By BEVERLY KEEVER
Journalism alumnus
It was sweltering as the mid-day sun beat down on the man-tall bramblebush and steamed up the air. As a correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune, I trudged beside the U.S. Marines dispatched to retrieve the dead from India and Hotel companies.
These two companies were part of Operation Starlight in August 1965, the first Marines’ offensive since the landing of the first U.S. combat troops in Vietnam. Most of the 5,000 U.S. ground forces in the operation never saw their enemy.
But for the 700 Marines in India and Hotel companies, it was a different story. Troops of India company rode across the lowlands in bulky square mini-tanks called amphibious tractors, or amtracks, that waded into the flooded fields and became what one trooper called “swimming coffins.”
Hotel company was airlifted by the H-34 banana-shaped helicopters into a “hot” landing zone but was rescued by five tanks, which in turn got mired in the mushy rice paddies and received such heavy fire that Tank A-34 was knocked out, abandoned by its crew. Demolished by Communist heavy-weapons fire, it remained a mass of charred rice-paddy rubble.
In a historic set-piece battle with an enemy that fought from hillside entrenchments, Marines in both companies, supported by tanks, amtracks and off-shore naval gunfire, were pinned down for a day and a night in a 1,000-yard ring of intense fighting — which one officer called “hell’s valley” — near a Communist-held combat hamlet not far from the border with North Vietnam. It was a conventional, pitched battle, an officer explained, “like World War II — with helicopters added.”
A day later we were approaching this combat hamlet of Ap Tho No. 2. As we moved past the first house in the hamlet, I was stunned by what I saw. At first I thought it was a doll, like Betsy I once cradled in Nebraska. Yet it was larger than Betsy, puffed up like an inflated carnival toy. It was not a doll, not a toy. It was a toddler, perhaps three or four years old, its near-naked motionless form swollen from heat and humidity.
This Betsy-like body became etched in my memory and continues to haunt me even though nearly 30 years have passed since I left Vietnam. By 1969, I had covered this Vietnam War for seven consecutive years, then a longer stretch of time than any other Western correspondent.
During those seven years, I returned often to this region north of Saigon, near the jungled Laotian and North Vietnamese borders, when I served as correspondent successively for Newsweek, The New York Herald Tribune and then the Christian Science Monitor.
While reporting for The New York Herald Tribune in mid-1966, I was gathering material along the demilitarized zone with North Vietnam when I learned that my newspaper had permanently closed its doors. I then joined the Christian Science Monitor, whose editors in 1969 nominated my series about the embattled Khe Sanh outpost for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting. Clippings from this Monitor series are yellowed now and seem like fragments from another world. Details about India and Hotel companies are preserved among the carbon copies of all my correspondence and articles, now bound in 29 volumes at my home in Honolulu. The Betsy-like image is imprinted on my mind and just won’t go away.
I arrived in Vietnam in 1962, just five years after graduating from the University of Nebraska with majors in journalism and political science. Even though I had dreamed of being a foreign correspondent, I was still surprised that I became one in such a short time and in such a faraway place that most Americans, including me, had never heard of. No U.S. textbooks had been written — in journalism, history, political science or military affairs — to teach anyone how to cover a war such as Vietnam.
Yet, my upbringing in Nebraska and my undergraduate education at the state university provided me with solid, essential stepping stones that fostered survival, if not success. My parents instilled my younger sister and me with a love of reading. Mother would surprise us with little books each time she went to town; after she read them to us several times, we knew the stories by heart. Reading sparks curiosity, opens new worlds and nurtures writing plus active learning — all prime ingredients for journalism. As a senior in high school, I won first place in an essay competition about the importance of soil conservation and began seriously to think about a career based on writing.
My parents also set high expectations for good grades, adding a few coins to our allowance when we succeeded (but not docking us when we didn’t). These expectations to excel carried through to college, greatly facilitating my having been graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa and a Mortar Board member from NU in 1957 and with honors from Columbia University in 1958. Growing up on a farm showed me the need for hard work, the discipline to perform that work when it needed to be done, the unpredictability of nature and the rewards of taking well-calculated risks.
