Wednesday 19 October 2011
Vinh told Edinger they had covered the same major story, but did not remembering meeting at the time, in Saigon in 1975.
Vinh, then a cameraman with (North) Vietnamese state television, was on the first flight from Hanoi to Saigon on 1 May, a day after Communist troops entered the city.
Edinger had arrived on 28 April because then-editor Jonathan Fenby believed his French passport might allow him to work more freely after the expected Communist takeover than bureau chief David Laulicht, an American, and reporter Jeremy Toye and fireman Pat Massey, both Britons, who were helicoptered out of the country on 29 April.
“I remember meeting a BBC crew but had no idea that a large part of my subsequent career would be with Reuters,” Vinh said.
He is being replaced at Reuters by his son, video-journalist Nguyen Ha Minh, who has already worked abroad for international media.
Vinh and fellow veteran Vietnamese journalist Nguyen Van Than have created their own Asia Vision agency which, among other projects, is interviewing eyewitnesses to the last days of the Vietnam War. Vinh and Edinger (accompanied by his brother Charles, a former Reuterian now a senior producer for SNTV in London), met several times in Hanoi, including once when Vinh videotaped Edinger’s recollections of the dramatic last days of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City.
Edinger was in Asia as organiser for a 10-member delegation from the French Defence Correspondents Association which spent a week in China at the invitation of that country’s armed forces, visiting army, navy and air force bases and schools in Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. He then met his brother in Hanoi for a two-week tour of northern Vietnam including the former battle site at Dien Bien Phu.
Photo: Bernard Edinger with Nguyen Van Vinh in Hanoi
Bernard Edinger samples mao tai and Glasnost à la chinoise
Tuesday 25 May 2010
“You may remember that I told The Baron last July that, as a member of the board of the 100-member strong Association des Journalistes de Défense, the French defence correspondents’ group, I had organised group visits since 2004 to the US (twice), Israel (twice) as well as to Germany and to Britain.
These visits are coordinated with the local military establishments and aim at providing stories for our members which take a long time to set up, i.e. meeting the top US General David Petraeus or going on a night mission along the coast of the Gaza Strip in an Israeli fast patrol boat.
Our visit to China turned out to be the first time that Chinese authorities had agreed to take a group of foreign journalists on a tour of their armies. Some individual foreign journalists had visited specified individual locations in the recent past but we were taken to installations which Western colleagues based permanently in Beijing said they didn’t even knew existed.
Our group consisted of four people; the defence correspondent of Le Monde, a reporter from Assaut magazine, former Reuterian Pierre Tran for US-based Defense News and myself as organiser and stringing for the main French Army monthly Terre Information Magazine.
Among sites or units we visited were the 6th Armoured Division outside Beijing, a helicopter regiment in Sichuan province and the National Defence University in Beijing.
We were also given extensive briefings about such topics as army participation in earthquake rescue efforts in recent years and about Chinese anti-piracy naval patrols in the Gulf of Aden.
One activity we were not prepared for was the traditional lavish banquets afforded to foreign guests (up to 23 dishes at a banquet given in Cheng-Du by the general commanding forces along China’s southern borders with seven foreign states – he commands nearly half a million men, more than twice the strength of the French and British armies combined).
During these banquets, I was embarrassingly bumped up to the rank of “head of delegation” and had to reply to speeches and toasts accompanied by multiple glasses (fortunately short ones!) of fiery mao tai national drink.
In the picture, I am being welcomed by Major-General Jia Xiaoning, deputy head of the Chinese Defence Ministry’s foreign relations division. Sitting in an enormous armchair listening to compliments being lavished upon our small group while official photographers snapped away, I felt like US President Richard Nixon on his ground-breaking visit to China in 1972.
But the interpreter sitting behind us wasn’t really necessary because Major General Jia spoke perfect French! Glasnost à la chinoise certainly has its surprises.
Our association tries to avoid our foreign outings taking place too close to one another. But Murphy’s Law struck here and less than 24 hours after my return from China, I was on my way to take another AJD group for a tour of US forces and headquarters in Germany.
The mood there was certainly far different from the Chinese banquets because the most marking moment by far in Germany was to stand outside Landstuhl hospital, the largest American medical establishment outside the United States, when severely wounded GIs, some of them comatose double amputees, were unloaded from buses bringing them from the airport where they had just arrived from Afghanistan.
Bernard Edinger leads French defence correspondents to US
Friday 3 July 2009
Bernard Edinger, former correspondent, meets General David Petraeus at the headquarters of the US Central Command at Tampa, Florida on 16 June.
Since his early retirement in April 2001, one of Edinger's activities has been to organise trips abroad for the French Defence Correspondents Association (AJD) of which he is a board member. His latest trip was at the head of a group of nine AJD members to Tampa as well as to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home of US Special Forces.
"Meeting General Petraeus was no easy matter and it took me four months to set up the visit," Edinger reports. "General Petraeus, sometimes described as the most influential US military man since General Dwight Eisenhower, received us for 40 minutes and spoke freely about the combat fronts for which he is responsible – Iraq and Afghanistan and, increasingly, Pakistan.”
The meeting may have been because President Obama wants President Nicolas Sarkozy to increase French troop presence in Afghanistan. “He hoped to get his message through to the French public through my colleagues who included representatives from such influential media as the AFP news agency and the daily newspaper Le Figaro, both of whom gave wide coverage to Petraeus' remarks," Edinger said.
The French group later flew to Fort Bragg where they were given rare access to the Special Forces who are extremely active in Afghanistan, including at a school for Afghan commandos run jointly by US and French Special Forces.
Edinger has organised previous visits to the United States, Israel, Germany and Britain. "Organising such visits is practically a full-time job since it means contacts with foreign embassies and defence ministries to set up meaningful and interesting events such as joining a night patrol off the Gaza coast on an Israeli missile boat. I brought along seasick pills but most members of the group said they would not need them. This was before the boat hit full speed and some correspondents spent nearly the whole trip leaning over the rail as we bounced along at high speed!” The job also involves organising air travel, renting mini-buses, reserving hotels and, especially, finding good restaurants for “very festive dinners” every night.
"Of course, like media everywhere, editors have to be convinced that the stories that are going to be brought back are really worth it before they approve the expense of travel. So I have to make sure our hosts will show us really original subjects and I also have to try to keep prices as low as possible.
“Our association picks up part of the tab for the travel and many military establishments have special discount prices in nearby hotels which we can benefit from. In London, we were able to stay in a posh officer's club at very low member prices; but only because the British MoD identified me to the club as a French officer. My colleagues had a hard time keeping a straight face when the club receptionist asked on our arrival: ‘Which of you gentlemen is Lieutenant Colonel Edinger?’"
