well, i owe a great debt to leroy and to those here tonight and to the many information officers who made me look good to my editors. probably too good because the next thing i knew "time" asked me to go back to vietnam and i was stuck there for two more years. but when i returned, i found a letter from dottie harris, that black nurse. when leroy's tour was over, she wrote, he extended six more months to command a company in the field. it was a decision that cost him his life. one day he fell on a grenade to save his own men. he was the first black officer to win the congressional medal of honor, and i loved him just like i would have loved my own brother. if leroy and i had trouble figuring out who was who in american uniforms, i never quite figured out who was who among the vietnamese to my everlasting embarrassment. after the attack on the american

embassy during the tet offensive we opened the teletype in the time bureau to any journalist who needed it. the great charlie moore came by. he worked, as you know, for "the new york times." he was full of excitement. he said wally, can you believe it? can you believe what the general did? like any journalist who doesn't like being beaten to the news, i pretended to know what the general had done. after charlie left i quickly read his copy, that the general had executed a suspected vietcong right in front of eddie adams' camera and the rest of the press assembled before the pagoda. we had a fellow in the bureau by the name of nguyen nguyen. he was our vietnamese military expert. i turned to him because i had sent him over to pagoda just in case something happened. i said, nguyen, why didn't you tell me what the general had done? he said, mr. terry, that was not news.

the general does that all the time. i looked aghast, and our other vietnamese reporter -- this was our political expert, been with "time" for five or six years, and he offered a slight smile in my befuddlement. he had been my interpreter and coach whenever i went out to interview the president and the various heads of south vietnamese intelligence and military commands. years later when saigon fell, ten years in the employment of "time" magazine revealed himself to be a colonel in the vietcong army. that shows how smart we journalists are. one more footnote to that day's coverage of the tet offensive. john cantwell joined in the early reports to say the enemy had gotten inside the embassy. if true, it would have been a major embarrassment to the united states. when american officials denied it later in the day, we in the press had to back down.

we were accused for years to come of irresponsible reporting in that episode. but i eventually learned from veterans of a secret commando team who had been there that the embassy had indeed been invaded. john and all of the rest of us were right. john never lived to know it. he was killed in the may offensive along with two fellow aussies and a british correspondent. i loved john just like a brother, too. over the years all we've heard is how we lost vietnam and what a great failure it was, and i hear this at every college campus i go to. but i suggested there was at least one great untold story from which we all can learn. i remember a sergeant major, a black sergeant major, a senior sergeant major in the marine corps, his name was edgar huff. he risked his life during the tet offensive when he decided to move out into a withering

machine gun fire to fall over the body of a white marine who was half his age to save his life. i asked sergeant major huff who faced discrimination in our society as well as the marine corps for most of his life, i said, how could you do that? how could you risk this in middle age? he said, wally, it was very easy. when i heard him cry, mother, i did not hear the color of his skin, i heard the color of our flag. in vietnam i believe we found a common humanity, whether we were carrying weapons or carrying our cameras or carrying our pins. there were men i found my common humanity with. i, a black man who came from harlem in new york found in white men who came from other parts of the world, zalan grant from south carolina, marsh clark from missouri, ray herndon

from texas, dick swanson from iowa and larry burrells from england. i found in them brothers. we found in each other brothers. i'm convinced that if we in america and in the rest of the world can look inside ourselves, inside this experience that was not shared simply by those who were in uniform, but by those of us who carried on the journalistic tradition that we could, by our own example, set in motion and improve race relations in this country, that we don't see in ourselves today. thank you. [ applause ] >> hi, everybody. i'm don north. i would like to offer a word tonight on behalf of that unsung, much maligned,

underpaid, and lowest ranking member of the brethren of war correspondents, the stringer. we turn up in little wars, big wars, in between wars and are most often found where the bullets are flying thickest, not because we're brave, but because out in the field with the troops and eating sea rations, we don't have big hotel bills. young stringers do a lot more running than they do thinking. stringers have to start their own motors each morning and assign themselves to where the action is. but often the upwardly mobile stringer is spoiled by success. you always know when a hungry stringer starts making money. they turn up at the better bars in newly tailored correspondents suits from ming the taylor with at least a dozen pockets and they start taking r&rs like the new regular staffers do. they buy new cameras and tape recorders and camcorders without taking the time to learn how they work.

