The Young Turks: Malcolm Browne, Peter Arnett, and Horst Faas in Saigon

On a rainy day in June 1962, two newsmen who provided invaluable service for the Associated Press for many years to come arrived in Saigon to help bolster the efforts of AP bureau chief Malcolm W. Browne. The journalists were reporter Peter Arnett, born and raised in New Zealand, and photographer Horst Faas, survivor of a war-torn upbringing in Berlin, Germany, during World War II.

The three men would all go on to win Pulitzer Prizes for their work in Vietnam and reported about the war for many years (Browne left the country in 1966, later to return; Faas stayed until 1973; and Arnett remained for North Vietnam’s victory in 1975). “I was 27, a gadfly in the journalistic backwaters of Southeast Asia,” noted Arnett, who had worked for the Bangkok World newspaper in Thailand and Laos before joining the AP. He had already been kicked out of  three countries in a region, Arnett noted, “where you have not really made the grade with Old China hands until you have been expelled from at least six.”

The newcomers soon learned, as Browne later pointed out, that the main issues in covering the war centered on the issue of “whether a reporter should merely observe the scene and pass on what is approved by the commanding officer, or whether he should get himself completely apart from the local authorities and stick his nose where it was not wanted. Particularly for the news service reporter who must present an accurate, fair and balanced report, the dilemma poses terrible problems.”

Arnett had stuffed all his worldly possessions, including a red-tasseled ceremonial tribal sword from Laos that he hung on the wall of his room at the Caravelle Hotel, inside of two scruffy suitcases. It was not the first time he had been in Saigon. Four years earlier, Arnett and his girlfriend, Myrtle, had visited the city as “penniless” tourists. He did not expect to stay in his new posting for long. “There was still a desperate quality about the country and its people that I remembered from my first visit and that had unfolded in newspaper headlines since that time: the attempted coups d’état against the dictatorial family regime, and the ferocious guerrilla insurgency that made the chaotic events I had witnessed in neighboring Thailand, Laos and Indonesia seem mild by comparison,” he noted.

To Arnett, Saigon seemed a much more “Americanized” city than others in Southeast Asia. He could see young men in crew cuts—U.S. advisers on leave wearing civilian clothes—looking to grab drinks at bars and trying to find rooms in hotels. The families of the American diplomats, senior military officers, consultants, and civilian aid workers seemed to be prepared to stay in the country for a long time. Arnett picked up a pamphlet at the U.S. Embassy advising the “new arrivals to bring necessary items unavailable here, including ‘card tables with additional round folding tops, seating six or nine, available at Sears, $6.95; ice cream freezer, hand operated, Sears, $10.97; playing cards forbidden to be sold here; picnic equipment with portable ice chests; folding aluminum tables; Thermos jugs; beach umbrella (two and one-half hours to beach),’ along with other items.”

Arnett had heard disquieting comments from AP people based in Asia that Browne “was something of an intellectual bore,” who had “kept his own counsel” and appeared distant to those who had visited the Saigon bureau. While most AP stories were short, the news service’s management allowed Browne to send over the wires long, two-thousand or three thousand-word pieces “about his adventures going out with Vietnamese troops, going to the highlands,” Arnett recalled. Although Wes Gallagher, the man who hired Browne and the wire service’s new general manager and chief executive, believed the longer dispatches added great value to what the agency offered its member newspapers, the “regular AP guys are saying, ‘What’s a 3,000-word story doing on the wire?’” Arnett recalled.

When Arnett presented himself for work at the AP’s office the day after his arrival, Browne experienced some initial misgivings about his new associate, as the New Zealander seemed “a little bewildered.” Noticing Arnett’s small stature (about five feet, six inches tall), Browne worried that he might be someone who could be easily browbeaten by “all of the rotten stuff that went on in Vietnam those days, lying bureaucrats, lying military officers,” as well as being too polite to stand up for himself.

In about an hour, however, Browne’s doubts had melted away as Arnett started “swearing like a trooper and bawling into the telephone and getting on his combat togs and going out and doing the Arnett thing.” Later, one of his fellow newsmen noted that if someone had been asked to design the ideal reporter to cover the Vietnam war, Arnett would have met all the requirements. As for Arnett, he recognized, as some people had suggested, that he might have compensated for his small stature “with a pugnacious attitude,” but he had learned during his years in the journalism profession that “a shrinking violet doesn’t get the story.”

