Memories of a Fallen City

For more than a century Saigon has played coy mistress to a series of foreign masters. Seemingly pliant, she has been occupied by Chinese conquerors, French colonialists, Japanese invaders and American troops. When the French arrived in 1862, Saigon was an unprepossessing village of palm trees and straw shacks. Then homesick planners dreaming of Paris remade her to suit their own visions. Narrow, winding streets were rearranged into the neat geometry of spacious public squares and broad boulevards. A twin-spired cathedral, an opera house, a palace were built to grace the squares. But if Saigon was kept in style by many, she was ultimately possessed by none. Now her latest masters seem intent on making an honest woman of Saigon. They have banned prostitution, dance halls and "acting like Americans." They have also given her a new name: Ho Chi Minh city.

With mixed feelings, a group of current and former TIME correspondents whose collective experience of Saigon spans the length of Indochina's Thirty Years' War pay their tribute:

1945: A Euphoric Few Weeks

I first reached Saigon with a small OSS detachment in August 1945. For a few weeks, the city lived in the euphoria of liberation from the Japanese. Saigon's Cercle Sportif bubbled with the dansant in the hot evenings. Ladies fashioned new gowns from their liberators' parachutes. The Vietnamese seemed happy, justly proud that they had fought the Japanese while their French overlords capitulated. The exhilaration faded when French troops began reoccupying their old garrisons in September and a French high commissioner arrived proclaiming that he had "not come out from France to turn Indochina over to the Indochinese."

In December 1945, I spent several weeks in Hanoi with instructions to make contact with Ho Chi Minh, then head of a provisional government in North Indochina. The last time we talked was after the French had landed a major force in Haiphong. We sipped Scotch (his) and smoked cigarettes (mine) long into the night. He was certain, he said, that there would be a long war and that he would fight "whomever and wherever" for as long as it took. Within months, Ho had left for the jungle, and the long war had begun.

--Frank White, former TIME correspondent

1956-59: Weekends with Diem

From late 1956 to mid-1959, Saigon was still a haunting, lethargic beauty exuding an undertone of wicked excitement. The French, lately humiliated by Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu, skulked about, bitter and distrustful of the new top-dog foreigners from the U.S. You heard stories about district chiefs being garroted by the Communists, but the violence seemed isolated and distant. More immediate was the prospect of an interview with President Ngo Dinh Diem, which meant that you had to visit the bathroom beforehand because he sometimes kept you six straight hours. The thing was to be Diem's weekend guest at Cap St-Jacques, where his sister-in-law, the lissome Mme. Nhu, led giggling moonlight hunts for crustaceans to put in Sunday's bouillabaisse.

Across from the Majestic Hotel was a miniature golf course. The Vietnamese would not play, but they loved to watch the Americans. One evening, a sergeant missed 15 putts in a row. Fuming, he flung his putter into the Saigon River to the cheers of the Vietnamese. He was led away by buddies urging him to control his temper and think about "our relations with these people." The golfer snarled: "Screw these people."

--James Bell, Atlanta bureau chief, TIME

SUMMER 1963: We Are Winning

The summer of '63 was the time of the great debate among foreign correspondents over how the war was going. General Paul Harkins, then the U.S. military commander, swore that it was "well in hand." Most of us disagreed. The late TIME Correspondent John Mecklin and I composed a song to the tune of Rock of Ages:

We are winning, this I know, General Harkins tells me so.

In the mountains, things are rough, In the Delta, mighty tough, But the V.C. will soon go, General Harkins tells me so.

One night, Harkins showed up unbeknownst to us and, sitting behind a post at the Majestic heard us sing the song. He did not smile.

--Lee Griggs, Nairobi bureau chief, TIME

FALL 1963: A Coded Signal

When Buddhists began immolating themselves in the streets in the summer and fall of 1963, the spectacle caused such revulsion in the U.S. that American aid to President Diem's government--virtually the only prop holding it up--was suspended. That was the signal for his generals to move against him.

"Please buy me one bottle of whisky at the PX," said a message delivered to a reporter one night at the end of October. It was a code, and the following day, "Big" Minh's troops moved into the city. From a roof 200 yds. away, I saw a white flag waving from a second-story window in Diem's Gia Long Palace. An hour or so later, in another part of the city, Diem was shot, and the era of the generals began.