i have a sad example. after an r&r in hong kong, i went back to vietnam with a new $1,000 likoflex to replace my old nikon and a newfangled bolex 16 millimeter camera with a beautiful zoom lens and a new gismo that lets you fade in and fade out. wandering around the central highlands with my knew gear, i found myself one night at an airstrip with a medi vac chopper was waiting for a break in the action just outside a special forces camp on the cambodian border. it was the first time a battalion was holding its ground and continuing to an attack a mechanized battalion riding in to bail them out. waiting there was rick maren,

the "ap" staff photographer, another stringer, tim page, and myself. the crew chief said they'd go in at first light and bring out the wounded and dead and we could ride in but not out. it was a one-way trip into a battle where the arvan were taking heavy casualties. well, rick marin said he had to go because horse foss had sent him up there and he'd fire his ass if he didn't go in on the first chopper. page and i held an ernest discussion about the wisdom of perhaps waiting for the next medi vac when at least the contact wasn't so intense. a freelancer can take that option without fear of getting fired. but marin was going in on that first chopper, so page and i reluctantly decided to go, too. well, choppering in at treetop level and standing out there on the struts, i could hardly believe what i was seeing through the view-finder of the

fancy new bolex. there were gun ships along the side of the road as we were going in. farther in there were air strikes going in. there were burning apcs on the perimeter and piles of body bags waiting for the choppers. as mortar rounds bracketed the lz, i jumped off the chopper and hit the ground hard, grinding that new thousand dollar ikoflex into the gravel and the red mud. it was a hell of a story. after a few days we pushed through to relieve the american a team. i got back to saigon fast with 20 rolls of 16 millimeter film which i decided to flog to nbc news. garrick utley did a narration for it. we rushed the film out to the airport for the next flight to the states. so feeling bold, i decided to go to "time" magazine with the dozen or so rolls of stills i had. bureau chief jim wild was delighted to get color on duko. it was the flavor of the week.

he was quite happy. just as i was leaving, he grabbed my arm and he said, kid, how do i know you didn't have your lens cap on when you shot this? if i ship all this to new york and it's no good, i'll kill you. and i believed him. early the next morning i dashed into the nbc bureau to see how much they used on the evening news, and there was a telex coming through on the wire from mack johnson in new york just as i walked in. and it said, on pass north, it said, looks like the story shot with lens cap on. then the telex went dead for about two hours. damn, i must have shot the story with the bloody newfangled bolex gismo in the fadeout leaver

gear. and chances are my stills with the new likoflex i ground into the dirt was about as bad and jim wild will surely kill me. it was the longest two hours of my life as a stringer. but when the telex started up again, it continued. two north rolls that were okay are great and we cut a solid minute 30 spot that led "nightly news." congratulations. i lay low for the next couple days until "time" hit the streets. there was one of my pictures from that likoflex with half a page of the lead vietnam story. i survived the siege and the rath of "time inc." and nbc. finally learned to shoot with the newfangled bolex and became a staffer later on at abc and later nbc. it seems the big news outfits today, particularly don't like their staffers to be much over

42 or so. a lot of staffers are rediscovering the fine calling of being a stringer but with a difference now, a lot less running stories and a lot more thinking stories. but you know, there's this new digital sony camcorder that's coming out next month. they only cost a couple thousand bucks. some things never change. [ applause ] >> my name is richard pile. i'm with "ap" but i've been asked to give this talk for dick swanson who couldn't be here tonight. most of you know the story about dick swanson in the fall of saigon and his heroic escape with members of his family, jermaine's family. this is a story about dick swanson when he arrived in january of 1966.

he says i got there at the age of 32, i was the quintessential abroad and absolutely clueless. i ended up staying five years and marrying jermaine who called me a hamlet boy. within three days of arriving, i became acquainted with the valley and the first air cav. i had also become acquainted with the jungle and countryside firsthand and alone. after unceremoniously being booted out of a helicopter from ten feet into a rice paddy, i suggested i wanted to step out on dry land, the door gunner suggested with his foot that i get out now. after a series of misfortunes, i found myself separated from the platoon with no cameras. ten hours later after wandering around from empty village to empty village actually too dumb to be scared, i was found and put on a helicopter for the air base. good riddance and don't come back was the message. i badly needed to hitch a ride to saigon and found a little two engine plane with two stars on

the side. i tapped on the side of the plane and a face appeared in the open cockpit window. i'm admiral so and so, what do you want? i'm a photographer for "life" magazine. i need a ride so saigon. if you're a photographer, where the hell are your cameras? i thought what the hell, what do i got to lose? and i was pissed. i replied, if you're an admiral, where the hell is your god damn boat? needless to say, i did not get a ride with him. ♪ s i'm tad bartimus. i was a wire service reporter and i went to vietnam. most of the people that i loved were in this room when the night began, and this is what happened to me. i went, i saw, i did some good

