Photo of Peter Arnett (above left) courtesy of the Saigon Caravelle Hotel

Legendary hotels and war reporters; they go together. Like gin and tonic.

Because reporters made their homes here and wrote about this place, for awhile the Caravelle Hotel as an institution became as associated with the Vietnam War in the public mind as did military bases like Khe Sanh and Cam Ranh Bay.

For example, the novelist John Steinbeck in a visit that coincided with the 1968 Tet Offensive wrote more than one column for Newsday about surviving the frequent Vietcong rocketing of the city in the Caravelle. He used various stratagems to avoid injury, including sleeping with his wife UNDER his mattress in his room on the sixth floor.

I met famous newsworthy visitors rooming here, that is, those not staying in the American Ambassador’s home, including the great aviation pioneer Charles Lindberg. For me it was the most famous hotel in which I had ever stayed in when I first came to Saigon 47 years ago as a kid reporter.

Of course the Caravelle is not alone in being distinctive in war-time. In the years to come after Vietnam, I was amongst the hordes of journalists, on generous expense accounts, who gave passing fame to the Ledra Palace and the Hilton in Nicosia, the Camino Real in El Salvador, the Commodore in Beirut, the American Colony in Jerusalem, the Memling in Kinshasa, the National in Moscow, the Al Rashid in Baghdad in the first Gulf War and the Palestine Hotel in the second, to name a few. Long before, of course, Ernest Hemmingway recaptured the Paris Ritz for the World War 11 press corps.

So what does it take to give a hotel in a war zone its distinctive panache, its flair, to make it so attractive to war reporters? Well, a great room staff, for starters. The brilliant television journalist Jack Lawrence of CBS emailed me that what he remembered most about the Caravelle was the politeness and efficiency of the hotel staff.

They were given tasks by us around the clock, Jack wrote, carrying telegrams to the cable office, arranging for flights at the Air France counter on the ground floor, bringing us coffee and cold drinks, meals in our rooms, cleaning up after us.

Most of us at CBS, Jack wrote, gave the staff tips of ten or twenty piasters for each act of servitude. And each time they bowed with their hands together and said thank you in Vietnamese, French or English. Jack felt sorry for them because they were so poor and he was so well off, relatively.

In 1982 Jack went back to Saigon for a brief working visit and he recalls returning to the Caravelle and visiting the second floor to remember what it looked like. By chance one of the room boys came along the hallway and recognized him from the old days. When shaking Jack’s hand he burst into tears.

Jack Lawrence has written a lot more about the Caravelle and his special perspective on the war in his wonderful book "The Cat from Hue", available, I am sure, in pirated copies in your favorite local bookstore.

Another recommendation for desirable press hotels are good bathroom facilities. George Esper of the Associated Press had not traveled much abroad when he arrived on his first assignment to Vietnam in 1965. He expressed surprised delight that his Caravelle room had a special toilet bowl for washing his dirty combat boots until we informed him that he was using an appliance generally reserved for intimate use by women.

Journalists are always looking for living spaces with convenient location and the Caravelle certainly filled that need, located as it was in the middle of town with a bird’s eye view of what was happening in a city at war.

To illustrate that point I quote from my own book, "Live from the Battlefield", about the November 1963 coup d’état that overthrew President Ngo Dinh Diem: “During a lull in the shooting I made my way to the Caravelle. Mal Browne, then the AP bureau chief, and a visiting staffer Roy Essoyan, were surveying the landscape from the upper floors, pointing out to me the major battle centers at the Gia Long Palace and the Palace Guards Barracks – ablaze after its ammunition storage depot had been hit. With only a few shots fired, the national and municipal police headquarters and the Defense Ministry had been seized in the first few minutes of the insurrection along with the radio station and the communication center. The naval headquarters on the riverfront was taken after a series of bombing attacks by six fighter-bombers.

“The rumors and the speculation of months past were coming true before my eyes and I watched it all, with a glass of Johnnie Walker red label in one hand and a cigarette in the other.”

