Saigon (83 page)

A full moon sailed high above Hanoi on the night of Monday, December 1i8, 1972, casting a ghostly, filtered light onto the city through ragged clouds that drifted lazily cross the sky. Crowds of cyclists and pedestrians were thronging the streets as they had done every evening since late October when the partial bombing halt declared by the United States had once again put the area of the capital and the region seventy miles to the south off limits to American air raiders. The streets consequently were not blacked out and the people in them were relaxed moving without haste or anxiety between their homes and the factories where they worked or the markets where they bought their supplies. In the industrial suburb of Kham Tien, Tuyet Luong and her two children were returning home from a local produce market, carrying vegetables and their meager monthly rice ration. They were heading for a drab, one-bedroom apartment in a twenty year old workers housing project that had been assigned to them with Tuyet’s job in a nearby munitions factory on her arrival in Hanoi in the spring of 1968. Since then Tuyet had spent twelve hours at the factory every day, screwing percussion caps onto artillery shells, and at the age of thirty-five her face was prematurely lined and gray with fatigue; her shoulders sagged, too, as she walked, and the shabby black calico trousers and tunic she wore were frayed and threadbare. 

Alongside her Trinh, grown tall and gangling at fourteen, and Chuong, her sprightly eleven-year-old son, chattered and chased one another up and down the curb, shrieking and giggling whenever one of them spilled the bag of vegetables they were carrying. Tuyet admonished them from time to time in a tired voice, hut they were able to walk quietly for only a minute or two before their youthful high spirits prompted, some new bout of mischief. The ear-splitting wail of the city’s air raid sirens, however, stopped the children dead in their tracks just after eight o’clock. Within moments the streetlights and all the illuminations in the public buildings went out, plunging the capital into darkness. The droves of cyclists immediately began stampeding homewards, and Tuyet called both her children to her and began running towards the underground shelter beneath their own four-story housing block. They looked up into the night sky as they ran, but although the full moon was still bright, they couldn’t see or hear anything, because the first wave of the biggest armada of strike aircraft ever assembled in the history of aerial warfare was streaking towards Hanoi at an altitude of nearly seven miles, which made it both invisible and inaudible to people on the ground. 

All the eight-engined B-52 Stratofortresses in that first wave carried a massive load of explosives — forty-two 750-pound bombs stacked like fish roe in their long steel bellies and another twenty-four 500-pounders clamped beneath their broad wings. They were homing on their targets in Hanoi and Haiphong at six hundred miles an hour in packs of three, having been guided nearly three thousand miles across the Pacific from Guam or across the neck of the Indochina peninsula from Thailand, by bombardier navigators imprisoned in tiny windowless cabins on their lower decks. These navigators, who would never catch a glimpse of the country they were attacking, had plotted their courses blindly with maps and instruments and were at that moment preparing to release their bombs with the aid of radar screens and stopwatches. They were proud of their ability to dump their destructive loads to earth with surgical precision, and each formation of three B-52s could on an ideal mission destroy everything within a precise target area almost two miles long by one mile wide. Because the American negotiators had not been able to win their arguments in that little artist’s cottage outside Paris five days before, on the night of December i8 the B-52s were being sent for the first time to attack vital installations in the very heart of both Hanoi and Haiphong — docks, shipyards, roads, bridges, missile sites, airstrips, supply dumps, munitions factories and military barracks; targets on their outskirts had been attacked sometimes in the past, but this was the first substantial raid of the war directed against the city centers themselves. 

Because the planes from which they fell could neither be seen nor heard, the explosion of the first stick of bombs petrified Tuyet and her children as they dashed towards their underground shelter. The night sky was lit first by a blinding flash of light which made the moon invisible, then the earth beneath their feet shook and the buildings on either side of the Street trembled. A deafening roar engulfed them, followed by another blinding flash of light which lit the city like day, and it was succeeded in its turn by another flash, then another, until the glare, the explosions and the rumbling of the ground became continuous. 

Tuyet, Trinh and Chuong stopped running and clutched fearfully at one another; at first they were not even sure bombs were falling. This was nothing, like the fitful fighter-bomber attacks on the suburbs that had been launched in response to General Giap’s Easter offensive in the South. The world seemed to be ending, the earth seemed to be heaving and exploding all around them in a blaze of light, and like all the other inhabitants of Hanoi and Haiphong they were gripped by the starkest terror. Only when the antiaircraft defenses around the capital began to open up and the long dark cylinders of Soviet surface-to-air missiles were seen lancing upwards into the heavens through the white glare of the exploding bombs, did Tuyet and her children realize that there were aircraft flying silently high above their heads; and only then did they recover their nerve sufficiently to run on to the shelter. 

