Ronald E. Yates's Blog, page 77

If South Vietnam Were Free Today

In 2015 the National Review ran an interesting story on Vietnam and the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and South Vietnam. The article makes some good points. 

There is a German proverb that says: “A great war leaves the country with three armies — an army of cripples, an army of mourners, and an army of thieves.”

For those who believe that the reunited Vietnam that came about as the result of  South Vietnam’s defeat and dissolution in 1975, I have news for you. It is not the Communist paradise envisioned by Ho Chi Minh or propagandized by the Communist masters in Hanoi.

In fact, it is rife with corruption, poverty and unequal opportunity. That was made quite apparent to me when I interviewed Dr. Dương Quỳnh Hoa, one of the founders in 1960 of the National Liberation Front, otherwise known as the Viet Cong.

A lifelong Communist, Dr. Hoa told me the revolution she and others fought for was usurped by political elites in Hanoi whose only goals are to hang on to power and enrich themselves. You can find that interview at the following link:

http://ronaldyatesbooks.com/2015/05/i...

I believe Dr. Hoa, was correct in her assessment. And I believe the following article also hits the nail on the head. (Ron Yates)

If South Vietnam Were Free Today

By Josh-Gelernter

National Review

Look at the rest of East Asia and imagine what South Vietnam could have been. April 30 was the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Forty years after the U.S. abandoned South Vietnam, it’s possible that the most universally accepted lie in American history is that America’s Indochinese intervention was a bad idea.

In most circles it’s a truism that Vietnam was a mistake, and few conservatives see it as a point worth arguing. When Republicans talk about Vietnam, they defend the maligned troops. Occasionally someone points out that the Tet Offensive was an American victory.

[image error] North Vietnamese  Gen. Võ Nguyên Giáp, architect of the Communist victory

Occasionally, My Lai is balanced with the thousands of comparable, and dozens of incomparably worse, Vietcong and North Vietnamese crimes. Rarely does anyone point out that once Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as head of U.S. Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, we started winning the war — and that by refusing to live up to our commitments after the Paris Accords, Congress snatched South Vietnamese defeat from the jaws of military victory.

Instead of making any of those arguments, though, I’ll point out some facts about modern East Asia. After colonialism collapsed during the epilogue to the Second World War, East Asia started remaking itself.

The United States supported three anti-Communist governments in their fights against Marxist expansion: We supported the Republic of China’s fight against the People’s Republic of China, we supported the Republic of Korea’s fight against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and we supported the Republic of Vietnam against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. That is, Taiwan against Red China, South Korea against North Korea, and South Vietnam against North Vietnam.

Two of those three republics are now among the most highly developed, most prosperous, and freest countries in the world. One of the principal peacenik criticisms of America’s support for South Vietnam was that the South’s government wasn’t democratic.

That was perfectly true; it was ruled by a military junta with varying degrees of civilian cooperation. However, to quote a contemporary account by anti-war Democratic congressman Leo Ryan, “Although South Vietnam is no bastion of democratic principles, the worst charges of widespread repression of fundamental human rights are overblown.

There is a vocal, operative political opposition and press. It is not doubted that there are some political prisoners, but neither the populace as a whole nor the opposition political leaders appear to be living in fear of government repression.” Happily, free markets tend to push unfree countries in the right direction.

Like the Republic of Vietnam, the Republics of China and Korea also saw periods of military dictatorship. South Korea was governed by General Park Chung-Hee from his coup in 1961 until his assassination in 1979. His administration was blighted by political repression, but he built South Korea’s economy into a powerhouse, which became the foundation for the thriving democracy that South Korea has today.

[image error] North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un

Likewise, the Republic of China was ruled, under martial law, by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek until his death in 1975. Like Park’s, Chiang’s rule was stained by repression, but it also created enormous prosperity and — under the general’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo — transitioned into an entirely free, republican democracy. Taiwan is — shamefully — not recognized by the U.N. as a sovereign state. However, using the U.N.’s Human Development Index formula (which, in essence, calculates standard of living), it is the 21st most developed nation in the world. South Korea is 15th.

