After the Fall: The Vietnam War was over - and my 50-year Epilogue begins.

GRUMPY OLD VIETNAM HAND.

Now that I’ve finished sharing all my excerpts from The Bite of the Lotus: an intimate memoir of the Vietnam War, it’s time to pick up the thread - what happened after those now life-defining years in South Vietnam, from 1964 to 1975. My last post on this subject way back in early May began with news of the Fall of Saigon on 30 April and then stuck aboard the USS Mobile in the South China Sea, just evacuated from Saigon and clutching little more than a camera bag and a plastic sack of clothes.

From there: Clark Air Base. Then on to an unfamiliar Manila - bruised, exhausted, and hollowed out. Still clinging to the hope of staying with AP in Southeast Asia, I made a push to find my wife’s brother and niece, torn away from me onto another ship. Subic Bay seemed like a possible intercept. But they’d already moved on - swallowed by the growing tide of Vietnamese refugees.

I was at a temporary media centre inside the plush officers’ club club on the then-US Navy’s sprawling Subic Bay Base, a surreal vantage point overlooking one of the most spectacular natural harbours in Southeast Asia. Through its wide windows, the bay stretched narrow and deep, flanked by volcanic cliffs that rose like a tropical fjord, everything dazzling bright in the mid-afternoon tropical sun. It was beautiful. But I’d blown one of my flip-flops, dressed in still-unwashed clothes from the evacuation of Saigon, needed a haircut and felt completely out of place.

Then coming out of the toilet, the stomach pains hit - sharp, unrelenting. US Navy medics at the nearby hospital waved it off as nothing serious. After a sleepless night in a bedroom above a girlie bar outside the navy base, I headed back to Manila - only to collapse into an emergency appendectomy at the Makati Medical Centre. And just as I was being wheeled into surgery, Kim-Dung appeared beside me, having flown in from Bangkok, where she’d been stranded since before the Fall ordered out by AP. She gripped my hand. The next morning, she was gone again - now to Guam, four hours further east, and a fateful step further away from the world we still hoped to stay - to find her brother and niece among the rising tide of makeshift tents and frayed families.

And so, we return to an excerpt from the memoir I wrote a decade ago - what followed the Fall, when the war was over and another was just beginning.

The next morning, Kim-Dung was gone. I felt lonelier than ever stuck in that Makati hospital room in a strange and unfamiliar city. I’d never known the AP’s Manila Bureau Chief Arnold Zeitlin but his secretary kept in touch, sending over magazines and retrieving that dreadful James Michener book - The Drifters - from my hotel room. [I never finished it.] I also received copies of messages to NY, including an advisory to AP President Wes Gallagher himself on my emergency appendectomy and anxiety over my lost family members now in Guam.

And while colleagues in Tokyo and Bangkok sent their best wishes and former AP colleague, then Los Angeles Times correspondent, George McArthur and his partner Kim, who’d escaped Saigon very last-minute on US Ambassador Graham Martin’s helicopter, including his dog, dropped by my room. NY was more concerned how I’d pay for the hospital. “He undoubtedly will have to pay bills and then submit claims,” wrote someone from AP Personnel. (No personal sympathies from this mob.)

The AP Radiophoto that accompanied Linda Deutsch’s story of their finding Kim-Dung’s brother and adopted daughter & niece Phuong in the sprawling refugee camps on the island of Guam, now almost two weeks since our evacuation together and their taken away from me onto another ship in the South China. I’d hoped to catch them at Subic Bay.

By the weekend, I was out of hospital and back at Manila’s Hyatt Hotel where I needed another week of recovery. Then on Monday afternoon came the wonderful news – via an AP story and radiophoto – that Kim-Dung had found Vinh and Phuong in Guam. It’d been quite an anxious five days. But with help from Linda Deutsch out of AP’s Los Angeles Bureau, assigned to assist our fleeing Vietnamese staffers and cover the story, they’d tracked them down in Guam’s now-sprawling tent city of thousands of Vietnamese refugees.

Armed with that note I scribbled on the USS Mobile, Vinh had stubbornly refused onward travel to the US Marine base at Camp Pendleton south of LA where most of the refugees were now heading in a massive airlift. They were waiting for me at Guam’s luxurious Hilton Hotel.

But now a couple weeks after the Fall of Saigon, the news from back in Vietnam was hardly very positive. In fact, no news at all with the Communist victors cutting communication and air travel right after President Duong Van ‘Big’ Minh’s surrender on 30 April, just monitored radio broadcasts from outside the country.

Everyone associated with the former regime was required to register, prostitution and drugs outlawed, even rumours of book burnings. The Bamboo Curtain was coming down. Correspondents who stayed on past the Fall of Saigon, like AP’s George Esper and Peter Arnett, had nothing to do and were looking for a way out.

