A 4-day Truce

And where that led

My picture of Premier Nguyen Cao Ky comforting a mother and baby

The last time the world stopped and watched as a 4-day truce unfolded was in Vietnam at the end of January 1968 … 55 years ago.

The Vietnam War featured an annual 7-day truce for the Vietnamese New Year known as “Tet”.

Tet changes slightly each year to coincide with the first new Moon of the lunar calendar.

It heralds the arrival of spring.

Communist guerrillas and the South Vietnamese army would incongruously take time out from killing and maiming each other for a week to relax, feast, and shop for new clothes.

To them, Tet was Christmas, Easter, and Show Week all rolled up into one.

Then, as soon as the truce ended, the two sides would start the slaughter all over again … until next year.

This frustrated the Americans who were trying to fight a war in a strange country, and wanted to get on with it amid rising anti-war sentiment at home.

Thus, agreeing on the terms of these truces grew more difficult throughout the 1960s.

Every year the three sides – Communist, Capitalist, and American – would argue over the number of days, which days, and the scope of the truce ... in a similar way to what has been happening in the Middle East today.

So it was vital for a newsagency like Reuters – where I was a war correspondent – to beat the other news organisations to the punch.

We were in direct non-stop competition with the Associated Press (AP) and United Press International (UPI) (both American newsagencies which called themselves “wire services”) and the French Agence France-Presse (AFP).

These four supplied news to all the papers, radio broadcasters and TV networks around the world and strove mightily to be first ... future contracts depended on it.

Reuters was the most wide-spread of these and only really worried about “the AP” because it was so rich and successful. Thus Reuters referred to AP in memos as “Primary Opposition”.

By mid-January 1968 the Vietnam War was reaching its zenith: American war dead had risen inexorably for nearly a decade (as more and more draftees were shipped out to southeast Asia) to more than 300 dead a week (plus many, many more Vietnamese).

We had to send the “American dead” figure story every week and soon it would be more than 500 a week.

So a truce, any truce, seemed increasingly unlikely.

The Americans, having started with a few thousand soldiers, now numbered 550,000 in South Vietnam, and 40,000 Air Force in Guam and Thailand involved in bombing all of Vietnam.

Recently, Seventh Fleet destroyers had started to bombard Communist North Vietnam from the South China Sea. (I was on the first destroyer that did this: the Americans, of course, took reporters along for the ride.)

On an American navy destroyer, another reporter and I take pictures of the other two destroyers preparing to bombard the coast of North Vietnam, end of 1967

Determined to get the first break on the 1968 Truce story, I checked the schedule of the South Vietnamese Premier, Nguyen Cao Ky: he was due to visit his troops in the Mekong Delta south of Saigon – an area the size of Denmark but almost all under water.

I took this photo out the rear of a C-130 over the Mekong Delta in 1968

I’d button-holed the 38-year-old Premier Ky a few times in the year I’d been in Vietnam and found he was willing to answer questions … if you could get close enough to look him in the eye.

Which made him an unusual politician: confident enough never to feel the need to avoid a question.

Premier Ky in action in Vietnam

Perhaps this came from his background as a pilot who rose to command the South Vietnamese Air Force where, I presumed, you had to face whatever came your way: no matter how quickly or unexpected.

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To find Ky, I hitched a ride on a helicopter south to Can Tho.

Nguyen Cao Ky was easy to spot. He was slim and fit and always wore a simple dark blue, open-necked bush jacket, matching trousers and cap, and had a strong full-width black moustache.

Most times the flamboyant Premier wore a white scarf wrapped dashingly around the neck.

Women considered him handsome, but many Vietnamese men called him “a cowboy” because of his closeness to the Americans and his tendency to defy tradition and do whatever he liked.

Always surrounded wherever he went, South Vietnamese Premier Ky was no doubt aware I was taking this photo

When I found him at an army camp, Premier Ky was surrounded by the usual entourage who follow a political leader anywhere in the world … with perhaps the only difference here being that his bodyguards carried levelled automatic rifles rather than holstered revolvers.

He was meeting hundreds of his ARVN troops, so it was difficult to get near him, but I followed with notebook and pen in hand, hoping he might see me and have something he wanted to say to the world via Reuters.

After all, he’d seen me before at press conferences and once stopped for an interview while I trailed him through a refugee camp.

Ky was strolling slowly around, meeting soldiers and surveying the camp with keen pilot eyes, so I worked out that he knew that the Reuters man was there.

After less than an hour – as he rounded a corner past a row of tents – I slipped between the body guards, the ropes, the tent pegs, and the assistants like an F1 racing car driver on a curve.

