Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 67

Remembering the Final 24 Hours in the Fall of Saigon

Forty-five years ago today, I was in a place called Saigon as it fell to Communist North Vietnamese troops. It is a day I will never forget, not only because I wasn’t sure if I would get out of Vietnam in one piece, but because I still consider it one of the greatest betrayals in American history. Thousands of Vietnamese who had worked for and with the United States in an effort to keep South Vietnam from being conquered and assimilated by Communist North Vietnam were left behind as America abandoned them to concentration camps and worse.

[image error] Ron Yates Covering Cambodia & Vietnam 1975

At the time, I was the Chicago Tribune’s Far Eastern Correspondent based in Tokyo, and I had gone to South Vietnam and Cambodia to report on both countries two years after the spurious Paris Peace Accord was signed.

In my post today, I am sharing with you my account of that harrowing, panic-filled 24-hour period between April 29-30, 1975, when a ten-year-long war that some have called America’s “lost crusade” came to a frantic and ignominious end.

During that frenzied final day, 1,373 Americans, 5,680 Vietnamese and an exhausted and ailing American ambassador with the American flag folded under one arm and his pet poodle under the other would flee a land infamous for its coups d’état and its Byzantine cabals—a stunningly beautiful place of soaring green hills, lush forests, vast rubber plantations and fertile rice paddies that had become a political and military swamp for several American presidents.

[image error] Frantic Vietnamese Seeking a Way Out of Saigon (Ron Yates)

Most Americans have subsequently concluded that what was then the longest war in this nation’s history was also the first war America ever lost. However, as a former North Vietnamese colonel told me several years ago, one of the great ironies of Vietnam is that the American military was never defeated in any battle of consequence.

“You lost the war in the cities and villages of America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam,” Col. Ba Thang political commissar of the Saigon­ Gia Dinh Special Action Unit, told me. “We could never hope for a military victory against such a formidable foe. Our strategy was to survive, to make the war last so long that you Americans would eventually tire and go home. That is what happened. We divided you politically and sapped your will to fight a war in a country few Americans had ever heard of or cared about.”

Indeed, while the specter of Vietnam still haunts us today, in the 1960s and 1970s, it divided the nation like nothing since the Civil War. In some ways, it continues to do so.

References to American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as America’s “new Vietnams” are consistently seen and heard in the news media. The phrase “no more Vietnams” adorns placards at nearly every demonstration against any U.S. military involvement and one even hears references to “the light at the end of the tunnel,” the phrase used in the 1960s by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to describe U.S. progress toward winning the war in Vietnam.

McNamara’s pet phrase was far from my mind 45 years ago when a barrage of 122 mm rockets slammed into Saigon. It was a little after 4 a.m. on April 29, 1975, when I was jolted awake in my second-floor room of Saigon’s four-story French colonial-era Continental Palace Hotel. As I sat upright in my bed, I realized it was oppressively hot and after the initial explosions, strangely quiet.

[image error] Continental Palace Hotel, Ca. 1975 (Ron Yates)

Then I realized why. The old window air conditioner had stopped its moaning and coughing. There was no electricity. The North Vietnamese had hit one of Saigon’s power plants—a common occurrence during the past few weeks. I lit one of the dozen or so candles I always kept ready and looked up at the ceiling.

The gecko lizards had stopped chasing after mosquitoes and were retreating down the walls. Cockroaches the size of credit cards were scampering into the cracks of the ruby floor tiles. Even the rat that regularly patrolled my room was gone (I had named him General Giap, after the architect of North Vietnam’s military campaign).

I wondered if what I had heard had been thunder. April 28th had been a day of thunderstorms with lightning flashing over the city. Then, a few moments later, the unmistakable metallic sound of a 122 mm rocket shrieked through the thick humid night air and exploded nearby. This time chunks of ancient plaster fell from the ceiling, and the walls of the 100-year-old hotel shuddered.

That was not thunder. These were the first rockets to hit Saigon since April 27 when one slammed into the roof of the Majestic Hotel overlooking the Saigon River a few blocks away, killing a hotel porter. Later that same morning, another rocket smashed into Saigon’s bustling Ben Thanh Market, killing more than a dozen people.

I jumped from the bed, scampered barefoot over the cold crimson tiles to the small balcony overlooking Lam Son Square, and threw open the French windows. Before me, looming in all its hulking alabaster majesty, was the old National Assembly Building and beyond it the high rise Caravelle Hotel. Both were intact.

To my right where Le Loi Street bisected Tu Do Street, several members of the South Vietnamese home guard, with red rosettes in their buttonholes identifying them as loyalists, were firing their old M-1 carbines. For the past several weeks, home guard troops, who were mostly teenagers, had patrolled the streets by day and at night had slept on sidewalks wrapped in ponchos.

As I looked down at the home guard, bullets buzzed through the dank night air and ricocheted off nearby buildings. I ducked as several rounds slammed into the white façade of the hotel. During the past several months, I had gotten to know several of these home guard militia. Their job was to enforce Saigon’s nighttime curfew. I paid them to escort me after curfew to the Public Telephone and Telegraph Office so I could telex my stories back to the Chicago Tribune.

“What are you shooting at?” I yelled.

“V.C., beaucoup V.C.,” a 17-year-old named Nha shouted back.

“Where?”

“They everywhere…you better hide.” Then Nha, who was usually wasted on Vietnamese “33” beer by this time, shrieked with laughter. “Không Quan trọng!” (It doesn’t matter). We kill all number ten V.C.”

Yeah, I remember thinking if you don’t kill everybody else in the city first. Nha lifted his rifle and fired several more rounds into the air. I had seen Nha in action with his M-1 carbine during our after curfew hikes to the PTT office. He often amused himself by blasting away at the giant rats that roamed Saigon’s deserted streets after the cyclos and ancient smoke-belching Renault taxis had stopped running for the night.

I retreated into my room. In the distance, there were more heavy explosions—what sounded like 80 mm mortar rounds and 130mm heavy artillery hitting Tan Son Nhut, Saigon’s main airport some 7 miles away. The temperature was already approaching 90 degrees as I got dressed, and the sun wasn’t even up. I decided to forgo what would have been a cold shower. I needed to get downstairs to see what was going on.

Was this it? I can recall thinking. Is this the end? As it turned out, America’s disastrous crusade in Vietnam was indeed over. And this was the way it would end: not with honor, as one president had suggested, but in disgrace and humiliation and chaos.

[image error] Terrified Vietnamese Storm the U.S. Embassy in Saigon (AP)

Even though the city was now under a 24-hour curfew, for much of that final day some 20,000 terrified, shrieking Vietnamese—many of them former U.S. government employees—would surround the American Embassy, pleading with Marine guards to allow them inside the 10-foot walls so they could board the choppers that would take them to the armada of 44 American ships waiting off the Vietnamese coast.

Some would make it over the walls and onto the helicopters. But only some. Most would be held at bay by U.S. soldiers—former allies—who pointed M-16s at them, cursed them, pounded their clawing fingers with rifle butts, and threatened to blow their heads off.  I can still hear the voices of American embassy officials and their Vietnamese interpreters shouting: “Không ai sẽ bị tụt hậu!” (No one will be left behind) at the frantic throng outside the Embassy compound.