Mayaguez Incident, May 1975. The last official U.S. military action in Southeast Asia—chaotic, costly, and tragically late.

Then in one last burst of fury and mayhem came the Mayaguez Incident when the US-owned container ship heading around southern Vietnam to Thailand strayed into Cambodian waters now controlled by the Khmer Rouge, captured and its crew arrested and taken ashore. As tensions quickly rose, the Americans responded with air strikes and a botched helicopter rescue that left 15 US Marines killed and three MIAs after the Khmer Rouge had already released the crew. What next? Vietnam again?

In the middle of that story, a totally distraught Kim-Dung woke me from an afternoon nap and demanded to know, “What about Laura and Alexander? What are you doing about them?” Well, they’re with Muk (Richard) up in Laos, I replied, and are quite safe, muttering on about getting everyone from our sprawled-out family over to Bangkok where I hoped AP would assign me next. “No, after Phnom Penh and Saigon falling, you think they’re really safe in Vientiane? How soon before the Pathet Lao take over there too?”

Sure, Laos wasn’t much in the news and, as readers would know, things were always kinda’ slow up there. But her gut instinct was right. It was only a matter of time before the Communists took over there too. “Well, get them out,” Kim-Dung ordered as she hung up. But I was still recovering. I couldn’t go anywhere. Overwhelmed by despair and helplessness, I sat on the edge of the bed and cried mournfully as tears poured down my face.

So, what next? I messaged Bangkok to contact Muk and get the kids out and a couple days later telexed its Bureau Chief Richard Blystone, a former colleague from Saigon, from the Manila office. Thankfully, we had a good telex connection and punching away – as one did – at the raised-up keys, Bly first assured me “there’s zero danger” but Muk was preparing the kids to leave. He was more concerned about my own recovery.

But I was pleased he shared my idea and already suggested to NY that I stick around to help in a beefed-up Bangkok Bureau. “Having written that was of course probably the Kiss of Death,” Bly banged on noting how the AP’s always crotchety Foreign Editor Nate Polowetzky had told him on the phone yesterday “to quit wasting your energies on things that’s our job here in New York and just concentrate on being bullish,” a reference to how AP must’ve lost the play on the Mayaguez story and Bangkok needed to work harder. I allowed my hopes to rise to the possibility of reporting from Guam for a while and then relieving Zeitlin when he went on home leave.

I was still pretty tired and run-down. But without telling NY and at my own expense, I flew over to Bangkok early the next week to rescue Laura and Alexander flying down from Laos. I was barely in the taxi at the airport when the burly driver offered me some heroin. One last stumble before the long road back. Happy and blissfully ignorant of our imploding world, the kids arrived safely and then we headed back to Manila. As the flight curved around Camau at the southern tip of Vietnam, I caught what’d be my last glimpse of that beloved country for the next 20 years.

Laura (6) and Alexander (4) were blissfully unaware of all that’d happened to their mom & dad, nor that they wouldn’t see Vietnam again, after I picked them up in Bangkok from my brother up in Laos, back to Manila and then on to Guam.

From the AP office, I messaged Foreign Editor Polowetzky in NY that I wanted to talk with him over the phone but when I called overnight from my hotel room, he was out – or busy. The next day came word from Bangkok that Muk’s girlfriend Meredith had arrived from Vientiane as the Pathet Lao moved into town and foreigners began to flee. (The full PL takeover wouldn’t come until December ’75.) Then, after a weekend mostly lounging around the Hyatt’s swimming pool with the kids, we headed east to Guam.

After six weeks apart after Kim-Dung and the kids evacuation to Bangkok and nearly a month after the Fall of Saigon, our family was finally together again on Guam – but now grown with the addition of Vinh and Phuong. Gathering everyone around me in our suite at the Hilton Hotel, I formally declared that life would be a lot different for us now and probably not very easy. But horsing around on the bed and furniture, Laura and Alexander were thankfully the least bothered.

Officially, I was now on assignment to cover the Guam angle on the Fall of Saigon story. With the airlift of thousands of refugees to the US Marine base at Camp Pendleton south of Los Angeles settling into a routine, Linda Deutsch was heading back and I kept an eye on things.

Back at the sprawling tent city, a few dozen South Vietnamese mostly navy military men – including our old friend Ngo from that ARVN military band during our Go Cong days (see earlier excerpts from The Bite of the Lotus) – were agitating to return home on one of their former ships. Claiming their officers had forced them to escape, they’d abandoned their families and boldly confident South Vietnam’s new leaders would allow them back.

As US officials mulled over their request, Kim-Dung and I strongly advised Ngo and others against doing so. (A couple months later, they sailed home where all were promptly imprisoned, many for years with Ngo’s own wife deserting him for a communist cadre.) I filed a story on these reluctant refugees wanting to go home.

