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My total of knowledge of Indochina was buried in my back pack: three books:
Graham Greene's "The Quiet American," Bernard Fall's "Hell in a Very Small Place,"
and Andre Malraux' "La Voie Royale."
The last was meant to improve French language abilities.
Someone (a misguided old colonial no doubt) told me that French was essential
to work in Vietnam. Vietnamese language lessons would have been a better investment.
Still, the books stood me in good stead and thirty one years later I still regard
them as the best ever written about Indochina.
Going to Vietnam in 1970 was more a lack of other opportunity than anything else.
I arrived in Hong Kong from Japan (where I had been freelancing in print and radio) in late
March. I fancied myself as a "young China hand:" a sophomoric analyst of Chinese affairs.
In University, I developed a passion for the study Mao's "Cultural Revolution."
But China was off limits.
In the days before President Nixon traveled to Beijing and opened the doors a crack,
visas to China for Americans were almost impossible to obtain.
My attempts in Hong Kong to join a group that might take me to China failed.
So in my curiosity about the region, Vietnam beckoned.
No student in America in the late 1960's could escape Vietnam's clutches, one way or another.
As a student reporter in Washington, I covered the massive anti-war demonstrations at the
Pentagon in 1967. Norman Mailer made them memorable in "Armies of the Night."
I had avoided the military draft by luck. A lottery system had been imposed to decide who
would be called. My number never came up.
Yet irresistibly Vietnam called.
Most importantly, remaining in Hong Kong , my money was running out. I was offered 250 US dollars
a week as a radio reporter if I went. I went.
I was lucky to have had four guides to initiate me in the ways of Saigon.
Jim Russell, my long time friend and college roommate, had arrived in Vietnam the year before
for U-P-I. He encouraged me to come.
Alan Dawson had just joined United Press thus creating the vacancy at the small radio
network I joined.
Bill Dowell, a freelance reporter just out of the U-S army, quickly became a regular
companion to morning cafés on Tu Do street and to fields of combat beyond.
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