No Facts, No Plans
Q: What were your first impressions of Saigon when you arrived?
My predecessor there for The Baltimore Sun said “There are two things to remember here.” I said, “Well, what are they?” He said, “The first is there are no facts. You’ll get lots of things that look like facts but you’ll never know which one is real.” I said, “What’s the second thing? I mean because facts are what reporters need, that’s what we use.” He said. “You can make no plans.” Both turned out to be largely true.
Countries in war are chaotic and certainly that was true of South Vietnam. Less true of North Vietnam, their chaos was a result of lots of bombs falling on them but South Vietnam was just pretty chaotic. Couldn’t make plans, one could travel rather freely but you weren’t sure if you could get back. You never knew whether going up the road was going to be safe. No facts. So who, who’s in charge of this village? The government? The Vietcong? You could go there in the morning and get one answer and in the afternoon get another answer, and you wouldn’t know. But it was a very lively place. The Vietnamese, even in all this chaos, were doing stuff all the time. Very resourceful people, very resourceful. It seemed that nothing went to waste. Everything was used somehow and the food was good.