The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

Roused out of bed around 3 a.m., Lansdale and the others grabbed weapons and went on guard duty in case the villa was attacked. It wasn’t. But numerous other locations were. At 6 a.m., Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s office called to say the embassy was under attack and not to go there. The two team secretaries, Reggie Miskovish and Martha Devlin (Lansdale referred to them, in the patronizing vernacular of the day, as “our two FS [Foreign Service] girls”), lived at the Park Hotel next to the embassy and called to report “heavy fighting next door.” At virtually the same time, a South Vietnamese senator called to say that the Joint General Staff compound, the Vietnamese military headquarters located next to MACV at the airport, was under “infantry assault.” Other frantic calls informed the team of “fighting all through the western part of Saigon–Cholon.” It was, as Lansdale noted, “a booming way to start the day.”