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Ghosts Talking To Ghosts

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

April 28, 2000 / 11:24 AM EDT / CBS

A certain slight air of awkwardness hangs over any reunion, the result of selves suspended between yesterday and today, between who we were and who we’ve become. No matter how much we enjoy catching up on families and jobs, on lives lived in the present, at reunions we are, at some level, ghosts talking to ghosts. We look around and see the people we once knew—some very well—and realize we are at that moment just as much looking forward from the time we shared in the past as we are looking back from today.

I went to a reunion, this past weekend, of people who had covered and helped to cover the Vietnam War for CBS News. The occasion was the 25-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon. It was good to see some faces I hadn’t seen in years, absolutely, and good to once again feel the camaraderie that will always lie between those of us who knew such strange and dangerous times in such a faraway place. Beneath the heartfelt greetings and reminiscences, however, thoughts and feelings begin to run deep.

CBS News In Saigon

To Saigon And Back
CBS White House Correspondent Bill Plante volunteered to return to the city everyone else was trying to flee -- Saigon in the spring of 1975.

The Greatest Story Never Told
CBS News Correspondent Bob Simon, one of the most experienced broadcast war reporters, reflects on his last days working as a foreign correspondent during the 1975 fall of Saigon.

Filming Under The Gun
On April 30, 1975 the last American troops left Saigon. South Vietnam had lost the war. CBS Cameraman Mike Marriott was one of the last to leave. He has some surprising memories of those final days.

My colleague Eric Sevareid once wrote that the essence of youth is believing things last forever. For those who were in Vietnam, in combat or in combat coverage, this essence faded before scnes that proved in unmistakably stark terms that this was not so. A kid from Tennessee, marching back from a Thanksgiving Day dinner of turkey from a can steps on a land mine and, with a muffled “ba-room,” his legs are no longer there. South Vietnamese soldiers, in a rage, push a blindfolded prisoner out of a helicopter at 3,000 feet. Disemboweled villagers strung up by Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars speak the truth from silent lips: Life is fleeting. What is here now can be gone in an instant, in the blink of an eye.

When I landed in Danang in late 1965 the American combat role had begun to escalate. I felt I should spend most of my time obtaining the television record of Americans at war. I saw the American push as the developing story.

I may have been wrong. I did receive some criticism, in and out of CBS, for spending too much time in the field covering combat instead of what was, to many, a political war. I did some politics. Perhaps not enough. I thought then and think now that the complaint was fair, but I also do not apologize for doing things the way I did.

For the first time, after all, war was coming into our homes. For the first time people could watch actual combat scenes while they ate dinner. I don’t say that is necessarily a good thing. But Vietnam changed the way we think about television. And television changed the way we think about war. The repercussions continue to this day: one of the many “lessons of Vietnam” absorbed by the Pentagon has clearly been to keep a tighter rein on the images that will be seen by the American public.

It was a new world for me, as it was for many of us. Covering the Vietnam War was made easier, though never easy, by the professionalism and expertise of people like my cameraman Jerry Adams. My rule was and is, when you move into rough waters, know your cameraman. Adams had worked for me at KHOU in Houston. And he had combat experience, having lied about his age to fight in World War II. Those involved in covering the war learned to lean on one another and to defer, in certain matters at last, to the voices of experience.

Bulletin Board

For the U.S., the Vietnam War was a watershed event. But even now, 25 years after U.S. Marines and embassy personnel evacuated Saigon, bitter feelings still flow through the veins of American society. Did the U.S. learn its lessons from the decade-long war it lost?

Go o the CBSnews.com Bulletin Board and join the discussion.

I also learned a contradiction that is central to being involved in combat coverage. Genuine though it may be, you never quite earn the fear, the discomfort, of whatever pain or grief you feel. This is because you are aware that, barring a misstep, you can leave at a time of your own choosing. Meanwhile you are dry and safe and fed more days than not. You stay a year, observe the war, intrude upon it, but you do not really, fully, share the daily risk. At least not in the same way that soldiers do.

But there is fear and there is risk. As many as 148 western journalists and photographers were killed covering the Vietnam War from its beginning to its end 25 years ago. For journalists, it was the deadliest of America’s wars.

“It’s Been A Long Time” was the theme and title of this weekend’s reunion. Looking around the room, it was a premise that was hard to refute. We who were once young now have gray hairs and adult children. Some have left broadcast journalism; most are no longer with CBS. We hashed over old times and learned about what’s happened in each other’s lives in the long stretch since. It was, all in all, a good time over memories of a bad time.

The only thing missing was those who were missing. And would be forever. We didn’t speak their names—correspondent George Syvertsen, producer Gerald Miller, cameramen Ramnik Lekhi and Tomoharu Ishii, soundman Kojiro Sakai, photographer Dana Stone—but I’d like to think we all found a quiet moment to think about them. They were the CBS casualties of the Vietnam War, the first five killed at a road block on Cambodian Highway 3 on their way to cover a major battle on May 31, 1970. The last, Dana Stone, also stopped at a checkpoint on a Cambodian highway in April of that year, and was never heard from again. I’m sure I was not alone in feeling the presence of these fallen colleagues among the ghosts of whom we had all once been.

The war lingers on in our memories and in the national consciousness, yes. But as another war correspondent recently remarked in a televised remembrance, Vietnam is almost as distant for today’s youth as World War I was to my generation. Those of us who gathered this past weekend are older now, and irrevocably changed, but the six who were there in spirit remain forever young, lost doing the work that those of us still here looked back on with some second thoughts, and a measure of quiet pride. We cared, we tried, and we gave it everything we had—because we knew it mattered.