It was a scene that still saddens me today—one that made me ashamed to be an American, not because we were leaving in abject defeat but because we were betraying thousands if not millions of Vietnamese who believed our promises of a free and better Vietnam if they supported our policies.

I had arrived in Vietnam from my Tokyo base in January 1975, and except for a few weeks spent in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in late February and early March, I had lived in Saigon at the Continental Palace.

The North Vietnamese push for Saigon began March 7 in Vietnam’s central highlands. Four days later, the provincial capital city of Ban Me Thuot, 180 miles north of Saigon, fell. A few days after that, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu decided to adopt a plan of “strategic withdrawal,” which, in effect, conceded the northern half of South Vietnam to the Communists and precipitated one of the greatest routs in military history.

By early April, the North Vietnamese controlled almost 75 percent of the country, and a palpable sense of doom enveloped Saigon. The city’s ubiquitous bars, famous for their “Saigon tea,” were mostly empty. Vendors selling “pho” and “cà phê sữa”(beef noodle soup and “white” coffee), beggars, and hundreds of homeless children had all retreated from the streets.  While these were ominous signs, I knew the end was near when the Indian tailor on Tu Do Street, where I had gotten shirts made and changed dollars into Vietnamese piastres, began producing North Vietnamese and Viet Cong flags instead of American and South Vietnamese banners.

“It’s the reality of the situation you see,” he told me matter-of-factly one afternoon.  “You do what you must to survive. You press chaps can leave; I cannot. Frankly, I am happy that this nasty affair is ending finally after so many terrible years.”

The official length of the war is generally conceded to have been eight years—from 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent in the U.S. Marines, to 1973, when the Paris peace accord was signed. However, if you count the first advisers sent to Vietnam by Harry Truman in 1950, America’s involvement in S. E. Asia spanned three decades. During that time, about 3.1 million military personnel (including 7,200 women) served in Vietnam.

The human toll was staggering. By the time America’s active involvement in the war officially ended in 1973, it had claimed the lives of 58,183 American men and women. Another 304,000 Americans came home wounded, sometimes physically and sometimes mentally. One of every ten soldiers who served in Vietnam was a casualty.

Also, some 105 journalists died covering the war—more than in any other conflict in world history. Several are still missing.

Vietnam was nothing if not intense. For example, Pentagon figures show that the average infantryman in the Pacific theater in World War II saw about 40 days of actual combat in four years. In Vietnam, the average infantryman saw about 240 days of combat in one year—a fact directly attributable to the helicopter, which allowed for much more rapid deployment of troops.

Then there are the MIAs—the 2,211 Americans still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia, including 1,651 in Vietnam.

The dollar cost of the war: More than $165 billion—a figure which includes the loss of 3,689 fixed-wing aircraft, 4,857 helicopters and 15 million tons of ammunition.

[image error] Vietnamese Who Believed in American Policy Were Devastated When They Were Left Behind (Corbis)

In Vietnam the impact of America’s involvement in the war was even more conspicuous: 3 million Vietnamese killed, including 1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers; 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers; and 2 million civilians, according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Labor, War Invalids, and Social Affairs. More than 600,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops were wounded. In comparison, 500,000 South Vietnamese troops were wounded, and 2 million civilians on both sides were crippled by mines, artillery fire, chemical defoliants, bombings, and the general mayhem of war.

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In early April, I had driven my rented jeep to a town called Phouc Hiep and found myself in the middle of a rice paddy along with a handful of other reporters when a firefight broke out between ARVN (South Vietnamese) and North Vietnamese troops.

We broke into a wild run across a vast expanse of dry paddies toward a hamlet when we heard the telltale “thump” of a mortar shell being fired.

“Eat dirt,” someone yelled, and we plunged en masse into a 3-foot deep irrigation ditch. Seconds later, an earsplitting explosion sent huge chunks of dirt and rock flying through the air and on top of us. We were fully exposed in the middle of a 10-acre chain of rice paddies. The nearest cover was a small river about 300 yards away. We thought about dashing it, but small arms fire from both sides kept us pinned down. We remained there in the muddy ditch for what seemed like hours as bullets kicked up dirt all around us. In fact, the battle lasted only about 15 minutes.

[image error] Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

When the shooting subsided, we scampered toward the river, zigging and zagging as we went. When we got there, we paid some farmers who had taken cover along the river bank to ferry us to the other side in their wooden dugout canoes. Once, there we were met with the aftermath of the battle. The bodies of perhaps 15 NVA soldiers were strewn across a field. They had walked into an ambush.

[image error] Dead NVA soldier after the battle of Phuoc Hiep (Ron Yates)

I was making a few notes and photographing the scene when several children from the nearby village emerged and began stripping the soldiers of any valuables they had—watches, rings, shoes. Others were amusing themselves by jumping back and forth over the wire cable that connected several anti-personnel claymore mines to a triggering device. One touch and the mines could have killed six or seven children and anybody else in standing within the effective killing range. When detonated a Claymore sends some 700 steel balls flying in a 60-degree horizontal arc at the height of 6 feet over a radius of 300 feet.

In Vietnam, I wrote in my notebook, the war and its instruments of destruction had become a deadly amusement park.

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On April 20, the provincial capital of Xuan Loc just 46 miles east of Saigon fell after holding out for several days against a tenacious siege by NVA troops. The fall of Xuan Loc was a signal for people to proclaim what quickly became Saigon’s epitaph: “La Guerre est fini; Saigon est fini; everything est fini.”

It also sped up the dynamic Saigon rumor mill. One rumor said that Catholics originally from the north would be sent on a death march along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Another story said that Viet Cong soldiers in Da Nang had ripped out the manicured fingernails of prostitutes, prompting a frenzy of fingernail cutting and polish removing among Saigon’s bar girls. Yet another rumor said that unmarried Catholic girls would be forced to marry North Vietnamese war invalids.

The rumors had one cumulative effect: they tended to support the growing belief that the end was near.

Since early April, several of us had pressed the U.S. Embassy for details of the evacuation—with no result. U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, who died in 1990, was intent on not creating panic by discussing the possibility of an American exodus. Until the last day of the war, he had held out hope that a negotiated end of hostilities could be worked out. Indeed, two days before he had gone on Vietnamese television and announced: “I, the American Ambassador, am not going to run away in the middle of the night. Any of you can come to my home and see for yourselves that I have not packed my bags. I give you my word.”

Martin had, nevertheless, sanctioned a low-key evacuation of Vietnamese and Americans called Operation Talon Vise. Two weeks before April 30, Operation Talon Vise evacuated about 37,000 Vietnamese employees of the U.S. government and their families from Tan Son Nhut to Clark Air Base in the Philippines—far short of the several hundred thousand Vietnamese who had worked with the American military assistance command in some way and who ultimately would be consigned to horrific “re-education camps” by the communist conquerors, in some cases for ten years or more.

To ensure that Talon Vise went smoothly, Martin authorized bribes to Saigon police so buses could move through checkpoints without a problem. He also allowed Vietnamese to be smuggled into the American Embassy through a hole cut into the wall of the adjacent French Embassy.

“What a perfect metaphor for this f…ked up place,” the late Hunter S. Thompson, who was covering the end of the war for Rolling Stone Magazine, told me one evening. We were having dinner at the My Canh floating restaurant on the Saigon River. “Lies, deceit, and betrayal. Hey, I think I have the name for my next book.” The “gonzo” journalist then took a long drag on a fat Buddha grass joint and asked if he could ride out with me to “the action” the next day.