Both countries outrank such European stalwarts as Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, and Finland; South Korea also edges out Japan, France, and Israel. Despite having few natural resources, Taiwan has the 19th highest GDP per capita in the world: $45,854 a year, which exceeds those of Canada, Denmark, Belgium, France, the U.K., Japan, and Italy.

Similarly light on natural resources, South Korea is in 30th place, ahead of New Zealand, Spain, and both halves of the former Czechoslovakia. Compare that to their Communist counterparts: Red China’s GDP per capita is 70 spots lower than Taiwan’s, behind Turkmenistan, Algeria, Libya, the Maldives, and Iraq. North Korea is almost off the bottom of the scale, behind Zimbabwe, Rwanda, and Haiti.

In human-development terms, Red China is also 70 spots lower than Taiwan, behind Tunisia, Peru, Grenada, and Azerbaijan. North Korea’s human development is, for obvious reasons, impossible to calculate accurately. And compare the American-backed, free Asian republics to Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh’s paradise is 122nd in human development, behind Syria, Iraq, Moldova, and Gabon, and in 126th place in GDP per capita, behind the Republic of the Congo, Swaziland, Dominica, and Albania. Perhaps this is just the inevitable result of traditional Communist purges of land owners, teachers, and intellectuals. Much more important than economics, look at their relative freedom. Taiwan and South Korea have free elections, independent judiciaries, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech.

Neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have any of these. Nor, of course, does Vietnam, whose Communist party continues to control “elections” and the courts, and continues to arrest and torture political and religious dissidents. Imagine what the Republic of Vietnam — South Vietnam — would be like today.

Vietnam is the 13th most populous country in the world, with more than 90 million inhabitants. Half of those people, more or less, could be living in the same sort of freedom and prosperity enjoyed by South Koreans and Taiwanese. (Perhaps even greater prosperity, because — unlike Taiwan or South Korea — Vietnam has tremendous natural resources, in the form of offshore petroleum deposits.)

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 — and so, entirely independent of the circumstances of the Sixties and Seventies, in 2015 it is glaringly obvious that fighting for South Vietnam was the right thing to do. And it’s time more people said so — our politicians and teachers, in particular, particularly because Vietnam veterans are getting old. And because, 40 years after the fall of Saigon, we should all get a lesson in the catastrophic costs of America’s refusing to fight the good fight.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article...

After The Fall of Saigon: A Retrospective

[This is a follow-up to the story I posted yesterday on the 44th  anniversary of the Fall of Saigon in 1975. )

After I and several dozen others were evacuated April 29th, 1975 from the hulking Military Assistance Command-Vietnam building at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airbase I filed my final story from the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, the Amphibious Command & Control (LCC) ship of the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet.

[image error] Yates in Vietnam, 1975

The story eventually ran in the Chicago Tribune on May 4. I have attached a PDF copy of it below.

Our evacuation chopper, a Marine CH-53 Sea Stallion, landed us on the U.S.S. Denver a few miles off the coast of Vietnam. For part of the late afternoon after our arrival, I watched Navy crewmen shove one Bell UH-1 Huey helicopter after another off of Denver’s deck. Even though the Denver was an amphibious transport dock with room for several CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters so many South Vietnamese Air Force Huey’s were arriving that there was no room on the deck.

VNAF Huey is pushed over the side

When South Vietnamese pilots were waved off from landing on the deck, they flew a few hundred yards away from the ship, allowed their helicopters to hover in the air and then jumped into the ocean, the helicopter’s blades barely missing them as the choppers crashed into the sea.

[image error]  VNAF pilot jumps into the sea from his Huey

That afternoon I and several other correspondents who had arrived during the evacuation were transferred by helicopter to the Blue Ridge. I spent the first night after evacuation on the Blue Ridge gazing at a scarlet sun as it sank below a darkening Vietnamese horizon. It was then that it all hit me. The United States had not only lost the longest war in its history (at that time), we had been driven out with our tails between our legs.

It was a reprehensible and dishonorable departure made even worse by the fact that we had left so many loyal Vietnamese behind who, up until the last few minutes, believed that the Americans they had worked for and supported would help them escape their Communist enemies.