--Murray Gart, chief of correspondents, TIME

1964-67: A Gut Feeling

In the year after Diem's assassination there were, as I recall, eight coups and countercoups. The American mission wrung its hands a good deal but discerned in each new Premier a natural leader and a true friend of the U.S. The confusion deepened when U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was replaced by Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, who was in turn replaced by Lodge. Mission sources gravely told newsmen that 1) it was fortunate to have a politician like Lodge in the embassy; 2) it was even more fortunate to have a military man like Taylor; 3) it was most fortunate of all to have Lodge back.

Late in 1967, I interviewed Robert Komer, then in charge of the pacification program. He wanted to know how things looked to me. On the surface, I said, pretty good. And yet somehow I felt that no real progress had been made, no matter what the computer statistics showed. Komer hooted. Did I really believe my gut feeling against all those banks of computers? Yes, I said. Komer grinned. That, he said, was what had been wrong all along with the reporting from Viet Nam: reporters were more impressed by what they felt than by what was so.

A little more than a month later, the 1968 Communist Tet offensive ravaged much of South Viet Nam.

-- Frank McCulloch, managing editor, the Sacramento Bee

1968: The Washable Ocelot

The war was at its apogee in 1968.

Saigon had become the think center --and dumping ground--for an American technology gone beserk. Into Newport harbor near Saigon, came airborne "sniffers" to detect the chemical traces of enemy troops and "sensors" to pick up the sound of Viet Cong footsteps.

Inevitably, much of the graciousness was gone from Saigon by then. The city was cacophonous--the din of engines and horns, the wail of ambulance sirens, and the distant rumbling of artillery and air strikes. There were 750,000 registered motor scooters and perhaps as many unregistered. Noxious blue fumes along the main streets denuded the tall trees of then-leaves right up to the top. We used to say that the best way to win the war would be to invite Ho Chi Minh to Saigon. After one look--and smell --he would say, "I don't want any part of it."

The G.I.s who filled Saigon's bars all helped make it the rip-off capital of the world. A friend of mine bought an ocelot on Tu Do Street. When it rained, the spots washed off, and my friend had a plain house cat.

--Marsh Clark, senior correspondent TIME

1971: Parable of the Fatted Dog

When I ran into a bright, earnest young Army captain, a pacification adviser, I asked him about the mysterious process called Vietnamization. After an hour of talk about how the South Vietnamese were learning to take over the war, he finally started making sense. He told me the Parable of the Fatted Dog.

A year before, the captain had spotted a mangy pup on a Vietnamese garbage truck. He asked the driver what would become of it and was told that it would probably be killed for food. The captain adopted the dog, and regularly fed it all-beef canned dog food from the States. But the captain did not want to bring the dog back home, and he did not want to leave it with the Vietnamese. "It would have ended up in someone's soup." So, he had the animal killed.

His story was emblematic of the doublethink that had already become a cliche of the war: destroy the village to save it, expand the war to contain it. Vietnamization, for that matter, was a word that meant exactly the opposite: Americanization, the final step in a long process of cultural assimilation.

-- Jon Larsen, editor, New Times

1971: The Peeling Veneer

The French and Americans tried to make Saigon over in their own image, but both ultimately failed. For the French, there were cathedrals and villas, good little restaurants and quiet little brothels. For the Americans, there were superhighways and superports, pizzerias and noisy little brothels. But

Saigon always had a rhythm of its own, a life that began to assert itself as soon as the foreign presence dimmed.

The American veneer started to peel away in 1971 when Nixon's Vietnamization policy began taking hold and the G.I.s headed home. The real Saigon came clearer: the narrow back streets and alleys honeycombed with tiny apartments, teeming with life that somehow retained order despite the crowding; the animist charms and mirrors that warded off evil spirits and welcomed good ones. The foreigners were leaving, and Saigon was returning to itself.

-- Stanley Cloud, Washington correspondent, TIME

1975: Twice-Told Tales

Before jettisoning my shoulder bag and dashing to a waiting helicopter for what may be my last flight out of Saigon, I fished out a copy of the first story I ever filed from Viet Nam. It was dated July 8, 1948. In that year, the Viet Cong were called the Viet Minh, and they were fighting against Vietnamese government troops, French soldiers, foreign legionnaires and black mercenaries from Senegal and Morocco. When I reread that story, my first and last days in Viet Nam seemed somehow indistinguishable. Excerpt: "The French hoped to pull large non-Communist nationalist resistance units away from the Communist-controlled Viet Minh. But instead of winning nationalists away from Ho Chi Minh's camp, they are driving them to it." Excerpt: "Saigon belongs to the French in the day and the Viet Minh at night. The faint, sporadic sputtering of machine-gun fire and thudding artillery disturb the night's peace."

--Roy Rowan, Hong Kong bureau, TIME

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