The first attack lasted about twenty minutes, and at the end of that time the elemental roar of the explosions ceased abruptly. After letting a few precautionary minutes pass, Tuyet and her children, along with thousands of others who had crowded Into the underground shelters of Kham Tien, came out silently into the darkened street and gazed upward in horror; a blood-red glow lit the heavens all around the city and thick black smoke drifted across the face of the moon. Muted explosions filled the night as distant fuel depots and ammunition dumps continued to blow up, and each new blast sent fresh columns of fire leaping towards the sky. In every direction they looked fires were burning — in the space of a few minutes Hanoi had become an inflamed bruise on the dark face of the earth. 

Before the shock of the first attack had subsided, however, the sirens sounded again at nine P.M., and Tuyet and her children dashed once more into the underground shelter. Soon the foundations of the city were shaking again as the onslaught was resumed, and this second attack lasted another twenty minutes before another lull ensued; then at ten o’clock, eleven o’clock and midnight the sirens sounded and fresh waves of B-52s arrived overhead to rain their lethal explosives onto new targets. The giant bombers continued to sweep in over the city at hourly intervals throughout the night, laying down their mathematical carpets of destruction, and they continued to attack relentlessly on the hour every hour throughout the night for the next eleven days, with only a short pause on Christmas Day. In the daytime while their crews rested, smaller tactical aircraft, F-4 Phantoms, F-111s and U.S. Navy fighter-bombers from carriers in the Gulf of Tongking, continued the raids so as to give the antiaircraft defenses of the cities no respite, and as the days passed the planes systematically pulverized and flattened all their chosen targets. 

At the same time, however, the awesome size of the attacking force paradoxically gave new encouragement to the defenders of Hanoi. In the previous seven years only one American B-52 had been lost over Indochina, but because the giant strategic bombers were attacking in such dense formations, fifteen were smashed from the sky by SAM-2 missiles. The bombers carried highly sophisticated, electronic counter devices that could jam the direction-finding radar in the Soviet missiles, but the North Vietnamese countered this by switching off the missiles’ guidance systems and firing the SAM-2s blindly into the midst of the B-52 formations armed with proximity fuses. More than sixty American crewmen had to bail out of the stricken aircraft brought down in this way, and half of them survived to join other American prisoners of war in Hao Loa prison — which remained unscathed as the raiders intended in the center of Hanoi. 

Although the B-52 crews were proud of their ability to pinpoint their targets, their bombardiers knew well enough that if they punched their bomb-release switches a few seconds too early or too late, their bombs would fall perhaps a few hundred yards outside their target area. Their commanders would later claim that with less than two thousand deaths claimed by the Vietnamese themselves in a city of one million people, the raids were one of history’s most accurate aerial campaigns. Hadn’t sixty thousand people died in the British bombing of Dresden? Hadn’t thirty thousand people died in the German blitz of London? Weren’t such figures proof that America had mastered the art of bombing cities while showing consideration for the people in them? But despite these comparisons, at least one Hanoi hospital was hit, large swathes of houses were reduced to ruins, and each morning new groups of dazed Vietnamese could be found wandering blankly amidst the rubble of their former homes, weeping for lost relatives. 

Among them on the morning after the last of the raids was the slender figure of Dang Thi Trinh. She stood in Kham Tien, outside what had once been the entrance to the underground shelter beneath her housing block, her awkward young body bent with anguish and her tears making pale streaks in the grime and dirt that coated her face. Only one wall of the building remained standing; the other three had collapsed as though punched by a mighty fist, and men, women and children were scrambling over the mountains of debris like automatons picking up pieces of broken furniture and ornaments. Others simply stood staring about them in blank disbelief, and Trinh was numbly watching a rescue team shoveling and manhandling stones from the shaft leading down into the shelter. Faint cries had been heard from beneath the rubble in the early hours of the morning, but they had long since ceased, and she had been waiting there for five or six hours, weeping and hugging herself in her grief. 

By three AM. on that last night of the raids, she had become accustomed to the constant roar of the attacks and because at that hour they had seemed to be moving away from the city, she had come out of the shelter with her mother and Chuong to watch the distant flashes of bombs falling on Haiphong. Chuong had squealed with delight when they saw a missile explode in a burst of orange flame high in the darkness and the silhouette of one of the great eight-engined American bombers had begun spiraling downwards in the glare. It seemed to fall for a very long time before it reached the ground several miles away, and they had watched until it exploded with an earthshaking rumble, sending a great new fountain of lire into the air. 