As it turned out, several hundred thousand of those steadfast Vietnamese wound up languishing and even dying in Communist “re-education camps”–a North Vietnamese euphemism for what the Nazi’s called Konzentrationslager.

A flood of emotions washed over me: shame, sorrow, guilt and finally anger at the way it all ended after so much sacrifice by so many. Some 58,000 Americans, of the 3.4 million who served in Vietnam, died there. Even more tragic were the 3.1 million Vietnamese, both civilian and military, who died between 1955 and 1975.

I recall U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin coming to an area of the Blue Ridge where a majority of journalists were ensconced. He was quickly surrounded by reporters demanding to know why the evacuation was not done earlier so more Vietnamese could have gotten out of the country. Why was the evacuation done in such a frantic and panic-stricken way?

Martin was not well. He had been suffering from pneumonia for several weeks, and he was weak and fatigued from the medication he had been taking. He was also a chain smoker and during conversations, was given to lingering coughing spells.

[image error] US Ambassador Graham Martin surrounded by reporters on USS Blue Ridge. (That’s the back of my head at Martin’s right shoulder) Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS

None of his answers satisfied the reporters who surrounded him that day on the Blue Ridge. Of course, all of us knew what Ambassador Martin thought. For weeks, he had insisted that the Americans would not run away, that South Vietnam would not fall into chaos and terror, that the U.S. would stand by its South Vietnamese allies as long as necessary.

Of course, as reporters watched the North Vietnamese Army march inexorably south toward Saigon with little or no resistance we knew that what Martin was saying publicly did not match the unvarnished truth that proliferated in the U.S. Embassy.

“This war is done,” one of my intelligence sources told me in early April. “We need to be thinking about how we are going to get out of here.”

Getting out of Saigon seemed to be the last thing on Graham Martin’s mind, however.

On April 28, after the first rocket attacks on Saigon by the Communists in several years, Ambassador Martin took the unprecedented step of going on Saigon television to promise that America was not leaving Vietnam in the lurch.

“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,” he told the Vietnamese people.

Whether the Vietnamese people believed Martin or not was irrelevant. Less than 48 hours later Martin was aboard the U.S.S. Blue Ridge with the rest of us trying to make sense of what had happened.

“The situation just got away from us,” he told me. “It is a sad day for America, for South Vietnam. I did the best I could.”

“I guess we can be relieved that it’s all over now,” I said.

“I can’t…not with the way it ended,” replied Martin, whose foster son died in combat in Vietnam in 1965.

Martin, a career diplomat who succeeded Ellsworth Bunker as the last U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam in 1973, died in 1990.

That day aboard the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, Martin was a broken man. He had done what he thought best. In retrospect, which of course is always 20/20, he and the U.S. administration failed the South Vietnamese people.

Without a doubt, it could be argued that that failure began when the first U.S. Marines landed unopposed at Da Nang in 1965 and continued for the next eight years as successive administrations dithered and waged a war they never intended to win.

Sadly, it is a pattern that seems to have repeated itself since then in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where we expend precious treasure in blood and material only to depart before even a semblance of victory, hollow or otherwise.

As for me, I am thankful that I will never have to witness and report on such a pathetic, disgraceful and ignominious exodus ever again.

The link below will take you to a pdf of the final story I filed about the Fall of Saigon.

 The last days of Saigon, May 4, 1975

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Remembering the Final 24 Hours in the Fall of Saigon

(NOTE: I make it a point to re-run this story every year on the anniversary of the Fall of Saigon–an event I covered for the Chicago Tribune in 1975. I hope you find it of interest) 

Forty-four 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, 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 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 40 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 ancient window air conditioner had stopped its moaning and coughing. There was no electricity. Apparently, 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 choppers. 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, while 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 making a dash for 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. During a two week period 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 10 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 air base, 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 its 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 in 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 hoofing it 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 door gunner’s shoulder. The city looked 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 own 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 what country you were from.

“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 43 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 for a Vietnam Retrospective

Tomorrow I will be posting my recollections of the Fall of
Saigon–an event that I covered for the Chicago
Tribune 44 years ago. I invite you to join me for this series of four posts
that will run until May 2.