I dreaded taking Thompson with me because he tended to wander off. I always feared that I would return to Saigon and have to announce that Thompson was captured by the Viet Cong or had stepped on a mine. I didn’t want to be responsible for the death or capture of “Uncle Duke” the Doonesbury cartoon strip character modeled on Thompson.

“What a thought,” someone said one evening. “If Thompson gets captured, he will get the whole North Vietnamese Army high, and the war will be over tomorrow.”

As it turned out, Thompson left Saigon for Hong Kong long before the evacuation, and Rolling Stone had to send in another reporter to cover the story. “This bull shit is going to last forever. I’ve got rigorous shopping to do,” he told me before he left for the airport.

Thompson’s assessment notwithstanding, Ambassador Martin did not want to be accused of cutting and running. Until the last few hours, he was convinced there could have been some negotiated, equitable settlement that would allow a smooth transition of power. It is possible today to forgive Martin for his muddled thinking—especially in light of the revelations contained in the book “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam” published in 1995 by one of the architects of America’s involvement in Vietnam, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

McNamara’s admission that he and others in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations knew the war was wrong—and even un-winnable—as far back as 1965 but decided to send Americans to fight and die there any way makes Martin’s diplomatic dithering seem acceptably innocuous.

Finally, on April 26, with 16 NVA army divisions converging on the capital from every direction, a unique “evacuation code” was revealed by the U.S. Embassy that would alert us when an evacuation was imminent.

The code, which would be played over a local U.S.-operated FM station, would be this: A short announcement that said, “The temperature is 105 degrees and rising,” followed by the first eight bars of the song “White Christmas.”

I can recall sitting one evening on the “Continental Shelf”— the open-air veranda of the Continental Palace Hotel (now glassed in and renamed Chez Guido) that overlooks Tu Do and Le Loi streets—when several Japanese correspondents came rushing up to my table.

[image error] On “The Shelf” at the Continental Saigon

“How does ‘White Christmas’ go?” they inquired anxiously. I hummed it for them. For the next few days, Japanese and others not familiar with the old Bing Crosby Christmas standard could be seen standing on Saigon street corners, humming the song to one another.

It was one of those droll little moments that punctuated the more considerable agony of the war’s last few hours.

But that humor was all but forgotten as April 29 dawned, and several of us huddled in the lobby of the Continental Hotel listening to the portable UHF receiver an embassy official had given the American press corps.

Over the tiny receiver, we could hear radio traffic between the U.S. Marine contingent charged with guarding the hulking complex of U.S. Defense Attache Office buildings near Tan Son Nhut Air Base called “Pentagon East.”

The radio crackled with a running commentary from the Marine unit assigned to the building as one artillery shell after another slammed into Tan Son Nhut and the American compound.

“The back end of the gym’s been hit!” a Marine shouted into his radio.

“Roger that, Whiskey Joe,” came the monotone reply from the embassy, which was appropriately code-named “Dodge City.”

“My god, control, we’ve got two Marine KIAs.”

“Where are the bodies?” asked the voice from the embassy.

“They’re right here. What should we do with them?”

Then there was a tremendous explosion, amplified by the small radio.

“Jesus, the ammo dump’s just been hit! All hell has broken loose out here!”

A few hours later, Operation Frequent Wind (the name given to the final evacuation) was ordered by President Gerald Ford, and I paid one last visit to my room in the Continental Palace. I had stockpiled a couple of cases of American beer, soft drinks, and a variety of PX junk food, along with a small library of pirated books.

I found Mr. Phan, one of the elderly hotel concierge staffers, who slept in a small room on the second floor, sweeping my room as if nothing had happened. For almost two months, Mr. Phan, who always appeared in clean white cotton pants and jacket, had cleaned my room, kept me in fresh bottled water, and occasionally sprayed my room in a futile gesture at ridding it of roaches and other critters of the night.

I pressed a wad of Vietnamese piastres into his hand. Then it occurred to me that the money would be worthless in a few hours—indeed, as far as Saigon’s ubiquitous money changers were concerned, piastres had been worthless for the past two weeks.

I had about $500 in cash, and I peeled off $300 and gave it to him.

“Here, this may come in handy, Mr. Phan,” I said. “And please take anything you want from my room,” I suggested he might want to get out of central Saigon and find a safe place until the fighting and artillery barrage stopped.

He smiled, bowed ever so slightly, and announced:  “Thank you, but not to worry, I am V.C!”

Many of us had suspected for some time that a lot of the “boys,” as Mr. Phan and his co-workers at the Continental were called, were probably Viet Cong or V.C. sympathizers. One reason many journalists stayed at the old hotel was that we had heard that the owner paid “war taxes” to the Viet Cong so it would not be targeted for attack.

As we shook hands, he looked up at me and said: “Why do you not stay. Everything will be OK here. Much better if you stay here.”

I explained that the Tribune had ordered me to leave and that I had a baby daughter I hadn’t seen for almost four months.

He nodded. “Yes, yes, maybe better you go now.”

It was the last time I would ever see Phan, who was in his 70s at the time. When I returned in 1985 for the 10th anniversary of the war’s end, the staff at the Continental Palace informed me he had passed away in 1982.

[image error] Tu Do Street, Saigon, 1975

By 10 a.m., a small army of American, European, and Asian correspondents lugging typewriters, sound equipment, suitcases, and shoulder bags left the Continental in a single silent file. We had been told to make our way to a point six blocks away near the Saigon River.

As we trudged down Tu Do Street, ARVN soldiers and home guard units watched our ragtag formation menacingly. In the distance, we could hear the constant explosion of artillery and mortar shells as they slammed into the city’s suburbs.

“You leave now?” Nha, the home guard soldier, asked me as we slogged toward the river. His M-1 carbine was slung over his back, and for the first time since I had known him and his small squad of home guard soldiers, he seemed genuinely terrified of what the next few hours would bring.

“Yes, we leave now,” I said sheepishly. Then, for some reason, I said: “I’m sorry . . . sorry for all of this.”

“Không sao, nó không quan trọng!” (Never mind, it doesn’t matter), Nha said. “You come back someday.” He was right, of course. I would return in 1985 and again in 1995 to witness the 10th and 20th anniversaries of the fall of Saigon.

Finally, we arrived at our evacuation point: a spot facing a statue of Vietnam’s 6th Century military hero Tran Hung Dao. A helipad had been created atop a building, but the South Vietnamese navy had placed a 50-caliber machine gun on the top of a building next door. It was decided the machine gun might be used against departing U.S. choppers. So that evacuation point was abandoned.

I made my way to the U.S. Embassy, thinking that might be an option for catching a chopper out. It was surrounded by thousands of furious Vietnamese demanding to be let inside the embassy compound. There was no way I was going to push my way through that mob.

I trudged down Hai Ba Trung Street. The temperature was already close to 100 degrees, and my shirt was soaked through with sweat. Eventually, I made my way to an alternate evacuation point—the University of Maryland’s Saigon Education Center. It was padlocked. I waited. Finally, at 12:20 p.m., two olive drab buses arrived, and I climbed aboard along with about 60 other members of the Saigon press corps.

The two buses then began an aimless voyage through Saigon. Every few blocks, the buses would stop, and the Marine assigned to our bus would ask for instructions on his two-way radio.