Jack Lawrence recalls a similar evening during the 1968 Tet Offensive when the CBS Saigon staff entertained visiting anchorman, Walter Cronkite, to a rooftop dinner at the Caravelle when he compared the sight of flares and tracer bullets to being on the rooftops of London during the Blitz in World War Two. Jack remembers arguing with his more positive colleagues about the progress of the war, and was gratified to hear Walter proclaim his own doubts on a famous broadcast on his return home.

My journalist work covering the Vietnam War had a major influence on the remaining 35 years of my international reporting career. It was in Vietnam as a young idealist that I learned that no personal sacrifice could be too great for a war reporter truly committed to telling the truth about the bravery and brutalities that accompanied soldiers into battle.

It was also in Vietnam in the years I covered the war, from 1962 to 1975, I learned that in modern war the civilian populations often suffered more than the combatants, and that the war reporter’s role was also to tell their story.

It were these beliefs that later took me back year after year to Baghdad in the decade following the first Gulf War of 1991, to examine the impact of the tough economic sanctions imposed on Iraq’s 25 million people as a punishment upon their leader, Saddam Hussein. And as I had in the first Gulf War, I reported on Live TV the bombing of Baghdad during the second Gulf War in March 2003.

My many years as an international journalist convinced me of the necessary role the media plays in the successful conduct of world affairs, and it is this message that I now carry in lectures to university journalism schools and media organizations in the years I have remaining to me.

Much has been said and written about press coverage of the Vietnam War. It is now seen by media historians as part of the Golden Age of American journalism that began with Ed Murrow confronting McCarthyism in the 1950s, the Civil Rights coverage of that time, the Vietnam War reporting, and Watergate in the 1970s.

In Vietnam the press paid a heavy price for the freedoms it received, and each time I visit here my feelings of loss for departed comrades sharpens. Amongst the more than 60 journalists killed working for foreign news organizations were four AP staffers, photographers Nguyen Cong My, Bernie Kolenberg, Ollie Noonan and Henri Huet.

And while our news executives at the APheadquarters in New York City fully supported our reporting, they were also aware of the rising chorus of criticism leveled against us as American battle losses mounted.

A note from our foreign editor, Ben Bassett, in 1966 read: “While continuing to tell the story as we see it, we must be sure that we cover anything that might be considered positive or optimistic from the US point of view.”

“In other words,” he said, “let’s not be circumscribed – that is limited --in telling the story, but make sure we are telling it in full.”

He ended with this advice, “It is a time for cool heads, and reflection on how our copy would look if challenged.”

I realized that when your own soldiers were dying in action overseas, there was the need to feel that they were giving their lives for something worthwhile – that the country should be supportive of that sacrifice. And in my reporting, I tried to avoid making a personal judgment on the war, on whether it was a good or a bad war. I saw it as a developing story.

I reported on the war with a team of AP reporters, most of who stayed in Vietnam for a year or so. We were comrades, pals. We relished the experience even if our families didn’t really understand why we were there covering the war.

I felt that only the combat soldiers we traveled with, whose dangers we shared took our real measure – who really understood us. But even they were always curious as to why we chose such dangerous company, why we were with them. We reporters, after all, were volunteers. However, the soldiers were generally accepting of us when they saw that our job was to document their lives at war.

We reported both the good and the bad, but the bad began predominating. The heart of the problem for me and the other reporters was that the US Government wanted more the good in our reporting, than the bad. I’ll give you an example from my AP reporting in November 1967, when a large force of American troops found themselves in action in the remote Dak To valley near the Laos border.

For the first time in the war the North Vietnamese army seemed prepared to do battle face to face with the Americans—20,000 or so on each side. It was there, on Hill 875, that I spent the toughest two days of my life. A whole battalion of soldiers from the 173rd airborne brigade had disappeared on that hill, one of many such jungle-covered hills in the Dak To region.

I’m saying that over three hundred Americans were gone, out of communication with headquarters. I was able to join a relief column sent up the hill to try and find what happened to them. It was already dark as we climbed through the thick jungle up the slopes.

We started to find bodies on the ground. They were dead Americans, in their underwear. Their uniforms, their boots, their weapons, had been taken. That was something that happened a lot in Vietnam. The communist side used those things for themselves because in the jungle they were far from places where they could get their own supplies.