As many of you may know, the war in Vietnam came to an ignominious end during a 24-hour period between April 29 and April 30, 1975, when thousands of Americans and Vietnamese scrambled frantically aboard American helicopters as Communist North Vietnamese troops overran the city.

It was a chaotic day I will never forget and one that all
Americans shouldn’t either.

Join me for a Vietnam Retrospective

Beginning Monday, April 29 I will be posting my recollections of the Fall of Saigon–an event that I covered for the Chicago Tribune 44 years ago. I invite you to join me for this series of four posts that will run until May 2.

As many of you may know, the war in Vietnam came to an ignominious end during a 24-hour period between April 29 and April 30, 1975 when thousands of Americans and Vietnamese scrambled frantically aboard American helicopters as Communist North Vietnamese troops overran the city.

It was a chaotic day I will never forget and one that no American should either.

Profile: Bangkok’s Klong

(Periodically, I post stories I wrote while working as a foreign correspondent.  Following is a story I wrote about Bangkok’s network of canals (klong).  Many have already disappeared under concrete roads, but life goes on along those that remain.)

Some 150 years ago, when Anna Leonowens, the prim English governess who has been immortalized as the “I” in the long-running musical “The King and I” arrived in Thailand, Bangkok was known as the “Venice of the East.”

It was a city of graceful gilded Buddhist temples, ornate palaces and wooden houses built on stilts along lotus-choked but life-sustaining waterways known in the Thai language as “klong.”

When Anna stepped off the barge that had brought her up the quarter-mile-wide Chao Phraya River from the Gulf of Siam, she emerged into a world still struggling to enter the 19th Century, a world King Mongkut (the “King” of the musical) was trying desperately to reshape and modernize by opening Siam’s closed doors to Western science, technology and education.

The klong were among King Mongkut’s first targets. If Bangkok was to take its place as one of Asia’s major cities of commerce, he reasoned, the city’s ubiquitous, foul-smelling, disease-ridden klong would have to be dealt with. The answer was to fill in as many of the putrid canals as possible.

[image error]                        Klong Bang Saikai

The result of that policy, as noble as its motives might have been, has been the creation of a city with fewer klong but with infinitely more roads–and traffic congestion. Bangkok today is a place trapped under a vaporous black veil of diesel exhaust and assaulted by the incessant whining and sputtering of internal-combustion engines.

Its traffic jams are notorious as the worst in Asia, and though King Mongkut might not like it were he around today, Bangkok’s surviving klong are more often than not a faster means of travel than the dozens of major streets constructed on top of paved-over waterways.

Progress has its price, and in Bangkok’s case, the price seems to be a universal yearning for the past.

“Things were better in Bangkok 80 years ago,” laments Eakchai Chiangasajar, the 92-year-old patriarch of the family that operates the Chiang Hun Moon funeral home. Eakchai’s father built the establishment atop stilts and pilings on a busy canal called Klong Bang Saikai about the time that Anna Leonowens, back in England, was writing the memoirs that many years later would become “The King and I” and make a career for a bald Yul Brynner. (It also made the actor persona non grata in Thailand, which takes vociferous exception to the musical’s fallacious premise–that a properly civilized English lady singlehandedly modernized a despotic and uncivilized King Mongkut).

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Just as it did more than 100 years ago, Klong Bang Saikai twists its way northwest from the Chao Phraya River through an area called Thonburi, which is still rich in green forests of takian trees, ferns, wild orchids and bamboo. It passes by ancient Thai wats (temples), ramshackle houses and the Chiang Hun Moon funeral home, where Eakchai spends most afternoons sitting on a faded green velvet chaise longue that looks as though it might have been left behind by Anna Leonowens.

In the old days, according to Eakchai, Klong Bang Saikai was quieter, the water cleaner, and business better.

“Seems like more people died more often back then,” he says. “Look at me, 92 and I’m still alive. People like me will drive people like me out of business.” Eakchai’s chest convulses with laughter at this quip. Family members, including Eakchai’s 68-year-old son Chanchai, who is taking a tea break, emit a chorus of supporting laughter.

Business has been good this week, confides Eakchai, his withered, teak-like hands opening the books to reveal the weekly receipts.