A moment later, to their horror, a new “ladder” of bombs had begun falling half a mile away on the other side of the munitions factory where Tuyet worked, and everybody had begun screaming and dashing for the underground shelters again. Trinh had fallen and become separated from her mother and brother in the stampede and she had been hustled into a neighboring shelter by a party cadre who helped her up. Unknown to them, at that moment, forty thousand feet above them, a SAM-2 missile was racing towards an approaching trio of B-52s programmed to finish off the munitions factory. The first one dropped its thirty tons of bombs successfully on target and turned away, but the SAM-2 exploded two or three hundred feet above the second aircraft, rocking it violently at the moment when the navigator was reaching for his bomb-release switch. The B-52 pitched and yawed under the impact of the explosion, and the navigator was flung hard against the bulkhead of his cabin. By the time he’d gathered himself, the second hand of his stopwatch was five seconds past the release point and the little yellow signal light indicating “Bomb Doors Open” was winking furiously on the panel before him. He seized the release switch nevertheless, and one by one the lights beside the radar panel went out, indicating that first the 750-pounders, then the 500-pounders had slipped from the gray body of the plane. Forty seconds later the “Bombs Released” sign lit up in the cockpit and the pilot breathed a sigh of relief as he began to turn the nose of the plane back towards Guam. 

The thirty tons of bombs that should have demolished the munitions factory, because of the five-second delay, stitched a row of craters across the southern end of the Kham Tien suburb; one of them smashed down three walls of the housing block in which Tuyet lived with her son and daughter and it exploded as it reached the ground floor, blasting a ten-foot crater into the underground shelter where a hundred people were crouching in the darkness. In mid-afternoon, Trinh watched the crumpled bodies of her mother and Chuong being dragged out together; they had been clutching one another when the bomb smashed into their refuge and they were still entwined. Sobbing hysterically, Trinh flung herself on her mother’s body and it took several minutes of pleading and cajoling before the rescue workers were able to lift her to her feet and lead her away. 

A solemn hush fell over the sumptuously furnished main salon of the old Hotel Majestic on the Avenue Kleber. For several minutes the rustle of high-quality parchment paper and the rattle of winter rain flurries against the windows were the only sounds in the chamber. Silent, deferential American and North Vietnamese protocol aides stood respectfully beside Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, who were seated facing each other across the baize covered mahogany conference table, and one by one they turned the sixty or so pages of the bound cease-fire agreements so that their principals could scribble their initials on texts they had negotiated so laboriously over the previous four years. It was a quarter to one on the afternoon of Tuesday, January 23, 1973, and in the formal diplomatic surroundings of the Quai d’Orsay’s International Conference Center furnished with gilded mirrors, tasseled drapes and antique silk tapestries, the ten-year war that America had fought through the heat and slime of Vietnam’s jungles and paddy fields was coming quietly to an end. 

A little group of correspondents, photographers and television news cameramen had been invited into the chamber to observe the ceremony, and their cameras had begun to click and whirr the moment a discreet French protocol official hovering inside the door gave the sign that they might begin to record the scene. Tran Van Kim, who was seated beside Le Duc Tho, glanced up from watching the signing ritual and scanned the faces of the journalists until he caught Joseph Sherman’s eye. The two men looked at one another for a moment, then the Vietnamese gave a little formal nod of recognition before turning his attention back to the typewritten agreements. 

When the two chief negotiators at last laid aside their pens, their aides closed the bound documents and walked around the table with measured steps to exchange their copies. Through their interpreters, Dr. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho made brief, sonorous speeches referring to their mutual desire for peace and the historic nature of the moment; then the meeting broke up so that they could step out into the rainy street to be photographed by the rest of the waiting pressmen. The pavements were drenched, the skies overhead leaden, and the photographers had to use flash for their pictures as the American and the North Vietnamese clasped hands on the pavement’s edge, smiling broadly at one another as if they were old friends. In the lobby leading to the street, the delegations and the pressmen milled together as they put on hats and raincoats; in the crush Joseph felt a tug on his sleeve and turned to find Tran Van Kim beside him. 

“Perhaps we might meet briefly, Monsieur Sherman, before you leave Paris,” said the Vietnamese in a low voice. 

Joseph shrugged. “Isn’t it a little late for fresh revelations about the secret machinations of the evil American negotiators?’ 

“I have information for you this time of a purely personal nature.” 

Kim spoke in a strangely subdued voice, and Joseph’s manner softened at once. “Why don’t we meet for a drink on the terrace at my hotel this evening? I’m at the Intercontinental.” 