work, i loved well, i was well loved and i survived. thank you. [ applause ] >> good evening. i'm bernard kalb, i yield back the balance of my time. i spent about 500 years in vietnam in a very short time. when i first got there some 30 or so years ago, i quickly bought up all the porcelain and was ready to leave except i got a memo from new york suggesting i stay behind and do a few stories. when i think back to the early years, i think how chummy things were prior to the huge u.s. invasion. there was a comradery that existed not only among reporters, but as well with the vietnamese. of course, in the early days of the war, there was indeed censorship.

the vietnamese on the other side of the table was a chap who had been designated for a job he didn't particularly care for, and the question was for him to explore the copy to see what words might be deleted that might portray a slightly different, more positive picture back for readers in the united states. i remember on one occasion when there was a confrontation between the catholics and the buddhists coming out of the presidential palace. i remember writing a story talking about the roman catholic president had given orders for a crackdown against the buddhists. when i turned the copy over to the censor, he did not like it and he said, it's not the kind of story we want leaving the country. what can we do about it, i said? i used to bring a thesaurus every time i came into saigon from hong kong. his suggestion was, to diminish the reason religious tension within the story, why don't i

drop the word catholic? i said that's fine. the story went out. the roman president cracked down, i had a feeling in new york they thought i was the julius caesar when he concurred goll. it was a slow process, wasn't it, the way america became involved in vietnam. and when i take a retrospective look back, the amazing thing was that the united states had never reached a point where it would indeed air condition the war. it was a war as we all know that to the american military was real estate. it really was no such thing as vietnam or vietnamese people. many of the americans remember that they were in vietnam only when the laundry was late. many, many americans never learned how to say thank you in vietnamese. and the richness of the ignorance was always portrayed when we'd sit at our hotels or wherever listening to the broadcast coming out of the white house. the president calling on the vietnamese to put aside internal

bickering and coalesce to fight the common enemy and we would double up with laughter in the caravele hotel, because each appeal for immunity from washington simply portrayed a rather extraordinary ignorance on the part of the united states and the military and political planners in the country. the war over, i remember the vietnamese coming to the united states, i remember on one occasion going to dulles airport inevitably having this great powerful empathy with vietnamese. and one vignette that is ineradicable was going out in the winter. i guess it was '75. and watching a vietnamese old woman struggling to put on a pair of gloves and not getting the fingers in the right place where the thumb went into the pinky and the pinky went into the thumb area.

you felt all at once the picture of an extraordinary cultural misfit, one that not only was captivated and captured in the sense of the woman struggling to put on her glove, but took you right back, cascading backwards, as it were, into the war. i was there a year ago. i was there earlier this year. i went back with peter as a matter of fact. very quickly because i know the time pressure is on, when i went back there a year ago i went to visit some of the old haunts, obviously. a quick drive past the embassy and saw the relic of it that existed. sma smattered, dirty, vietnamese sleeping in front of the gate. but the surprise of it all was visiting the palace, that is to say, the new presidential palace that we all know. the new palace had been rented by mercedes benz and the entire lawn and the first floor of the palace was filled with brand new mercedes benzes for sale.

it was suddenly, when i took a look at this panorama of automobiles, suddenly a rush of obscenity as it were, because i kept thinking of the sacrifices, the dead, what it had done there, what it had done at home, and there there were the mercedes benz selling for between $30,000 and $80,000 to people, among them hotel clerks, trilingual people earning $80 a month. inevitably, we could go on with a variety of vignettes that catch up the spirit of that story. just let me say in closing that vietnam for all of us in this room will always be emotional shrapnel in our hearts, inoperable. thank you. [ applause ]

