Vietnam . . .What a Helluva Story!  HOME
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   The Saigon press corps was a mixed bag of old time hard-nosed newspapermen like Joe Freid of the New York Daily News, and lots of young bushy-tailed network correspondents like Morley Safer, Bill Plante, and Roger Peterson. Morley was then, as he is now, irreverent and intensely curious. I got to know him and many other network regulars at the Caravelle Hotel in downtown Saigon. ABC and CBS had their own floors in the hotel. NBC was across the street in their own location. Everyone helped everyone else. I was constantly peddling Red Cross story angles for stateside network coverage, but mostly we hung out and swapped latest leads and rumors.
A group from ABC I went with frequently  ate in Cholon at a great mom and pop restaurant called the 'Eskimo'.
    Morley's initial fame came from one story in particular, which most TV viewers from the 60's will remember. It showed American GI's using Zippo lighters to set thatched roofs afire in a small village. The village was burned as part of the American policy of rooting out Viet Cong and punishing villagers who were "VC sympathizers". (The poor bastards couldn't win either way!) This was right in line with the famous quote from a MACV press briefer who stated, with a straight face, that ". . . we had to destroy the village to save it." Yeah boy.
    We called the daily afternoon ground and air briefings at the JUSPAO press auditorium below the Rex Hotel the "Four O'clock Follies". It was at one of these briefings when a teletype operator from UPI came in and whispered to a group of us that there had just been a plane crash at Tan Son Nhut airport. . . in front of a group of boy scouts being hosted by Premier Nguyen Cao Ky.

  One of Ky's pilots was hot-dogging in an AD Skyraider for the scouts and plowed it in really making a mess. We piled in a UPI jeep and took off for the main gate of  Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon.
    Roger Peterson of ABC and his cameraman joined our UPI group and the photo, (above at right), tells its own story. We weren't going to be let on the base, even with our permits and credentials. This was a big-time stonewall attempt by the US as well as Vietnamese military. The little Vietnamese gate guard,  whom you can see in the background standing by the guard house, saw me take this picture. I saw that he saw, turned around and quickly rewound the film, took it out, hid it in the upper corner of my pants pocket and threw a new roll in the camera just before he wound up in my face, waving a loaded .45 screaming. "You give film! No peechurs! NO PEECHURS! Give film!"
    Roger Peterson, an accomplished and well known journalist, was raising hell with the American AP guard. I smiled and acted very contrite while making a big show of opening my camera and dramatically stripping out the film, pulling it from its green and yellow TRI-X cassette exposing it forever. This photo from the reel I hid in my pocket was presented to Prime Minister Ky's press relations office and was the basis of a real nasty formal complaint brought by the Foreign Correspondents Club. We gained a lot more freedom of movement as a result of beating this attempt to stifle reporting.

  (above) ABC's Roger Peterson defies stonewall at Tan Son Nhut airbase gate . . .Viet guard comes after me!


At age 26, after completing 4 years active duty in the US Navy and already working as a TV Journalist, I had the chance to go to Vietnam as a civilian correspondent for the American Red Cross to cover their huge presence there. I produced documentaries and filed stories on their services throughout So. Vietnam,  as well as contracting as a 'stringer' for United Press International.