REMEMBERING THE VIETNAM WAR – THE BITE OF THE LOTUS

Carl Robinson lived the Vietnam War first as what he calls “an idealistic US do-gooder” and later as a journalist until he fled Saigon with his Vietnamese wife and some of his extended Vietnamese family on a US helicopter. His memoir of that time is now available in his newly published The Bite of The Lotus which describes in candid style his love affair with the Vietnamese people and culture, his disillusionment with the US role in the war and his equally disgust at the Communist takeover of South Vietnam. To capture something of that account, Carl Robinson addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 18 March 2020,for filming and presentation on Youtube and was interviewed after the talk by Gerard Henderson.

REMEMBERING THE VIETNAM WAR – THE BITE OF THE LOTUS

CARL ROBINSON

It is a great honour to be back here again at The Sydney Institute, after 25 years, in 1995. That was exactly 20 years after the Fall of Saigon in April 1975. I was on a real high and had just returned to Vietnam for the first time and all that anger and bitterness from the war and especially its aftermath had disappeared. Like water off a duck’s back.  I could finally look Vietnam square in the eye again.

I offered a new perspective that we weren’t so wrong after all. More the way we did it. And most importantly, how naïve and full of wishful thinking I’d been to think we could ever have done a deal with the communist side. Especially after hearing and seeing first-hand what the bastards had done to the place since 1975. Years after the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, I finally became an anti-communist and completed the process of re-examining my lifelong lazy typical journo leftie outlook to a more conservative and realistic political outlook.

And now we are on the eve of the 45^th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon, let me take you back to those long-ago days.

It is 28 April 1975 — and Saigon is falling, and I’m home for lunch.  For the past 11 years, I’ve lived and worked in South Vietnam, first as a civilian adviser with the US Government and then a photographer and journalist with The Associated Press (AP). Over the past six weeks, the entire north of the country has fallen to the North Vietnamese Army and fighting now rages on the city’s outskirts.  Desperate hopes for a last-minute cease-fire and political solution surround the afternoon’s inauguration of neutralist and ex-General Duong van ‘Big’ Minh which I’m covering.

My father-in-law’s Citroen CV2 is outside. I haven’t seen him since my wife and two young children were ordered out 10 days before. We share an abiding disdain for the US-backed Saigon Regime and lulled by Communist promises of “national reconciliation” and “no recriminations” we have no plans to leave.

But, no, he’s changed his mind and wants to escape. And where’s the rest of the family, I ask?  “Still in Go Cong,” he glumly replies, 60 kms and three hours away in the northern Mekong Delta. But, tragically, everything is too late as events madly accelerate out of control over the next 24 hours and end with my running for one of the last choppers out of Saigon with only my wife’s brother and a niece, the rest of her family and my own beloved adopted homeland abandoned.

And that – at quite a head-spinning pace – is how my memoir of the entirety of the Vietnam War begins.

Then, more languidly, Chapter Two opens with my arrival in Saigon in early 1964 aboard a French passenger ship from Hong Kong as a curious university student on a month-long break from Chinese New Year. I was immediately enchanted and in love with Vietnam.

And that’s the underlying meaning of the expression the Bite of the Lotus. The lotus as the symbol of Vietnam and becoming enchanted by the place, an expression I heard very early – I forgot if it was a French-speaking Vietnamese, a Frenchman or an American – but it came back as I was searching for a title for my memoir.

The book then follows my next 11 years in South Vietnam as the war exploded. The Americans came, trashed and left. And, finally, back to opening chapter’s bitter ending and that chopper outa’ Saigon.

The sequel to what happened after 1975 and my ending up in Australia and start a new life is an Epilogue – including my talk here at The Sydney Institute – entitled Epiphany. But by way of prequel – actually in my original manuscript completed six years ago and often referred to in passing in the book — are about my Congo Days.

I was born in the US in 1943 and grew up in the Belgian Congo as the son of Methodist missionaries until the age of 15, or 1958.  English was actually my second language with all my early education in French. I learned Swahili from my Congolese playmates. Later, a missionary kids school run by Southern Presbyterians. You can imagine how my spoken English sounded in those days.

From my parents, I always had a keen interest in news and current events. Time magazine. Short-wave news on the BBC. The Lillibulero theme a signal for my bedtime. The Korean War. Hungary. Suez.

Later, back in the US, the heartbreak of Congo’s independence in 1960 and the secession of copper-rich Katanga where I’d grown up and the UN intervention.

But also – while originally an Adlai Stevenson fan – I was drawn into the idealism of John F Kennedy and planned to join the Peace Corps, perhaps even become a diplomat, after university.

