Chaos.
That was the word, and James Fenton knew it the way you know
a smell—not intellectually, not after careful consideration, but in the gut, in
the marrow, in that ancient reptile part of the brain that exists for one
purpose only: to keep you alive. Chaos. It tasted like copper in the
back of his throat. It smelled like diesel exhaust and something else,
something older and darker that he didn’t want to name.
It was Wednesday, April 30th, 1975. And Saigon was dying.
He watched several trucks—military green, canvas-backed,
filled with men whose eyes had gone somewhere far away—suddenly reverse course
and head back toward the city’s heart. Nobody knew where to go. That was the
thing about chaos, real chaos, the kind that seeps up from the earth like
groundwater after three days of rain: it didn’t announce itself. It didn’t
knock. It just arrived, and suddenly every direction looked exactly as
wrong as every other direction, and the trucks were turning around, and the
city was eating itself, and James Fenton—last man standing, the lone Washington
Post correspondent who hadn’t yet booked a helicopter out of this particular
circle of hell—stood on the sidewalk feeling the world tilt beneath his feet.
Then the gunfire started at the nearby intersection.
It wasn’t the rolling thunder of an artillery barrage, wasn’t
the distant percussion of a firefight three klicks out. This was close.
Sharp and intimate and personal, the way a scream is personal when it comes
from the next room. Brian Barron from the BBC grabbed his arm. They looked at
each other. They’d lost their car somewhere in the last hour—he couldn’t even
remember when or how, time having become a strange and unreliable thing—and now
they were two western journalists standing on a Saigon street corner while
history buckled and groaned around them like a ship going down.
The city had a sound to it that day. Not the sound of
battle, exactly. More like the sound of a crowd in a theater when everyone
suddenly realizes the exits are locked. That low, rising moan. That collective
sharp intake of breath.
We are trapped, the city seemed to whisper. Every
last one of us.
A taxi materialized out of the haze—because sometimes, even
at the end of the world, a taxi materializes—and the driver, a small man with
quick, assessing eyes that had clearly seen enough already, offered to take
them downtown. The price was inflated. Of course it was. Even here, even now,
the old transactions held. Fenton didn’t hesitate. There are moments in a man’s
life when he understands, with absolute and crystalline clarity, that money is
just paper with delusions of grandeur.
They got in.
---
The Reuters office smelled of cigarettes and old coffee and
the particular desperation of men trying to impose narrative order on events
that had stopped caring about narrative. Fenton was at a typewriter, his
fingers moving, the words coming slowly the way they always did when the story
was too large—when the story was the size of a country collapsing—when you
couldn’t find the edges of it because you were inside it.
Then the door burst open.
Brian Barron stood in the frame, and his face wore an
expression that Fenton had never quite seen on it before. Not fear exactly. Not
confusion exactly. Something in between. Something that lived in the territory
where those two things overlapped, in the dark country where a man’s brain
receives information that it simply cannot process because the information is wrong,
because it violates some fundamental agreement about the way reality is
supposed to work.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Barron said.
He said it the way a man says something that he already
knows is inadequate. As an apology, almost. As an acknowledgment that language
itself had become insufficient for the occasion.
“I just saw a tank with the National Liberation Front flag.”
Fenton was up and moving before the sentence finished. Later
he would not entirely be able to account for this—the way the body sometimes
makes its decisions before the mind gets the memo, the way some deep cellular
intelligence overrides the cautious, reasonable, self-preserving parts of a man
and sends him running toward the thing instead of away from it.
Outside. The street. And there—
The tank.
It was magnificent and terrible, the way a natural disaster
is magnificent and terrible, the way a tornado is magnificent and terrible. You
know you shouldn’t look. You know the looking changes nothing, improves
nothing, makes you no safer and considerably less so. And you look anyway.
Because some things demand to be witnessed.
He ran after it.
---
Later, he would try to explain to people what it felt like
to negotiate passage onto a Viet Cong tank using nothing but hand gestures,
while Saigon burned and history turned on its axis around him. He never quite
could. The words always came out smaller than the experience, flatter, drained
of the electric animal aliveness of that moment. The soldiers on the tank—young
men, some of them very young, with the kind of faces that hadn’t yet
settled into what they would eventually become—looked at him with something
that might have been surprise, might have been wariness, might have been the
recognition that this wild-eyed western journalist was too crazy or too
committed or too something to simply be waved away.
They let him climb on.
The tank was already moving, already accelerating toward the
Presidential Palace gate. The gate stood there the way all symbolic barriers
stand when their time is up—slightly absurd, vaguely noble, fundamentally
doomed. The tank sped up.
Do you know what it sounds like, Fenton thought—or
perhaps he thought this later, in the reconstruction, in the careful archeology
of remembered terror—when history changes? When the old world ends and the
new one begins?
It sounds like metal hitting metal. It sounds like the groan
and shriek of a gate’s hinges. It sounds like a concussive blast that doesn’t
quite knock you off your perch but makes every bone in your body hum like a
plucked string. Shards of metal flew in every direction—past his face, past his
hands, past everything soft and mortal about him—and somehow, impossibly, he
was unhurt.
The gate had not fully fallen.
The tank backed up. And then—and this was the detail that
would stay with Fenton, the detail that felt almost cosmically anticlimactic,
like the punchline of a joke God had been setting up for twenty years—a man
with a nervous smile simply opened the central part of the gate.
Just opened it.
Because in the end, that’s how the world ends. Not always
with fire and fury. Sometimes with a man with a nervous smile opening a gate
that was never, in the final accounting, going to hold.
