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My Turn
I never covered the Vietnam War. The last American helicopter pulled out of Saigon long before I earned my first byline. But I believe I reported the real end of the war many years later. Time for Vietnam
War to endWhen South Vietnam fell to Communist forces in 1975, I was in an Australian classroom, surrounded by anti-American, anti-war sentiment.
Not until many years of reporting on Asia and the military, however, did I start to understand the war that I later wished I had covered.
My late opportunity came in 1994 on a hot, windswept hill in Pleiku, a well-known battle site. It was a journalist's golden moment: I was the only reporter there to catch what I considered a historic event.
President Clinton wanted to lift the 19-year trade embargo against Vietnam, but many in America were still not ready to concede defeat to the Communists. For the country to move beyond the war, Clinton knew the thumbs-up would have to come from the military first.
The president had tied the fate of the embargo to Hanoi's cooperation in the search for America's POWs and MIAs -- the United States listed 1,647 Americans unaccounted for in Vietnam. He sent Adm. Charles R. Larson, then the Hawaii-based commander-in-chief of Pacific forces, to take a firsthand look.
Larson was the highest ranking U.S. officer to visit the country since the war ended. He spent two days in Hanoi, where journalists from around the world had flown in to await the news moment. It didn't happen, nor did Hanoi officials say much worth reporting, and the media mob was getting restless.
On Larson's last day in Vietnam, he visited three field sites where U.S. and Vietnamese teams were searching for remains of missing servicemen: Kontum, Quang Ngai and Pleiku, all places I had been during two earlier reporting trips to Vietnam. When the one print reporter allowed aboard the helicopter gave up his seat, I grabbed it. My reporter's instinct told me that if the moment was going to happen, it would come in some remote place where Larson might get caught up in the spirit of a battle.
Always trust the old gut.
Larson was like a tall, excited kid on his first airborne adventure. His nose remained pressed to the helicopter window as we swept over the still-potholed countryside around Da Nang.
The last stop was a search site near Pleiku, where a U.S. C-130 crashed in 1966. Larson inspected the excavations, then returned to a big umbrella with Vietnamese officials.
He agreed to chat. After a few minutes I popped the big question: So admiral, what will you tell the president when you see him?
"They're doing everything we've asked them to do," Larson said unequivocally about Vietnamese cooperation in the searches. "They have delivered and they've given us their best. I think cooperation across all fronts has been excellent."
And for those who had accused the Vietnamese of withholding information? "I don't think they're holding anything back."
The moment had arrived. The embargo would end. Full diplomatic recognition would come next. And finally the war would be over, perhaps not in the minds of all, but at least in official U.S. policy.
I couldn't wait to get to a phone when we landed in Da Nang. But Larson called me back, shook my hand and said he had enjoyed the day. He, too, seemed to realize the moment.
I also felt good about the day. I'd spent three weeks with POW-MIA search teams in 1992 and seen their sincerity and frustrations. "We investigate each case as if we are family members," Chief Warrant Officer 3 James Webb told me.
I had hiked with Webb up a jungled mountain in Quang Nam, led by a former Viet Cong, where we found a fuselage and control panel of a U.S. Huey helicopter shot down in 1971 by an AK-47. Za Ram Dai pointed out where he had buried its dead pilot.
The excited team found a piece of flight suit -- but no remains. Fresh digging indicated someone had beat us there. Poor Vietnamese would bring bones to the teams -- bones of animals, of Vietnamese, and occasionally of Americans -- believing they would get money or U.S. visas. It was a problem neither the Vietnam government nor Americans could control.
I saw young GIs mingling with Vietnamese, for the most part friendly, popping rap music into the ears of a giggling mama-san north of the wartime DMZ. I saw older GIs clink toasts with their former Communist foes, wondering if they had met on the battlefields decades earlier.
When I needed transportation out of Dong Hoi, a heavily bombed area in the north, a Vietnamese woman, with me on the back of her small motorcycle, chased down a train to get me aboard. That didn't work. She finally found me a van and driver for a slight fortune. I paid, the driver squeezed in all his family and friends for the free ride, and we all made it to Da Nang many hours later, bumping our way past cemeteries of soldiers, over tortuous roads still pockmarked with bomb holes.
I often thought about the children outside Da Nang who had learned enough English to become mini-tour guides of former U.S. military camps, and caves and tunnels where Viet Cong had surveilled the Americans. When there were many steps to be climbed in the steamy heat, they always knew exactly how many were left, encouraging us to keep going. These scrappy entrepreneurs were bound to do better if the economy grew.
It was time for the war to end.
Susan Kreifels is a Star-Bulletin staff writer.