>> as i look out on that vast audience, i now understand why mcnamara referred to attrition. there are a couple of quick, just quick stories, because i know all of us are tired and want to get back. i remember coming into the central highlands flying in from new york to do a documentary for nbc, being met by a wonderful pao called j.d. coleman who many of us in the room, many of us still left in the room will remember. j.d. took my jet-lagged partner and i and showed us a couple of welcomes, in the present time and said get some sleep, i got you going out on an assault tomorrow morning. there will be hni fire going on tonight, harassment and intradix fire, don't pay attention to it. we fell into bed, deep into sleep. all of a sudden i heard mortars and rockets and artillery and

machine gun fire and small arms fire. i grabbed bill ryan who could sleep through the second coming, woke him up. both of us in our skivvies scooted out under the tent looking for the slit trench that was promised and walked on our knees right into the movie which was a world war ii movie "wake island." it took us about a week to live that one down. a couple of years after that, i was there during the easter offensive and the americans had left and we were all feeling kind of lonely up there. stumbling around in the ruins of this city i saw a guy with a notebook. i went over and said, where are you from? hadn't seen him before. he said, i'm from "ap." i said, you're new here. he said, i'm here from south africa. i said, what are you doing from south africa? he said, i was covering all these christian bernard heart

operations. "ap" decided they didn't like my byline and sent me over here. i said that doesn't compute, that doesn't make sense. what's your name? he said, justin payne. lest we all be continuing in pain, that's it for me. >> the fall of saigon. i went to the embassy roof, after the last helicopter left, there were 100 vietnamese standing there with their little bags packed. i didn't have the heart to tell them there would be no more helicopters. i was back in the embassy roof earlier this year with vietnamese. they were assisting cnn in our live coverage. so there was a life after the fall of saigon. to tell us about those particular days, a last group of witness correspondents, kevin delaney, george esper, bill plante, ron nessen, will you join us please? ♪

>> hi, i'm kevin delaney. you better hold that slide for just a moment, if you would. what does it tell us, anyway? yet another irishman out of control. and i think that -- the saigon police -- we better pity them at this point. the fact is that they didn't want us to go into that hotel, neither richard pyle or any of the other standing there with us. the vietcong, so-called virks etcong peace negotiators had just been housed there in saigon for the first time. i want to formally thank richard pyle for his terrific moral support on this occasion and i couldn't have been manhandled

properly without him, so i want to thank him. i hope you'll catch those sideburns, by the way. eat your heart out, brady anderson. i'm also thankful that both pyl and myself are both very politically correct in our tailored men's correspondent uniforms of that day. i was not a correspondent at that time. i was a bureau chief and our job was to send correspondents and camera crews every day down a lot of dangerous highways. let me share one other vivid memory with you. i went back during the last month before the fall of saigon to run abc's operations, and as the end grew closer and we all knew it was coming, our big concern was in getting our vietnamese staff out. the first list i gave new york was for 15 vietnamese staffers and their families.

a total of 56 people. two weeks later, the 56 total had stretched to 101 total. apparently a lot of sons and daughters had been overlooked in the first count. the folks in new york were a little taken back, but to their credit, they did go along with us when we talked about the fact we were dealing with a lot of personal lives here. the deal with the embassy at that time was if we could get our people out or through the vietnamese mps at the tent and the gate, onto the air base, they could be flown out of the country to safety. so for about four straight days, we got a big van and we drove to the gate. and then we would collect a wad of vietnamese from those present and one of the vietnamese would then approach the vietnamese mps

at the gate with some kind of documentation. and the mps would growl and shake their head until one of their hands touched this wad of money under the paper and then suddenly they'd say, oh, these papers are perfectly in order, and wave the van through. and we on the van would give a silent cheer and say thank god the system works, corruption still pays. one other postscript to that, we had a gathering of our vietnamese, our saigon bureau on april 20th, recently, for the 20th anniversary of the bureau, and attending that were a number of the vietnamese staff, cameramen and sound men, and bureau drivers. and with them were their grown children. and some of them now were

doctors, nurses, stockbrokers. you name it. i think they've been a great credit to this country, and we should all be very proud of them. thank you. >> good evening. i'm george esper. after the -- thank you very much. thank you. after the last u.s. helicopter left vietnam 20 years ago, the incoming teletype in the "associated press" bureau clicked off a message from our general manager then, wes gallagher. gallagher was concerned about the safety of peter arnett, matt frangola, who's here with us tonight, and myself. he advised one final helicopter might be returning. any of you want to leave if it

works out, he messaged. i never really bothered to ask peter or matt because i knew what their answer would be. thanks for your offer, i replied to gallagher, we want to stay. during our many, many years as war correspondents for the "ap," all of us, i think, wondered how and when the war would end. we had seen it from the beginning and we wanted to see the ending. on wednesday morning, april 30th, 1975, saigon time, our vietnamese reporter alerted us to a national broadcast over saigon radio by general zone van min, the last president of south vietnam. as he translated min's address word by word, peter and i crafted out a bulletin that was