“What’s this, the Graham Martin sightseeing excursion?” someone asked.

The UHF radio in the Marine’s hand crackled. It was “Dodge City” again.

“We’re in trouble here!” a voice said. “There are 20,000 people at the front gate of the embassy. It’s getting hostile.”

“What should I do with my bus?” our Marine driver shouted into his radio.

“Looks like Tan Son Nhut’s your only option,” came the reply. “Don’t come here!”

[image error] Tan Son Nhut Airport Saigon, 1975

“Roger that,” the Marine said. Then, turning to the 60 people jammed on the bus, he said. “Looks like we’re going to the airport.” In the distance, we could hear the explosion of rockets and mortar shells slamming into Tan Son Nhut.

As the bus approached the main gate of the airbase, we could see black pillars of smoke rising from the runway. Then Vietnamese guards at the gate began firing their M-16s in our direction. We dove for the floor.

Our Marine escort, code-named “Wagonmaster,” yelled into his radio for instructions. “This looks bad. What should we do? What is the situation at MACV HQ?”

”It ain’t good,” the radio crackled. “We are taking lots of mortar and artillery fire. Bust through the gate if necessary and then drive like hell.” The radio crackled, and as an afterthought, a voice said: “Good luck.”

I seriously considered getting off the bus and walking the 7 or 8 miles back to the city. Before I could, the driver moved the bus back some 100 yards from the gate.

“This is it,” he yelled. “Keep low. We’re busting through the gate!” He stomped on the accelerator, and the bus lurched forward. As we bore down on the gate at about 60 mph, we expected the guards to start shooting. Instead, they inexplicably backed off and opened the gates seconds before the lumbering vehicle would have rammed through them.

Off to one side, a downed Huey helicopter, with one skid broken off, lay on its side with its motor running and it’s tail rotor still spinning.

We watched a Vietnamese C-119 transport plane somehow lift off from the cratered runway, and we applauded the pilot’s skill. Our applause turned to horror seconds later when a heat-seeking missile streaked skyward, slammed into the transport, and sent it plummeting toward what looked like the Cholon section of Saigon.

As we pulled up to the MACV HQ compound, a 122 mm rocket punched into the Air America terminal just across the road, showering us with debris.

[image error] MACV HQ, Tan Son Nhut 1975

I was in the back of the bus trying frantically to get the locked emergency rear door open when another artillery shell exploded a few hundred feet away, pelting the area with shrapnel and breaking several windows on the bus. By this point, I was on my back, kicking with all my strength at the door.

Finally, I managed to kick the door open. I slid down to the ground and waited for a few minutes using the bus as cover. Most of the press corps had already made it into the building. I took a deep breath, then began my sprint over some 50 feet of open ground to the DAO building. Another rocket slammed into the road a few yards behind me. I dove to the ground and flattened myself on the hot concrete. I could hear razor-sharp metal shrapnel slicing through the air behind me. A few seconds later, I pulled myself up and scuttled like a crab toward the door.

Once inside, we crouched along interior hallways and waited. A couple of hours went by. Several Marines handed out paper bags and told us to write our names and next of kin on them and attach them to our clothing.

“These are for you, not your luggage,” they said. I knew what they were. I had seen them before—attached to the bodies of battle casualties.

Outside, a constant deluge of rockets, mortars, and artillery shells rained on Tan Son Nhut and the DAO compound. I closed my eyes and actually managed a few minutes of sleep between explosions.

It was almost 6 p.m., some 14 hours since the final bombardment of Saigon had begun. I was exhausted. I was sure every ounce of adrenalin in my body was used up. I thought about the C-119 I had watched get knocked out the sky by a SAM-7 missile and began to wonder if I had made the right choice. Maybe I should stay. After all, during one of the Saturday briefings at the Viet Cong compound at Tan Son Nhut, which was established as part of the 1973 Peace Accords, Col. Ba had told me all correspondents would be treated as “guests” by the conquering North Vietnamese Army.

“We are not barbarians like the Khmer Rouge,” Col. Ba said, referring to the news of the carnage in Phnom Penh that was beginning to filter into Saigon. “Just remain in your hotel room, and someone will come for you. Those who earn an honest living will be welcome.”

Of course, I had not remained in my hotel room. I was inside the DAO compound, more than 7 miles from the Continental Palace Hotel. How would I get back to the city center? Catch a ride on an NVA T-54 tank? Hardly.

The shelling outside intensified. The huge DAO building trembled as one artillery shell after another slammed the compound. I was on the verge of getting up and walking back to central Saigon when a Marine captain walked into the corridor and bellowed:

“OK, this is it! We’re moving out! Di di mao…Go, go, go!”

We spilled out of the DAO building. Two Sikorsky CH-53 Sea Stallion heavy helicopters were waiting on a tennis court about 300 feet away, their blades whooshing slowly in the hot sticky air. After what seemed an eternity, I and about 80 others scrambled up the rear loading ramp hunkered on the floor and canvas bench seats. Seconds later, the loadmaster raised the ramp, and we lifted off.

[image error] Evacuation from “Pentagon East” April 29, 1975

We flew low at first. Then the pilot put the helicopter into a steady climb. I stood up and looked down at Saigon over the door gunner’s shoulder. The city seemed bizarrely peaceful and idyllic with the Saigon River meandering through the city and toward the South China Sea some 50 miles away.

Forty minutes later, we were landing on the deck of the USS Denver, a Landing Platform Dock about 35 miles off the coast of Vung Tau.

For the next several hours, we watched one helicopter after another arrive. Some unauthorized South Vietnamese army helicopters were allowed to land and then were pushed over the side into the sea.

[image error] Pushing HUEY’s From the USS Denver into Ocean During Evacuation

Eventually, with the ship’s decks filled, Vietnamese pilots were no longer allowed to land, so they would fly their Hueys to within 100 yards of the ship, open the doors and jump into the sea along with their passengers. The chopper would remain in flight for a few moments and then pitch into the ocean-sometimes dangerously close to those swimming toward our ship.

At 4:58 a.m. April 30, Ambassador Martin closed down the embassy, destroyed its communications equipment, and climbed aboard a helicopter on the embassy roof.

The helicopter pilot sent a message to the fleet: “Lady Ace Zero Nine, Code Two is aboard.” Lady Ace Zero Nine was the chopper’s call sign; “Code Two” was the designation for an ambassador.

At 7:52 a.m., the last chopper lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy, carrying out the small detachment of Marines who had guarded the embassy compound and engaged terrified Vietnamese in a running floor-by-floor holding action throughout April 29 and early April 30.

As the last Huey lifted off, the pilot radioed the final official U.S. message from Saigon:  “Swift-Two-Two is airborne with 11 passengers. Ground security force is aboard.”

Then, the radio crackled again: “Bye, bye, Vietnam,” a voice said. “Bye, bye for now.”

Aboard the USS Denver, several of us looked at one another in stunned silence. The longest war of the 20th Century was finally over. Our emotions ran the gamut: relief, guilt, anger, disgust, joy, sadness—depending on who you were and from what country you were.

“So this is what the light at the end of the tunnel looks like,” I said to no one in particular.

I then went below decks to write my final story of America’s war in Vietnam. Only it wasn’t.

I am still writing the final story 45 years later. You just read it.

