Thinking back to Saigon
by Peter Cordingley
Peter Cordingley covered the Vietnam War for Agence France-Presse. He witnessed Saigon's surrender to the North Vietnamese on April 30, 1975. This is his story.
"Whatever you do, don't get shot!" Those were the last words to me from a senior AFP editor as I walked out of the office in central Paris and headed off to be a correspondent in Saigon early in 1975.
I took the warning seriously. The correspondent I was replacing, Paul Léandri, had been gunned down at a Saigon police station. In the version told to me, there had been a sharp exchange of words with police after a traffic incident and his car had been riddled with bullets as he angrily drove away from a police station. Different versions circulated later and I never learned the truth of the matter.
It didn't take me long to work out why the Saigon police - and just about everyone else - were so edgy. The North Vietnamese had mobilised 100,000 men for attacks on major southern cities, and the question everyone was asking was whether the South Vietnamese armed forces had any fight left in them.
Amid reports of North Vietnamese advances in the Central Highlands, I hitched a ride in a four-seater plane up to Pleiku, about 500 kilometres north of Saigon. There, circling at a few thousand feet, I witnessed a river of soldiers and civilians streaming down the QL 25 highway from Pleiku towards the coast.
We touched down in Tuy Hoa, on the coast, where the refugee column had come to a stop. There I was told tales of South Vietnamese soldiers breaking ranks and mingling with the civilian population as they fled ahead of the approaching North Vietnamese troops.
Pleiku was obviously about to fall, and the rout of the South Vietnamese armed forces was underway.
Nerves in Saigon were further put on edge on April 8 - some three weeks before the capital was to fall - when a renegade air force pilot in an F-5E fighter plane staged a bombing raid on the presidential Independence Palace. It caused little damage, but for me it was to provide a comedic moment - at my expense.
- 'Take me to the palace!' -
My knowledge of the geography of Saigon at that stage was scant, and as I rushed out of the AFP bureau to investigate the bombing, I foolishly placed myself in the hands of a passing cyclo taxi driver. "Quick! Take me to the palace!" I told him. As we weaved our way through traffic, I began to sense something was wrong. "The palace! The palace! Where's the palace?" I shouted, growing increasingly nervous that I was about to miss the story. I got the reply when we pulled up in the heart of the Cholon Chinatown - outside the Palace cinema.
My apartment was above the AFP office so there wasn't far to go one night to get to work and report on an explosion that had woken up the whole city. A North Vietnamese rocket had slammed into the suburbs, flattening hundreds of homes and simultaneously announcing the arrival of the war on Saigon's doorstep. With the help of staff manning the phones, I put together a story and it was rushed off by telex to AFP in Paris.
The response from HQ was an irritated message a few hours later asking why we had not filed on the attack when the rival agencies had all covered it. The answer came from the Danish consulate in Hong Kong, which called to ask if we had really meant to send the story to them. One rogue digit when dialling the telex number had undone our efforts.
By now there was no doubt that the end game was on. Phnom Penh had fallen on April 17 and it was clear that Saigon would soon follow. When a rocket hit tightly packed homes in Cholon, leaving little but bodies, shocked survivors and twisted corrugated iron, promises by US ambassador Graham Martin that Saigon would not be allowed to fall seemed completely out of touch with reality.
Paris asked us if we wanted to go or stay. The AFP journalists chose to stay, though many other newsmen were evacuated. At AFP, none of us wanted to miss such a key moment in history.
Not that I didn't take my precautions. Ready for the day when I assumed the new masters would challenge me, I perfected "bao chi anh" (meaning British journalist, which I was) and "bao chi phap" (French journalist, which I wasn't, but I thought it might come in handy). Anything seemed better than "bao chi my" (American journalist).
But I wasn't the only one thinking about my welfare. One of the pretty young women in the AFP bureau had been busy on her sewing machine and had run up a nifty pair of black Vietcong pyjamas that she said I should wear come the day. I never did.
- Dante's Inferno -
When the day actually came, it was preceded by 24 hours copied from Dante's Inferno with a fearsome night-time thunderstorm, lightning that turned night into day, gunfire all around town, helicopters sweeping low across rooftops and searchlights piercing the sky. As I took in this cataclysmic scene from the balcony of my apartment, I wondered how much worse things would be when the North Vietnamese marched in.
I needn't have worried. When they did come in, there was almost no resistance apart from some skirmishing near Tan Son Nhut airport. And when a tank bulldozed the gate of the Independence Palace, where the newly installed President, Gen. Duong Van Minh, was waiting to surrender, it was all over.
It didn't feel like the end of the longest war in modern history. The mood on the streets was one of relief, with the North Vietnamese regulars seemingly bemused by how easy it had all been.
I wandered around like a tourist, unchallenged and exchanging thumbs-up with the soldiers posted in trucks on intersections, while all the time regretting that I had not had time to replace the camera that had been snatched from my shoulder a few days earlier by a Saigon Cowboy on a motorbike.
With communications with the outside world closed down, a few weeks of limbo followed while the new authorities worked out what to do with the foreign journalists in their midst. The answer was to pack us into Ilyushin 18s and fly us to Vientiane, Laos. From there it was back to Paris. But not for long. By 1977, I was back in Asia under my own steam, first in Bangkok and then Hong Kong and now Manila. Asia does that to you.