The Vietnamese shook his head quickly. “I’d rather we met in private. I’ll come to your room there at six o’clock.” As soon as he’d spoken, Kim moved away, giving the American no opportunity to reply, and he was quickly swallowed up in the crowd. 

Joseph lunched with a member of Kissinger’s staff who explained in confidence the background to the two dozen new clauses embodied in the final agreements, and by mid-afternoon he was back in his hotel room, fitting a blank piece of paper into his typewriter to begin his final article for The Times. For an hour he wrestled with the task of trying to explain how the final accords differed from the terms reportedly agreed before the massive Christmas bombing raids on Hanoi and Haiphong. He thought back over what the aide had told him over lunch: there were changes in the definition of the Demilitarized Zone, the American right to continue military assistance to Saigon had been clarified, some offensive phrases had been dropped and other favorable clauses had been strengthened, the aide had told him — but all of that had seemed to Joseph little more than wrangling over semantics. President Thieu, he’d learned, had been forced to go along with the agreement against his will in the end because the U.S. government had threatened to cut off all future aid and leave him to Hanoi’s mercy if he didn’t — but nothing he’d been told seemed to explain why the furious Christmas bombing 

onslaught had been necessary. - Joseph himself had spent an uneasy Christmas holiday in England at the country house deep in the West Sussex Downs where he had lived with Naomi since their marriage in 1968. There he had listened round the clock to radio reports of the wholesale destruction wrought by the B-52s in North Vietnam. Harbor facilities, railways, bridges, roads, military dumps and factories had all been successfully destroyed, and Hanoi’s capability to wage war had been severely curtailed, but side by side with the news had come furious, worldwide criticism of the massive raids; some ninety-five thousand tons of explosives had been dumped on Indochina over the Christmas period, more than Nazi Germany had dropped on Britain during the entire Second World War, and many newspapers and politicians throughout the Western world had condemned the bombing as barbarous. The raids had been called off finally on December 30 and the White House had then given an assurance to Hanoi that they would not be resumed as long as “serious negotiations” were taking place. Henry Kissinger had returned to Paris on January 8 to find that the bombing had left Le Duc Tho a greatly changed man; anxious to settle quickly, his manner was no longer obstructive as it had been during the round of talks in early December, and the Final details of the cease-fire had been hammered out in less than a week. 

In those first days of 1973, Joseph knew that already in the United States the war had been recognized almost universally as a tragic mistake for the nation. Some fifty-seven thousand American lives had been lost and $146 billion had been wasted on a conflict that had divided his countrymen more deeply than any other issue since the Civil War, but as he sat in his Paris hotel room on that wintry afternoon, he nevertheless found himself struggling to give the moment the right perspective for the next day’s paper. Hour after hour he grappled unsuccessfully with his thoughts, and he was still sitting before a blank sheet of paper at six o’clock when Tran Van Kim knocked crisply on his door. On entering, the Vietnamese offered no greeting but held a large manila envelope wordlessly towards him. 

“What’s that?” asked Joseph, taking the packet warily. 

“Photographs,” replied Kim without looking at him. 

“Photographs of whom?” 

“Your daughter, Tuyet.” 

There was silence for a moment, then with a puzzled frown Joseph began opening the envelope. 

“I’m afraid she’s dead,” added Kim quietly. “She was killed in the Christmas bombing.” 

Joseph stopped opening the envelope and stood still in the middle of the room. After a moment he dropped the package unopened on the table beside his typewriter and sat down with his back to the Vietnamese. Once or twice he rubbed his hand across his forehead as if to ease a pain, and all the time Kim stood waiting quietly just inside the door, his overcoat buttoned, his round face blank and expressionless. 

“How did she die?” 

“There was a direct hit on the underground shelter beneath her apartment block. She was found with a hundred other people buried in the rubble.” 

“Were they all killed?” 

“Fortunately a large proportion of the workers quartered in Kham Tien had already been evacuated from the city. But almost the whole of that suburb was atomized by the ferocity of the bombing on the last night — not a single dwelling was left standing.” 

“I meant Tuyet and her family,” said Joseph dully. “Were they all killed?” 

“Her son Chuong died with her. The girl Trinh by chance had taken cover in another shelter. She survived.” 

