Part II: The Unforgettable Moments
Besides the brutal aspect of the war, are there any pleasurable moments during the war that you really appreciate？
I think one thing that the war does is that it binds people very close together. Friendships I’ve made there, the relationships with other journalists have last all these time. I have many very close friends who were also war correspondents. I think that share sense of adversity brings people together. Sure, we would have moments when we finished doing our work for the day then we would sit down at the bar or restaurants and share few laughs together. It was, relatively speaking, civilized because we would go out in the morning and filming the action where there was combat going and come back and try to make the last plant out of Saigon to either Hong Kong or Bangkok. That was about five o’clock in the evening, so it was kind of nine to five experience. We get back in time to get our film shipped and that was it for the day. We go out and have a nice cold beer and a good meal. It was interesting. I went back to Vietnam last year and for the first time in Hanoi, I got to meet a bunch of journalists from the other side who had covered the war for the North Vietnam News agency. I described my routine to them. They said “We didn’t have the luxury of knocking off at 5 and having a cold beer and nice meal. We were out on the Ho Chi Minh trail for months on end and the only meal we had is the kilo of rice on our backs”. So I decided that I had a much easier experience than they did in covering war.
What effects does the Vietnam War have on you personal life and your career?
Well, I think it had great deal of impact. It taught me to be very skeptical of things that government officials say. There was a thing in the Vietnam War called “credibility gap” where we would go out and observe battles on the battlefield. Particularly during the 1970-1971 period, where they were trying to turn over more of the combat to the South Vietnamese army. And we would see terrible defeats for that we came back to Saigon and we go to what they called “5 o’ clock follows days” which was the news briefing. And often, they told different stories. They spurn the defeat out the battlefield into a great victory. And X number of people are wounded or died and we knew it simply wasn’t true. And that taught me to be very skeptical of officials at news briefings. It also taught me how to cover other war I got involved witnessing the rest of my careers in the Middle East and Latin America. You quickly learned how to stay alive and not to do stupid things in battlefield situation.
What’s the most exciting story you’ve ever covered?
I think I would probably choose the fall of Saigon because I had invested the most time in covering the Vietnam war than any of my assignments. I was in Iran for 66 days and they kicked all the western journalists out of country so I didn’t get to spend much more time than that in Iran. And in Tiananmen Square, it ended very sadly and very quickly; it had a great deal of impact on me. But if I thought about the one story that sticks with me forever is Vietnam. Still about Vietnam War, just a recall.