(The link below is a special NBC report on the Fall of Saigon done several years ago. It is long but worth viewing for the context it provides)

http://digital.films.com/play/8MW33T

Join me Tomorrow & Thursday for my retrospective on the final 24 hours of Saigon

(NOTE: Tomorrow and Thursday I invite you to join me as I relive the last 24 frantic hours in Saigon as it fell to Communist North Vietnamese troops on April 29-30, 1975–an event I covered for the Chicago Tribune in 1975. I hope you will stop by) 

Forty-five years ago I was in a place called Saigon as it fell to Communist North Vietnamese troops. It is an experience I will never forget, mainly because I wasn’t sure if I would get out of Vietnam in one piece.

[image error] Ron Yates Covering Cambodia & Vietnam 1975

At the time, I was the Chicago Tribune’s Far Eastern Correspondent based in Tokyo and I had gone to South Vietnam and Cambodia to report on both countries two years after the spurious Paris Peace Accord was signed.

In my posts tomorrow and Thursday, I will share with you my personal account of that harrowing, panic-filled 24-hour period between April 29-30, 1975 when a 10 year-long war that some have called America’s “lost crusade” came to a frantic and ignominious end.

 

Join me Wednesday & Thursday for my retrospective on the final 24 hours of Saigon

(NOTE: This Wednesday and Thursday I invite you to join me as I relive the last 24 frantic hours in Saigon as it fell to Communist North Vietnamese troops on April 29-30, 1975–an event I covered for the Chicago Tribune in 1975. I hope you will stop by) 

Forty-five years ago I was in a place called Saigon as it fell to Communist North Vietnamese troops. It is an experience I will never forget, mainly because I wasn’t sure if I would get out of Vietnam in one piece.

[image error] Ron Yates Covering Cambodia & Vietnam 1975

At the time, I was the Chicago Tribune’s Far Eastern Correspondent based in Tokyo and I had gone to South Vietnam and Cambodia to report on both countries two years after the spurious Paris Peace Accord was signed.

In my post Wednesday, I will share with you my personal account of that harrowing, panic-filled 24-hour period between April 29-30, 1975 when a 10 year-long war that some have called America’s “lost crusade” came to a frantic and ignominious end.

 

‘The Pretense of Knowledge’ has Cost America Dearly

I am reposting the article below by Nicholas J. Kaster, which recently appeared in the American Thinker. In it, Kaster refers to Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek, who, upon accepting his Nobel Prize in 1974, said: “I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.” That comment is especially prophetic today during the COVID-19 lockdown when a handful of “experts” have virtually “destroyed our economy in order to save it.”

‘The Pretense of Knowledge’ has Cost America Dearly

By Nicholas J. Kaster

Recently, Brit Hume, the sober and understated Fox News commentator, voiced the thoughts of millions when he said,

“I think its time to consider the possibility… that this lockdown, as opposed to the more moderate mitigation efforts… is a colossal public policy calamity.”

The financial extent of the calamity was quantified by economist Scott Grannis when he observed that “almost overnight, we have wiped out all the net job gains of the past 14 years.” He made that comment on April 12, and the losses aren’t over yet. Grannis bluntly concluded that “The shutdown of the U.S. economy will prove to be the most expensive self-inflicted injury in the history of mankind.”

The loss of liberty incurred as a result of shutdown is not as easily quantifiable but is no less significant.

Epidemiological “models” have provided the scientific basis for this large-scale abrogation of personal and economic liberty. Now that the models have been shown to be grossly inaccurate, some are demanding accountability.

In a recent op-ed, Georgia congressman Jody Hice wrote:

“Public health experts, scientists, and government officials all warned that millions would die unless strict measures were put in place… So, we willingly took unprecedented steps to save the most vulnerable among us, even at the cost of wreaking unparalleled economic damage. The experts said it was necessary, that the coronavirus was especially deadly, and our medical systems were in danger of being overwhelmed… Now, weeks into the pandemic, the dire outcomes foretold by experts have failed to come to pass. The models used to justify the closure of society have been shown to be wildly inaccurate… We need to examine why the models failed us, why their creators have been so far off the mark, and why these projections were used to justify policies that have resulted in unparalleled economic disruption.”

It is worth having that discussion. In retrospect, and despite their air of authority, the experts never had enough knowledge about this virus to make reliable calculations about the future.

But the real problem with the models wasn’t that they proved to be false, but rather that they were promoted with false certitude.

“I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge,” economist Friedrich Hayek once said, “to a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”

Hayek’s remark, given as he was accepting the Nobel Prize in 1974, was that thinking of economics as a “science” might lead to “a pretense of knowledge,” the idea that any one person might know enough to engineer society successfully, unmindful of unintended consequences.

But Hayek went on to note that his reasoning applied to the physical sciences as well:

“There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever-growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, ‘dizzy with success’… to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society–a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.”

These observations, made over 40 years ago, look prescient today.

How might we have acted if the models didn’t exist? Most likely, we would have chosen a more traditional approach to fighting the pandemic: quarantine and protect the sick and vulnerable, institute some sensible mitigation policies, and otherwise get on with life.

This is essentially the approach Sweden has chosen, and for which it has been pilloried in the American media. Yet, Sweden’s policies are based on thinking that is quintessentially American.

In an article in the U.K. Spectator, Fredrik Erixon, the director of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, explained that:

“We worry about Covid-19 a lot. Many people work from home. Restaurants are open, but not bustling. Keeping two meters apart at bus stops is something Swedes were pretty good at before the crisis: we don’t need much encouragement now. We’re careful. But our approach to fighting the pandemic starts from something more fundamental: in a liberal democracy you have to convince and not command people into action. If you lose that principle, you will lose your soul.”

So far, the Swedish strategy of allowing some exposure to the virus in order to build immunity among the general population while protecting high-risk groups like the elderly appears to be paying off. The country’s chief epidemiologist reported that “herd immunity” could be reached in the capital of Stockholm in a matter of weeks. Moreover, Sweden has achieved this while taking less of an economic hit than other countries in Europe.

Sweden’s approach was a mixture of epidemiology and principle. Erixon noted that the concept of a national lockdown is “deeply illiberal — and, until now, untested.”

He allowed that Sweden may change if facts warrant. “But,” he wrote, “the vast majority, for now, want Sweden to keep its cool. We don’t want to remember 2020 as the time when we caused irreparable harm to our liberties — or lost them entirely.”

Sweden instructing the U.S. on liberty. Who would have thought?

 

 

The Lost Years of Billy Battles is Book of the Day TODAY

Pleased to say that The Lost Years of Billy Battles was selected as Book of the Day TODAY by the Online Book Club and today only is temporarily free!

Here is what the Online Book Club is saying about the book:

The Lost Years of Billy Battles: Book 3 of the Finding Billy Battles Trilogy by Ronald E. Yates This book has received a PERFECT 4/4 rating by the Onlinebookclub.org.

Review Team! The Lost Years of Billy Battles has won multiple awards, including Chanticleer International Book Awards Overall Best Book of 2018 & the Goethe Grand Prize, as well as the New Apple Book award for Excellence in 2019. Please check out books 1 & 2 in the trilogy to experience all of Billy’s amazing life!