“Ahhh, let’s see,” he says, adjusting his old gold wire bifocals on a nose still flat and deformed from youthful days as a Thai boxer. “Four coffins at 4,000 baht ($148) each. Three cremations, transportation of the deceased. Yes, yes, a very good week. And I still have one more cremation to do.”

Indeed, even as Eakchai speaks, a Hang Yao (long-tailed boat) carrying the body of an old woman pulls up to the funeral home. Gently, the body, wrapped tightly in white muslin, is lifted from the bobbing boat and onto the open-air wooden planking of the funeral home. Nearby, two rows of ceramic funeral urns stand like silent pot-bellied soldiers behind a parapet of wood planks. The whine of a saw slices through the thick afternoon heat as the wood for one more coffin is cut.

[image error]

“We used to do it by hand saw,” says Eakchai, watching as the woman’s body is carried to a small room in the back. After the door is closed, he continues his thought: “Today we use the power saw. We are getting modern, eh?”

Still, electricity and outboard motors seem to be the only incursions the 20th Century has made into the languid world of Bangkok’s remaining klong.

They continue to be rivers of life for perhaps a third of Bangkok’s six million residents. Everything from medicine to magazines, from noodles to narcotics, from sarongs to sex is sold from the tiny wooden boats that ply the klong, which ultimately spill into the Chao Phraya River.

The 190-mile-long Chao Phraya, swift of current and glutted with barges heavily loaded with rice and sand, is both the Nile and the Mississippi of Thailand. It is a river shrouded in ancient folklore and legend and at the same time is an integral part of this nation’s future. On its back ride the country’s abundant rice harvests, its teak logs, its textiles, and tin.

Warehouses situated strategically between the mouths of klong along the Chao Phraya are the repositories of Bangkok’s agricultural and mineral wealth. Here amber-skinned Thai men turned chalk-white from carrying 100-pound sacks of flour down planks from grain barges, look from a distance like ghosts in a procession.

A few hundred yards farther down the river at the mouth of Klong Bang Saikai, two dozen sweat-drenched men unloading rolls of canvas shout the Thai equivalent of “lights, camera, action” as they notice a photographer aiming his camera in their direction.

[image error]

“Life is good but hard on the klong,” says a 48-year-old waterborne butcher named Wanchai as he chops up two kilograms of pork for a customer, his tiny boat bobbing in the wake of a speeding Hang Yao that has just roared past.

“Sometimes,” Wanchai continues, wrapping the meat with a sheet of newspaper and securing it with a rubber band, “I can’t make enough money to feed my family. And then I think I would be better off taking a city job away from the klong. But then I think about all the noise and traffic and people I would have to face, and I think I am better off on the klong.”

Like most of Klong Bang Saikai’s floating merchants, Wanchai normally clears between 600 and 700 baht ($17-$20) for a 12-hour day on the water. In a nation with a mandated minimum daily wage of 300 baht, that is twice the national average and is considered a good living by Thai standards.

Another Hang Yao roars past Wanchai’s small wooden canoe, sending it crashing against the wooden pilings of the stilt house of his customer. Nearby, two onyx-black water buffalo snort and trample through the elephant grass as the churned water laps at the shore.

Out in the middle of the klong, caught in the Hang Yao’s wake, a small dugout canoe piloted by a woman named Boonsom pitches precariously in the turbulent blackish water.

[image error]

Boonsom, who is wearing a conical “kanp” hat, struggles to control her boat and angrily spits a few choice Thai epithets at the Hang Yao’s spewing rooster tail. Aboard her 15-foot-long boat are mangoes and sticky rice, peanuts, coconut milk, papaya, bananas, noodles, and ducks.

Her face, despite the protection afforded by the bamboo hat, is dark and creased by the tropical sun. Her 33-year-old hands appear little different from Eakchai’s as she clutches a machete and deftly splits the tops off two coconuts. The 40 baht (about 85-cents) she receives for the two coconuts represent less than one-tenth of what she normally earns during a 10-to-14-hour day on the klong.

“I will never get rich on the klong,” says Boonsom. “But my life is good. I have a good husband and five healthy children. I have a good house. I am happy.”