Joseph put his hands to his head and sat staring in front of him. Then his eye fell on the envelope again and he finished opening it and spread the half-dozen photographs inside across the table- top. There was one of Tuyet he had taken himself outside the Lycée Marie-Curie in Saigon; she had been a willowy sixteen- year-old then, dressed in a pale ao dai, and even wearing a faintly sullen expression, her youthful face was still strikingly beautiful. Another, apparently taken on her wedding day, showed her smiling and holding the arm of a handsome, fierce-eyed Vietnamese youth who seemed uncomfortable in a crumpled suit. A third picture showed Tuyet and Lan together, wearing their elegant national dress; both were slender and graceful, obviously mother and daughter, but they stood apart, neither touching nor looking at one another. There were others too of Tuyet and the children and the last one, showing Trinh and her brother Chuong, grown taller than in Hue, had apparently been taken sometime during the past four years. 

Among the prints there was a short note scrawled in French on a sheet of rice paper; it was signed with Trinh’s name, and Joseph felt a lump come to his throat as he read it. 

My mother, I know, wanted you to have these photographs. She didn’t talk of you often but I made her tell me all about you after Hue. I think she didn’t like to talk too much about it because it always made her cry. She once told me you’d never seen most of these pictures and I thought my great-uncle Kim would know how to get them to you. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve kept for myself one of you and my mother outside her school in Saigon. Goodbye Trinh. 

Joseph dropped the note on the desk and covered his face with his hands; he sat like this for a long time, ignoring the Vietnamese. 

“She was very insistent that I pass them to you. Otherwise I wouldn’t have made contact.” 

Joseph started at the sound of Kim’s voice; again he recognized the subdued, almost confiding tone in which the Vietnamese had spoken at the Avenue Kleber earlier in the day, and he swung round in his chair. “What will become of Trinh?” 

“The party will look after her welfare!” His quick response had a hollow ring to it, and as though suddenly embarrassed by what he’d said, Kim took a hesitant step towards Joseph. “I’ll take a close interest in her too, myself, of course. Tuyet wasn’t just your daughter, remember — she was also the child of my sister.” 

“Were you close to her?” asked Joseph in a surprised tone. 

“She was very conscious of her mixed blood after she came to Hanoi, and I think this made her distant with me. But I was able to help her in small ways without her knowing. As you can see from her note, Trinh is less inhibited — she thinks of me rightly as her great-uncle.” 

Joseph nodded ruefully. “If Lan had kept her promise to marry me, we would have been brothers-in-law, Kim.” 

The Vietnamese raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Tuyet once told me that you had asked my sister to marry you — but she said nothing of Lan’s wishes.” 

“Lan accepted when I first proposed to her,” replied Joseph, his face downcast. “But in the end her loyalty to your father was too great. It was the same week that you quarreled with him, and after you’d gone she changed her mind. She said your father needed her loyalty more than ever then.” 

Kim lowered his eyes and said nothing, and an uncomfortable silence lengthened between them. 

“You don’t have any family of your own, do you?” said Joseph quietly. “I can sense it.” 

“No, I never married. I decided like our late president to devote my life to our revolution.” Kim spoke almost defiantly, but Joseph could see that there was a trace of embarrassment in his manner. 

“Is that the only reason?’ 

“Perhaps my quarrel with my father had something to do with my decision,” he replied slowly, dropping his eyes again. “Perhaps because of it I became skeptical about our stifling family traditions in Vietnam. Perhaps in the end, that wasn’t the wisest decision of my life.” 

Joseph could see that. the admission of his own error hadn’t been made easily, and he felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for the stiff-faced man before him. “It’s ironic, Kim, isn’t it that we should find ourselves talking together in Paris on a day like this. It’s more than forty years since we first met, and both of us have suffered greatly because of the wars in your country. Your father, your sister and her daughter are dead and you cut yourself adrift from your family long ago. I’ve lost my elder son, my brother and a daughter — hut for what?” 

“For freedom — the people of Vietnam have always been determined to be free.” Kim’s words were uttered almost sorrowfully, and he unbuttoned his coat and lowered himself wearily into a chair as he spoke. “A conflict between those who collaborated with France and our country’s true patriots was always inevitable. There was no way to stop brother fighting brother in Vietnam. The United States should have had enough sense to leave well alone. Then at least you wouldn’t have shared in the tragedy.” 

Joseph sat staring at the blank sheet of paper in his typewriter, then turned to look at the Vietnamese as a thought struck him. “You’ll probably never understand, Kim, but we came to Vietnam for noble motives. We were afraid Communism would swamp the world and change it beyond recognition if we didn’t act. The trouble was, we went on fighting long after it became clear we’d been wrong about that. But we’d never understood the complicated background to your war, and in our frustration we used terror and methods of mass destruction which betrayed all our own dearest principles. In the end we were trying to win just to satisfy out national vanity. That’s why the war has torn my country apart.”