My main priority, however, was that plan to stick around for the AP in Asia. With help from a couple friendly Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) officers, we quickly obtained UN-sanctioned Refugee Travel Documents for Vinh and Phuong and I headed over to the Philippines Consulate to pick up visas for my now expanded family.

I was trying to present AP with a fait accompli, as they say in French—just get it all done and hope they’d rubber-stamp the aftermath. Of course, I hadn’t cleared any of this with NY. I was acting on what Blystone had told me, Zeitlin’s going on home leave and a heap of Wishful Thinking. Still, I felt fairly confident of I’d make it back to my old stomping grounds, especially as we spent a pleasant Sunday driving around the island of Guam in a rental car and a picnic at one of those typical island-paradise beaches with white sands, turquoise blue waters and fringing coral reef. (Otherwise, Guam was a rather drab and boring place – and I’m sure still is.)

Reunited on Guam a month after the Fall of Saigon and on a Sunday drive around the island, I was hopeful I’d soon be back in Southeast Asia with AP and planned everything accordingly, including travel documents for Vinh and Phuong.

When everything was done and I advised NY that I was ready to head back to Southeast Asia, my hotel room phone rang early one morning with AP’s assistant personnel boss, Tom Pendergast, on the line. I barely met him on my earlier trips to NY and he got right to the point. “We want you back in the US,” he announced. “You’re not going to Bangkok or Manila.” Gulp! Kim-Dung watched the colour drain from my face. The dream was shattered. I asked how soon they wanted me back in NY and he told me to take some leave. I muttered I’d be with my folks in Denver and back in touch from there. What a bastard.

And so we headed home to America. Using my AP-issued Air Travel Card, I booked First Class air fares for our entire mob. Then, claiming direct flights to LA were fully-booked, we travelled on Japan Air Lines up to Tokyo where I caught up with AP colleague Ed White and heard his evacuation story from over the fence at the American Embassy and hung out with my old university pal Carl Adams, now teaching English, and my Aussie CBS cameraman friend from Cambodia Norman Lloyd. Dropping by Norm’s Japanese-style home one evening, we sneaked up into his attic for a much-enjoyed joint in drug-tight Japan – and hiding from his anti-dope South Korean pianist wife.

We then headed across the northern Pacific Ocean into LA for a couple days where we caught up with Linda Deutsch and all the Vietnamese staffers who’d escaped Saigon in that secret airlift before the fall. The AP was already letting most of them - three grand apiece - planning only to keep Dang Van Phuoc and Nick Ut of Napalm Girl fame. After all, you don’t fire someone who lost an eye for AP or won a Pulitzer.

One day with Phuoc and his family, we headed down to Anaheim - my old summer stomping ground from university days at Redlands - for a day at Disneyland. As the daily parade of Disney characters marched flamboyantly down Main Street, nearly six-year-old Laura got separated on the other side. When the parade cleared, she stood frozen - panic-struck eyes, tears pouring down here face. After that defector pilot bombed the Presidential Palace near their school a couple weeks before the Fall of Saigon, any loud and sudden noise haunted terrified her and her brother and took years to overcome.

Finally, we were in Denver – tired, exhausted and burned out – but a relaxing place to slip back into the USA, especially for newcomers Vinh and Phuong. My folks had been worried witless over the past month. Summertime. We had a Pot-Luck Dinner at Dad’s St Paul’s Methodist Church where I talked about the last days of Saigon and the evacuation. We travelled up to the cabin in the Rocky Mountains and wistfully looked over the adjoining block of land we’d purchased, not knowing what we’d ever do with it. But with no news from Vietnam, Kim-Dung was very dejected and missed her family terribly.

After a couple weeks, I called Pendergast to arrange my arrival in New York right after the 4th of July weekend. “Yes, that’s fine,” he said—then dropped the hammer: “You’ll be on the Photo Desk. Report to Hal Buell.” Gulp. After all the hard work over the past couple years shifting to the writing side, I was going back to damned photo editing - my original hired-on position with AP in Saigon. Jeez.

I called George Esper, now back in the US after his expulsion by Saigon’s new authorities, and pleaded for help. A couple days later he rang back. “You’ve been re-assigned,” he said. “World Desk. 24-hour international wire.” Finally, some good news.

That 4th of July of 1975 in Denver was no celebration. Every explosion sent the kids into a cringe. For me - back in the U.S. for my first Independence Day in years - it was a bitter reminder of what had happened in Vietnam just three months earlier. I was grieving, angry, frustrated. I wanted to talk about it. But I didn’t, and I couldn’t. My folks were simply happy to have us home. So I settled into an accommodating exterior: drink, laugh, chit-chat - and those bitter curls of blue smoke from a Gitanes.