Upstream the shrieks of children penetrate the sticky afternoon air as they jump naked into the inky waters of the klong from the porch of their house. Though the klong are used for bathing and washing, their putrid waters are not used for drinking. Water for drinking and cooking is brought by boat or collected during Bangkok’s frequent showers in huge toum (ceramic water jars) set on porches and stairways.

Houses along Klong Bang Saikai and other Bangkok canals are usually simple wooden structures with roofs of corrugated metal covered with palm leaves. Almost every house is equipped with diamond-shaped fishing nets attached to long counterweighted poles suspended above the water. Despite the pollution, the klong remain rich in a variety of fish, which, along with rice, is the staple of the Thai diet.

[image error]

Unlike many areas of modern Bangkok to the east, Thonburi and its klong seem resistant to change. Except for an occasional motorboat screaming by on the black waters or a silent TV antenna poking out of a palm- thatched roof, these tiny waterways must look–and sound–the way they did to Anna Leonowens and King Mongkut’s children whom she was hired to teach.

Coconut trees lean precariously over the edge of the water, as do nipa palms and flaming bougainvillea. In the mangrove flats, pillars of blue smoke still waft skyward as wood is turned into charcoal. Half-naked children stomp through the mud in search of crabs in the soft light of a fading carrot- colored sun.

“I could have left the klong many years ago,” says Eakchai, sucking on an ancient long-stemmed pipe and squinting into the receding sun. “But no matter where I went, I knew I would miss this place. So I stayed. And I made my decision to die here, on the water, in the house of my father where I was born.”

Across the Chao Phraya, a police siren wails, and the cacophony of automobile traffic can be heard as dusk settles into the crevices of the day.

On Klong Bang Saikai, amid the squealing of children still splashing in the dark water, the resonant ringing of temple gongs and the cries of waterborne merchants trying to sell off the day’s remaining stock, the body of the old woman, who died of dengue fever (a virulent tropical disease), is laid out in a freshly made coffin and covered with orchids.

Small boats carrying her sons, daughters and grandchildren dock at the foot of the Chiang Hun Moon funeral home, and just as he has done for some 75 years of his life, Eakchai greets each one as they step up onto the wooden floor.

“On the klong you are born, you are married, and you die,” he says. “It is Buddha’s way, the way of the river.”

A Little Advice for New Authors

Fellow author Amy Neftzger recently wrote a column for a writer’s group that I belong to called BookDaily in which she provided some good advice for novice writers.

Amy is an author of fiction for both adults and children and you can find out more about her and her work at her website: http://www.amyneftzger.com.

I thought I would share her prescient thoughts with you so I am turning my blog over to her for today.



[image error]


Amy Neftzger






Starting Out As a Writer: 5 Things You Should Know
By Amy Neftzger



Becoming an author is a long road to walk, and most people have no idea how long it takes to become successful or what they need to do when traveling this road. There are a lot of different ways to get to the end of it, but here are a few suggestions I have to help you along on this journey.

1. Success is not immediate


Many people think that publishing a book is like winning the lottery: you just put the book up for sale and then watch the royalties roll in. The truth is that simply putting your work out there will not make it sell. Readers have too many choices, and when they want a new book they tend to stick with what they know: authors they’ve already read. It takes quite a bit of time to build a following, so patience is the name of the game here. This is true whether you’re self or traditionally published.

2. In order to do it well, you will need help.


Don’t assume that you can write, edit, design layout, format, create cover artwork, and market your book all on your own. If you’re with a traditional publisher they will help with most of these things. If you’re self-published, you’ll need to find a way to get all these things done. You may be multi-talented but you’re still only one person and you may even have another job that currently pays your bills. So there’s the time factor to consider: If you do everything yourself then you’re spending a lot of time doing things other than writing. Aside from the time, when you do everything yourself your work tends to lack the balance that other people can add. Your finances may be limited, so figure out what you’re better at and where you’re weaker and seek affordable help for your weaker areas.

3. The market is currently flooded.


There are a lot of books out there and the number is growing, so readers have a lot of choices. What this means is that your book needs to be the best it can possibly be, because a less polished work simply won’t get any traction in a flooded market. This means that you may want to consider using beta readers to get feedback, and if you’re self-published you should definitely hire an editor and maybe even a proofreader.

