Book
Vietnam: A Reporter’s War
Author
Hugh Lunn
Read
March 2020
Vietnam – a country whose brutal war imagery somehow captured the imagination of a seven-year-old boy in westernized, safe, Melbourne, Australia. It was at about the same time I had heard from my father, in answer to my questions about why Mum has a Dad and he doesn’t. He told me he did have one – but when he was a boy, younger than I was at the time - his father had died of ‘war wounds’.
When some of the imagery from the Vietnam War started filtering through on the evening news, I thought how horrible that was – to be wounded in a war and then die. I wondered why people wanted to kill each other, I still do.
Did my grandpa die like the guy who was shot in the head at point blank range on a city street by another man as the cameras rolled? Or, by running along a road having been blown up by bombs so fierce they ripped clothes off people - a young girl in this instance - leaving her with awful burn marks on her face, back and arms? I never asked Dad any more questions because I don’t think he wanted to answer.
So began a strange fascination with Vietnam that remains to this day. It led me to reading many books, seeing films, studying its history and the war, trying to understand why the war had started and ended and why Australia became involved. I read more when I realized thousands of people were still leaving there some years after this war ended. On a warm summer Melbourne night in the late 1980s, my wife and I had purchased tickets to a water puppetry performance put on at the Botanic Gardens by actors from a famous Vietnamese theatre troupe. Outside were hundreds of flag waving, megaphone holding protesters who were very unhappy at the presence of this artistic group from Vietnam.
Some of these protesters were from similar parts of Vietnam as many students I taught English to in the 1980s – the south. They were refugees who risked their lives on leaky, lurching, overcrowded boats trying to escape their new old country in search of freedom and the hope of a better life. I heard a figure somewhere that for every, one person who made it, about three didn’t. Gee they must have been desperate to leave.
Throughout the time I taught, I only met one student from the north of the country – she stood out like a sore thumb. The other Vietnamese distrusted her while she looked down her nose at them. They thought she was a spy. In the end, I did too.
As a volunteer for the Adult Migrant Home Tutor scheme I befriended a male, middle aged Vietnamese refugee. He had been here five years and was waiting for his family to join him. It took another two years before they could. I was at the airport to greet them and some years later at the wedding of the eldest daughter, and then the youngest son. Seeing a fully roasted whole pig being carried by the bridal party around the neighborhood streets of Footscray, regaled in bright red and yellow cloth, was something different.
Then, finally, about twenty-five years later than I wanted to, I visited Vietnam. For three weeks, with my family, I went from north to south. The two epic train rides on a single gauge track – the first from Hanoi to Danang and the second, from Danang to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) took me through the heart of the country that had experienced so much pain but looked, on the surface, very much like it had healed. I loved the people, the history, the culture, the landscapes and, dare I say it, the food!
I thought I had a reasonable working impression of the place across a number of areas.
Then, two years later, I read Hugh Lunn’s book. A Christmas gift from a friend who said he found it on a bargain stand –three books going for $5. Thought I might be interested. What a bargain and WHAT A BOOK.
The insights Australian journalist, Hugh Lunn, offers in his 300 pages are of the highest order. A significant reason for this is because the organization he worked for as a journalist, Reuters, who flew him from London to Saigon in 1967, had taken a punt on employing a local boy. Dinh walked into the office with no qualifications or experience – just wanted to be a reporter – a bit like Hugh though without the background, education or training. They gave Dinh a broom and told him he could clean the office. Then they recognized his potential:
Dinh had achieved so much respect among previous Reuters correspondents that they had christened him Gungadinh – he was a better reporter than any of them it was said. I soon learned that what Dinh lacked in education he made up for in cunning and personality. And he knew what was important.
Knowing what was important is why this is a good book, and it comes through with each turned page. Hugh and Dinh became close colleagues.
‘The Follies’ was the name given to the daily late afternoon press meeting conducted by the US Military. It was the definitive and most up-to-date news on the war in Vietnam. Unfortunately, most of it was not altogether true and one reason the war dragged on so long – the Americans believed their own propaganda that they were winning. This is because they chose to ignore or seriously downplay all the indicators that were telling them otherwise.
Yet, and one of the many paradoxes this book highlights, relative freedom of the press was on offer, allowing reporters the opportunity to ask any questions they felt were needed. This was a right preserved even if those questions were mostly answered with a dead bat or at least a deflected one. Ultimately, the weight of questions and how they were continually allowed to be asked worked against the interests of the US government and its military arm in Vietnam. Damn that democracy we are fighting for!
Victories were grossly exaggerated, defeats glossed over. Numbers of Americans wounded and killed, statistics of how many of their helicopters were shot down, halved or worse. Enemy fatalities were doubled. Is it any wonder that for so long, so many, including those of us receiving the news in the west, thought it was only a matter of time before the might of the USA prevailed?
Very early on Hugh Lunn’s observations and instincts told him that, although he was reporting for a particular side, it was not going to be the eventual winner – this he knew even when it turned out there were still eight years left of this war to run.
There was a very important reason how he knew. This country had an established and proud tradition of trying to rid itself of foreign control. They were starting to master their much-practiced techniques and for most of the country their determination never wavered – they were in for the long haul. It was their country, and these foreigners were only ever going to be visiting. It’s just they all outstayed their welcome.