By midnight our group was under attack from rockets and machine guns fired by communist soldiers hiding in the jungle. We kept moving forward up the hill. Before dawn we reached the place where the lost battalion, the lost troops, was believed to be located. We could see, in the moonlight, many dead bodies on the ground. I dug a small hole for myself in the soft dirt. It was a place to hide in.

At dawn I could see how bad things were. Wounded soldiers were hiding beside fallen trees, some of them crying in pain. They had all been there for 36 hours. An American officer told me that all the medics had been killed. The officer himself had been wounded, and most of the other officers were dead. The communist soldiers were still attacking from the nearby jungle.

I found a young American soldier in a bunker protected by bags of sand and tree branches. He told me was from New York. He was exhausted. He held a metal Christian cross in his hand, and he said, “God is protecting me.” But his friend next to him said, “Not likely, the Chaplain who gave that to you yesterday was killed last night.”

I nearly died on that Hill 875. What happened was, when the communist shooting died down a little, I began shoveling dirt on the top of my bunker, to better protect it. I noticed an American fighter bomber circling in the air and then making a bombing run against the nearby communist forces.

Just the previous day, I had been told, a bomb had accidentally killed 36 Americans soldiers on the Hill when it landed off target. This time I saw two bombs dropping from the approaching aircraft, both 250 pounders. And I saw that both bombs were falling short.

They were coming at us. I stood there, knowing these were my last moments on earth. The first bomb landed in a bunker 300 feet to my right, and exploded. The second came right towards me, and hit at the base of a tree 50 feet away and buried itself in the ground. It did not explode. Only one bomb out of fifty or so doesn’t explode when it hits the ground. It’s probably still there today. And I am still here today!

For a time on Hill 875 I felt worthless as a person. When I saw the death and destruction and the bloodshed, I felt ill. I was just a reporter. I could give the soldiers some of the water I was carrying. I could try to help the wounded with basic first aid. But otherwise, I felt useless. What use were my cameras and notebooks to them? I didn’t even carry a gun. I was just one more liability for the surviving defenders and the rescue party. But I could write about them. That’s why I was there, I reminded myself, to tell their story. That’s what war reporters do. And I did that when I got off the hill. I wrote a story about the desperation and bravery of the Americans, with more than 200 of them killed, and the cleverness and the ability of the communists.

My story began:

“War painted the living and the dead the same grey pallor – on Hill 875. The only way to tell who was alive and who was dead amongst the exhausted men, was to watch when the enemy mortar shells came crashing in.

“The living rushed unashamedly to the shelter of the tiny bunkers dug into the red clay of the hilltop. The wounded squirmed to the shelter of trees that had been blasted to the ground. Only the dead didn’t move, propped up in the bunkers where they had died in direct mortar hits, or lying face down in the dust where they had fallen to bullets.”

It was a long story. I wrote it quickly and eventually telephoned it in to our Saigon bureau. Along with my pictures, it was widely used in American newspapers.

But General William C. Westmorland, the commander of all American forces in Vietnam, did not like my story, or similar stories of battle action from other reporters in the field. He said they were too realistic, with too much detail about the difficulties of fighting the war.

In the month that I wrote about Hill 875, Westmoreland was in the United States addressing a joint session of the Houses of Congress, that’s about the most important audience you can get in America. Westmoreland told them “there is light at the end of the tunnel”; he was saying that victory was ahead. His turn of phrase was historic. When that phrase is used in America today it suggests unrealistic optimism in the outcome of a difficult job, Westmoreland’s gift to our language. In bitter truth there was no light of victory for the United States in Vietnam in 1967 or any other year.

The general and the President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, attempted for several years to persuade reporters like me to write positive stories. Stories to say we were winning the war. President Johnson, we later learned, even had me investigated by the FBI, to see if its agents could find damaging material on me and ruin my career. The president himself asked senior AP executives -– my own bosses -- to move me out of Vietnam. They refused.

I want to stress that I was not anti-war, not anti-American, and not pro-communist. I was a reporter working on a story of great significance to the United States – and to the world. I was an eyewitness to history. I was not violating any ground rules with my reporting of the uncensored war. The truth of what was going on was important to all parties. I was unwilling to deliberately conceal and hide the truth. And that truth was that the war was going badly for the United States.

