Cho Lon
When I studied, when I read a book, when I talked with friends and teachers and classmates about politics, I did it with the same urgency I'd felt when I left my outfit at Chu Lai. One day in the Spring of 1968, as the aftermath of the Tet offensive in Vietnam dominated the news, the availability of a small grant for a student to travel to "an underdeveloped country" was announced in classes. In separate classes, at the same hour, Jim Martin and I heard the announcement and had the same idea: Vietnam was an underdeveloped country.
We became joint recipients of the grant.
I didn’t know anything about cameras, but Mike Taylor did. He became my photography teacher. He said I needed a camera with a light meter, or a separate, hand-held meter. Our classes consisted of a couple of hours on the porch and lawn of the “Shell House” at 524 East Cache La Poudre in Colorado Springs, with Mike, ever generous with his friends, patiently explaining F-stop, shutter speeds, film speeds, focal lengths. I took some pictures of the lawn, trees, and the rusting spray-can-painted green panel truck that Tom and I had bought cheap because it was old and almost done for.
So for the summer between our junior and senior years, Jim and I were accredited, by the Denver Post and the Colorado College Tiger, to the Joint United States Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO) in Saigon, the official agency for the dissemination of information about American operations in Vietnam to the news media. We got to Saigon in late May.
We hooked up with Lee Dembart, a student reporter like ourselves who had come to the country some months earlier with a credential from New York radio station WBAI and then found other work as a journalist. Lee knew the lay of the land as far as reporting in Vietnam was concerned. He knew how to deal with government information bureaucracies, who was who in the journalism community, how to get places.
Lee took us to Cho Lon, the Chinese district of Saigon where there was still fighting that had begun during Tet. We hopped into a small taxi and headed out into Saigon's wartime maelstrom of motor scooters, rickshas, jeeps, and Army trucks.
The traffic gradually thinned, and the noise with it. First there were only a few vehicles and the odd hurrying pedestrian or bicyclist. That number dwindled to none as war's damage appeared: corners of buildings blown out, masonry tumbled into the streets, blackened rebar twisted against the sky, Renaults overturned, burned, dimpled with bullet holes.
The driver stopped; this was as far as he'd go. Jim and I got out. Lee stayed to return with the taxi; he'd already reported the Cho Lon story, and had another commitment that afternoon. He pointed us in a direction, with the war correspondent's parting shot: "Keep your heads down." The taxi turned around and left.
Nothing is as noisy as a crowded city, or as eerily quiet as a deserted one. We walked a world of rubble, shattered glass, silence.
But soon, up ahead, we heard the guns: the snap snapsnap of rifle fire, then the throbbing staccato of a heavy machine gun, then the crash of a much larger weapon.
The scene we arrived at was one of two ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) tanks, parked a few yards apart in the middle of a wide street in the business district of Cho Lon, their turret guns angled down and across the street at what had been a sizable brick building. A unit of ARVN Rangers hung out on the sidelines, in no particular hurry to move up the street.
Jim and I took cover in a doorway and watched. I'd been shot at before, but street fighting was new to me, except for a little training at ITR six years earlier. Jim, a Navy vet who had served on an icebreaker in the Antarctic and then volunteered for duty in Vietnam but was never sent there, was under fire for the first time. He did well, though. In fact, he moved ahead a little more quickly than I thought was wise.
There were other journalists around. Peter Arnett, the AP reporter, and his frequent partner Horst Faas, the photographer whose Vietnam pictures for Life magazine were already famous, were standing on a street corner where Arnett conversed in Vietnamese with some local people. They were both wearing flak jackets and helmets. In the years since 1968, whenever I saw Arnett’s byline, or saw him on television, I would jump to his defense if sarcastic remarks such as “opportunistic reporters” or the like surfaced from the gallery. This happened frequently when Arnett stayed behind to report for CNN on the bombing campaign against Iraq during the first days of the Gulf War in 1991. I’ve always considered him the real deal, in a profession where lots of people weren’t.
Everyone, including the ARVN infantrymen, was watching the tanks. We learned that there was, or had been, a sniper in the brick building the tanks were firing at. During the time we were there, there may (or may not) have been a round or two of return fire come up the street in our direction. There was so much muzzle blast, so many ricochets, so many pieces of flying masonry that it was impossible to tell. Return fire or no, the tanks were systematically destroying the building. Each had a .50 caliber machine gun up front, and a 90mm cannon mounted on its turret. One .50 gunner would open up and traverse the top row of bricks on what was left of the building. When his can of ammo ran out, the machine gunner on the other tank would take over while he reloaded. Periodically, one or the other of the tanks would cut loose with its 90mm cannon on a stubborn section of the building. Then the .50's would go back to work.
Storefronts all along the street were demolished, their contents spewed onto the sidewalk. Plastic shoes and small electric appliances covered the sidewalk where we knelt, hugging the wall with our right shoulders.
I began to feel that less was happening here than met the ear, that the sniper had long since left the brick building, that what we were witnessing was the expenditure of ammunition, the destruction of a building, and Vietnamese soldiers taking advantage of the opportunity to vent their racial enmity towards the Chinese merchants of Cho Lon.
I let my attention drift away from the tanks. A few feet away from me, some of the ARVN Rangers had wandered into a store with its glass front shot out, helping themselves to the merchandise. A soldier who emerged next to me seemed pretty pleased with the small electric fan he'd procured.
I turned around, peered into the gloom to my rear. I was crouched in a corner formed by the elevated sidewalk, the storefront at my shoulder, and a low wall behind me, at right angles to the storefront. The low wall sealed the end of a long space enclosed by the raised sidewalk which extended down the street behind me, about three feet above street level.
As my pupils dilated, I saw a roughly circular hole in the masonry of the low wall behind me, blown open by some large caliber ordnance. I duck-waddled over and peered inside. At first it was too dark to see into the space beneath the sidewalk. Gradually I made out the form of a corpse, a Chinese woman in her middle years. She had recently died. I assumed she had been killed in the fighting, though I saw no wounds. She had been carefully laid out on the rubble that defined the floor of the space, until the fighting ended and her relatives could retrieve her. She looked very dignified. Looking at her, I thought of the phrase, "lying in state."
As I looked - she was just inside the hole in the wall, with her feet near enough for me to touch, and her body extended away - the body let out a long, loud, slow, putrid fart right into my face.
We walked out of Cho Lon the way we'd come in, away from the tanks, past blocks of blownout buildings, back to where there was again traffic in the streets, back to the land of the living, and caught a taxi downtown just in time to catch the "Five O'clock Follies," the daily press briefings at JUSPAO. Some journalists did all their reporting from there, scooping up the official handouts, rewriting them a little or a lot, shooting them off to their stateside editors, and collecting a regular paycheck for it. Some of the better ones, like Arnett, preferred to get their news where it happened, and seldom went to the briefings except to compare them with reality.
The gallery of reporters sat through the U.S. Army Major's recital of recent encounters between their side and our side, giving comparative body counts. During the question and answer period, things got more animated when people began asking about whether some helicopter gunships working over Cho Lon in recent days had caused any civilian casualties. I don't remember the outcome of that exchange, except that it was both confrontational and inconclusive.
What I do remember was the evening's final question. The briefer was asked to comment on reports that ARVN Rangers had been looting during the fighting in Cho Lon. The major was emphatic. Nonono, he said. The Rangers were the South Vietnamese Army's elite. They had all been trained by U.S. officers and NCO's. They would never do that.
