Monday 3 May 2010
During a distinguished Reuters career James Pringle’s byline appeared over coverage from Buenos Aires, Saigon, Phnom Penh, Havana, Nairobi, Peking and Biafra. Now he writes a personal reminiscence for The Baron on a return to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon.
James Pringle
Our office, selected, I think, by an earlier bureau chief, Nick Turner, was in the most strategic position of any media group, just 200 yards from the presidential palace, and in the other way in a direct line with the American embassy. That really served us well in the January 1968 Tet Offensive, the battle that was a psychological victory for the guerrillas over the Americans and a harbinger of the final end – though still some years away – of the Vietnam War.
Both the palace and the embassy were principal targets. At one stage, I actually heard the VC talking urgently in the street immediately outside. That was shortly after bullets flashed past the windows of the downstairs office, and I told the telex operator to “douse the lights”.
The disappointing news is that the whole of Han Thuyen, a beautiful terraced street, is to be demolished to make way for high rises. Vietnam is no different than anywhere else.
The parade celebrated the 35th anniversary of the liberation of Saigon, and was the latest, and some say last, re-union of correspondents who covered Vietnam.
In Cambodia, earlier in the past ten days, we had the first and only reunion of correspondents – called the “Vietnam Old Hacks” – who covered Cambodia, usually, as in my case, the same people who were in Vietnam.
We commemorated the 37 foreign and Cambodian journalists who were killed in Cambodia, and the 34 foreign and Vietnamese journalists killed in Vietnam.
Looking behind me, I could see the office door through which, in the “second wave” offensive in May 1968, Bruce Pigott, then 23, and Ron Laramy, 31, exited for the last time, to be killed an hour or so later in Cholon, Saigon's Chinatown, in the bitter street fighting there. Earlier, I had stood outside the office thinking about them, and how their careers, and lives, were so abruptly cut off.
I also thought about our fantastic Vietnamese staff, who came to work through the shooting and mortar fire to punch out, not only our copy, but that of a dozen American and British newspapers and magazines, and help us cover the war. These were Mr Bo, Mr Tho, Mr Bien, Mr Lan, Mr Dinh, Mr Anh, the lovely Miss Tuyet (“Snow”) and “Mde Cookie”, who fed the bureau chief, who lived above the office.
It was very sensible in Vietnam to always have someone close to a telex, be it the bureau chief or someone else, in from the field.
In Cambodia, where more correspondents died on the terrifying roads than were killed in Vietnam, I paused to remember Sok Ngoun, our reporter, interpreter and driver, who was bludgeoned to death by the Khmer Rouge after the fall of Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975.
● Peter Sharrock, once our man in Phnom Penh in the war, was to have been present, as an archaeological academic now at SOAS, to guide our group through the Khmer sculptures at the National Museum, but was prevented from coming by the volcanic cloud downhold on UK flights.
In our midst in Cambodia, there were two journalists who were portrayed in the movie The Killing Fields, Jon Swain and Al Rockoff, and there was also the “heavy smoker” Tim Page, still trying to find the remains of his photographer friends, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone, who disappeared 40 years ago and who probably died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge.
Because my wife, Milly, is Cambodian and we have a house in Phnom Penh, on the Old Hacks’ last night here we were able to give a reception, where a whole pig was consumed and also much of the hard stuff and, by Rockoff and Page, much of the soft stuff.
Postscript: Garden of Stone
The Chilang Garden was always a pleasant little haven in the heart of Dong Khoi, previously Tu Do, Saigon's main shopping street diagonally across the road from La Pagode, a relaxed coffee shop popular with hacks, with charming waitresses from Cholon.
Now, one third of the garden has been taken over by the 18 storey marble and glass Vincom Center, a shopping mall with outlets of Armani, Versace and Jimmy Choo.
It looks as if, before long, the whole garden will be needed as extra parking space, further depleting the amenity of Dong Khoi, which is also losing, of course, the Eden Building, with Givral's.
About the last thing that Ho Chi Minh City needs is another shopping mall.