Today only, The Lost Years of Billy Battles is free. It is book 3 in the Finding Billy Battles trilogy and is a stand-alone book. https://lnkd.in/eqvpTcj

Book of the Day April 23rd, — FREE Historical Fiction, Rated 4/4 Temporarily FREE: https://lnkd.in/eqvpTcj

Some Waggish Thoughts on the Pandemic

I know it’s not that easy to joke or laugh about the Wuhan Coronavirus that China unleashed on the world, but sometimes I think a little levity helps us deal with the challenges all of us are facing. The other day a friend sent me the following list of thoughts, so I thought I would pass them on. I hope they lighten the load a bit.

Now would probably be a good time to re-pave the roads.
COVID-19 has grocery shelves looking like the Cincinnati Bengals trophy cases.
Just read that tonight’s Powerball is up to 275 rolls of Angel Soft toilet paper! [image error]
Many parents are about to discover the teacher was not the problem.
3 hours into homeschooling and 1 is suspended for skipping class and the other one has already been expelled.
Homeschool day 1: wondering how I can get this kid transferred out of my class.
This is the day dogs have been waiting for. They realize their owners can’t leave the house and they get them 24/7. Dogs are rejoicing everywhere. Cats are contemplating suicide.
I wonder if God got so mad about all of our fighting down here that He sent us to our rooms? [image error]
Don’t know why my fishing buddy is worried about the coronavirus, he never catches anything!
The truth is, it’s not so boring at home. But it’s interesting that one bag of rice has 7,456 grains and another has 7,489.
We are about 1 week away from knowing everyone’s true hair color!!!
I’ve eaten 22 times and taken 13 naps and it’s still today!

What do you like about Historical Fiction?

Historical fiction is one of the most popular forms of fiction being written today–along with young adult, zombies, romance novels, and sci-fi.

I am interested in learning why people like historical fiction books. I have a few theories, but I would like to know what others think.

I enjoyed writing the Finding Billy Battles trilogy that begins in the Old West of Kansas, moves to the colonial Far East in the late 19th Century, and then to early 20th Century Mexico during its revolution and finally, back to the United States.

[image error]

As a reader (or writer) what is it that draws you to this kind of fiction?

I take pleasure in doing the research necessary to create an accurate portrayal of the people, places, and events of other eras, such as the 19th Century. I especially like “slowing” down the pace of life.

What I find appealing about the past is that people were not overwhelmed and seduced by the high-tech gadgets and social media that dominate our waking moments today—smart phones, I-pads, texting, Twitter, Facebook, etc.

BSM (Before Social Media) you had time to THINK rather than merely react. The art of conversation was alive and well—not the 140-character verbal blitzes or the shorthand texts that pass for it today.

When I worked as a foreign correspondent, I can recall telling my office (via telex) when I was covering Vietnam, Cambodia, El Salvador, etc. in the 70s & 80s that I would be out of touch for several days. Then I would go to some remote area and spend time talking with people, analyzing what I was hearing, and what I was seeing. Then I would return to write a story that wasn’t filled with “instant wisdom” as we so often see today from uninformed reporters who “parachute” in to cover a story.

Writing about the 19th Century, as I did in my trilogy, allowed me to slow the pace down, provide historical context, and give my characters time to think.

Today, we are all in such a hurry to do things, to pack in as much as we can in a single day. When I think about my characters in Finding Billy Battles, I envy the fact that they were not sped up by “galloping technology” as we are so often today.

What do you think? Do you like reading books where the pace of life is slower, where technology is not sovereign, where civility and propriety (usually) reigned?

Let me know what you think. I would like to take those thoughts and comments and use them in another post on this topic.

 

TOOLS OF A FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, THEN AND NOW

Back in 1975 B.C. (Before Cyberspace), I lugged a 17-pound Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter from the jungles of Cambodia to the central highlands of Vietnam as I covered the fall of both countries to communist forces.

That Olivetti never failed me, though it took a severe pounding as I jumped on and off helicopters, bounced down rutted roads in jeeps and trucks, and exposed it to 110-degree temperatures and monsoon rains.

[image error]

Its solid, blue metal shell behaved like armor plating. No matter how much I threw that typewriter around or how often I dropped it when I unzipped the vinyl case and pulled it out, the platen always held my paper in position, and the keys always worked.

In 1975, this was state-of-the-art technology. Tough. Dependable. Cheap. Easy to maintain.

Today that Olivetti resides on a shelf in my garage. And I am sure if I cranked a sheet of paper into it and began banging on the keys, those low-tech black letters would start marching, albeit haltingly, across the page, just like the old days.

[image error]           My Olivetti Lettera 32

But as reliable and sturdy as that old Olivetti was, would I consider lugging it back to Vietnam if I were to return for the 45th anniversary of the fall of Saigon on April 29? Not on your life. Of course, that’s a moot point now because of the Wuhan Coronavirus unleashed on the world by China.

Instead, I would carry my Dell laptop computer. Unlike my old typewriter, the Dell XPS 7590 weighs only 4 pounds.

And, unlike my portable typewriter, it is crammed with software products that allow me not only to write my stories and record notes, but to do my expense reports, communicate with the outside world, keep track of contacts and sources, and even play games when I get tired of doing real work—all in living color.

[image error]                            My Dell XPS 7590

If I were able to go back to Vietnam, I would sit in my hotel room in Saigon with the Dell’s screen aglow and wonder how I ever got along without this kind of technology in 1975.

The answer seems obvious enough. Most of the work a correspondent does involves observation and interviewing, otherwise known as reporting.

These are things that no machine—not my low-tech Olivetti typewriter nor a high-tech Dell laptop–can do for you.

There is little doubt that the actual process of writing this time around in Vietnam would be made infinitely easier by the Microsoft Word program inside the Dell.

After all, in just a few seconds, I could spell-check my story and even use Word’s electronic thesaurus to juggle adjectives and verbs. Try that on a portable typewriter.

Today, I think about all those times in 1975 that I found myself in the Vietnamese outback with a story written, but with no way to get it back to the Chicago Tribune. Few Vietnamese cities outside of Saigon had a public telecommunications office where you could take a hard copy of your story, punch it into a telex machine, and have it transmitted to Tribune Tower 12,000 miles away.

That meant you had to “pigeon” your story. “Pigeoning” a story meant that after I reported it and wrote it on my portable typewriter, I would jump into a taxi and head for the nearest airport.

There I would run frantically through the terminal looking for a pilot—often one of the CIA’s Air America airplane drivers—and give him my story to take back to Saigon.

[image error] Your humble correspondent covering Cambodia & Vietnam 1975

Once in Saigon, the pilot would drop the story off at the PTT (Public Telephone and Telegraph) office, and a congenial young woman named Miss Minh would unfold the crumpled pages and try to decipher all of the barely legible editing notes I scribbled in the margins.

Then Miss Minh would switch on her telex machine and convert the whole thing into about 20 feet of paper telex tape. That done, she would dial-up 253638, which was the Tribune’s old telex number.

If all systems were “go,” then maybe 10 or 15 minutes later, one of the Tribune’s old gray telex machines would hump its carriage a few times, ring a few bells, and my story would clank forth, printed on an 8-inch-wide roll of yellow paper.

The total elapsed time from when I finished the story until that old telex machine regurgitated it in the Tribune’s wire room would be close to 8 hours. It might be longer if the pilot stopped off at the Continental Palace Hotel’s veranda for a few beers before trudging down Le Loi Boulevard to the PTT office.