I was always a very serious guy with little time for frivolities. I finished high school in Los Angeles and, as I started university in late 1961, like every young man, I was required to register for the draft. But, influenced by my pacifist parents and the example of my older brother, I ticked off Conscientious Objector and received an automatic student deferment.

After five years back in the US, I was ready to get out and, very much on a whim, decided to take my junior, or third year of university, 1963 – 1964, in Hong Kong. But I needed my Draft Board’s permission to go overseas.

Much to my surprise, I was sent a long form to fill out justifying my CO position. A bit of a struggle really. All very theoretical. Religious grounds were still required and after Catcher in the Rye, Ionescu’s Rhinoceros and Kafta’s Metamorphosis, my young mind was all over the place.

I got my Draft Board’s permission but had never thought that deeply about my convictions – much less that I’d end up in a real life war zone.

So, my pacifism – and just wanting everyone to just get along and a reflection of my missionary upbringing — is clearly an underlying theme of my story.  I always saw the war more in political terms. My early support for a neutralist solution. A coalition government. Opposition to US ground troops and the Saigon regime. Winning hearts & minds. Later, my friendship with and support of South Vietnam’s non-communist nationalist opposition, the Third Force.  All doomed causes, of course.

My memoir is a history of the entire Vietnam War from start to finish – and there’s even a Chronology to help you out – and told through my own personal journey. The whole damned movie.

And speaking modestly, a pretty ordinary guy too. A young idealist trying to win the hearts & minds. And then just another hack in the vast Saigon Press Corps. But with all the war’s major events a constant backdrop.

The narrative is contemporaneous. What I saw and felt at the time with only the rare retrospection.   It is evocative of time and place.  Fast-moving and full of anecdotes.

My story is also brutally honest, unemotionally and unembarrassingly so. But from all my years in Australia, also self-deprecating and laconic.

Many have remarked on my memory for detail. Work and personal. How Pacification worked — or was supposed to, anyway. How I lived, worked and socialised. Conversations and incidents. The salacious bits. Girlfriends. My love story with Kim-Dung, the bite of the lotus. Friendships. Later, the drugs. The romance of opium and dregs of heroin.

My narrative is hardly heroic or boastful. Looking back, I was often stupidly brave. Out there on the edge.  Repeatedly saved repeatedly by a lucky star.  Idealistic. Naïve. The full range of human emotions and contradictions. The tragedy of our lost child. Friends killed, wounded and just disappeared. The doldrums of wire service journalism. The adrenalin rush of combat. The joys of family life and bright rainy season days.

But always from a unique perspective, especially the details of the day to day life of the Vietnamese. Their culture and traditions.  Love of family. Endurance and resilience.

Now for some readings from my memoir. On the eve of my very first trip to South Vietnam on that French ship from Hong Kong during the Chinese New Year (page 17):

I had few preconceptions about South Vietnam, but I genuinely believed America was right to be there. Having grown up overseas, I didn’t think much of my country’s depressing parochialism and the dreadful superficiality of its pop culture, but I did believe in its great principles and ideals. Shattered as I was by his assassination, I was still a JFK idealist.

Like many of my generation, I was caught up in the excitement of Kennedy’s 1960 election. His inauguration speech about defending freedom around the world resonated strongly, and personally, with me. Compared to the ham-fisted ‘mutually assured destruction’ nuclear policy of Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower and his reactionary secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, JFK would surely reform the country’s ugly international image.

But after a Berlin crisis or two, and then the Cuban missile crisis, I understood that worldwide communism was a startling reality. We’d seen the emergence of East Germany and West Germany, North Korea and South Korea, and now the same division here.

Although philosophically I was a pacifist, and hardly a strident anti-communist, I had seen and read enough to know that the Communists weren’t the good guys. My brief time in Hong Kong on the fringes of what China was going through after its disastrous Great Leap Forward only confirmed that impression. America had a duty to actively and constructively confront the spread of communism.

I returned to Vietnam and was working on the Pacification Program with USAID down in the Mekong Delta. It was after the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the 1964 Presidential election with Lyndon B Johnson and Barry Goldwater where he was portrayed as the war monger and LBJ won election in his own right. We were in a phoney war, tested by the Viet Cong to escalate the war.  The US Embassy in Saigon was blown up. In March 1965, our small team of a dozen military and a couple civilians discussed rumours of US ground troops entering the war (pp 48 – 49):

Down in Go Cong, we met the prospect of US ground troops in South Vietnam with scepticism. Other Americans in Mytho and IV Corps HQs in Cantho felt similarly. Officers from our team brought back incredible stories and rumours of what MACV had in mind. They sure weren’t listening to us.

