50th Anniversary Issue — October 1, 1995

By Wally Beene

It has been said that war brings out the best, and the worst, in people. Most veterans are likely to look back on their wartime experiences as the most interesting period of their life.

The same can be said for former war correspondents. No other journalistic experience is likely to prove as memorable.

When I signed on with Pacific Stars and Stripes in the fall of1965, I had no idea I would do four tours as Saigon bureau chief during the coming two years.

My background included 10 years of police reporting on stateside papers, plus six years with European S&S as a reporter and Madrid bureau chief. I had served with the 5th Air Force in the Pacific during WWII, so the jungle would be nothing new for me.

I just had time to unpack my wife and two young children in Tokyo before heading for Saigon on my first 90-day tour.

What surprised me most was to discover how few of the Tokyo staffers wanted to cover the Vietnam War. There seemed to be a "maybe it'll go away'' attitude around the newsroom, or so it appeared to me. Not one of the staff photogs showed up during my four tours.

We depended on our Korean free-lance photographer, Kim Ki Sam, who did a helluva job, plus the photos from the military reporters in our Saigon bureau. Their photo training was usually to pick up a Nikkormat and a couple of rolls of film to shoot around our office villa in Saigon.

Then it was off to war.

Some of these guys came back with first-rate pictures. None were more outstanding than the shots made by the Navy's young Gary Cooper when five members of a 12-man patrol were hit in an ambush. Gary kept his camera clicking despite the panic, and there were no better action photos to come out of Vietnam, in my opinion.

The Saigon bureau was a mixed bag.

We had a military officer to oversee the operation; I was the lone civilian responsible for getting the stories out, and there were usually about a half-dozen military correspondents assigned to Stripes for a year by the different services.

One officer described it accurately as an operation that was as loose "as a two-minute egg.''

My greatest concern was getting someone killed. You had to take chances in the field to get the stories, but I didn't want to lose one of the young guys just for a possible story.

We also had a few "Saigon commandos'' -- guys who never left town if they could avoid it.

I think the most dangerous story during my era was done by Army writer Bob Kersey, of Los Angeles. He got sent out with one of the patrols dropped behind the enemy lines up near the DMZ to observe troop movements. Kersey was lucky, and his patrol wasn't spotted, although the VC were so close by that Kersey could hear them talking.

Airman Bob Cutts got the distinction of being the only correspondent to fly over North Vietnam. The Saigon command had strict orders not to take journalists over the DMZ into North Vietnam, but Cutts eased over into Thailand and got permission to go on a mission.

Whether or not the Thailand squadron was aware of the Saigon restrictions was never made clear, but Cutts got the flight, and his story was in the paper before all hell broke loose at the Saigon press center.

One of my favorite reporters was a mad Irishman named Gerald Forken, who later was in the thick of it in Saigon during 1968's Tet offensive.

One night, Forken was with a unit near the Rock Pile, a major outpost near the DMZ.

Our boys had imported some dancing girls for the evening, but they needed some supplemental light to see the talent involved. So, someone reported possible enemy activity in the area, and flares were dropped over the area for an hour or so. God knows how much that floor show cost.

As for myself, the Vietnam experience was an almost daily step through the looking glass. I was twice the age of the others, but I didn't feel that I could expect them to get shot at unless I spent time in the field as well.

On any given day I might start out in some place such as Cam Lo, where the VC got buried with a bulldozer after a bloody night assault on our fortified camp.

I could catch a flight back to Saigon and make the "Five O'Clock Follies,'' the official briefing.

After making sure the varius stories were filed at the UPI office and were on their way to our Tokyo headquarters, I could have dinner in a good French restaurant.

After the curfew, I might end up the evening having a beer on the roof of our villa with the other guys while helicopter gunships sprayed tracers at suspected VC hideouts around the city.

We did this seven days a week, and life tended to blur into a surreal montage of fantasy and fact.

Among the most vivid memories:

Being the first correspondent to fly a combat missing mission in the F-4C Phantom while getting sprayed with ground fire; flying in "Spooky 13,'' an old C-47 gunship with a Gatling gun that fired 6,000 rounds a minute in a desperate attempt to protect some Marines getting attacked near the DMZ; riding in the convoy that launched the first battle of Bong Son in the Central Highlands; "flying the Bug,'' one of two helicopters used at night in duels with the VC along the canals of the Mekong Delta; seeing the aid station at Dong Ha that was so primitive that it made the MASH unit look like Johns Hopkins; and the roughest fight of them all -- Hill 400, where Marine Capt. J.J. Carroll got nominated for the Navy Cross, only to die a few days later from a short round fired by one of our guns. He was the only person to have a Vietnam base named after him during the war.

Three civilians, including our own Kim Ki Sam and Arnaud du Borchgrave of Newsweek, got slightly wounded on Hill 400. Two Marine photogs also got hit, and the chaplain was among those killed.

It was somewhere about this time that I became convinced that Vietnam was not going to be won with military force. During a trip back to the U.S. in 1966 to see my ill father, I wrote a story for the Shreveport Times, one of my former employers, saying in effect that after a certain point, you got the feeling that the whole ball of wax wasn't worth the life of one more American.

Unfortunately, it took the politicians several more years to arrive at the same conclusion.

I had a reunion with Pulitzer winner Peter Arnett in Tucson a couple of years ago when he was honored by the University of Arizona Journalism Department for his outstanding coverage of the Persian Gulf War for CNN.

After a couple of beers, I asked him which had been the most hairy, his experiences in Vietnam for the AP or his coverage of the Baghdad action with SCUD missiles flying by his hotel.

After a moment's reflection, he replied, ``Vietnam was worse.''