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— 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.