We in Advisory Team 83 had many late-night conversations over a can or two of cheap American beer about what was coming.

‘Why should GIs come in when even the South Vietnamese don’t want to fight?’ someone would say. ‘Let’s just wrap up the war and leave right now.’

That was how most of us felt, me included.

Then a yell from someone else: ‘Yeah, let’s give them the whole country – it’ll set back world communism by 20 years!’

‘No, you can’t really do that,’ I said. ‘What about all the pretty girls? No, what we should do is give every man, woman and child in South Vietnam a million dollars each! They’d all be too busy making money to fight.’

Yes! Cheers and a toast. But there should be no US combat troops into South Vietnam – on that we all agreed.

More realistically, I felt that if we did bring in US troops, we should put integrate them with the South Vietnamese army – mixed units. The Yanks eating rice and the Viets eating C-rations, our ‘hearts and minds’ united in the struggle. But, of course, no one in Saigon was interested in that brilliant idea.

The dice were rolling and in early March 1965, the first US Marines landed in northern Danang … and soon Australian troops too.

After that first year, I returned to the US to finish university and returned again to Vietnam – and again down to Go Cong Province in the northern Mekong Delta. Our team was larger now and we spent many evenings talking about the war – and now its morality (page 73):

Our conversations also touched on the morality of what our government was doing here, and the tactics it was using. The moral dilemma of Vietnam. We had no first-hand knowledge of what things were like for the US ground troops, although the 9th Division was moving in next door in Dinh Tuong Province and would soon wreak havoc across the northern Delta. But we did see and hear how the VC treated people: with compulsion, indoctrination, taxes and assassinations. We saw buses and mini-taxis blown up by remote-controlled mines, with atrocious civilian casualties. The VC’s outright acts of terrorism, including random mortar and rocket shellings, in Saigon and other urban centres, were obvious. They ruled by fear and intimidation. We saw the so-called National Liberation Front (NLF) for the phoney bunch they were, controlled by Hanoi. They were the ones who wanted to destroy an open and comparatively free society and ruin people’s ordinary lives.

The Viet Cong sure weren’t the good guys. So we wondered: how should we fight back? Be as mean and nasty as they are? Should we descend to their level of violence and terror to win this war? We still believed – and desperately wanted to believe – that what we were doing was right and moral. But was it? Or had we already crossed the line?

I’d met Kim-Dung in Go Cong which was about the only city not hit during the offensive. But when we flew out back to Cantho, there was a scene of  total destruction, including the sight of our bombing our own people. I quit USAID in protest. Together we ran away to Saigon. My journalism career began as I was hired out of a Saigon bar as a caption writer for The Associated Press.   What we used to call the Saigon School of Journalism – still applicable today – of just showing up, getting accredited and covering the war.

With regard to Kim-Dung and how we’d run away together, I didn’t want her to lose her family and her father had refused our marriage.  Finally, I’d run out of helpers to negotiate what was tougher than the months-long talks at the Paris Peace Talks over who’d get to sit at the table, Kim-Dung ended up as the match-maker at the final negotiations with her father  (pp 140 – 141):

 Sitting together at a small table, her father and I ate a simple but delicious lunch of crispy fried chicken wings on a bed of watercress and sliced tomatoes with vinaigrette dressing and steamed rice, which Kim-Dung and mother had prepared. A memorable favourite. Then the serious negotiations began.

Her father had a few questions. Was I married already? It was not a dumb question, as many Americans were taking second wives in Vietnam – with all the ceremony, even the paperwork – and later abandoning them.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I have never been married.’

Kim-Dung was the oldest of five children from the second marriage of both parents, whose earlier ones had produced three older girls. And so, with no number-one son or daughter in southern Vietnamese culture, only twos, she was number five, or Nam, which was how she was generally addressed, except by her own parents, who called her Dung. This daughter was not just beautiful but precious too, and her father worried that I’d be taking her away, never to be seen again.

‘No,’ I honestly assured him. ‘I am not planning to leave Vietnam. I never want her to lose touch with her own family.’

He seemed satisfied, and then said: ‘I have one more question for you. If I am satisfied with your reply, you can marry my daughter.’

‘Yes?’ I said anxiously. ‘What is it?’

Taking a deep breath, and then looking me straight in the eye, he asked, ‘Do you work for the CIA?’

