The
first sign of trouble came on a clear Friday afternoon, November 1, 1963. Saigon,
South Vietnam’s capital, had been “empty and silent” for the traditional noon
siesta when Malcolm W. Browne, Associated Press bureau chief, received a tip
from a source at the U.S. Embassy. He learned that rebellious Army of the Republic of Vietnam troops had surrounded the central police station and the
country’s naval headquarters on the riverfront was also under siege.
Browne
drove his office’s Land Rover at “breakneck speed” to the navy compound. He
ignored the base’s security guard, traveling past him for a half block until he
heard yelling and the unmistakable sound of someone “chambering a round in his
carbine.”
Uncertainty
reigned, however, until 3:00 p.m., when Browne and his staff heard planes
roaring over their office. With the AP office located only a short distance
from the Gia Long Palace, the official residence for President Ngo Dinh Diem,
“the combined sound of the strafing and heavy antiaircraft guns was
shattering,” Browne remembered. An incoming shell came close to hitting the
journalist as he tried to get a better view of the action, but a guard loyal to
Diem saved Browne’s life by pulling him through a hole in a wall to safety.
Edwin Q. White, who had come from AP’s Tokyo bureau to bolster the staff, dispatched
the first bulletin describing the heavy gunfire at the presidential palace and reports
about ARVN troops in full battle gear deployed throughout the city. In his article,
delivered out of the country with the assistance of the American and South
Korean embassies, White predicted that the firing could well signal the start
of a military coup against Diem’s government. “Marines in battle dress with
heavy weapons and artillery surrounded national police director headquarters
about 1350 [1:50 p.m.],” he wrote. “Other police headquarters throughout city
were taken over by marines, apparently without resistance.”
As
White remained at the office, Browne, Roy Essoyan (from AP’s Hong Kong bureau),
and Bill Ha Van Tran set out to discover what was happening. “We did a lot of
walking, running and crawling, machinegun fire and shrapnel snapping just
overhead,” Browne recalled. “There was action everywhere, and no telling where
the fire was going to come from next.”
The
gunfire grew more intense as the sun set. Browne and his colleagues were able
to identify where the hotspots were and which units “were clearly on the
offensive against government troops and which ones were trying to
counter-attack. So, it was pretty confusing. The whole city was divided up into
a patchwork of different loyalties and different uniforms and plenty of
shooting.”
The
AP bureau’s “indefatigable” messenger, Dan Van Huan, sidestepped numerous
firefights, said Browne, risking his life to keep messages flowing to White at
the AP office. “We all think it will be nice to get back to the relative peace
and safety of the normal war operations against the Vietcong,” joked Browne.
Rumors,
plots, and heralds from above absorbed the attention of Saigon residents in the
days leading up to the coup and even afterward. Conspirators seemed to be
everywhere, scheming away in each other’s homes, in nightclubs, and in the
countryside. “Everybody knew that something was coming,” Browne recalled.
Browne
even wrote an article, sent over the AP wires, about a rumor that the Vietnamese
expected the sun to start revolving strangely in the sky. Large crowds of
office workers, shoppers, and strollers jammed into the city’s central markets,
only to be scattered by the police. He reported that the sun’s abnormal motion
was supposed to be the sign of a Buddhist miracle. Officials were suspicious
about the rumor, believing it had been spread “as a test, to see how fast
crowds could be assembled at key places in the city,” he added.
When
mutinous ARVN units finally struck on November 1, plots and counterplots
continued rose and fell. Rebel officers sometimes lied to their men about the
true purpose of their movement into the capital. A colonel admitted to newsman
Stanley Karnow of the Saturday Evening Post that he told his platoon
leaders the police “were plotting to overthrow Diem and we were going to save
him.” A mystified paratrooper asked his commander who they were supposed to
fight and received the answer: “Anyone who opposes us is the enemy.”