Arnett also changed his initial assessment about his bureau chief. He realized that Browne possessed an intensity and directness that made him stand apart from the “easygoing attitude of the American journalists I had met up to that time.” The two men worked smoothly together, with Arnett enjoying Browne’s intellect and how he held governmental officials accountable for their actions. “He was into the story,” Arnett noted. “He gave me fascinating documents and books to read about the Viet Cong and the history of the war.”

The young reporter quickly became enamored with a twenty-four-page guide to news coverage in Vietnam Browne had prepared to help acclimate him to his new surroundings. Arnett had heard of the guide through the AP rumor mill, with most of the comments about it negative, especially from veteran newsmen “who figured they had nothing left to learn.” Arnett, however, believed that Browne’s pamphlet contained the finest journalism instruction he had ever received and added that if “the military had anything similar it would be classified!” Poring over the manual, he paid great attention to the pointers it offered for how to cover guerrilla warfare. Browne advised those who went out into the field the following:

"Try to keep in good physical condition so you can march or run for a reasonable distance. You might have to save your life doing this at some point. You should know how to swim. Canals and ditches often are above your head.

If you hear a shot and think it’s not from your own side, don’t get up and look around to see where it came from. The second shot might get you. Lie prone under fire, and move only on your belly. Look for cover and move toward it.

When moving with troops DO NOT stay close to the head of a column or the “point man” in a formation. Professional soldiers are paid to do this. DO NOT stand or march next to a radio man or an aid man. They are prime targets. Stick close to the commander, who is generally in the safest position available. The whole idea of covering an operation is to GET THE NEWS AND PICTURES BACK, not to play soldier yourself.

When moving through enemy territory (a good part of Viet Nam is enemy territory) watch your feet. Spikes, mines, concealed pits and booby traps are everywhere. When possible, step in exactly the same places as the soldier ahead of you. If he wasn’t blown up, you probably won’t be." 

In his memoirs Arnett remembered that after reading Browne’s extraordinary document, he looked up to scan the items decorating the AP office’s walls. What came next encapsulated the personalities of the two journalists. Arnett spied what he believed to be a twig hanging on one part of the wall. Upon another glance, however, he saw that it was a “blackened human hand,” which he later learned had been discovered at a Viet Cong ambush and returned to the office by part-time AP photographer Le Minh. Another macabre souvenir Arnett recalled was a bamboo water container stained with a red liquid that office assistant Bill Ha Van Tran told him was human blood.

Browne’s memory had less-sensational details for the office’s battlefield mementos. He admitted to having a photograph of a severed hand stuck to the wall, but not the real thing. “And yes,” he noted, “there was a bamboo-log canteen . . . that I had brought back from an ambush, but it was stained with rotting sugar water, not blood.”

Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1933, the same year Adolf Hitler came to power, the husky Faas was familiar with the “dangers of war and the effects of war and bombing and shooting.” Hired as a photographer by the AP in late 1955, he had been exposed to the dangers of combat in both the Republic of the Congo and Algeria, as well as the pressure of being a wire-service employee. “Working for the AP it was always that you worked in fear,” Faas remembered, including fear about events that have not yet happened, and when they did they “invariably happened at three in the morning.”

The AP sent him to Saigon to bolster the quality of photography issued by the bureau. (Faas learned that a stringer cameraman had been reusing film he had shot on previous military operations and passing them off as new engagements.) Arnett had worked with the German in Laos and found him to be very competitive and single-minded about completing his assignments. Arnett remembered Faas responding to a compliment from him about one of his photographs with what could have been his motto: “Great photographers are not born, they just get up earlier in the morning.” Faas considered Browne to be quite different from any of the people he has come across working for the AP: “Very serious. Very studious. . . . And very good sources.” Staffers sometimes had to vacate the office so that Browne could talk with his informants about sensitive matters in private, according to Faas.

Despite his bulk (more than two hundred pounds), Faas believed in pursuing a story no matter where it occurred. “If something is happening somewhere, get there—by foot, or bus, or boat,” he advised. “If you’re not fast you’ll miss it all.” Faas blanched at relying on Saigon photo shops to develop the bureau’s film. He decided to commandeer the AP office’s single bathroom, the only water source available, and turned it into his darkroom. He filled the cramped space with the equipment he needed, sometimes improvising, using, for example, large clay pots to hold the chemicals for developing film. Faas also convinced Pham Van Huan, the bureau’s office boy, to assist him in the darkroom.

Browne marveled at Faas’s efficient operation, finding him to be a “delightful guy, very friendly and warm and a terrific sort of person, but still, he could be an awful kraut [German] sometimes.” Faas also equipped himself for his work by visiting Saigon’s black market to purchase army trousers and a jacket, replacing the insignias with a nametag that also emphasized his affiliation with the AP, as well as a jungle cap, backpack, hammock, and several water bottles. “This was when everything on the market was still old French or Vietnamese source, Vietnamese supplies; they didn’t have all that fancy, fancy gear the Americans came with later on,” Faas noted. 

