Walking the Tightrope

By Jan Smark Nilsson

Saigon 1961/62 - civil war, coups d'état, family breakdowns, awash with rumour and political intrigue.

Very little has been written about this period in Vietnam’s history: after the defeat and departure of the French and before the influx of international armies.

The book portrays the strength of Vietnamese nationalism, which led to what some might call espionage and betrayal. It spans forty years and traces the lives of two Vietnamese men working for Reuters News Agency, one of whom was also employed by the Viet Cong.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304091963

Book preview

Walking the Tightrope

WALKING THE TIGHTROPE

by

Jan Smark Nilsson

Copyright © Jan Smark Nilsson 2012

Terebra Publishing

1/71 Moore Street

Trinity Beach Qld 4879

Australia

Email [e-mail]

First published by Terebra Publishing 2012

ABN 85270907379

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers and the author of this book.

ISBN 978-1-304-09196-3

For my dearest Bertil with all my love

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE 2001: GOING BACK

Feelings of apprehension began to set in as the Malaysian Air jet left Kuala Lumpur and headed over the Gulf of Siam towards Cambodia. Would I recognise Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City? Reunification between North and South had taken place in 1976 and the capital of the newly united country had moved to Hanoi. Would Saigon, I wondered as we flew over the brownish Mekong River, have become a grey, grim city with soldiers on every corner?

In addition to my misgivings were flashes of excitement when I realised that, after forty years I was really going back to visit the city which was my first home after my marriage to Peter Smark, and the first city outside Australia I had lived in. We had been married for only a few weeks when Peter was posted to Saigon as Bureau Chief for AAP-Reuters. I remember feeling both apprehensive and excited then, too, but in a different way. At that time, a whole new way of life, a new world, was opening up and I had no idea or expectation of what lay ahead.

What did lie ahead was forty years of travel all over the world. According to the Vietnamese calendar, I was born in the Year of the Tiger and therefore my life would always be on the move.

And so it had been. After two years in Saigon, we moved to Singapore for another couple of years, then Sydney, Canberra, London, Alicante, Melbourne  and San Francisco.

So the forty years between 1961 and 2001 had been frantically busy, both professionally and personally. But I felt I had to return to Saigon to sort out a mystery that had caused me great consternation when I had first heard the rumours over ten years before.

These rumours had come via other foreign correspondents and concerned two Vietnamese men, Pham Xuan An and Pham Ngoc Dinh. An and Dinh worked in the Reuters office in Saigon in 1961, when I first arrived there. Pham Xuan An, the elder of the two, was Office Manager for Reuters in Saigon, and Pham Ngoc Dinh was the Office Assistant. He worked as a general factotum, delivering copy to the Post Office, picking up office supplies, filing and performing general office duties.

We had heard that An left Reuters under a cloud in 1964, two years after we left. He then joined Time Magazine as South East Asian correspondent - the only Vietnamese to hold such a post. When Saigon fell in 1975, An found his wife and four children places on a flight to the US, on one of the last planes leaving.

This much I knew. Then the rumours began to circulate. An, it was said, had lost contact with his wife and their four children. They were said to be, perhaps, in Paris. And then, the journalists said, he re-established contact with his family and sent his wife air tickets for their return to Saigon. The tickets were said to be on Aeroflot, the Russian airline, and they travelled via Moscow and thence to Saigon. On arrival in Saigon, Nhan (An's wife) was met by her husband resplendent in a colonel's uniform - the Communist Party uniform.

Nhan and An and their children were chauffeur driven to an imposing two-storey house in one of the inner suburbs of Saigon, a residence once inhabited by the British First Secretary.

When I first heard rumours of An's story in 1978, I was living in San Francisco. I immediately wrote to him in circumspect terms, because I suspected that letters would be intercepted and censored.

He wrote back to me, but by then I had moved back to Melbourne and I did not receive his letter.

Then, in 1993, a journalist called Luke Hunt who was writing a book on the war in Vietnam, approached me, aware that I had known An. Luke was going to visit An in Ho Chi Minh City to question him about his involvement with the Viet Cong. I asked Luke if he would hand deliver a letter from me to An and Nhan, which he did.

To my delight, Luke returned from Vietnam carrying a five-page handwritten letter from An, in which he summarised what had happened to him and Nhan and their family in the intervening years. There was no mention of his involvement with the Viet Cong.

CHAPTER TWO 1961: SETTLING IN

Dinner was arranged for eight o'clock. The General Manager of Reuters News Agency arrived from London at six. Tan Son Nhut Airport was in its usual chaotic state, with a mixture of military aircraft, helicopters and international and local passenger planes parked next to each other. We were there in our faded green Hillman Minx to roll out the welcome carpet.

A rather portly man, he was perspiring in the late afternoon heat, mopping his rather florid complexion with a crumpled white handkerchief.

As we drove from the airport to our flat in the centre of Saigon, he exclaimed about the traffic, which appeared to him to be life threatening, the beauty of the Vietnamese girls on their bicycles with their long, flowing dresses over silk trousers flapping in the wind, street hawkers milling around with bamboo poles over their shoulders carting water in jerry cans. The smells, he noticed, were very different - a heady mixture of nuoc mam, the pungent fish sauce which stands in stone jars in the sun until it ferments, and the subtle fragrance of tamarind and frangipani blossoms blended with a whiff of effluent, all mixed with exhaust fumes from the battered old blue and yellow Renault taxis with their doors held shut with twine.

