Stephen Harper's Story Of Vietnam

The Vietnam War as seen by a British foreign correspondent who covered the main developments of the conflict over a period of 15 years. In 1961 Communist Vietcong guerrillas were so thin on the ground, only able to operate in darkness, that he called it the Sunset War. United States Vice-President Lyndon Johnson visited Saigon while he was there, and at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport shortly after Johnson left he watched the arrival of a US Air Force C46 transport carrying young Americans wearing jeans, carrying kit-bags. They made for the bar where one of them told the author, "We've come to show the Vietnamese how to kill Communists." They were the first of 600 combat advisers to the South Vietnamese army.

During following years, he covered the controversial 1964 Tonkin Gulf affair that led to huge American involvement; the Vietcong's 1965 Monsoon offensive; the devastating 1968 Vietcong Tet offensive; continued fighting in 1973 after the American withdrawal under the Paris Peace terms; and the North Vietnamese offensive and the fall of Saigon in 1975. He left Saigon from the roof of the American Embassy in a United States marine helicopter as North Vietnamese tanks crashed through barriers over a river bridge three miles away.

Many correspondents were killed or wounded reporting these events, but the author survived terrorist bombs, mortar, artillery, machine-gun fire and sniping, only to be bitten by an Elephantitis-carrying mosquito that began sapping his strength two months before the fall of Saigon, involving surgery when he returned home.

The American author Philip Caputo, was among marines landed to protect the Danang air base in 1965, and returned as a TV correspondent to report the 1975 defeat. His novel, A Rumour of War was published in this country in 1977. In it he wrote this epitaph to one of the first young Americans who died, "I'm sure you died believing it was pro patria. You were faithful. Your country is not. The country for which you died wishes to forget the war in which you died. Its very name is a curse. There are no monuments to its heroes, no statues in small town squares and city parks, no plaques or public wreaths, nor memorials, Your country wishes to forget and has forgotten."

During convalescence the present author attempted to get memories of Vietnam out of his system by writing a novel called Live till Tomorrow, also published in 1977 in Britain by Collins. The American publisher Doubleday, having published his first novel, told him that nobody in America wanted to know about Vietnam. It took years for this deep American trauma over Vietnam to fade.

In order to present the true atmosphere at the height of conflict, the author of this present account, quotes many of the stories he filed over 30 years ago, a time when British newspapers were only a few pages bigger than during wartime newsprint rationing. Many of these stories about a foreign war were savagely cut, mainly for space, frequently from sub-editorial ignorance of their significance. This is the first time many have been properly aired.