So now to my last Caravelle story, April 30, 1975, the day the war ended. I had stayed behind along with two of my AP colleagues when the press corps had departed the previous day. Thousands of Vietnamese were trying to get out of the city as the communist forces closed in. A final assault was near. I worked through most of the night.

Here is what I wrote in my autobiography: “I made my way down the darkened office stairway and crossed the rain-drenched Lam Son square to the Caravelle. I seemed barely to have touched the bed when I was awakened by shouting in the streets below my window. I pulled the curtains aside and the bright sun blinded me for a moment. I could see a commotion in the square; several people fighting over a king-sized bed. I thought I must be dreaming but it turned out to be real. The looting had begun.

“I shaved and showered in cold water and selected a grey proletarian shirt for the benefit of the new city masters. I headed upstairs to the dining room, doubtful that breakfast would be served. But I was wrong. The uniformed waiters were on duty as usual. Below, the streets were already busy, with vehicle traffic headed towards the Saigon waterfront, where navy and commercial boats were docked. Sea would be the last avenue of escape.

“I saw groups of people waiting on tall buildings in the heart of the city, peering into the sky. Don’t they know it’s over, I wondered, but then came the familiar whine of a US Marine helicopter, circling the twin steeples of the Catholic Cathedral on John F Kennedy Square and settling down on the roof of the American Embassy. A waiter handed me binoculars and I watched a score of battle garbed US Marines race from behind sandbagged revetments on the embassy roof and enter the helicopter. In less than one minute they were gone -- the last official Americans to leave Saigon.

“I telephoned Esper at the AP office with the story. Even before that last helicopter had cleared the coast, the news of its leaving would be in the offices of every major press organization in the world.”

I was fortunate in the summer of 2007 to bring a team of students from Shantou University in southern China to visit Vietnam on a reporting trip that was memorable for all of us. We planned a breakneck schedule to give the journalism students a sense of what real news world is all about, a world where speed and volume has become a primary requirement because of the high costs of travel.

Our team had read pages of research material on Vietnam prior to the trip, and like all travelers before them they quickly realized that words and pictures did not prepare them for the shock of arrival in a foreign land.

Our study team traveled with some advantages. Vietnam is a close cousin to southern China so the foods and customs were familiar, as was the upsurge of economic growth evident in new building construction wherever we went. In Cholon, the thriving Chinese suburb of Ho Chi Minh City, the students even discovered former Shantou residents who had moved there years ago and were happy to talk, in Chinese, about their life in modern Vietnam.

Vietnam and China have similar communist governments and the students were interested in finding out how society functioned in a political environment like their own. One economic official we interviewed was asked if Vladimir Lenin, whose statue and image were familiar aspects of the Hanoi landscape, would have approved of the Do Moi or “renovation” economic policies that have transformed the Vietnamese economy, as indeed similar programs have done in China. He responded that Lenin was a reformer whose premature death ended progressive economic policies, an answer, the students agreed, they might have heard in Beijing.

My own primary experience with Vietnam had been the American war in the 1960s and 1970s. I had lectured about the subject at Shantou U. I now wanted the students to get a sense of that war, but more so, to look beyond that conflict to modern times, to a place where the Vietnamese had put the war behind them. After all, more than half of Vietnam’s 90 million people had been born since the war ended in 1975. Many observers had written that the war was no longer a factor in Vietnamese life, and that the country was united, and that prosperity was the primary objective for all.

One field trip I made with the students in Vietnam was particularly memorable. We were very busy in Hanoi and I planned an easy day after we arrived in Hue, our second stop, visiting the imperial palace, the royal tombs and the boat people on the Perfume River. In my heart of hearts I would have preferred to head north to the huge military cemetery at Truong Son were 10,000 North Vietnamese troops were buried, most of them killed on the Ho Chi Minh trail during the American war.
Near to the cemetery is the old U.S. Marine firebase of Con Then that overlooked the old DMZ with North Vietnam, and was the subject of a Time Magazine cover in 1967 during a series of heavy attacks on the base. I had covered that battle. And on the way to that area there was the city of Quang Tri, itself subject to frequent attack later in the war.

