Now with AP in NY - and devastating news finally arrives from Vietnam
GRUMPY OLD VIETNAM HAND.
And so that's how grim it was at AP Headquarters in New York—cold, unwelcoming. No compensation for anything we’d lost when Saigon fell in April 1975. But the deeper loss was waiting at home after every shift on the Upper West Side. Some readers may recall: my wife Kim-Dung’s father delayed too long before deciding to flee. That moment—his coming up to Saigon from Go Cong in the Mekong Delta without the family—opens the first chapter of my memoir, The Bite of the Lotus: an intimate memoir of the Vietnam War. It end with my sprint for those last choppers with what family I could: her younger brother and adopted niece. Ordered out earlier by the AP, she had never accepted that I’d left the choice to him. I wasn’t going to force him to leave his own country.
Still, it was my fault, she said. And of course I felt guilty as hell. Her family was now gone—cut off and unreachable. Going into work was almost a relief.
And another excerpt from my unpublished memoir of my post-Vietnam days, written ten years ago—about that miserable time, and how I coped.
Stoned or not, I always liked heading into work on the overnight shift on the AP World Desk standing at the subway’s front window alongside the driver’s cabin and watching its lights on the dimly-lit underground tracks and stations ahead.
My greatest pleasure was heading home back down the Subway as New York City awoke as the still-bleary-eyed drones swarmed up into the daylight to work. (Still, I never got used to the sight back around where we lived of folks walking down the sidewalks eating big 25-cent slices of pizza at the crack of dawn.)
Often on subway rides, I just sat there glancing around at my fellow passengers and wondering, as someone suggested, if the wild assortment of characters in each carriage wasn’t computer-generated. Did I look as weird as them, I wondered?
Well, at least my work was keeping me busy. But at home, things weren’t all that smooth. We needed to find something for our two extra family members. (Imagine the struggle if I’d brought out the entire family, I often wondered.) Phuong helped out around the house, walked the kids to school and, after English classes, started high school. But the older Vinh struggled. We really didn’t need my old friend from the Congo and Vietnam, Bill Robbins, showing up and staying a while.
They took a course and made plaster moulds for those friends of Barbara’s who’d given us the furniture. But along with another project hand-sewing silk purses for Bloomingdale’s with Kim-Dung and Phuong, these attempts to earn desperately-needed extra money collapsed in acrimony. (Friendships are fine, but never go into business with ‘em, we learned.) By year’s end, Vinh was off to Fort Wayne, Indiana, of all places and catch up with a family who’d been neighbours in Saigon and a daughter he fancied. Bill headed off to Japan to teach English and annoy Carl Adams, the Other Carl.
Kim-Dung was desperately lonely and missed her family terribly. But with no mail service from the US and barely any news out of Vietnam, we’d heard nothing from her folks. While I distracted myself with shift work, weekend binges and sneakily smoking dope with old friends, she had little more than the kids. Her dark moods weighed down my feelings of guilt for leaving her family behind.
Everything was my fault. Many mornings, I turned to see Kim-Dung lying next to me, already awake with tears pouring silently down her face.
We’d been together now for more than half-a-dozen years but our relationship always had a certain “abstraction,” even distance, back in Vietnam. She still heavily into her own culture and family. Me, busy with work but always the deferential outsider and fly-on-the-wall who was totally besotted.
After that one scary run-in with the paratroopers in Saigon, we didn’t make a public show of our relationship and rarely went out together. My work kept me out long hours and those frequent trips away brought a wonderful frisson of care and passion on my return.
Now, we were together all the time. Strangers in a new place—and even to each other. And this wasn’t just a Seven-Year Itch. Was our relationship going to last? The thought of divorce passed through our minds—but was never spoken about.
But more than ever, I doted terribly on Kim-Dung and deferred heavily to her. If she preferred light and funny television shows and movies over my taste for the deep and profound, that’s what she got.
Why go sightseeing when that was the last thing she wanted to do? Besides, after all those years of war, Vietnamese only travelled for a purpose, real Point A to B sorta’ folks.
Kim-Dung had gone off the Pill back in Vietnam and by autumn as the leaves of New York City’s parks turned red and golden, Kim-Dung was pregnant again. Elisabeth Jakab introduced us to a great Hungarian-born woman obstetrician over on Central Park who made the pregnancy a comfortable experience.
For some simplistic bloody reason, perhaps because they were Asians, the AP thought the best place for the only Vietnamese staffers they hadn’t fired—Dang Van Phuoc and Nick Ut—was back where they’d come from, sort of anyway.
So, still a bachelor, Mr Pulitzer was assigned Tokyo while Phuoc was sent to Hong Kong with his wife Hoa and two children. Paid local salaries, they could barely survive, to say nothing of the language problem, with Phuoc angrily returning to the US after barely a year. (Ut survived Tokyo a couple more years.)
On the positive side for us, however, Kim-Dung was able to use Phuoc—and Bill Robbins now up in Japan—to finally communicate with her lost family. But letters still took a couple months and presumably opened and read by the communist authorities along the way.
The first brief letter barely cheered Kim-Dung. Where was father? He always wrote. Why hadn’t he written? The reply came back. They said they didn’t know. He was taken away after Liberation. More letters.
Grim times: Christmas 1975 in New York with our children Laura & Alexander and Kim-Dung. Bad news about to hit.
Finally in early 1976 around Tet—our loneliest-ever Vietnamese Lunar New Year— came absolutely devastating news. Father was in the provincial Re-Education Camp along with a brother-in-law, the husband of Kim-Dung’s oldest sister, Chi Hai, who’d worked as an ARVN intelligence sergeant.
Mother could visit almost daily to bring food but barely time to talk over a barbed wire fence. In addition to formal re-education, both were required to do manual labour. Father was ill and lost a lot of weight.
