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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.