The moral high ground, the Free World V Communism for control of the new world order, had validity and some skin in the game, but only up to a point. That is what the Free World side never understood until the gates of the Presidential Palace were smashed in by forces loyal to the north. At the same time Americans, and those loyal to them, were scrambling onto the last helicopters to leave Saigon forever – tails firmly between their legs, lives in peril.
The story writ small though is another reason why this book is a winner. Albeit with great reluctance, Hugh goes out several times with units of marines undertaking operations. He was as likely a casualty as any when the unseen enemy started mortar and artillery fire in the middle of the night. He flew back from one story with several of the men he had walked among piled up in body bags, others more recently dead, not afforded even that small dignity. As this helicopter rose above the din, bullets would ricochet off the undercarriage, pinging about until the machine reached skyward above the height where Viet Cong sniper fire could reach.
Hugh describes seeing the vague, lost, other-worldly eyes of a colleague sent in to report on one of the most precariously held hillsides. He found out later that his friend’s departing image, after surviving numerous near misses and seeing death, fear and carnage on a level no one could ever be prepared for, was a marine with both legs recently blown off, somehow still trying to ‘run’ for his medivac helicopter.
Hugh gave us small hints of a Vietnamese war despite the Americans having the profile, power and prestige. In one instance when it was clear a decisive engagement had been overwhelmingly won by the Americans and their South Vietnamese comrades, even when their side had crushed its black pajama wearing opponents, there was empathy shown from the southern army to the young boys, most not older than thirteen, shot to smithereens representing the Viet Cong. Though lying dead and disfigured across a roll of barbed wire, those soldiers, some of whom may have fired the shots that killed their enemy, whispered ‘brothers’ as they passed, offering quiet respect for the blind bravery of youth with a cause strong enough to give your life for.
There are some important and rarely known statistics and information that come via Hugh Lunn about the war and how it related to Australia. Total military personnel killed (550) in a decade of Australia having a presence was not as many as the American military death toll in a bad week when Hugh Lunn was there in 1967.
In the two small areas of South Vietnam Australian forces were given responsibility over, Dinh learned, from a North Vietnamese colonel after the war, that the ‘Ud Dai Lois’ (Australians) were held in high regard as a fighting force:
The colonel told Dinh the Viet Cong feared the Australian night ambushes because they had been used to having the nights to themselves, even during French times. ‘They never to defend inside, only outside’.
In the context of those Vietnamese in Melbourne protesting outside the Botanic Gardens, the students who had made Australia their home after the war, and Tong, the man whose family eventually joined him here in Australia, all vehemently believed ‘Communist no good’ and from their perspective, with good reason.
However, what Hugh Lunn’s book outlines is a simple but powerful truth. In the north there were more Communists. That was accepted and the reason the south, backed by the Americans, set up the DMZ - to separate the Communist north from the Free World south. The only slight problem in this was that many of those villages in the south that just wanted to get on with their lives without a war, without their land being scorched so they could grow crops, and without more of their animals or them dying or being in fear of their lives, saw the Americans prolonging the time this would take to happen. Eventually these people in the south outnumbered those who supported the foreigners with their democracy.
It was Dinh who best grasped this concept. Sitting next to Hugh, as both worked on stories as they tapped away on their typewriter keys, he leaned over and told his colleague, ‘You wrong’. Hugh was upset. All he had written, he thought, was fact – ‘the demilitarized zone (DMZ) that divides North Vietnam from South Vietnam …’. Dinh saw this ‘fact’ in a different light. ‘The demilitarized zone not divide North Vietnam from South Vietnam – it divide Vietnam’. When expressed like that, Hugh grasped a clear difference.
The majority of Vietnamese people for whatever reason, good or bad, right or wrong, did not want their country divided. Eventually they chose the side that was best going to un-divide it. There was always going to be a home grown outcome to these series of wars - those against the French and the Japanese, and now the Americans – because mother time was on the local’s side and they had limitless patience, albeit hugely tested by the enormous loss of life they had endlessly endured.
The ‘enemy’ was much more prominent than what most people in Saigon thought. Yes, they were in the villages but they could also be your polite neighbour, or in the case of the Reuters office, one of their own who had gone onto bigger and better things and had been spying for years, continuing on the higher the position he obtained.
And – in the rush for the Americans to get out of the city, when they knew the North Vietnamese forces, supported by the Viet Cong, were moving into the outskirts on mass and unchallenged, six buses were hastily arranged to take Americans and important Vietnamese to the airport for the final evacuation:
Dinh tried to get on the second bus but was kicked off by an American military policeman and put on the fourth. This was very unlucky because at the airport only two buses went inside. Dinh was to find out that the four buses at the back were each driven by Viet Cong … and, along with everyone else on these buses, he was returned to central Saigon where there was now no way out.
Hugh Lunn really did not know who the enemy was, and nor, it would seem, did the greatest military power on earth. That is the essence of what he captured, and this review is just the bare bones of a fascinating tale of a reporter who was an eyewitness at a critical time.
Four out of six bus drivers, unknowingly, were Viet Cong. That seemed a fair reflection of the numerical reality on the ground and why the war was won or lost.
SIMON SAYS – 9 out of 10.
