(EDITOR’S NOTE: Charles Black, Enquirer military writer, has returned home after four months in Viet Nam. He was with men of the 1st Cavalry Division during many of their recent engagements with Communist guerrillas, and his articles on the war as he saw it will continue in The Enquirer daily.)
By CHARLES BLACK
Enquirer Military Writer
At Camp Holloway, Capt. J.
D. Coleman, the towering assistant to Maj. Chuck Siler in the 1st
Cavalry
Division’s Public Information Office, spotted me as I got off a chopper.
It was easy for him to
do. He is about six feet six in his
stocking feet and his stocking feet were one of the local
conversational topics
in Viet Nam when I was there.
Capt. Coleman, who also
weighs 265 or so, wears an appropriate size boot - 14 1/2 to be exact.
Despite the fact that boots
were being sent to the division in adequate numbers to replace the one
rotted
away by jungle dampness, the U.S. Army logistical system hadn’t
properly
planned for Capt. Coleman’s arrival.
When his boots wore out, there just weren’t any that big in all
South
Viet Nam.
Correspondents and
interested Army friends had prowled every conceivable source of supply
in
search of boots size 14 1/2. Since the
average Vietnamese man wears size 5 1/2 or six there aren’t many
substitutes
available from the local economy, either.
Capt. Coleman had taped the
flapping soles of his last pair of boots to the uppers but the supply
of green
tape was also running low on my last visit with him.
This time he swaggered up in
a pair of jungle boots which looked as if they had been left over from
the
French adventure in this land. They
were brown, had buckles and bright green canvas uppers - and they were
big.
“Maj. Siler found them down
in Saigon someplace. How do you like
them?” Capt. Coleman asked.
He was obviously proud of
them and he was also about twice as big as anybody in the group of
correspondents who had just alighted, so we all stood around and
admired them
for him. There was quite a bit to
admire and I almost overdid it walking around and studying the green
and brown
construction projects from various angles.
“They look like alligators,
two big, live alligators,” I told him.
He repaid the comment with
considerable interest by informing me that my presence was requested as
a
member of a briefing team which was going to Saigon to tell interested
persons
- including the press corps - about the Plei Me campaign to that date.
“It is a little unusual for
a reporter to be put on assignment as part of a briefing team, but
you’re
invited on the official roster. I hope
that Saigon press corps goes after you, too,” Capt. Coleman told me
kindly.
I accepted the invitation,
since it was delivered by him, as a vast education to me.
I had not realized until this time how many
journalists are actually in South Viet Nam.
The little club of men who
showed up out in the wilderness - men such as Horst Faas and Peter
Arnett of
Associated Press and others whom I have named, as well as some whom I
haven’t -
are only a representative fraction of those who seldom venture there.
Lt. Col. Harlowe Clark,
commander of the First Brigade, his battalion commanders and their
executive
officers and myself got there on a Caribou piloted by Capt. James
Lybrand and
CWO Bill Combs with a representative display of captured weapons
between our
feet.
We were picked up at Tan Son
Nhut air terminal and taken to one of the guarded “R and R” (rest and
recreation) hotels, the Myerkord, where we left our gear and then went
almost
directly to the famous “five o’clock briefing.”
There was one other stop
during which public information officers explained the ground rules of
these
affairs. They mainly concerned time and
not losing one’s temper, as I remember.
Be brief and be sweet seemed to be the idea of it all. The officer who gave the lecture seemed
embarrassed to be telling a correspondent how to deal with
correspondents.
The briefing takes place in
an auditorium in the U.S. Information Service Lincoln Memorial Library. Marine guards check the correspondents in,
studying their credentials with the care Marine guards always use
whether they
know you or not. There were almost 300
men and women in the rows of seats by 5 p.m. with some standing up in
the back.
An Air Force officer came
down the aisle handing out mimeographed sheets of paper.
The ink was very blurred on mine. A
lieutenant colonel stood up on the stage
and pointed to numbers on a big map and read the items on the
mimeographed
paper. He only missed pointing to the
correctly numbered spot twice, which was fairly impressive to me.