Faas always wanted to be properly equipped so he did not have to “depend in any way on troops in the field.” Arnett remembered that Horst set himself off from other photojournalists, who had been transitioning from using the clumsy Speed Graphic cameras of the Korean War to the smaller Rolleiflex models. “Horst used the 35mm Leica series, small finely machined cameras that he hung around his neck like Hawaiian leis,” Arnett reported.

Browne learned that Arnett and Faas were “absolutely fearless” when it came to visiting the most violent combat zones, complete with fire coming from all directions and “people dropping like flies.” Although intrepid, Faas, who came to be considered one of the best photographers to document the war, proved to be prudent when it came to risking his life, believing that no picture was worth being wounded or killed. “If there is a good chance, an overwhelming chance that you are about to get hurt by doing something,” he later explained, “don’t do it.”

Faas made it a habit to always be the first person to exit a helicopter, as he believed that the excitement of the first encounter caused the enemy’s aim to be inaccurate. He also tried to check the quality of the troops he accompanied into battle, avoiding those armed with poorly maintained weapons or displaying other signs of ineptitude or bad leadership. “I thought he was the smartest of us,” recalled Richard Pyle, later Saigon bureau chief for the AP. “We would be thinking of what was going to happen and after that happened, what would happen next, but Horst was always thinking what would happen after that. He was always one or two steps ahead of the rest of us.”

Arnett and Faas developed into a superb team, so much so that Charley Mohr, who covered the Vietnam War for Time magazine and later the New York Times, lamented that if he heard about a big battle in the Central Highlands and managed to make his way to the area on a plane or helicopter he would inevitably “find that Peter and Horst had already been there and were back in Saigon filing [their story].”

Everybody in the Saigon AP office did what was required to fill the agency’s rapacious appetite for news. Luckily for Browne, the office in Saigon was different from other AP bureaus. While bureau chiefs in other locations had to sometimes spend more time on “member relations, contracts and so forth as on news,” he did not have to deal with such bureaucratic tasks. “Things tend to run themselves,” he said, “thanks to the very high caliber of our people here.” Browne maintained a policy that “all correspondents should take pictures whenever possible, and all photographers should gather material for stories.”

On operations Faas snapped “superb” photographs with his Leica cameras, and gathered material that, when he returned to the office, he would work on with Arnett to fashion into a story they could send out on the wires. Both Browne and Arnett took cameras with them and used them, bringing back images that, if fuzzy, underexposed, or overexposed, Faas could use his darkroom wizardry to produce a decent photograph. Faas advised the reporters on the proper shutter speed and f-stop (aperture measurement) to use and told them: “Set the distance at six feet. Don’t move the camera; don’t focus. Just look through the viewfinder and—click! Click only when things are moving. Don’t click when people are standing still and looking at you.”

Even with the added manpower, Browne realized that his bureau could not be everywhere, and he had to manage his resources with great care. “There is no single front anywhere in Viet Nam, but a hundred battlefields, where the war flickers on and off like summer lightning,” he said. “Coverage means a seven-day week for everyone.” Daily Browne could never tell where the next attack might come from, either from the ARVN or the VC. He had to “gamble constantly” when it came to picking areas to cover.

In addition to hitching rides into battle on U.S. Army helicopters, Browne and his staff had access to a battered, but “very serviceable,” British Land Rover, one of his first purchases he had made as bureau chief. The vehicle’s off-road capability saved AP staffers’ lives more than once, as they did not have to stick to main road when encountering “a road block or some kind of nastiness up ahead, we could always sort of swivel off. Even through swamps if they weren’t too mushy, we could get through them,” Browne remembered

A not-so-dispassionate observer, David Halberstam of the New York Times, who arrived to cover the Vietnam conflict for the paper of record in September 1962, commented that Browne imparted an important tone to the bureau in two ways. First, he stood behind his staff when they were “challenged by the Saigon officialdom, something which was very important, and which greatly liberated those who worked for him to give their best work,” Halberstam noted.

Additionally, Halberstam recalled that Browne never “big-footed the story,” which prevented any “pettiness and back-biting” among the staff. Browne was able to do this, Halberstam added, because he believed hogging the story was “morally wrong, and because his own philosophy which soon became the philosophy of Arnett and Faas as well, was that there was going to be enough here for everyone—plenty of war, plenty of heartbreak, plenty of stories.”