In the accident, I’d lost all the food I would ordinarily bring to the Caravelle. I didn’t look so good, either, so I skipped the socializing and headed back to my humble abode. The next day, I tried again, taking two bags of food and making deliveries to Mr. Minh’s, the folks at Nuong’s hotel, the animals at the zoo, and, finally, the Caravelle rooftop. No ambushes this time, thankfully.
The reporters, when you saw them, had their hands full with all the breaking stories they had to cover. They were charged up; this is what they were born to do, and some of them risked their lives doing it. And what they were seeing was not pretty: February had started with the chief of the National Police, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, shooting Vietcong prisoner Nguyen Van Lem point-blank in the head on a Saigon street as cameras rolled. NBC cameraman Vo Suu caught it on film, and Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams snapped the shot seen ’round the world, turning more Americans against the war and winning Adams a Pulitzer Prize.
CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, the nation’s most respected newsman, who had himself been a courageous foreign correspondent in World War II, decided to fly to Vietnam in mid-February and witness Tet for himself. He reunited with his old acquaintance General Creighton Abrams, whom he’d first met in WWII. Abrams is said to have told Cronkite, “We cannot win this goddamn war, and we ought to find a dignified way out.”
Cronkite went on the air on the evening of February 27, 1968, and said, “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.” Then presidential aide Bill Moyers was with Lyndon Johnson as he watched Cronkite’s editorial. LBJ lamented to him, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” A month later, the president would announce that he would not seek reelection in the fall.
Meanwhile, the Tet offensive continued for weeks in Saigon’s outskirts, as well as in the imperial city, Hue, in Khe Sanh, and other towns and military sites. From February 11 to February 17 alone, 543 Americans were killed and 2,547 were wounded, making it the deadliest week of the entire war. Five days later, the US Selective Service System announced a new draft call for 48,000 more boys to add to the half million already in Vietnam.
On February 29, leap year day, appropriately, McNamara officially walked away from the war he’d helped escalate. He and LBJ, himself about to back out of the war without ending it, got stuck in a Pentagon elevator for twelve minutes on their way to McNamara’s retirement ceremony. There was something symbolic about that. They got out, but all 536,100 boys were still stuck.
In my own way, I was stuck, too. Soon it was March, and gaining on Saint Patrick’s Day. There isn’t any parade in Saigon on Saint Patrick’s, and I never like to miss the parade. It looked like I wasn’t leaving anytime soon.