How a can of Coke and day-old cake led to iconic photo that went around the world

Bangkok: They’d watched overnight as the bombardments grew closer, and observed through binoculars as the last US marines piled into a helicopter on the roof of the embassy to be whisked away from Saigon.

So when the reporters who had stayed behind heard the telltale squeak of the rubber sandals worn by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops on the stairs outside The Associated Press office, they weren’t surprised, and braced themselves for possible detention or arrest.

But when the two young soldiers who entered showed no signs of malice, the journalists just kept reporting.

Offering the men a Coke and day-old cake, Peter Arnett, George Esper and Matt Franjola started asking about their march into Saigon. As the men detailed their route on a bureau map, photographer Sarah Errington emerged from the darkroom and snapped what would become an iconic picture, published around the world.

Fifty years later, Arnett recalled the message he fed into the teletype transmitter to AP headquarters in New York after the improbable scene had played out.

“In my 13 years of covering the Vietnam War, I never dreamed it would end as it did today,” he remembers writing. “A total surrender following a few hours later with a cordial meeting in the AP bureau with an armed and battle-garbed North Vietnamese officer with his aide over warm Coke and pastries? That is how the Vietnamese war ended for me today.”

The message never made it: after a day of carrying alerts and stories on the fall of Saigon and the end of a 20-year war in which more than 58,000 Americans were killed and many times that number of Vietnamese, the wire had been cut.

The fall of Saigon ended an era

The fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, was the end of an era for the AP in Vietnam. Arnett left in May, and then Franjola was expelled, followed by Esper, and the bureau wouldn’t be re-established until 1993.

The AP opened its first office in Saigon in 1950 as the fight for independence from France by Viet Minh forces under communist leader Ho Chi Minh intensified.

The Viet Minh’s decisive victory over the US-supported French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 marked the end of French Indochina and sparked major changes in the region with the partitioning of Vietnam into Communist North Vietnam and US-aligned South Vietnam. The official US military engagement began in 1955 and slowly escalated.

Malcolm Browne took over as AP bureau chief in Saigon in November 1961 and was joined in June 1962 by Arnett and photo chief Horst Faas.

The trio soon won consecutive Pulitzer prizes: Browne in 1964, Faas in 1965 and Arnett in 1966 – the first of five the AP would receive for its coverage from Vietnam.

Four AP photographers were killed covering the war, and at least 16 other AP journalists were injured, some multiple times, as they reported from the front lines, seeking to record the news as completely and accurately as possible.

From the start, a lot of the reporting contradicted the official version from Washington, revealing a deeper American commitment than admitted, a lack of measurable success against the Viet Cong guerillas, and a broad dislike of the ineffective and corrupt American-backed South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, Arnett said.

That prompted managers in New York to wonder why the Saigon staffers’ stories were sometimes “180 degrees” different from those AP reporters wrote from press conferences at the US State Department, the Pentagon and the White House, he recalled.

“We had a strategic advantage because we were 12,000 miles (1931 kilometres) away from our administration critics, with our boots on the ground,” said Arnett, 90, who lives in California today. “Within a year, our reporting was vindicated.”

At the height of the war, roughly 30 staffers were assigned to the bureau, divided between news, photos and administration, and the AP made regular use of freelancers as well, usually photographers. It was a diverse group that included people from 11 different countries, including many local Vietnamese.

During surges in the fighting, staffers would rotate in from other bureaus to help.

When the US government took umbrage with AP’s coverage in 1966 and claimed its staffers were young and inexperienced, AP’s general manager, Wes Gallagher, penned a salty reply, noting their combined decades as reporters.

“Three covered World War II and Korea. Two, Pulitzer prize winners Peter Arnett and Horst Faas, have been in Vietnam four years each, which is longer than ambassador [Henry Cabot] Lodge, General [William] Westmoreland and nine-tenths of the Americans over there,” Gallagher wrote.

In an attempt to manage the news reports out of Vietnam, the US established a daily news conference in Saigon to feed information to the growing American press corps. They came to be colloquially known as the “Five O’clock Follies” because, as Esper reflected, “they were such a joke”.

Esper said in a 2005 interview that sometimes he’d show up to evening briefings the same day he had covered a battle first-hand and was left puzzled by the official version.

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Is this the same battle I just witnessed?’ ” Esper, who died in 2012, said. “So there was some confrontation at the ‘follies’ because we would question the briefer’s reports, and they also withheld tremendous amounts of information.”

Esper said it helped that Gallagher took a personal hand in Vietnam coverage, frequently calling and visiting in support of his journalists.

“He took a lot of heat from the Pentagon, from the White House, but he never faltered,” Esper said. “He always said to us: ‘I support you 100 per cent. You know the press is under scrutiny, just make sure you’re accurate, just make sure your stories are fair and balanced,’ and we did.”