Confusion
also marked attempts by rebel forces to convince government supporters to join
their cause. Browne uncovered the story of Captain Ho Tan Quyen, Diem’s naval
commander, whose schedule that day was supposed to include an official dinner
commemorating his birthday. Early Friday Quyen had been summoned to report to
general staff headquarters by Major General Duong Van Minh, one of the key coup
leaders. “Quyen drove to the headquarters near Saigon airport, where he
undoubtedly met military commanders who were to lead the successful coup later
in the day,” Browne reported.
Declining
to join the rebellion, Quyen sped from the scene in his car toward Bien Hoa,
hoping to rally loyalist forces. “Several jeeps and a civilian car were seen
following Quyen outside the city,” wrote Browne. “The pursuit continued for
eight miles outside city limits, and ended when a burst of submachine gun fire
riddled Quyen’s vehicle. His body was laid out in the road and then taken away
in a civilian car.”
That
afternoon Quyen’s staff learned of his death from a revolutionary naval
officer, who called upon his colleagues to surrender. Fighter aircraft attacked
ships docked nearby, and the craft responded by blazing away at the airplanes
with their deck guns, downing one plane, Browne reported. “But about 15 minutes
later,” he added, “the naval command staff agreed to give in, and signed a
document pledging loyalty to the revolutionaries.”
As
Browne rallied his AP staff to cover the coup, two of his top men, reporter
Peter Arnett and photographer Horst Faas, both away from Saigon, did all they
could to get to the capital. Returning to South Vietnam after a trip to
Cambodia on an Air Vietnam passenger jet, Arnett recalled that the plane had
flown into Vietnamese airspace at 3:00 p.m. when he felt it starting to veer
away from its destination. “I banged on the pilot’s cabin door and my fears
were confirmed by the captain, who was talking with an air traffic controller;
a coup d’etat was in progress; bombers were in the air over Saigon, blasting
the Presidential Palace,” Arnett remembered. “I would miss the biggest story of
my life because Tan Son Nhut Airport was closed to all traffic.”
Thinking
fast, Arnett argued with the pilot, pointing out that the aircraft “had a right
to land on its own soil” and raising terrible fears about the fate of the
crew’s families amid the chaos. Arnett’s arguments worked, and the plane’s
captain guided his craft to a safe landing.
An
airline bus took Arnett most of the way to the AP office before its driver lost
his nerve and made his passenger disembark. “Gunfire roared and ricocheted
around me,” Arnett recalled. “I could see soldiers firing from upper-story
windows at the Gia Long Palace. Our three-story office and apartment building
had been turned into a fort with soldiers firing their weapons at the palace
across the street, protecting themselves behind makeshift sandbagged
emplacements in the parking lot and the first-floor balcony outside my
apartment door.”
Bursting
into the AP office, Arnett saw White, known by his colleagues as “unflappable
Ed,” calmly puffing away on a cigar while typing; the rest of the staff had left.
“The others are at the Caravelle [Hotel] and I’m holding the fort, which is something
I’ve said plenty of times in the past but for once is true,” White told Arnett,
who took advantage of a lull in the fighting to make his way to the Caravelle.
White
remained at his post until 6:30 p.m. when, as Browne noted, “he decided things
were getting a little too hot.” Later that night, a shell hit an M48 tank
parked in front of the AP’s office, igniting the tank’s ammunition and causing
it to burn throughout the night.
When
he arrived at the Caravelle, Arnett discovered Browne and Essoyan on the
hotel’s upper floors, where they had a spectacular view of the fighting going
on at Gia Long and the barracks housing its guards. “The rumors and the
speculation of months past were coming true before my eyes and I watched it all
with a glass of Johnnie Walker Red Label Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in
the other,” Arnett remembered.
As
it grew dark, Browne saw tracers and shells streak through Saigon’s skies, with
many hitting the palace, while others fell short, bringing down power and
telephone lines. Leaving the hotel as the battle continued to rage, Arnett came
upon children running around collecting spent cartridges from the sidewalks,
two U.S. soldiers who stopped him to ask directions to the nearest bar, and two
drunk Americans walking near the National Assembly building, one of them loudly
complaining, “Tell them to knock that off, they’re scaring everybody.”