4. Reader experience is everything.


People read books for the experience it provides. Your book should be designed to provide it and avoid anything that detracts from it.Things that pull away from the experience are glitches in plot development, spelling or layout errors, and errors in logic. maintaining a logical and believable flow to the plot will enhance reader experience, so use a good outline and be sure that the characters and situations are believable (even in fantasy).

5. It’s worth the effort


If you love to write and it’s in your blood, then you’ll find that all the work you put into producing your book is worth your time. The key is to keep working and improving your craft and to grow as a writer.

About the Author:


Amy Neftzger is the author of fiction books for both adults and children. She has also been published in business and academic journals, as well as literary publications. A few of her favorite things include traveling, books, movies, art, the Oxford comma, and gargoyles.

Laws of Nature NOT Taught in Physics Class

There are laws made by human beings. Those laws are often ignored and broken.

Then there are laws of predictable constants, laws of physics, and laws of nature. These are essentially immutable.

But there are also laws created by some unknown and mysterious power that are also seemingly inviolate. As much as we may try they cannot be ignored or broken. They seem to control us no matter what we do, AND they are NOT taught in physics class.

[image error]The other day I received an email in which several of those incontrovertible laws were listed, along with the consequences they incorporate.

So I thought I would share them with you. Read them, reflect and see how many you have already been subjected to.

1 . Law of Mechanical Repair

After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch and you’ll have to pee.

2. Law of Gravity

Any tool, nut, bolt, screw, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible place in the universe.

3. Law of Probability

The probability of being watched is directly proportional to the stupidity of your act.

4. Law of Random Numbers  

If you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal; someone always answers.

5.Variation Law

If you change lines (or traffic lanes), the one you were in will always move faster than the one you are in now.

6. Law of the  Bath

When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone will ring.

7. Law of Close Encounters 

The probability of meeting someone you know INCREASES dramatically

when you are with someone you don’t want to be seen with.

8. Law of the Result

When you try to prove to someone that a machine won’t work, ITWILL!!!

9. Law of Biomechanics 

The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to the reach.

10 . Law of the Theater & Baseball Stadium, 

At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from the aisle, always arrive last. They are the ones who will leave their seats several times to go for food, beer, or the toilet and who leave early before the end of the performance or the game is over. The folks in the aisle seats come early, never move once, have long gangly legs or big bellies and stay to the bitter end of the performance. The aisle people also are a very surly folk.

11. The Coffee Law

As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your boss will ask you to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.

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12. Murphy’s Law of Lockers 

If there are only 2 people in a locker room, they will have adjacent lockers

13. Law of Physical Surfaces

The chances of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a floor are directly correlated to the newness and cost of the carpet or rug.

14. Law of Logical Argument 

Anything is possible IF you don’t know what you are talking about.

15. Law of Physical Appearance 

 If the clothes fit, they’re ugly.

16. Law of Public Speaking

A closed mouth gathers no feet.

17. Law of Commercial Marketing Strategy 

As soon as you find a product that you really like, they will stop making it OR the store will stop selling it!

18. Law of the Physician

If you don’t feel well, make an appointment to go to the doctor, by the time you get there, you’ll feel better. But don’t make an appointment and you’ll stay sick.

Some Thoughts on Writing

I have been writing, in one form or another, for most of my life. I learned the techniques and skills of writing by toiling for almost 30 years in the relentless and stressful world of journalism.

I was in some pretty good company. Ernest Hemingway began his writing career as a journalist. So did Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack London, Annie Proulx, Stephen Crane, John Steinbeck, James Agee, Lillian Ross, and Mark Twain.

For 13 years I taught writing and reporting at the University of Illinois after leaving the world of professional journalism. During that time, I managed to condense my thoughts on writing into a structure suitable for the classroom.

So allow me to share my views on writing.

Writing is both an art and a craft. To be a good writer you must first master the tools of the craft. What are those? They are, vocabulary, grammar, research, style, plot, pacing, and story.

Words are your basic tools. They are your implements in the same way hammers, saws, bubble levels, squares, screwdrivers, and tape measures are the tools a carpenter must possess.