There was a long list of Air
Force sorties, numbers of bombs dropped, and estimates of damage done
from
these bombs. Many of those reports said
things such as “45 VC structures destroyed and 38 damaged.”
I remembered the bamboo
camps I had helped touch off with cigarette lighters and wanted to ask
if the
VC structures were different than those, but since I was on the
briefing team I
felt it wouldn’t be fair play to join the other team.
A report had come in during
the day that 27 South Vietnamese men and women had been slaughtered by
Viet
Cong in a raid on a Buddhist pagoda southwest of Saigon because the
peasants
had been working on a government canal which would help local
sanitation, aid
local farmers and provide transportation for them.
This one went by with only cursory questions.
A report that a bonze in a
temple near Da Nang had threatened to burn himself in order to protest
a
“desecration” of a pagoda there drew instant fire from some reporter in
a front
seat, however.
It seemed that an elderly man in the area had said that he “thought” he had seen a U.S. Marine leave the pagoda in the early morning and the protest from the Buddhist elders had been stringent and apparently addressed to all comers. The reporter seemed quite incensed over this occurrence.
I became fairly upset myself
when I found that somebody had promised the U.S. would build a new
pagoda for
them - whether an American was at fault or not, apparently.
I went so far as to ask
whether the slaughter of innocent peasants by the VC in the other
pagoda was
also an act of desecration. So far as
the information available indicated it wasn’t.
The damage to the pagoda
near Da Nang had been mainly confined to some scrawls on the wall,
soiling of
the floor and a statue of Buddha knocked over, I was told.
I asked if a good scrubbing
and a touch of repair wouldn’t suffice - most of the pagodas I’ve seen
could
stand both, anyway - but the reporter in the front row had the full
attention
of the briefing officers and my questions got lost in the shuffle.
The wrangling over the
desecrated pagoda went on and on until some reporter with a heavy
German accent
suddenly burst in and asked if it were true that “the Buddhists in the
Da Nang
area have launched a submarine fleet to attack the Seventh Fleet in
protest”
and somebody else asked if the “the Rhade (a rebellious Montagnard
tribe) had
protested yet, since everybody else seems to have something to say on
this.” With this the subject was
closed. (I believe the last questions
had humorous intent but one is never sure at these briefings.)
Nobody ever printed a story
on it that I saw, come to think of it, it just took 45 minutes to get
it over
with and the entire episode seemed peculiarly typical of things in
Saigon.
The briefing officer then
underwent some very searching questions on another item from Joe Freed,
the New
York Daily News reporter who has become a legend in Saigon because he
has never
left it in his three years in South Viet Nam except under extreme
circumstances.
(Once an airplane he was
returning to South Viet Nam aboard after a vacation was forced to land
at Bien
Hoa, about 16 miles away, for example.)
Freed has become very expert
at grilling suspects as they climb on the stage at the briefings. He was quite relentless in his pursuit of
some nugget of fact on this particular afternoon - I can’t remember
exactly
what it was he wanted to know about but I will always remember the
tremendous
effort of his search for it at the five o’clock briefing.
Lt. Col. Clark took his turn
on the stage then and I performed my personal mission for him. I was supposed to keep track of how many
times he slipped up and used a swear word.
Infantrymen in the boondocks occasionally indulge in mild
expletives and
they may lapse into them on public occasions when suddenly jerked back
into
civilized surroundings.
He did nobly both on that
chore and in his critique of what his brigade had done.
The greatest compliment
which could be paid him in fact come from a reporter near me who
apparently
lived from one five o’clock briefing to the next and considered himself
an
aficionado.
“Now I believe that
man. He is giving straight
information,” the reporter told me. “I
think the First Air Cavalry Division is really accomplishing something
up in
the highlands.”
None of the rest of us were
called to enlarge on any of the points Lt. Col. Clark had made so
apparently
the rest of the press corps also was impressed, or possibly simply
enervated.
I saw some of my
correspondent friends from the boondocks as we left and I stopped and
whispered
to one of them that I was surprised how many reporters there were in
Viet Nam.
“There are a lot of people, not a lot of reporters,” he whispered back to me.
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