Reporting from the streets and rooftops

In 1969, the American commitment in Vietnam had grown to more than half a million troops, before being drawn down to a handful after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords in which then-US president Richard Nixon agreed to a withdrawal, leaving the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves.

By 1975, the AP’s bureau had shrunk as well, and as the North Vietnamese Army and its allied Viet Cong guerilla force in the south pushed towards Saigon, most staff members were evacuated.

Arnett, Esper and Franjola volunteered to stay behind, anxious to see through to the end what they had committed so many years of their lives to covering – and conspiring to ignore New York if any of their managers got the jitters and ordered them to leave at the last minute.

“I saw it from the beginning, I wanted to see the end,” Esper said. “I was a bit apprehensive and frightened, but I knew that if I left, the rest of my life I would have been second-guessing myself.”

On April 30, 1975, the monsoon rains had arrived and Arnett watched in the early morning hours from the slippery roof of the AP’s building as helicopters evacuated Americans and selected Vietnamese from the embassy four blocks away.

After catching a few hours of sleep, he awoke at 6.30am to the loud voices of looters on the streets. An hour later, from the rooftop of his hotel, he watched through binoculars as a small group of US marines that had accidentally been left behind clambered aboard a Sea Knight helicopter from the roof of the embassy – the last American evacuees.

He called it in to Esper in the office, and the story was in newsrooms around the world before the helicopter had cleared the coast.

‘I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we’re all the same.’

George Esper, AP journalist

Franjola and Arnett then took to the streets to see what was going on, while Esper manned the desk. When they got to the US Embassy, a mob of people were grinning and laughing as they looted the building – a sharp contrast to the desperation of people the day before hoping to be evacuated.

“On a pile of wet documents and broken furniture on the back lawn, we find the heavy bronze plaque engraved with the names of the five American soldiers who died in the attack on the embassy in the opening hours of the Tet Offensive in 1968,” Arnett recalled in an email detailing the day’s events. “Together we carry it back to the AP office.”

At 10.24am, Arnett was writing the story of the embassy looting when Esper heard on Saigon Radio that South Vietnam had surrendered, and immediately filed an alert.

“Esper rushes to the teleprinter and messages New York, and soon receives the satisfying news that AP is five minutes ahead of UPI with the surrender story,” Arnett said, citing AP’s biggest rival at the time, United Press International. “In war or peace, the wire services place a premium on competition.”

Esper then dashed outside to try and gather some reaction from South Vietnamese soldiers to the news of the capitulation, and came across a police colonel standing by a statue in a main square.

“He was waving his arms, ‘fini, fini’, you know, ‘it’s all over, we lost’,” Esper remembered. “And he was also fingering his holstered pistol and I figured, this guy is really crazy, he will kill me, and after 10 years here with barely a scratch, I’m going to die on this final day.”

Suddenly, the colonel did an about-face, saluted the memorial statue, drew his pistol and shot himself in the head.

Shaken, Esper ran back to the bureau, up the four flights of stairs to the office and punched out a quick story on the incident, his hands trembling as he typed.

Stories flow as Saigon falls

Back on the streets, Franjola, who died in 2015, was nearly sideswiped by a Jeep packed with men brandishing Russian rifles and wearing the black Viet Cong garb. Arnett then saw a convoy of Russian trucks loaded with North Vietnamese soldiers driving down the main street and scrambled back into the office.

“‘George,’ I shout, ‘Saigon has fallen. Call New York’,” Arnett said. “I check my watch. It’s 11.43am.”

Over the next few hours, more soldiers, supported by tanks, pushed into the city, engaging in sporadic fighting while the AP reporters kept filing their copy.

It was about 2.30pm when they heard the rubber sandals outside the office, and the two NVA soldiers burst in, one with an AK-47 assault rifle swinging from his shoulder, the other with a Russian pistol holstered on his belt. To their shock, the soldiers were accompanied by Ky Nhan, a freelance photographer who worked for the AP, who proudly announced himself as a long-time member of the Viet Cong.

“I have guaranteed the safety of the AP office,” Arnett recalled the normally reserved photographer saying. “You have no reason to be concerned.”

As Arnett, Esper and Franjola pored over the map with the two NVA soldiers, they chatted through an interpreter about the attack on Saigon, which had been renamed Ho Chi Minh City as soon as it fell.

The interview with the two soldiers turned to the personal, and the young men showed the reporters photos of their families and girlfriends, telling them how much they missed them and wanted to get home.

“I was thinking in my own mind these are North Vietnamese, there are South Vietnamese, Americans – we’re all the same,” Esper said.

“People have girlfriends, they miss them, they have the same fears, the same loneliness, and in my head I’m tallying up the casualties, you know nearly 60,000 Americans dead, a million North Vietnamese fighters dead, 224,000 South Vietnamese military killed, and 2 million civilians killed. And that’s the way the war ended for me.”

AP

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