I had to, as there were no other reporters to help round him up: which is why reporters mostly travel in packs.

Now I had him to myself.

“Mr Premier,” I said as we changed eyes, “will you hold a truce for Tet this month? I’ve flown here specially to ask on behalf of Reuters.”

Ky looked serious and thoughtful as we stared at each other through brown and blue and finally, after some contemplation, he said:

“We are willing to have a truce. But because of the security situation, this time not for seven days … but for four days. And not in the five northern provinces [up near North Vietnam], because the military situation there is so bad.”

That was all I needed to know.

We both nodded and on he went with his entourage … while I jumped on board a plane heading back to Saigon because I had a genuine scoop all to myself.

Wouldn’t all the other news agencies and the scores of other reporters be envious!

On the short flight to Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport from the Mekong Delta, a Vietnamese civilian about 10 years older than my 26 years, came and sat down next to me. I’d seen him in Premier Ky’s party so he was clearly also going back to head office.

 “I see you were talking to my Premier,” he said, “but I couldn’t hear what it was about. What did he have to say?”

Forgetting the age-old rule “never tell anyone you have a secret” I said I couldn’t tell him because this was my scoop.

He seemed a cultured Vietnamese man and so we got to talking.

“Look, you know you should have gone through me before talking to the Premier. I’m his press officer, and he knows he shouldn’t talk directly to you.”

I said: “I asked him a question and he answered. It was that simple.”

“Nothing is simple in Vietnam,” he replied. “You’ve put us both in a very difficult situation,” he added, as we came in to land.  

“It’s important you tell me exactly what Premier Ky told you because he’s uncontactable out in the field and when Reuters sends off your story all the other news organisations are going to ring me and ask whether your story is true.

“If you don’t tell me, then I will have to deny it and your story will be contradicted around the world.”

He was starting to make sense.

I didn’t want people saying my story was wrong, even if I knew it was true.

This had happened once before when I wrote that the province capital of Loc Ninh had been captured by the Vietcong: I was there, so it was the truth; but the American military spokesman in Saigon denied it, and, because I was out of contact in the field, I had to wait days to convince London that they shouldn’t have corrected it.

On the basis that this gentleman was Ky’s official press secretary, I told him: “The truce is on this year but only for four days.”

We shook hands and he thanked me for my co-operation with the government of South Vietnam.

At Tan Son Nhut, I was so pleased with myself – and so thirsty in the tropical heat and so hungry because I’d had no breakfast or lunch – that before heading straight to the office, as I normally would, I stopped for a cold soft drink and a bowl of rice.

I sat there pleasantly sketching out my scoop in my notebook.

Then I hired a small ancient Renault Vietnamese taxi to the Reuter office.

On the footpath outside the Reuter Saigon office Australian Bruce Pigott and I lean on our VW station wagon

I waddled in the front door slowly with a big smile on my dial, ready to skite to bureau chief Jim Pringle that we had a world scoop on our hands.

Before I could say anything, Pringle leapt out from behind his desk and fixed me through his Coke-bottle glasses and broke out his Scottish brogue:

“Is that you Hugh? Aye! We’ve had a call-back from London! Primary Opposition is quoting Premier Ky as saying he’s limiting this year’s truce for just four days! London says: Need matcher urgentest.”

How could this have happened?

Later that week I was talking to a correspondent from the AP (Primary Opposition), and he laughed:

“Yeah, that press secretary, he’s one of our stringers [a non-journalist paid per story provided]. He phoned the story through from the public phone at the airport while watching you sitting there eating rice and drinking orange juice.”

It turned out that he was even hungrier than I was.

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Postscript: That1968 four-day truce enabled the Viet Cong to move hundreds of guerrillas into Saigon to launch surprise attacks and to capture parts of Saigon including “Pentagon East”: the American Embassy fortress in the capital.

All this just as the Americans had been telling the world the Communists were on their last legs.

The US director of combat operations in Vietnam, Brigadier-General John Chaisson, told a press conference: “Well gentlemen, they surprised us with the sheer panorama of their attack! It was surprisingly well coordinated, surprisingly impressive, and launched with a surprising amount of audacity”.

Effectively, that 1968 4-day truce ended the Vietnam War.

Within a month, the commander of US Forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, was withdrawn after four years … then President Johnson announced he would not stand for another term.

Two months later peace talks were agreed – which North Vietnam stretched out on-and-on-and-on as the Americans slowly withdrew … until Saigon fell on April 30 1975.