Still, a lot of party honchos from way back have an interest in such franchises just as they once had first choice of houses (the former Reuter office was occupied for years by a high level NLF personage, whose daughter was gracious enough once to invite us in).
But I wonder if it was for Versace and Armani that the National Liberation Front sacrificed in the tunnels of Cu Chi, and many other battlegrounds.
Was the bottom line of it all a shopping mall? One doubts that this was meant to be case.
Photo: Milly Pringle
● Steve Somerville’s ‘inspired strategic choice’ for the Saigon bureau
● Chris Peterson: Memories of Saigon
In nostalgic return to Vietnam, Jim Pringle remembers fallen comrades
Friday 30 April 2010
For some it was their first return to the region since 30 April 1975 when communist North Vietnamese tanks smashed through the Presidential Palace gates in Saigon. The US-backed government of South Vietnam announced its unconditional surrender, ending the war. In neighbouring Cambodia, the war had ended with the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975.
Among the self-proclaimed old hacks re-living old times in old haunts was Jim Pringle, one of the first Reuters correspondents to be assigned to cover the war and one of the few journalists for whom the adjective legendary is apt.
Pringle completed his first tour of duty in Vietnam six weeks after the Tet Offensive in January and February 1968, and left for home leave before taking up his new post as Reuters correspondent in Cuba.
"Two weeks after that, my mother woke me one morning to say that four correspondents, two of them from Reuters, had been killed in Saigon. The two from Reuters were Bruce Pigott, 23, whom many Old Hacks here would know, and Ron Laramy, 31, from the UK who had joined us just two months before. The others who died were John Cantwell from Time and Michael Birch from the Australian Associated Press."
Pringle, who later worked for Newsweek and The Times, recommends a visit to the journalists' church St Bride's next to the old Reuters headquarters at 85 Fleet Street, London. "There is a plaque there for Bruce and Ron, and I try to visit it every year. Yesterday, I went up to Han Thuyen, and stood for some minutes – not to be intrusive – and thought of the four correspondents as they must have been as they pulled away from the Reuter office for the last time. To paraphrase the world war one poet, and not to be maudlin, they did not grow old as we who are left grow old, and at the going down of the sun we will remember them, as we remember all our late colleagues."
Pringle remembers the lighter moments of working in Phnom Penh. Journalists sometimes capped their evenings with a visit to Madame Chantal's opium den, where diplomats and some of the local elite also congregated. "We would take off our clothes and put on a sarong, and we would just lie there and chat. After you had a pipe, the tension would abate and the B-52 strikes that you'd hear in the distance would grow fainter and fainter."
Pringle also recalled that about two months ago he applied for a press visa at the Vietnamese embassy in Phnom Penh. This would entitle him to a pass to see the annual 30 April Liberation Day parade in Ho Chi Minh City and attend the press conference that usually follows it.
"The embassy asked me for credentials, cuttings, etc. They said they had sent the documents to the Department of External Relations in Ho Chi Minh City. Ten days before we left they said that they now had to re-submit them to the Press Centre in Hanoi. No surprise there. But the Hanoi Centre indicated we would be met wherever we arrived (even on the bus from Cambodia?), and that it would cost us.
"I let the matter slip and got an ordinary visa at the consulate in Sihanoukville, as the embassy in Phnom Penh wouldn't issue them as they now knew I was a journalist. Yesterday, at the City Hall – where I had attended the press conference five years ago – I met Mr Tuan, director of culture and information at External Relations. He already had the documents, so could he issue a press pass for the parade as the Mongolians and other press representatives were getting, thanks?
"Mr Tuan told me that he doubted that I was who I said I was, and he doubted that I was the Reuter bureau chief at the time of the Tet Offensive. He also doubted that I had known Pham Xuan An, who used to work for Reuters, and then was with our near neighbour, Time, and who came regularly to consult with our own senior Vietnamese reporter, the late Pham Ngoc Dinh. Tuan also doubted I had seen An with a guide from Hanoi after his real background was revealed [he was one of the Viet Cong’s best undercover agents and after the communist victory was honoured as a Hero of the Revolution]. And he doubted that I had interviewed Marshall Vo Nguyen Giap in Hanoi.