I laughed out loud and looked at Kim-Dung. That’s his last question? So I’ve passed! ‘No, I’m not with the damned CIA,’ I sputtered, and burst into a wide grin. ‘So I can marry your daughter now, right?’ We all laughed.

Preparations for our wedding began. But first we needed to fix a date, and not just any date. Kim-Dung’s mother consulted a soothsayer – I don’t like the term ‘fortune-teller’ – to pinpoint an auspicious day. After just one look at our animal years, however, he threw his hands up in despair. ‘No, these two are not compatible. She is a buffalo and he is a goat.’

Of the 12 animals on the lunar zodiac, we were directly opposite each other, and that wasn’t good, apparently. Plus, our respective horns would, logically, always be locking together and fighting.

‘But they’re in love and we’ve given our approval,’ protested Mother.

Reluctantly, the soothsayer continued his deliberations, and finally declared that there was only one auspicious day in all of 1969, the 26th of May. Otherwise it would have to be next year. Okay, then.

I have written also of my friendships including with John Steinbeck, son of the famous novelist and war correspondent but now estranged, and Sean Flynn, the son of Australian, actually Tasmanian-born, actor Errol Flynn. Our motorcycle trips together. A dope run down to Chau Doc in the western Mekong Delta and then a hairy ride up through the heart of Laos from Vientiane to Luang Prabang.  Sadly, after the March 1970 coup that overthrew Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk, he disappeared along with another friend on their motorcycles down near the South Vietnamese border never heard from again.  I could’ve been there too.

I didn’t do much combat, and was not expected to do that. Plus, as I’ve said, I always saw the war more as a political struggle. But when the South Vietnamese invaded Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail in early 1971, I got my taste of combat. I’d got a lift with a GI from Khe Sanh and at a firebase which soon came under long-range NVA (North Vietnamese Army) from artillery fire from across the border inside Laos. I crawled into a tight bunker as shell fragments exploded all around the firebase. You could hear the click, the sound and the explosion all around us (pp 213 – 214):

Coming out of one scrunch from an incoming round, my GI friend held a cigarette through a narrow space between the sandbags and said, ‘Here, have some of this.’ Jeez! The last thing I needed was a joint.

‘No, better not,’ I said. ‘It’ll just freak me out.’

‘No, man, this will make you relaxed.’

And so I accepted his offer – and soon realised I wasn’t smoking dope, but heroin. Pure 95 per cent smack. He’d just picked up a fresh stash for himself and his mates from some ARVNs back at Khe Sanh. And damn if things didn’t start feeling a lot more relaxing. After a couple of cigarettes, I could’ve stayed there for the rest of the day. The NVA artillery kept coming in and we didn’t even bother scrunching up anymore.

The GI told me his story, and how he just wanted to go home to Cleveland and work as a mortician. What, after seeing all this death and destruction in Vietnam? After a couple of hours the barrage finally stopped, and as we crawled out of our shelters my head was spinning. ‘You’d better get going,’ my friend advised, and I rushed down to the road to hitch a ride back to Khe Sanh. I didn’t need Lao Bao anymore.

Almost immediately I was picked up by two ARVN Airborne in their distinctive red berets in an open jeep. Back where the GI had paused before driving me into the firebase a couple hours before, another ARVN jeep lay on its side, with two dead men twisted into grotesque positions; they’d hit a land mine, the huge explosion we heard during the shelling.

Not much further down the road, I heard some small explosions and the traffic ground to a halt. The NVA had just fired a couple of mortars from that escarpment just across the border. A US armoured cavalry unit on the elevated left side of the road was firing its powerful guns, mixed with tracer rounds, along the base of the mountain.

Without thinking of the danger, I hopped out of the jeep and began taking pictures. Shit, I thought. This is real!

With the gunner grimacing at the outgoing fire, I saw that the front of his armoured vehicle was decorated with flowers and the peace sign. Then one of the Airborne troops ran up and yelled for me to get back in the jeep. The road was open again. Nice of them not to leave me behind.

I’d made my dash and finally got my taste of combat. I now knew the exhilaration of getting shot at and surviving. I’d felt that adrenaline kick in, where everything slows right down, and I could feel and sense everything around me in brilliant colours. There is no other high like it; I could understand the addiction. I could see that, yes, you could get yourself killed doing shit like that. But there’s no greater feeling than surviving.

Last quotation.

So that was 1971. In January 1973 was the Paris cease fire agreement. A lot of media organisations cut back on their staff. I stayed on with the AP and that was really the peak of my time as a journalist. But I also fell into, as I referred earlier, the addiction of heroin which I’m quite honest about and why that happened. It was all part of a slow deterioration, like being on a train that you knew was going to crash, like taking prozac three times a day or whatever. As the Vietnam War ended, I was just a nervous wreck when I ran for that helicopter. Everything fell apart after all those years.