Then comes grammar. Just as carpenters must learn to respect and skillfully master their tools, so too must writers learn to skillfully manipulate words and respect the language.

If you don’t respect the language, you will never succeed as a writer.

You must also give yourself time to learn the art and craft of writing. You don’t learn how to be a writer by sitting alone in a room and squeezing your brain for inspiration the way you wring water from a sponge.

One of the first steps to becoming a good writer is by reading. Read, read, and read. As I used to tell my students, “If you want to write well, read well.”

Learn from the best; imitate (and I don’t mean plagiarize). Listen to the words! Words speak to us from the written page, IF we let them, IF we allow our eyes to open our inner ears.

Gifted writing can’t be taught. It must be learned.

And we learn from doing it; from experience. That’s how we gain confidence.

Let me repeat that, because it is SO VERY IMPORTANT. To be a good writer you need to be confident in your ability to use the tools of the craft: vocabulary, grammar, research, style, plot, pacing, and story.

A confident writer is typically a good writer. We gain confidence by being successful in our work–no matter what work we do. We also learn from failure. Why was a book rejected 40 times? Why isn’t it selling on Amazon or Goodreads or Barnes and Noble? There must be a reason. Find out what it is and learn from it. Then go back to work and make the book better.

[image error] Ernest Hemingway

Once you master the Craft of Writing…the fundamentals, the mechanics, the “donkey” work, then you are ready to move on to the Art of Writing.

I don’t know if those who do not write for a living understand just how difficult writing is. Many believe that writers work from inspiration and that the words simply leap onto the blank page (or into yawning maul of the computer).

Ernest Hemingway once said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

In fact, while inspiration is a wonderful thing, it is not what makes a good writer or book. Writing requires significant research, whether fiction or non-fiction. It requires a facility for organization and a keen sense of plot, pacing and story.

I don’t believe writers are “born.”

They evolve over time as a result of significant experience in the craft.

Not all writers are brooding, intractable alcoholics, or unbearable misanthropes who feel their creations contain irrevocable and definitive truths that most of humanity is too obtuse to comprehend.

In fact, most successful writers are excellent storytellers and they like nothing more than to have their stories read by as many people as possible–even if those stories don’t always possess immutable truths.

And storytelling is not limited to fiction. Storytelling in non-fiction or journalism is just as important.

When I was young, I used to write lots of short stories. Were they any good? No. But for a person who wants to be a writer they were my way of practicing. Sort of like practicing the piano or the flute or some other instrument. The more you practice, the better and more accomplished you become.

Somerset Maugham, author of such classics as The Razor’s Edge, The Moon and Sixpence, and Of Human Bondage, had this to say about writing: “If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.”

 

Musings in a Writer’s Mind When He Should be Writing

I get a lot of strange emails. Sometimes they contain little bits of wisdom and when they do, I file them away on my computer for future reference.

Today, I want to share some of these musings with you. Perhaps you will find them interesting. Perhaps not.

In any case, take a look. You may find something you like.

I had amnesia once — maybe twice.
I went to San Francisco. I found someone’s heart. Now what?
Protons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic.
All I ask is a chance to prove that  money  can’t make me happy.

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If the world were a logical place, men would be the ones who  ride  horses sidesaddle.
What is a “free” gift? Aren’t all gifts free?
They told me I was gullible and I believed them.
Teach a child to be polite and courteous  in  the  home  and,  when  he grows up, he’ll never be  able  to merge his car onto the freeway.
Experience is the thing you have left when  everything else is gone.
One nice thing about egotists: they  don’t talk about other people.
My weight is perfect for my height–which varies.
I used to be indecisive. Now I’m not
How can  there  be  self-help  “groups”?
If swimming  is  so  good  for  your  figure, how  do  you  explain  whales?
Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and  I’ll  show  you  a  man  who  can’t  get  his  pants
Is it  me  — or do  buffalo  wings  taste  like  chicken?

Finally, a few interesting facts that you can use to win a bet or two.

There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

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There is one slot machine in Las Vegas for every eight inhabitants.
The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence to shave them off.
The most popular first name in the world is Muhammad.

And  this little tidbit for those of us who use keyboards.

The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog.” uses every letter of the alphabet