"He then said one or two other not so pleasant things."
Former correspondent ● Peter Sharrock, now a professor of archaeology at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies and an expert on Khmer antiquities, was prevented from attending the reunion by the airport shutdown in Europe caused by the Icelandic volcano eruption.
Photo by Milly Pringle: Jim Pringle in Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, with a 35th anniversary Liberation Day poster.
● Memorial: Bruce Pigott and Ron Laramy
Cambodian War correspondents to retrace their steps
Thursday 25 March 2010
Two former Reuters correspondents who covered the 1970-1975 Cambodian War are preparing to retrace their steps at a reunion in Phnom Penh 40 years on.
James Pringle and Peter Sharrock will be among a dozen or so former war correspondents at what is billed as a first and last reunion of a unique band of brothers and sisters.
It is organised by Chhang Song, last information minister in the Lon Nol government. As a military spokesman at the beginning of the war, then-Captain Chhang Song worked closely with foreign correspondents.
“The sudden presence of a large number of foreign journalists in Cambodia in the early 1970s was an important historical development in Cambodia’s fight for survival,” he said. “I knew them as friends. Many were killed or disappeared. For the past 40 years, I have never forgotten those days and have dreamed constantly of bringing them back. Now, it is finally happening.”
For the first time since the war, a few foreign correspondents are returning to Phnom Penh for a reunion from 20 to 23 April.
For those who covered the war the memories have always been particularly painful. They witnessed first-hand as a peaceful Cambodia was dragged into the Vietnam War. Then, over the next five years, the horrors multiplied as war engulfed the entire country. A total of 36 foreign and Cambodian journalists were killed or disappeared, more than in the war in neighbouring Vietnam. When the war ended with the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975 Cambodia's nightmare continued – and many of those who covered the war could not bear to look back at the entire tragedy. At least 30 Cambodian journalists were executed after the Khmer Rouge take-over.
Assisting Chhang Song is former Associated Press correspondent Carl Robinson who covered the war from Saigon, today's Ho Chi Minh City, and now lives in Brisbane, Australia.
"Covering the war was so painful that many, even now, are unable to look back on that period," said Robinson. "It's even harder to look at what happened afterwards. For their own peace of mind, this return is an important event in their lives. I'm sure there will be quite a few tears. But I'm sure joy too as they witness Cambodia's amazing resilience and recovery."
Activities over the three-day reunion include informal gatherings and exhibitions in the downtown quarter, and a visit to the Killing Fields of post-war Cambodia.
Peter Sharrock, now a professor of archaeology at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies and an expert on Khmer antiquities [● Peter Sharrock, ‘Indiana Jones’, finds historic relic in Cambodia], will conduct a guided tour of Cambodia's national museum.
James Pringle, whose assignments took him to Buenos Aires, Saigon, Havana, Nairobi, Peking and Biafra, later worked for Newsweek and The Times. He covered Vietnam and Cambodia during the war and now lives in Phnom Penh with his Cambodian wife, Milly.
Hugh Lunn, in his 1985 book Vietnam: A Reporter’s War, recalls that when Reuters sent him to Saigon to help cover the war “the person in the office I had been most looking forward to meeting was a legendary correspondent called Jim Pringle who was widely regarded in Reuters as their top man. He was certainly the one they sent to all the worst danger spots in the world – Northern Ireland, the Dominican Republic, New York, Cuba, Haiti, Vietnam. They used to say in London that they wouldn't bring Pringle back to head office or war would break out in Fleet Street – he had such a knack of attracting violent news. His reputation was that of a fearless Scot, and during my previous eighteen months in London I had carried an image of him as a slightly larger version of Sean Connery.
“When I first entered the Saigon office there was a shortish, slightly round-shouldered man of about twenty-eight sitting at a phone. He looked unfit for his age, and his blue eyes were disconcertingly large, distorted by very thick pebble glasses. When he hung up he was introduced as Jim Pringle.”