Damn, I hadn’t expected my father-in-law to get that sort of treatment. After all, hadn’t he spent years in prison as a suspected Communist, or Viet Minh, in the late 50’s under the Ngo Dinh Diem regime? He absolutely loathed successive Saigon regimes after the South Vietnamese president was overthrown and assassinated in 1963. We shared a sympathy for the neutralist Third Force.
What was going on?
Well, that much-predicted bloodbath that some Americans predicted after a Communist victory—like those public executions in Cuba after Castro’s take-over in ’59—certainly hadn’t taken place in Vietnam.
And from news reports, I knew anyone, military or civilian, from the Saigon regime had to register and then report for “re-education.” Hundreds of thousands of them. But no details had emerged on what that involved—or just how bad they were.
Given his position, I simply assumed that Kim-Dung’s father would be okay. Farewelling him that tragic day of the helicopter evacuation the year before, I asked if he was afraid about the now-inevitable Communist take-over and he’d shaken his head no. That scene kept rolling through my head.
And from the way I remembered them, many associated with that corrupt old South Vietnamese regime were damned lucky they weren’t simply taken out and shot. But he wasn’t one of them. Not by a long shot.
Even with this news, I still accepted the Communist victory as a thankful end to the war and—Wishful Thinking again—gave them the benefit of the doubt in the rough transition to peace. To cite just a couple of the crackdowns: Why not send drug addicts and prostitutes to rehabilitation? And what was wrong with shifting people out of over-crowded Saigon and other refugee-swollen cities to New Economic Zones in the countryside? Still, some of those first reports on book-burnings were a bit over-the-top.
My anger and bitterness was more towards the US—and that damned Ford Administration who sank South Vietnam and flew away. Vietnam should be given diplomatic recognition and deal done on those secretly-promised reparations to Hanoi promised before the Paris Peace Agreement. Anything to normalise relations— and get us back there, I thought.
Instead, Washington just slammed the door and walked away, even slapping a trade embargo on the country, just like Cuba. They vetoed unified Vietnam’s requests to join the United Nations.
My resentment about the war’s end also carried over to my attitude towards the thousands of refugees who flooded into America since the Fall of Saigon. Damned bunch of cowards who ran away when the crunch came to defend their country. Everyone for himself. Sauve-qui-peut. Losers. Corrupt and poorly-led and sending the whole country down the gurgler into the hands of the Communists.
I’d seen the US cut back its military and civilian aid those last couple years, but didn’t buy that argument. If enough South Vietnamese had truly believed, they would have fought. I was hardly sympathetic to those first refugees.
When Southern California’s Camp Pendleton couldn’t handle the heavy flow of Vietnamese refugees, another was set up at Fort Indiantown Gap in nearby Pennsylvania. As sponsors were found, usually churches, the newcomers moved into East Coast communities, including NYC.
One night, we joined a gathering of several dozen Vietnamese at a nearby Roman Catholic Church where, quite surprisingly, I ran into that corrupt former Go Cong Province chief I tried so hard to get sacked all those years ago. Now, he treated me like a long-lost pal.
I never saw the old Lieutenant Colonel again but, at the same event, we ran into Carl Strock’s former wife, Truong, still heart-broken how my ex-IVS friend fled his AP stringer job in Laos to the US with their daughter—and whom she’d never see again.
Kim-Dung was quite touched when the priest gave her a large plaster Buddha who would follow us to Australia and our new lives there. Never that religious, she was pleased just to have it.
But that’s about all we had to do with our fellow Vietnamese refugees. We kept our distance and didn’t socialise or get involved in their lives and politics. After that first bitter winter in the US came a second migration of refugees to warmer Southern California and what’d become Little Saigon, although a smaller community of the former South Vietnamese elite settled in the Washington DC area.
With the exception of those in NY and a couple others, I also didn’t want much to do with most of my working colleagues from my Vietnam Days. Let’s face it, while I knew many by face or in-passing, I was never that into the Saigon Press Corps and always considered myself an outsider. (Hell, I even lived outside their downtown enclave and rarely socialised with them.) Besides, none of them knew Vietnam like I did.
I kinda’ resented those colleagues married to Vietnamese who had got their families out before the Fall, like Life magazine’s Dick Swanson, whose wife Germaine would later open a flash upmarket self-named Vietnamese restaurant that attracted the like of Henry Kissinger and others high-fliers. Lucky Bastards.
I also worried about that damned heroin addiction and how widely-known it was. Suspected. Gossiped about? An early comment from my old AP boss in Saigon and close friend Richard Pyle, now in DC, stuck cryptically in my head, “I was really worried about you.”
I was off the damned smack with absolutely no desire for a hit, especially shooting up America’s heavily-adulterated shit. Goodbye also to those heroin addict friends like Roberto in Arizona, Jerry up in Canada and John lurking somewhere in the NY area. Meeting up with John Steinbeck IV in Colorado on that last Home Leave in ’73 had left me uncomfortable and wondering what we had in common. John was still in Asia. Substance Friends. Forget ‘em.
Overcome with anger, bitterness and guilt, I purposefully suppressed those memories, people and times from Vietnam. All that mattered now was Kim-Dung’s family—but what the hell could I do about it? Who could help? But I was tired. Lethargic. Burned out.
I bought a big grey Royal typewriter just like the ones in the AP office in Saigon. But never wrote. Just another drink or sneaky joint and a dead-end job so I never thought too much. I wasn’t making any new friends. After losing all my music in Saigon, I no longer kept up with the latest sounds—and no money to buy ‘em in any case. WCBS-FM became my sound track.
The hits hadn’t aged yet. But I certainly had.