The Greatest Story Never Told

Cameraman David Green and I were planning to stay in Vietnam after the American evacuation, but on the morning of April 29, 1975, we changed our minds.

The North Vietnamese started shelling Saigon at first light. Around 10a.m., Armed Forces Radio began broadcasting Bing Crosby's rendition of White Christmas.

That was the surreal signal that the evacuation was to begin.

Minutes later, a telex arrived in the Saigon Bureau from Bill Leonard, Vice President of CBS News. It ordered all of us to leave. Frankly, that didn't bother us too much. It certainly didn't move us to change our plans. We saw it as a corporate move, a disclaimer of sorts, and were we to disobey and be the only Americans to film the North Vietnamese bursting into Saigon, we didn't believe Leonard would discipline us too severely.

But when we went out into the streets, the fury and the chaos gave us reason to pause.

South Vietnamese soldiers were roaming around, firing in the air, looting shops, and hijacking vehicles. "Big brother" was leaving, abandoning them to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese, and they were one scared and mad bunch of guys.

We returned to the Caravelle Hotel for some spare batteries and headed out for the embassy. The surrealism followed us all the way.

As I walked out of the hotel, a room-boy ran after me shouting, "Mr. Simon, you forgot your laundry." I didn't have the heart to tell him I had no use for my laundry so I gave him a few bucks and threw my nicely tailored Mr. Minh shirts in the street.

David and I took the vehicle named the "Mini-moke," drove to the embassy, parked a block away, looked at each other and laughed. What to do with the keys? We left them in the ignition.

The embassy walls were already surrounded by thousands of frntic Vietnamese trying to get inside. They waved ID cards, visas, and letters from employers. Nothing worked. "Round eyes" were the only passports that counted that day. We were lifted over the wall by a couple of marines.

If you were a TV news producer and you made a list of the shots you wanted to see of that day, the last day of the war, we had them all.

Pudgy embassy officials in short sleeved white shirts sawing down a giant jacaranda tree in the interior parking lot so the jolly green giant helicopters could land. Other diplomats were burning stacks of hundred dollar bills. Small helicopters parking precariously on the roof as people haltingly made their way upstairs.

We had it all and when we knew we had it all we decided to head for the ships. A CIA agent who wanted to get his people on board chased us off the first helicopter we tried to board at gunpoint. But we finally took off in one of the jolly greens. I lay on my stomach near the open rear door for my last glimpse of Saigon.

When we landed on the Midway, I somehow wormed my way up to the bridge, got inside and told the captain I realized he was a very busy man right then, had a lot on his mind, but we had just covered the end of the war in Vietnam and we would be forever in his debt if he could help us get our film somewhere where it could be sent by satellite to the states.

He was remarkably sympathetic, told us that a chopper would be leaving his ship at 6 a.m. for a carrier with fixed wing capability and if we gave our film to the chopper pilot, it would land in the Philippines by mid morning.

I wrote my script on deck on my old Olivetti typewriter. I remember the last line. Over pictures David Green had shot from the helicopter, I wrote, "Saigon. A city which will haunt us for the rest of our days."

The way it turned out, that's not all that would haunt me about that last day.

After recording the script on David's camera, we paced the deck all night. We couldn't risk falling asleep and missing the chopper. But it all went totally according to plan. The pilots showed up before dawn. They knew about the film and we watched them take off.

We were only to discover five days later, when we arrived in the Philippines, that all had not gone according to our plan. The chopper had indeed landed on the fixed wing carrier. The film had indeed been offloaded. We have that from the pilots.

But that is where the record stops. The film was lost, never made it anywhere. At least, anywhere we ever found it.

The biggest story I ever covered, or ever would cover, never made air.