The cost for all of this could run close to $200 because, in addition to the $160 or $170 it cost to transmit the story, I was obligated to buy dinner or several rounds of drinks for the pilot when I returned to Saigon. Today, I could send that same 1,500-word story with the Dell in less than a minute the Internet. The cost? Negligible.

Back in 1975, it not only cost more to get a story from Saigon to Chicago, but the psychic outlay of pigeoning a story was substantial.

After all, I had no way of knowing if the story I handed to a pilot was sent until I returned to Saigon several days later.

About the only thing that comes close to equaling that sensation in this, the computer age, is that plummeting feeling you get when the hard drive in your laptop fails, and you haven’t backed up your work.

In 1975, my backup system consisted of a few sheets of threadbare carbon paper and a tattered 8-by-11 manila envelope. There were no CMOS batteries, no fragile hard disks, and no central processors to worry about— unless you counted me.

There is no doubt that advanced computer technology, for all its brilliance, comes with drawbacks. For example, what would I have done with a laptop in Phnom Penh in 1975? The city, which was under constant bombardment by the communist Khmer Rouge, only had electricity an hour a day. That would have barely given me time to recharge my computer’s battery or the two nickel-metal hydride battery packs I could use as a backup.

[image error] Your humble correspondent possibly contemplating new technologies in Saigon?

Then there is the most significant liability of all. I have a feeling I would treat an expensive laptop a lot differently than I treated my Olivetti typewriter.

For example, in 1975, I occasionally used my $99 Olivetti to shield myself from airborne shrapnel and the other fluttering detritus of war.

But I suspect that given the $1,149 price tag of a Dell XPS 7590, I might use my body to protect it during mortar and artillery bombardments.

Just consider the mathematics. You could buy about twelve Olivetti portables for the price of one Dell XPS 7590. And that’s not counting the software.

But then, when I think about all those times I trudged down Tu Do Street to attend the military briefings we used to call the “5 O’clock Follies,” and all the times I swore I would never again waste my time going to them, I’m convinced that the technological advantages of a 2020 laptop definitely outweigh the shrapnel-shielding capacity of a 1975 Olivetti.

For example, had there been laptops and on-line news retrieval in 1975, I could have plugged in my modem to the nearest phone jack and picked up the salient points of the Follies while sipping a vodka tonic at a table on the veranda of the Continental Hotel—otherwise known as the “shelf.”

On second thought, that might not have been a good idea. The obstreperous collection of hacks, soldiers of fortune, and castoffs that used to gather in the shelf and other watering holes in Saigon in those days tended to slosh drinks and spill plates of food.

And while my old Olivetti was irrigated more than once with Vietnamese “33” beer” and assorted food products, I shudder to think what a single glass of vodka or a small dish of Saigon fish sauce might do to the innards of a $1,200 laptop.

 

Q & A With Ron Yates On Writing, Etc. (Part 3)

During the past year, I have done several interviews with bloggers, audiences at book festivals, and others about books, publishing, and writing in general. This is the last post in a three-part series.  I hope you found the posts interesting and, most of all, helpful.

If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be and why?

Winston Churchill. He was brilliant, and I would hope that by the end of dinner, some of that brilliance would have rubbed off on me though I seriously doubt it.

What is one food you would never eat?

Monkey Brain Sushi (yes, it is a real dish in China, and I won’t tell you how it’s prepared). It is considered a cure for impotence (what isn’t?).

Another dish I will continue to eschew is Balut, which is a delicacy in The Philippines. It is fertilized chicken or duck eggs in which the developed embryo is boiled and eaten from the shell. Yum!

Which brings me to some advice an old Chicago Tribune copy editor named Spokely gave me when I was getting ready to leave Chicago for my first posting as a foreign correspondent. “You are going to places that serve strange food, and you will be tempted to say ‘no thank you,’ when it is offered. Don’t do that. It will be an insult to your host. When somebody offers you something to eat that looks or smells horrible, just remember Spokely’s Law: Everything tastes more or less like chicken.”

What were the last couple of movies you watched?

1917, Midway, Little Women, Bombshell, Joker, The Good Liar, and Harriet.

What was the scariest moment of your life?

There have been several. One was during the evacuation of Saigon in 1975. The last day was chaos incarnate. Russian made 122mm rockets were slamming into buildings, 130mm mortars were hitting Tan Son Nhut airport, and the U.S. Embassy was surrounded by frantic South  Vietnamese desperate to get out of the country because they had worked for the American military or some U.S. agency. The city was in full panic mode. Several of us made our way to the sprawling Defense Attaché Office building at Tan Son Nhut, and we were finally evacuated by a U.S. Marine CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. It was a relief until the door gunner told me later aboard the U.S.S. Okinawa that the pilot had to drop a flare to misdirect a S.A.M. -7 (surface to air missile).

Another was during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre when several Chinese students and I were pinned down near the square for 30 minutes or so by Chinese soldiers shooting in our direction. Several students near me were wounded, and we were helping them get to a doctor’s house nearby so he could treat them. I was convinced I was going to wind up dead in the square. Then suddenly, the shooting stopped, and I was able to get my Red and White bicycle that I had chained to a lamppost and peddle like crazy for the Jinhua Hotel where I was staying and from where I was filing my stories to the Tribune.

Another memorable moment was during the revolution in El Salvador when two German correspondents and I were stopped in our car near the town of Suchitoto by Communist guerillas. They put cloth bags put over our heads and forced us to kneel alongside the road. We were sure we were going to be executed. However, suddenly the “jefe” (leader) showed up and set us free. “Don’t kill journalists–unless they are armed,” he yelled at his troops. I was greatly relieved that I had left the Model 1911 Colt.45 pistol I had purchased a few days earlier back in the hotel in San Salvador. I believe it is still there.

Ahhh yes, the life of a foreign correspondent…never a dull moment. Nevertheless, I still believe I had the best job in the world, and I wouldn’t trade my career for anything.

What books have most influenced your life?

Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck; The Quiet American, Graham Greene; The Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott; Kim, Rudyard Kipling; Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain); A Passage to India, E.M. Forster; Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser; The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer.

What do you do to unwind and relax?

What else? I read. I find that a good book helps me escape from my writing, which I need to do on occasion.

Do you have a Website or Blog?

Yes, I have both. My website is http://ronaldyatesbooks, and I am continually updating it. My blog is http://ronaldyatesbooks.com/category/foreign-correspondent/ I try to post to it at least once or twice a week. I also have an Amazon Author Central page at http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001KHDVZI, and an Author’s Page on Facebook called Ronald E. Yates Books. It is located at https://www.facebook.com/Ronald-E-Yates-Books-688075584557417/  

What is your favorite line from a book?

I have a couple, and they are both from Evelyn Waugh: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.” It is a line from Waugh’s book Scoop written by nature writer William Boot for the London Daily Beast just before he is mistaken for a famous foreign correspondent and sent off to the fictional African country of Ishmaelia to cover a war.

AND from Waugh’s book, Vile Bodies comes this great line: “I know very few young people, but it seems to me that they are all possessed with an almost fatal hunger for permanence.”

If it were mandatory for everyone to read three books, what books would you suggest?

Huckleberry Finn; Grapes of Wrath; Sister Carrie. Not only are these classics, but they are also beautiful stories about the human spirit, its resiliency and strength, and its deficiencies and weaknesses.