I mentioned that trip idea to the student team, and I was delighted that half decided to come with me despite their weariness and the prospect of ten hours of driving and walking in the very hot sun. We split up into two groups, with one staying in Hue to get the necessary pictures and interviews we had previously planned. It was a good example of how news coverage works in the field, that you grab the opportunity for a special story whenever you can.

My students later wrote about what we found on our exhausting journey into the old battlefields -- places that have not been forgotten by the Vietnamese. I had devoted four power-point lectures at Shantou U to the press coverage of the Vietnam War. I think that our trek to Con Thien in particular was an appropriate way of bringing the war home.

We walked the old trails to the base area over rotted sandbags and broken metal pieces, and saw the last remaining strongpoint, a concrete bunker, its walls pitted with shell and rifle fire, standing on the hilltop with a commanding view of the old DMZ, a view that many US marines gave their lives to maintain. One student told me, after I had described battles fought in the bomb-blasted landscape we were driving through, “This is like a moving text book”. She was wearing a T-shirt eerily appropriate for the day, adorned with the inscription, “Scary Random bombing”.

We discovered something else as we moved from north to south. We found that on the surface the Vietnamese people were amiable and helpful to visiting foreigners, and we were aware that the government had long stressed the importance of strong political and economic ties with its former enemies in the west.

Most Vietnamese we met in the north, however, were quick to make some reference or other to the American war and the terrible toll it took, with as many as three million people dead we were told. We were to find much remaining evidence of the war in the south, but we learned it was the north that provided most of the manpower, with the phrase “born in the north to die in the south” was a lament for Vietnamese families losing their sons and daughters in the war years.

I asked a local businessman if he got much solace visiting the Hanoi War Museum with its array of captured American heavy guns and fighter aircraft and he responded that he lost a brother in the war and mourned him more than he took pleasure in victory. This sense of sadness has permeated some Vietnamese literature in the past decade.

The Shantou U students were soon to see that the Vietnamese government placed patriotism and sacrifice at the core of national ideology, from the elaborate Truong Son cemetery at the old DMZ with its 10,000 reverently tended graves, to the old French prison nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton” in the center of the capital where John McCain’s bloodstained flight suit hangs in one of several rooms dedicated to American prisoners held in the building during the war years.

Much more dramatically, the prison featured in pictures and in life-like models the wide range of tortures said to be practiced by the French colonialists on political dissidents during their 100 year rule, including a tall wooden guillotine with its sharp blade raised, and a bloodstained head basket lying nearby. The normally buoyant Shantou U students were stopped in their tracks by the most gruesome display any had seen outside horror movies.

There was one particular scene that grabbed our students’ attention, and I hope it remains in their memory for a long time. It was a large room in the Ho Chi Minh City war museum with a permanent exhibition devoted to the journalists of all nations who died covering the French and American wars. The faces and pictures on the walls were familiar to the Shantou students because they were former colleagues I had often talked about in my lectures, photographers killed in the war such as Life Magazine’s Larry Burrows, the AP’s Henri Huet and Hyunh Cong La, and UPI’s Koichi Sawada amongst many others.

The bitter legacy of the war had not dimmed the Vietnamese government’s understanding of the bravery and dedication of the reporters and photographers of all nations who strived to tell the truth about the war and gave their lives doing so. To be so remembered was a reinforcement of a theme I was emphasizing in Shantou University, that journalism has a major – and worthy -- role to play in the World today.

I believe the insights my students gained into modern Vietnam went way beyond what the average tourist would find, which is what journalism is all about. We noted the obvious things such as the four million motorcycles clogging the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, the perfect 4:30 a.m. sunrise on China Beach, and the rampant commercialism that is transforming Vietnam, to some degree, into a competitor with China.

But we also detected the inherent sadness below the surface of a country much more scarred by war than many observers believe. This is not to say that our Shantou U student team began their Vietnam journey as amateurs and emerged as journalism professionals, but I can say they are on their way!

My return visits to Vietnam, particularly in the company of students, are some of the most satisfying journeys in my life. They close the circle from when I first arrived as a reporter in this war-torn country in 1962, to when, from the ashes of a long war, an independent nation and people have emerged to take their place proudly in the World community.

• Peter Arnett's speech is reprinted here with permission from Saigon Caravelle.