As we skirted around the general market, a fleet of ambulances, their two-tone klaxons blaring, cut in front of our car to the emergency entrance of the main hospital. We braked sharply, just missing the rear of an ambulance. It was really quite normal for Saigon traffic, but our guest took in several deep breaths.

We arrived at our flat and took the rickety lift to the fourth, and top, floor of the building. It opened on to a small landing, opposite which was our flat. Once inside, drinks were served and the pleasantries observed.

- Jolly nice little flat you've got here. Is it airconditioned?

- No, but the ceiling fans do a good job of circulating the air.

We moved into the dining room. He strode to the window.

- And look at those roofs down there. Broken tiles on all of them, he exclaimed.

- We've had a few bombings and air strikes lately. People don't rush to fix them, and besides, they can't see them. Apart from the hospital, ours is the only four-storey building around here, so we are probably the only ones who can see them. As long as the rain doesn't come in, I suppose it doesn't matter much.

- How long have you been here?

- Oh, about four months now. We were lucky because we were able to move into the flat left for us by Bruce Russell, the previous correspondent.

Mai, who besides doing our cooking and housekeeping, also doubled as a valet, appeared carrying a heavy tray laden with the main course. She was very anxious to impress our visitor from London and we had imported a leg of lamb from Singapore especially for the occasion. Mai had cooked it with loving care since it was the first time she had ever seen, let alone cooked, this strange beast. Because of the paddy fields and the monsoonal climate there were no herds of cattle or sheep around Saigon. The only meat came from aged water buffalo when their working days pulling wooden ploughs through the paddy fields were finished. The carcasses arrived at the general market from the Delta and were expertly butchered. When delicious French sauces were added, buffalo turned out to be a delicacy. There was also plenty of seafood - crabs, fresh and saltwater fish, eels and the occasional lobster - to be found in the market, as well as scrawny hens fit only for boiling.

So the advent of the lamb was a very important occasion and Mai had been excited while preparing it to my instructions. Not that I knew very much about cooking, but roast lamb is part of the staple diet in Australia and I had a rough idea of how it was done, from watching my mother prepare it for Sunday dinners.

Maybe it was the weight of the tray, but as Mai came into the dining room, the roast lamb resting on its wooden serving dish slid onto the tiled floor with a soft splat.

The conversation halted, Mai uttered a troi oi, the Vietnamese equivalent of oy veh or, in the Australian vernacular, bloody hell, picked the lamb off the floor and beat a hasty retreat.

What to do? With suppressed concern Peter and I found ourselves suddenly gabbling on about the current political situation in Vietnam, about which I knew very little. No one mentioned the downward destiny of the lamb as I passed bowls of Vietnamese dried fish strips and cashews round the table. Our guest, too, played along and pretended that nothing untoward had happened.

After what seemed like an eternity, Mai re-appeared with a big grin on her face. Without a word she set down a beautifully presented roast chicken on a porcelain dish in the middle of the table. This had been carved off the bone into strips, then reassembled, making it, I thought, simplicity itself to serve.

The chicken turned out to be rabbit, assembled to look like a chicken. This was my first experience of the famous Chinese dish known as Beggar's Chicken. A tap with the back of a serving spoon released all the pieces and I served them happily on to three large plates.

After our guest had departed, Mai came back with that same big smile. How had she done it? There was certainly no rabbit in the kitchen and besides, she'd never cooked Beggar's Chicken for us before.

- Yes, but sister cook this. Sister work in flat below. I take down lamb, she cook rabbit. We swap. Truongs downstairs have lamb and you have rabbit!

Life in Saigon in 1961 was like that. No matter how much you thought you had settled in and absorbed the lifestyle, there was always another surprise in store... and another.

CHAPTER THREE THE PEARL OF THE ORIENT

Saigon was a wonderful blend of the Orient and Paris, complete with a concert hall, elegant boutiques selling French perfumes and beautifully dressed women and immaculately tailored men promenading the broad tree-lined boulevards in the cool of the evening. Added to this were the pungent smells of an Asian city, the hoots of taxis seeking fares, and the cries of street vendors offering to sharpen knives or scissors, rhythmically beating the stone rods which they used as their tools. There were also fortune tellers and vendors selling peanuts and flowers and black market American cigarettes, as well as local brands, one quaintly called Ruby Queen.

Out in the countryside however, the French influence had only superficially changed a way of life that had existed for thousands of years. There the fluent French of Saigon gave way to a patois, used only to converse with foreigners.

Way back, the old kingdom had consisted of three parts: Tonkin in the north, Annam in the centre and Cochin China in the rice-growing delta in the south.

South Vietnam was ruled by the 60-year old mandarin and ascetic, Ngo Dinh Diem. He was generally acknowledged to be incorruptible, but there were constant allegations of corruption among those close to him. Chief among these were his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the Head of Police, and his wife, Madame Nhu, referred to as the Dragon Lady. Another brother, Ngo Dinh Can, was war lord of Central Vietnam and yet another, Ngo Dinh Thuc, was Archbishop of Saigon.

In North Vietnam the Communist Party Chairman Ho Chi Minh had led the country since 1954. The Commander-in-Chief of North Vietnam's armed forces was General Vo Nguyen Giap, the man who was the brains behind the Vietnamese Communists' military victory over the French forces in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu also in 1954.

To the west of Vietnam, Cambodia walked the tightrope of support from both East and West, led by the flamboyant 39-year old Prince Norodom Sihanouk. By 1961, he had been Cambodia's leader for twenty years, firstly as King and