---
From somewhere nearby—or so it seemed, in the strange
spatial compression of extreme events—Martin Woollacott of the Guardian watched
Fenton on top of the tank and noted that he looked both thrilled and nervous.
This seemed to Woollacott a perfectly reasonable way to look. He turned his
attention to the bo doi—the North Vietnamese foot soldiers—entering the
palace grounds.
Their faces, he noted, showed relief.
Not triumph. Not rage. Not the savage joy of conquerors.
Just relief. The pure, simple, almost domestic relief of men who had
survived a thing that should have killed them, who had played their part in
something immense, and who were now—improbably, blessedly—still alive to see
how it ended.
Inside the palace, the quiet had weight. General Duong Van
Minh—“Big Minh,” the papers had called him, six feet of South Vietnamese
general who’d been president for exactly two days, long enough to inherit a
catastrophe and not quite long enough to escape it—stood waiting for the
conquerors who were no longer, technically, the conquerors of anything he
possessed.
He said he was ready to hand over power.
The North Vietnamese official who answered him did not
shout. Did not gloat. Did not deliver a speech. He simply said what was true,
in the flat, declarative tone of a man explaining a weather forecast:
You cannot hand over what you do not possess.
Nine words. The whole history of the war, of the American
involvement, of the Paris Accords and the “decent interval” and the thirty
percent aid cuts and Nixon’s resignation and Kissinger’s calculated
abandonment—all of it—compressed into nine words. Big Minh, who had ordered his
troops to stand down, who had perhaps saved Saigon from a bloodbath it never
knew it had narrowly avoided, stood in the echoing quiet of the Presidential
Palace and understood that the bill had finally come due, and the currency it
required was everything.
He surrendered.
---
Fear has a specific gravity. You can feel it pressing down
on a city the way weather presses down, the way a storm front changes the air
pressure hours before the first drop falls. Saigon, in those hours, was a city
under the weight of its own imagination—not just what the Viet Cong might do,
but what it had been told, had been trained to believe, had dreamed about in
its worst three-in-the-morning moments for years.
Fear of the Vietcong had robbed Saigon of its nerve.
One reporter wrote that. Just that. As a plain statement of
fact. And it was a plain statement of fact, the way so many of the most
terrible truths are: simple, unadorned, accurate, and capable of sitting in
your chest like a stone for years afterward.
Woollacott saw casualties. There had been fighting at the
city’s edges, brief and brutal. But here, in the center, what was happening was
different. What was happening was the particular violence of order
dissolving—looting, running, the ancient human emergency response of take
what you can carry because tomorrow is not guaranteed. The laws that hold
civilization together are, in the end, just agreements. And agreements require
two parties willing to honor them.
---
They had been living on borrowed time. The whole
enterprise—had been living on borrowed time since January 1973, since the Paris
Peace Accords, since Nixon and Kissinger had looked at the arithmetic of the
war and done the cold, clinical, unsentimental calculation that continuing was
no longer politically viable.
They had known. Kissinger had known. He had wanted, he said,
a decent interval. Such a phrase. Such a bloodless, diplomatic,
thoroughly inhuman phrase. As if twenty years of war was a social call that
merely required a polite pause before you checked your watch and made for the
door. As if the interval could be made decent by the wanting of it.
The weapons and equipment had slowed to a trickle. North
Vietnam had never stopped. It had taken Hue on March 26th—the old imperial
capital, a city of ghosts and history and beauty—and the shock had rippled
south like a stone thrown in still water. Da Nang fell three days later with
almost no fight. Almost no fight. As if the resistance had simply looked at
what was coming and decided, at some collective, cellular level, that it was
finished.
President Thieu had fled to Taiwan. The U.S. had already
gone. The dominoes that Washington had spent twenty years and fifty-eight
thousand American lives trying to prevent from falling had—
Well.
But here was the thing about the dominos. Here was the thing
that Fenton, riding his tank through the broken gate, had seen with his own
eyes. The dominoes fell, and the horror that had been promised—the purges, the
massacres, the rivers of blood, the boot descending on every face forever—did
not come. Not like that. Not as advertised.
“To me it seemed clear, and very ironic,” he would write
later, “that all the talk about what the North Vietnamese would do when—if—they
took over Saigon turned out to be wrong.”
The monsters had not arrived.
Which left you to wonder—and this was the thought that could
keep a man awake at four in the morning for years, for decades, long
after the last helicopter had lifted off the embassy roof and the last American
boot had left Vietnamese soil—it left you to wonder about all the years
between. About all the things that had been done in the name of preventing what
had not, in the end, come to pass.
Peace, Fenton wrote, more or less, had come.
More or less.
Two of the truest, saddest, most honest words in the English
language, when placed one after the other. Not the peace of justice. Not the
peace of vindication. Not the peace of any outcome anyone had precisely
intended or desired or designed.
Just peace.
The kind that arrives, finally, when everyone is too tired
to do anything else. The kind that settles over a city like evening settles
over a city—gradual and inevitable and, in its way, merciful. The kind that
doesn’t ask whether you deserved it.
Saigon was quiet.
Somewhere in the ruins of the Presidential Palace gate, the
metal had stopped groaning.
The man with the nervous smile had gone home.
And James Fenton—newsman, poet, witness, the last one
standing—sat down to write.
---
Chaos.
That was the word he’d started with.
But chaos, he was beginning to understand, was only what it
looked like from the outside—from the truck beds, from the street corners, from
the back of a tank moving too fast toward a gate that was never going to hold.
From the inside, it had felt like something else entirely.
It had felt, against all reason, like an ending.
Which is to say: it had felt, against all reason, like a
beginning.
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