Chapter 62

The Cost of Doing Business

 

Four correspondents died in the Jeep that day, May 5, 1968. Four more were killed and about a dozen wounded within the next two or three weeks of the May offensive. Everyone had the jitters, a real change in their outlook. For a brief period, it made Nick stop and think about attitudes he’d never questioned before. Reporters always feel invincible. He’d seen a lot of them, even back home, himself included, go into dangerous situations like walking into inner city shooting galleries to get a feature story on a day in the life of an addict, or, just on a tip, meeting with some mobster who was into breaking kneecaps or with some play-for-keeps union type. You don't worry, you figure you’re neutral, have a magic shield around you, like the guy in the glass booth. But no more.

“These suckers are playing for keeps,” he said to Corrigan one night, when the two of them stopped for a drink after leaving the hospital together. ”They’re gunning for us. Cholon was no accident. Those mothers opened fire after the guys in the Jeep identified themselves as journalists in both Vietnamese and English.”

Meanwhile, the doctors had decided that Angela’s kneecap wasn’t broken, but that the long bone in her leg had been shattered in several places. They had to repair it surgically and put some kind of metal rod in through from her hip that would help hold the whole thing together. An intermedulary pin, they called it. They said with therapy she might eventually be able to walk without a limp, but it would be a long, slow process. In those early days, she was in and out of surgery and doped up or feeling just plain sick most of the time. So Curtis and Nick didn’t see a lot of the May offensive. And you might say Angela missed it altogether, after her own early and explosive participation.

Curtis and Nick kept working, after a fashion. Nick did pick up one great interview with an Air Force pilot who had rescued three ground personnel accidentally left stranded when the U.S. abandoned a Special Forces camp on May 10. The camp, at Kham Duc on the Laos border, was surrounded by NVA. The pilot, a Korean War vet named Joe Jackson, had managed through some very tricky maneuvers to land in the midst of the occupied field and was on the ground less than one minute. The feat was likely to get him nominated for a Medal of Honor.

Otherwise, Nick and Curtis did cursory work, not much more. They even stooped to going to the Follies. Other reporters helped them a bit by giving them an occasional lead. The people in Curtis’ bureau were especially good about it, handing things off to him, so he’d have something to file. He and Nick took turns sitting with Angela; the one out drumming up a story would share at least the general outlines of it with the one back at the hospital. But when Angela had to be in surgery, or have some grueling test, or some other diabolical hospital procedure, they’d both stay, sitting out on a verandah or pacing up and down a connecting corridor like a couple of expectant fathers. That’s when the other guys were particularly good about giving them a hand with something to file. Harry figured what was going on, but he was pretty decent, too. There were several times during those first few weeks that he had to patch and fill what Nick sent him with wire copy, but he only bellowed mildly, he didn’t really come down hard. From Harry, that was something.

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