Research shows that U.S. farmers have progressively revolutionized the nation’s agriculture by adopting successful innovations that paid off in increased production. The revolution in agriculture in Nebraska might well have informed some farmers in South Vietnam in the 1960s, eliminating one rationale for its own bloody revolution and thus, conceivably, saving more than a million lives.
A lot of little things happened on the Lincoln campus that proved pivotal in my career. For example, I chose French as my foreign language requirement, sort of on a lark, dreaming I could and would some day cover the Paris fashion shows. Not in Paris, but in Saigon, my study of French proved decisive in my landing a job with Newsweek, getting me selected over a more seasoned correspondent in Tokyo who lacked that language skill.
A nationally syndicated columnist, Phyllis Battelle, was brought to the Lincoln campus by the journalism department and by the Theta Sigma Phi honorary when I was its president, thus signaling that women in journalism could and should think big about a career in the field, even though they were then such a small minority. And it was the director of the school, Dr. William E. Hall, who literally commanded me to get a part-time job on the city newspaper, the Lincoln Journal, and then a summer job in the Des Moines regional office of The Associated Press so that I would apply to and could be accepted for graduate study in journalism.
Dr. Hall’s instructions proved right. I was one of 10 women accepted the next year into the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and became the lucky recipient of a scholarship memorializing The New York Times columnist Anne O’Hare McCormick. The flunky, vacation-fill-in job at The Associated Press paid off, too. The next summer I wrote five articles for AP Newsfeatures when I visited Moscow, Leningrad and the Central Asian republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as a member of the first Soviet-U.S. student exchange. Two years later, I left for Asia with a letter of introduction to each AP bureau chief on my itinerary and a long list of story ideas for more AP news features.
For two years before leaving, I had worked as the assistant for Samuel Lubell, a syndicated political columnist and public opinion analyst whom I had studied with at Columbia University. I did grassroots political polling in the East and Midwest for the 1958 congressional and the 1960 presidential elections. Interviewing voters on weekends meant working overtime, traveling a lot on an expense account — and being so busy I couldn’t spend money. Two girl friends on the Russian trip had promised to team up with me to visit Asia, but one got married instead, and the other failed to finish her studies on time. With my own nest egg ready to be spent, I planned a one-year trip around the world, with most of the time to be spent in Asia.
My interest in Asia developed as a youngster when I was still playing with dolls and had read Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth about a turbulent era in China’s history. As an undergraduate I studied Chinese culture and history .
Vietnam then was hardly a household word, even though the French colonial forces were being so shamelessly defeated by Communist guerrillas that, as the U.S. public much later learned, the Eisenhower Administration seriously considered dropping atomic weapons to aid the Westerners. In my planning, I had allotted Vietnam only two of my globetrotting weeks. When I left Saigon seven years later, I had forgotten about seeing the rest of the world. And
Nebraska looked better to me than it ever had before.
The unconventionality of Vietnam often gave it the label of the Which-Way War. It was political as well as military, involving the civilians as well as organized fighting units, creating frontlines that popped up anywhere and then vanished to nowhere. No one was ever safe in any one place, but yet one rarely knew where the danger lay. My own apartment in the center of Saigon was shot up during the 1963 coup d’etat that overthrew the occupants of the palace three blocks up the street. Bullets shattered mirrors on my living room wall; shrapnel pierced my nearby book titled Problems of Freedom: South Vietnam Since Independence.
Early on I adopted a nonchalance about the possibility of getting killed. That attitude developed during one of the first patrols I made, at a Ranger training camp at Trung Lap, close to Saigon but near a Communist jungled area called D-Zone. Strong moonlight cast eerie shadows around the edge of the jungled canopy, and every twig snap made one jittery.
Then one G.I. whispered to me. “Don’t worry,” he advised. “You never hear the bullet that gets you.” His advice sustained me for the rest of my years in Vietnam.
Conversely, the G.I.’s advice is still with me. Although I am no longer in a war zone, Vietnam has taught me to live each day as though it might be my last.
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Beverly Keever and her husband, Charles, live in Honolulu where she teaches journalism at the University of Hawaii.
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