a while to wake up and realize this was different. Besides, I had a late night.”
“Am I ever glad to see you,” Nick said with a wide grin. “You’re hired.”
“What a mess,” Angela said. “Everyone is on holiday leave, or partying. I was myself until after midnight. With some high-level military intelligence officers. I’m pretty wrecked.”
“Oh great,” Nick said with sarcasm. “No wonder we’re caught with our pants down. The spooks were at a party.”
“Yep,” said Angela. “So tell me what you want me to do. But first, I picked up some info when I ran into a PIO near Lom Son Square after I came out of my hotel. He said the VC sappers didn’t get into the Embassy itself, just the grounds, and most of ‘em are dead by now. That’s when I decided to come up here. Figured you’d need someone to go file for you.”
“Do I ever. But there’s nothing new here since I last filed. It’s been like this for hours. How’d the press officer know so much?” Nick asked. The night sky suddenly turned white over the Independence Palace a few blocks to the west as U.S. planes dropped flares to light up enemy positions.
Angela and Nick both momentarily ducked, then looked skyward before she answered. “Came from the Embassy coordinator. You know, the guy lives in the little villa on the grounds.”
“Yeah, George Jacobson, mission coordinator,” Nick corrected.
“Whatever. Anyway, Zorthian, the press office boss, phoned Jacobson, who described the whole thing. Said they never got in the Embassy. Jacobson has himself locked in his bedroom, or something.”
“Jesus. Good angle. OK, did the guy you talked to say what else is under attack? I mentioned the airport, the Viet Navy HQO and the palace when I first filed.”
“Several billets, he said, both enlisted and officers’ quarters. A bunch of . . . ” Angela was interrupted by the distinctive whine of a rocket, at enough distance to be barely discernible, then the thud of its explosion several miles to the west, in the vicinity of Cholon, the Chinese section of the city. She began again, “A bunch of fires around the city. He said that Westmoreland said the Embassy is highest priority.”
“Shit, yeah,” Nick said. Then he laughed. “Obvious reasons. Not just the symbolic value, but it’s smack dab in the middle of where all the reporters are based. And here we are. No one’s going to hop a bus and go see what’s happening at the airport. And American readers won’t give a rat’s ass about South Vietnam’s Independence Palace.”
“Jesus, you’re such a cynic,” said Angela.
“A realist,” Nick replied. “Besides, a couple of the wire guys took a buzz around to see what was happening and got pinned down by VC fire for their trouble. So they came back here.”
They both looked over as a Jeep pulled up across the street from the Embassy gates. Before the two MPs could get out of the vehicle, they were blown out by a stream of bullets from an automatic rifle. A sharp-shooting Marine, standing in front of the gates, bent down on one knee and provided cover while several other MPs ran across and pulled their wounded buddies out of the street. The sniper was silenced.
Overhead, another Huey came into view and appeared headed for the compound. The gathered newsmen stopped talking among themselves, looked skyward as a collective face and seemed to hold their collective breath. The chopper dipped, hovered above the Chancery roof, and disgorged its load of paratroopers, their M-16s held aloft as though they were leaping into rice paddies. Most of their boots were on the roof and on the run before the chopper's blade runners touched down.
“I’d better take the Reuters shift this time,” Nick said to Angela as he prepared to take off. “You cover this end, and I’ll alert Harry that you might be filing in the future.” Before he could move, the gathered MPs broke through the Embassy front gate shooting and throwing grenades. The gathered newsmen rushed behind them into the compound, flashbulbs popping and cameras rolling. The grounds were littered with dead Cong wearing red armbands, wounded Marine guards, dropped rifles and the debris of exploded ordinance.
“Oh my God,” said Angela, “what a sickening sight.”
“Yeah,” Nick replied, as several of their colleagues brushed past him headed for the Chancery, exclaiming over the large shield of the United States lying in the rubble, riddled with bullets.
Angela grabbed Nick’s arm. “George Jacobson,” she mouthed, rolling her eyes and nodding her head to indicate a right turn toward the back of the building where several MPs were being trailed by an NBC cameraman. Nick looked at the retreating backs of the reporters going into the chancery.
“Good idea,” he said. “You go. I’ll follow these guys, before I head for Reuters.”
Angela trotted after the small group moving through the grounds. The heads of shot-off flowers carpeted the lawn, fallen palm fronds created a zigzag course, bullet-scarred trees stood sentinel as she cautiously picked her way past an AK-47 that she didn’t want to accidentally trigger. She passed the prone form of an Asian man wearing a black headband whom she did not fear because his body already had become home to swarms of buzzing flies and insects.
As she rounded the corner of the big building, she spotted the small white stucco villa set back among the trees that she had been so curious about.