Is there ever a time when you feel like your work is truly finished and complete?

I don’t know if that ever happens. I do know that at some point, YOU MUST LET IT GO! Writing a book is a bit like rearing a child. Eventually, after you have imbued the child with as much of your worldly experience and wisdom as he or she can grasp and absorb, you have to allow your creation to encounter the world. It’s the same with books. Writers can fiddle with plots, characters, endings, and beginnings ad nauseam and never feel the book is finished. My advice–JUST FINISH THE DAMNED BOOK! Get over it and get the book out into the public domain. Readers will let you know if you have finished the book–and if they like it.

What is the biggest misconception beginning writers have about being published?

Probably that once you get a publishing contract, you are going to become a millionaire. I have published two books before Billy Battles with traditional publishers, and I am still in the hunt for my first million. The J. K. Rowling’s of the world are anomalies. However, thank God they do exist because it keeps the rest of us working our tails off in pursuit of that elusive kind of success. Now, I believe many writers write for the sheer joy we get from telling a good story–at least I do. The money is less of an incentive.

What would you like readers to gain from reading your books?

Because the Finding Billy Battles trilogy is historical fiction and is set in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, I would like readers to get a sense of the time and place of the story told in the three books. I would like them to have an appreciation of the way people lived, how they thought, and how they dealt with both adversity and triumph in a very different era. Finally, I would like readers to finish my trilogy and think to themselves: “Damn, I didn’t want that story to end!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Q & A With Ron Yates on Writing, Etc. (Part 2)

During the past year, I have done several interviews with bloggers, audiences at book festivals, and others about books, publishing, and writing in general. For the next few days, I am posting those interviews as a three-part series. I hope you find these posts interesting and, most of all, helpful.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? 

Don’t let anybody discourage you from pursuing this work if it is genuinely what you want to do. Don’t be intimidated by rejection. You must believe in yourself, your ideas, and your stories. If you don’t, who will? Certainly not that dense editor or literary agent who couldn’t see your potential or grasp your book’s storyline.

Is being a writer a curse or a gift?

It is a beautiful gift if you allow the process to come to you and don’t force it. However, don’t let anybody tell you it is not damned hard work. It is. The joy of writing for me is telling a good story. I don’t care about imparting a “message.” Nor do I care about creating any hidden “meanings” that some literature professor will hold forth about in a writing class when I am no longer around to rebut him/her. I just want to tell a good story. That, to me, is the ultimate goal of writing.

The curse is that writing can take over your life, isolate you from family and friends, and turn you into a kind of sophistic recluse if you are not careful. Writers need to take breaks from working. If they don’t, I believe they run the risk of becoming stale, self-absorbed, and misanthropic.

Where do you write?

I have taken over the upstairs bonus room in our house. It is about 500 square feet. In it, I have my rather extensive library, a good sound system for playing classical music, a large screen TV for watching sports, Discovery, History, and National Geographic channels when I need a break from writing. My window looks out onto a plant and boulder-strewn foothill that rises in front of my house. Another window looks down onto the Temecula valley some 2,000 feet below. It is quiet and soothing. I couldn’t have a better place to write.

Do you prefer silence or some noise while you write?

I like to listen to music when I write. Most often, I listen to Mozart, Haydn, Telemann, William Boyce, and Beethoven. Classical music played softly, is inspirational, and helps me think. However, I also like the jazz of Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, The Modern Jazz Quartet, George Shearing, etc. and I will, on occasion, switch from classical to that.

What do you typically drink while writing?

Icy iced tea.

What challenges have you had in regards to your writing life?

When I was a working journalist for the Chicago Tribune and then a Dean and Professor of journalism at the University of Illinois, I could never find large enough blocks of time to write consistently. Writing requires HUGE amounts of time and long periods of seclusion–things most of us don’t have. Therefore, the time to write was always my greatest challenge. Now that I am no longer administering a college, teaching, or working full-time as a journalist, I am blessed to have a lot more time to write than I ever thought I would have.

When did you first start and when did you finish your book?

I started the first book in the Finding Billy Battles trilogy in 2010, but I wasn’t consistent in working on it. I buckled down in the spring of 2013 and probably wrote 60% of it in about five months. I started Book #2 in the trilogy in December 2014 and finished it in 2016. I began Book #3 in the trilogy in 2016 and finished it in 2018.

What does your protagonist think of you? Would he/she want to hang out with you?

I think Billy Battles and I would be good friends. We are both journalists, and we both like going to new places and experiencing new challenges. Also, we both enjoy a good cold beer after a long hard day.

How do you market your books? What avenues work best?

I am still learning how to use the vast universe of social media for marketing my book. In addition to Amazon and Barnes & Noble, of course, my book is on Goodreads, Smashwords, Google Books, Createspace, NetGalley, Independent Book Publishers Association, as well as the Historical Novel Society, my blog, my author page on Facebook and the book’s website, ronaldyatesbooks.com http://www.ronaldyatesbooks.com/

What has been the harshest criticism of your book so far?

Most of the critical comments have been minor. A few people found the 19th Century Kansas vernacular my characters use in Book #1, an annoyance. Book #2 has very little of that because Billy Battles is now in Asia and Europe. A handful of people said they didn’t like the fact that the book is part of a trilogy because they had to wait for Books #2 and #3. I like THAT kind of criticism.

What has been the best compliment?

There have been several, but I will list just four here. You can find these and other reviews on the book’s Amazon page:

“This trilogy is easily the best work of fiction I have read in some time.”  

“There is something about this trilogy that is almost impossible to explain, but it takes it from being a *good* story to a GREAT one.”

“Move over Elmore Leonard and Pete Dexter–there’s a new deputy sheriff in town.”

“Ever have a series of books that take over your days and nights – that’s what the Finding Billy Battles trilogy did for me.”  

Is anything in your books based on real-life experiences or purely all imagination?

That’s tricky. I call my work “Faction” because it is a blend of both fact and fiction. Some of the events in the book–especially those dealing with real people, did happen. Was my character directly involved in them? No. However, members of my family were native Kansans, and some of the experiences I write about did happen. Of course, I have woven some of my own experiences into the storyline also which I hope provides the story with an essence of realism.

How did you come up with the title?

I had been trying to think of a title for years. I didn’t like any of them. Then one day, this one just jumped out of my brain and into the computer, and Finding Billy Battles was born. That was the title of the first book. I titled Book #2 The Improbable Journeys of Billy Battles because, in this book, Billy’s adventures take him to Asia and Europe. I called Book #3 The Lost Years of Billy Battles because, in this book, Billy disappears for several years. Why? You will have to read Book #3 to find out.

Will there be a sequel to the trilogy?

I am thinking about a couple of sequels to the trilogy. One will focus on Billy’s semi-outlaw cousin, Charley Higgins. Another will focus on Billy’s great-grandson who writes Billy’s story and who embarks on a few adventures of his own as a result of what he learns about his great-grandfather.

What project are you working on now?

I am finishing a book about foreign correspondents in Asia. The working title is: “Asia Hands: A Tale of Foreign Correspondents and other Miscreants in the Orient.” I am also pulling together reams of notes for when I finally decide to write about own life covering war and mayhem as a foreign correspondent.

Please fill in the blank: Keep Calm and___________:

Laugh–a lot! It’s good for the mind and body.

(TOMORROW: Part 3)