(EDITOR’S NOTE — More than two decades of war in Vietnam, first involving the French and then the Americans, ended with the last days of April 1975. Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of combat for The Associated Press and later gained fame as a CNN correspondent, has written a new memoir, «Saigon Has Fallen,» about his dozen-plus years reporting on Vietnam. Arnett has recounted this period before but approaches it with a fresh perspective for the 40th anniversary of the war’s end. The book is published by RosettaBooks in partnership with The Associated Press (www.ap.org/books). This is an edited excerpt, focused on the war’s final throes.)
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Artillery explosions sound a fearsome 4 a.m. wake-up call, but I’m already awake. The attackers waiting at the gates of a vanquished Saigon have been warning they would act, and now with each thump of the Soviet-made 130mm guns, sound waves rustle the curtains of my open seventh floor hotel window. As I reach for my water glass, it trembles, and me with it. The last full day of the Vietnam War is beginning.
Street lights shine below as I look out toward Tan Son Nhut airport, once described as the busiest in the world when America was waging war here. Now it is burning from one end to the other, the flames brilliantly lighting up the sky.
There will be two more hours of darkness, but this seems like a new dawn rising, an appropriate description, I think later, of the intentions of those wreaking havoc on the airport this morning, April 29, 1975. The commanders of North Vietnam’s military juggernaut, pressing for victory after a 50-day rout of their South Vietnamese opponents, are pushing open the gates of the capital. They will force a new dawn on South Vietnam, America’s once favored ally, as it loses its 20-year struggle to remain an independent, pro-western state.
After watching the destruction of the airport, I phone the Associated Press office a few blocks away, and my colleague Ed White answers. He and George Esper, the bureau chief, have been up all night working the telex communications link with our New York headquarters.
White tells me the American embassy confirms major damage at the airport with the runways probably unusable. American planners have been intending to airlift out of the country several thousand more vulnerable Vietnamese allies today, but what can they do now?
EDITOR’S NOTE _ More than two decades of war in Vietnam, first involving the French and then the Americans, ended with the last days of April 1975. Peter Arnett, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of combat for The Associated Press and later gained fame as a CNN correspondent, has written a new memoir, «Saigon Has Fallen,» about his dozen-plus years reporting on Vietnam. Arnett has recounted this period before but approaches it with a fresh perspective for the 40th anniversary of the war’s end. The book is published by RosettaBooks in partnership with The Associated Press (www.ap.org/books). This is an edited excerpt, focused on the war’s final throes.
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