A middle-aged white man in striped pajama tops was gesturing wildly from a second-floor balcony. As she stopped to watch, one of the MPs ran over and tossed a pistol up to the man, who then disappeared back into the house. Angela moved over to the cameraman, “Is that Jacobson?” she asked.
A blast of automatic fire rang out, and the MPs rushed the villa. A moment later there were two shots.
“The last were small caliber, maybe that’s good,” Angela said to the cameraman, who was much too engrossed in his work for her to expect any replies.
Jacobson walked out his front door a short time later. “I was lucky,” he said. “The guy who came at me was already wounded, and his shots went wild.”
Angela knew that with the sound of the shots, several of the other reporters were likely to come running. So she beat it back across the lawn to find Nick as quickly as possible. They met halfway.
“You might want to get over and file this,” she told him breathlessly, as she stepped over a dead VC lying by a flower tub of geraniums. “A network was there, but they won’t be able to get their film out today.”
“Shit, yeah,” he said. “You muck around here, and pick up whatever else you can. Westmoreland is likely to show. Get whatever spin he puts on this, then meet me at Reuters as soon as you can. Don’t wait for him if it’s much more than an hour. Harry can patch him in from the wires. We need to map our strategy.” He started running for the Embassy gate, and Angela ran alongside filling him in on the story he would file.
“Jacobson said the Cong guy was creeping up the stairs. He figured he probably had hidden in a room downstairs while Jacobson was locked in his bedroom for hours giving the lowdown to Zorithan over the phone. The pistol was a .45. Oh, the MPs also threw Jacobson a gasmask ‘cause they were going to lob in teargas canisters, not knowing if, or how many, Cong might be in the house.”
“Get names on any MPs?” Nick asked, still on the run.
“No, sorry,” Angela said. “They were all still in the villa, and I didn’t want to wait to get to you once I got the confirmation and quote out of Jacobson.”
“That’s OK,” Nick said. “This is fucking fantastic to have this this early. Harry the Arse should be mighty pleased.”
“It was the 101st Airborne, by the way, that landed on the roof. And, oh, did you know Jacobson was a retired Army colonel?” Angela asked, panting as she trotted past another dead Cong and out the big gate of the Embassy.
“Yeah,” Nick said.
“Well, damn,” Angela said. “I wish I’d known. Embarrassing. I asked him where he learned to handle a gun so well. He was nice about it, but I felt like a jerk.”
“You’ll live,” Nick said with a grin as he took off at a run. “Good luck with Westmoreland. Don’t let me down.”
****
The general showed up in a starched, immaculately pressed uniform, toured the disorderly scene and then talked to reporters on the Embassy grounds. The bodies of dead sappers scattered around the huge tubs of flowers ringing the main building served as a backdrop for Westmoreland’s remarks. The blood from dead and wounded Marines had by now dried, but had not been scrubbed away.
The North Viets and Cong had been deceitful in breaking the truce, he told the assembled reporters, but their “well-laid plans went afoul … American troops went on the offensive and pursued the enemy aggressively.”
Angela and the other assembled reporters exchanged skeptical, if not astonished, glances at Westmoreland’s upbeat assessment. But all dutifully reported his remarks, along with the factual information that Saigon, Hoi An, Da Nang, Pleiku and Hue, among scores of other cities, had all been hit in surprise attacks within the last 24 hours, and that all were still burning.
Westmoreland also said 19 “enemy” bodies had been found on the premises, although that information was “clarified” within a matter of hours. Actually, four of them were Vietnamese employees of the Embassy. One died frantically waving his U.S. Embassy employee card. But as every reporter knows, there is always more than one and usually several sides to every story. One of the four “faithful” employees may well have been a ringer, a person who helped set up the assault. He was nicknamed “Satchmo” and had worked at the Embassy for years, even at one time as the ambassador’s chauffeur. Marine eyewitnesses said he had fired on them during the battle, and a 9-mm pistol was said to have been tucked in his belt when his body was found. The body count for the U.S. was reported as much lower: Five MPs dead and only two Marines. The contingent of Marine guards had stayed holed up in the Chancery, effectively keeping the attackers out and confined to the Embassy grounds.
The American flag was raised anew over the Embassy at 11:45 a.m. Saigon time, but Angela had already left to make her way back to Reuters to meet Nick as she had promised.
They worked like that for days. They wrote stories about the failed attempt to take over the Saigon government radio station to broadcast propaganda tapes, the house-to-house fighting in Cholon, the burned-out buildings and desolation in the garbage-filled, rat-plagued city. Nick felt they were golden. “The gold-dust twins,” he called them. Angela not only walked like an oiled machine, she worked like one. She was fast, she was resourceful, and she didn’t hand out any crap. She picked up her share of the workload and expected Nick to do the same.
It never occurred to either of them that Harry the Arse, his foreign editor, might not see it exactly the same way.
~~~~~~