Walking
to the Rex Hotel, which housed American troops, Arnett found its officers mess
crowded with soldiers, who had been warned by authorities to stay off the
streets. “They were whiling away the time rolling dice or playing the slot
machines,” he noted. Later, on a suggestion from Browne, Arnett made his way to
the U.S. military mission, where he stayed for the rest of evening. He even
received a briefing about the coup from an American intelligence officer, “a
rare display of generosity toward the media,” Arnett recalled. The official had
been impressed by what he had seen from the anti-Diem forces, telling Arnett
that it showed that the Vietnamese could “run a pretty good war if political
considerations are removed.”
While
Browne and Arnett tried to stay safe in the embattled city, Faas was in Ca Mau,
on a patrol with South Vietnamese Rangers. A U.S. adviser accompanying the
Rangers heard a report on his radio telling him to prepare to pull his forces
from the field, as a coup had broken out. “Oh shit,” Faas remembered saying,
“I’m two hundred miles away from Saigon and that’s the story that’s developing
and I’m down here in Ca Mau. Get me out of here as quickly as possible.”
Faas
hooked up with Steve Stibbens, a Marine photographer for Stars and Stripes,
and they were able to get tickets for a flight to Saigon. Unable to land there
because of the fighting, the plane diverted its flight to the port city of Vung
Tao, located about sixty miles southeast of Saigon. Faas and Stibbens commandeered
a jeep from the Vietnamese and drove as fast as possible to the capital,
getting there after the newly established 7:00 p.m. curfew.
Dressed
as he was, in a helmet and makeshift uniform, Faas discovered he had little
trouble passing through roadblocks or driving around rebel units scattered
throughout the city. Finding the AP office empty, he remembered feeling guilty about
being late for such a momentous story.
Shortly
after midnight, Saigon “became still and dead as a city under the plague,”
Browne reported. Downtown streets seemed deserted, and the guns fell silent.
The lull allowed a dinner-jacketed headwaiter at a leading hotel, White wrote,
to calmly seat a few guests, laughingly explaining to them that “service might
be [a] little slow because some restaurant help had left.” A dog’s loud barking
betrayed “stealthy movement in the shadows,” Browne observed. “No lights showed
from inside the waiting palace.”
At
about 3:00 a.m., intense gunfire broke out, with large shells from distant
artillery hitting a building behind the telecommunications center. Browne could
also see tanks moving through the streets, slipping “across the main boulevards
from the west and from the riverfront, taking up positions just outside the
palace walls.”
The
final assault on the palace began at 4:00 a.m. “The blast of cannon,
machineguns and rapid-fire pieces blended into a continuous roar,” he reported.
“The dark shapes in the streets spat clouds of green, yellow and blue fire, and
great blobs of red flame marked the exploding shells. Buildings near the palace
became infernos, and answering fire from the palace set two armored vehicles
afire.”
Finally,
at 6:37 a.m., Browne recorded, the drained, grimy palace guards surrendered,
hoisting a white flag, which was greeted with “a thunderous cheer” by the rebel
forces. Faas followed as Vietnamese marines stormed into the palace, smashing
chandeliers, tearing down Diem’s portraits, and firing their weapons, though
there was no need to do so as the opposition had collapsed. By 9:00 a.m. Faas
decided he had taken enough photographs and turned his attention to finding a
place to develop his film.
With
the AP office’s darkroom out of action (the power and telephone lines were
out), Faas went to a local photo shop, scaring the store’s staff when he burst
through the front door in his makeshift uniform. He used the store’s equipment
to develop approximately twelve photographs. With the photos in hand, he walked
to the Post,
Telegraph and Telephone office to transmit his work with the assistance of an
employee he knew, Madame Binh.
Talking
to Binh, Faas learned that he was the first photographer to arrive, beating his
colleagues. “They had mistakenly believed that the post office, because it was
occupied by troops, had been closed; it hadn’t been closed. The troops went
through it,” he recalled. “The coup troops made a few propaganda broadcasts,
occupied it with their people, but the personnel continued as normal.” By 4:00
p.m. a line opened and Faas was able to send his photographs to the outside
world. “I happened to be a hero when I thought I would be almost fired,” he
remembered.