Morely Safer has always been my favorite 60 Minutes correspondent. It wasn’t just that taciturn expression, which seemed only to crack that craggy visage for a moment to display amusement or skepticism. He is in the mold of the fast diminishing Murrow generation of reporters. In his book I learned that the Vietnamese, who liked to assign Americans sobriquets, called him “Stoneface.” He seems to approve of it.
Safer’s book, reflecting on his days as a young reporter during the Vietnam War, is based on a visit there in 1989 to do a 60 Minutes segment, during which he takes the opportunity time to visit places and people who have been changed (in some cases unchanged) by that conflict and the years hence. But Vietnam seems to be changing rapidly. My own visit in 1997 would display, at least in Ho Chi Minh City, even further changes toward that curious amalgam of rollicking street-level capitalism and communist hegemony, a contradiction that China has employed with such vigor. But then, Safer has his tenure as a war correspondent as a dramatic benchmark.
With the majority of Vietnam’s population having been born since the end of the war, he found a country bent on getting on with its future. But it is the war, and the flashbacks of it, that was uppermost in his mind. Most interesting to this reader is the perspective of the NVA and Vietcong soldiers and leaders that he interviewed. At the top of that list is General Vo Nguyen Giap, who probably had more to do with defeating the Americans than any other person. Giap, who apparently is still alive, looked fit and sounded feisty when Safer interviewed him. He had been fighting since the 1930s and claimed he never doubted the Americans would be defeated. Safer also visited with a Col. Bui Tin who wondered why the U.S. had a one-year policy for their soldiers. He claimed that it took some six months for an American soldier to become combat effective, then they fought well for another three, but began being tentative and less effective when they had ninety days to go. Nobody wants to get it on his last day. NVA soldiers were in for the duration; they only way they would get to go home alive was to hasten victory.
A lot of NVA never did get to go home. They are buried by the thousands near the sites of big battles such as Khe San, Hue, and along the Ho Chin Minh trail. Interesting to this reader was that several of the former NVA soldiers that Safer interviewed admitted that what they feared the most were B-52s. Helicopter gun ships and fighter jets at least provided some warning and direction with their engine noise. But the imminence of the high-flying B-52s was signaled only by the absence of the choppers and jets; then carpets of bombs fell silently with no indication of where to run or take cover. Col. Bui said, “The worst was the B-52. After the raids you go around and gather up the bits, the pieces of the bodies, and you try to bury them.”
Flashbacks does get into the lingering difficulties between the North and the South of Vietnam. Contrasts remain between a dreary Hanoi and the business and bustle of HCMC, which is still called Saigon by many of its denizens, and what side one fought on stays with one with the indelibility of a war in which, literally in some cases, brother fought brother. Safer had friends and acquaintances who got out in time, other who did not. One, a spy for the South who would have been a certain target by the VC, was the last passenger to board a Huey (in the famous photo of the escape from the top of an American apartment building – not the American Embassy).
But it is the people, on both sides, who now are given a more human face than the pictures of self-immolating monks, the police officer executing a VC in a Saigon street, a screaming naked girl fleeing her napalmed village, or the dead bodies in ditches at My Lai. Safer’s interviews a battle hardened NVA veteran with a smile that might morph into a war face at any moment, but the warrior still has nightmares of the war. Van Le, a novelist and former private for the South says, with sad eyes, “Any bullet from wherever it comes is shot at the mother first, not the son who is killed.” A tiny VC woman smiles brightly in recalling her capture of a American soldier and remarks that she was surprised to find him “very handsome.” Professor Nguyen Ngoc Hung, a former sergeant for the South, visited a huge military cemetery with Safer, still feeling the pain over a lost generation. A woman cardiologist who was one of the founders of the Vietcong left the Party disillusioned after the war. “Nobody won this war,” she says, “Nobody.” But she would get plenty of argument. Yet a former spy – although Safer is still unable to discern for which side, perhaps both – and former correspondent for Time magazine, retains his ambiguity to this day, masked by an engaging gentility.
In the final analysis the Vietnamese are shown to be an astonishingly resilient people, far more complex than we knew them to be and, although tough and brave, nowhere near a people who, as was claimed by one of America’s generals, value life less than we do. But Flashbacksconfirms that they just placed a higher value on the land they were fighting on than we did.
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©2005, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.6.2005)