Interview with Gerard Henderson

Gerard Henderson: Thanks for that Carl. All very frank I must say. I’m really pleased you became a born-again anti-communist at The Sydney Institute some years ago. There’s no better place to become a born-again anti-communist. But can I just take you back to the year before you arrived in Vietnam, because you arrived in Vietnam in 1964. But it seems to me that the war was lost in November 1963 when, as you describe it in your glossary, an American backed coup overthrew Diem, who for whatever his faults was the only leader South Vietnam ever really had. You arrive in 1964 and by that stage there was no real legitimate government in South Vietnam. So how did you interpret arriving in 1964, the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem the previous year?

Carl Robinson: Well yes, and, of course, just a week before “Big” Minh had been overthrown in a coup because he was too much of a neutralist.

Gerard Henderson: That’s the week before you arrived?

Carl Robinson: Yes, the week before I arrived.

Gerard Henderson: So that’s 1964?

Carl Robinson: Early 1964. And there had been a great high. What the people described as a revolution by the students and Buddhists and everyone else who had helped overthrow Diem. But what replaced him was a rabble really who were constantly fighting amongst themselves as if warlordism had taken over. That was a tragedy, you’re right. Diem was the only effective leader they ever had. And he knew the communists and how they operated very well. It’s too bad that he wasn’t able to establish a stronger anti-communist nationalist coalition. That was his problem.

Gerard Henderson: Our one time Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser — who was a prominent Liberal backbencher in the mid-1960s and then became a minister — in his memoirs said that he was never aware of any American or CIA involvement in the Diem overthrow but he must have been the only person in the world who wasn’t because we discussed this at school in 1963. So, what did you know about the American involvement when you arrived there in 1964?

Carl Robinson: It was just generally assumed that that was what had happened. The American mission was very small, and everyone knew each other or knew about each other and of course the Americans had their fingers all over it. But they wanted to make it look like it was something that the South Vietnamese decided on their own. There’s always this appearance. Even when the United States brought troops in, you had musical chairs governments. You might remember Australia waited until they were invited to come in by one of the musical chairs governments. That was part of my early days in South Vietnam.

Gerard Henderson: What was the view at the time about why the Americans, the Kennedy administration, was involved. President Kennedy was said to have been deeply disturbed by Diem’s death, a fellow Catholic. But he was clearly involved in it. Well, not necessarily Diem’s death but Kennedy was involved in the overthrow. So why do you think the Americans felt the need to overthrow the Diem government?

Carl Robinson: I’ve always wondered about that. I’ve done more reading on this recently. The Administration went around the president and went to Saigon to give them go ahead for that coup. Kennedy, sad to say, was really out of it and he tried to wind it back after he heard that the message had gone to start talking to the generals. But it is too bad that he didn’t make a more public gesture. But the die was already cast at that stage unfortunately.

Gerard Henderson: Now did you enter USAID because you were a bit naive? You thought that a neutral government could emerge in South Vietnam. But over the border was a hardline Stalinist communist dictatorship led by Ho Chi Minh. How could you have ever imagined that that sort of regime in the 1950s into the 1960s would have tolerated a neutral non-communist government in the South?

Carl Robinson: Well you remember also next door was neutralist Cambodia with Sihanouk.

Gerard Henderson: Yes, but it wasn’t next door to North Vietnam.

Carl Robinson: I know. But at that early stage there was more or less an equilibrium between the two states as far as military power and so on were concerned, and Charles de Gaulle in September 1963 had called for the neutralisation of South Vietnam. If it was something backed by the French and the Americans could have had a greater chance of success. And before the hardliners took over completely in North Vietnam. But the whole third world movement was something that we weren’t going to get involved with, remember? With Sukarno and India and China. It could have worked if the Americans had thrown their weight behind it but they would not do it, especially with a Democratic party regime. There was also the model of neutralisation of Laos, even though the effect of all that was just to turn the war secret and allow the North Vietnamese to keep using the Ho Chi Minh trail.

Gerard Henderson: If you go back to what the left was saying on university campuses and elsewhere in the1960s. They said the problem with the South Vietnamese government was there should have been a genuine election for the whole of Vietnam. Yet we know there was not one chance in a million that North Vietnam would allow a genuine election. So, again, that was a degree of naivety wasn’t it? The concept that somehow this could be resolved by a free election when there were more people in the North than there were in the South and no one in the North had any freedom at all. Whereas in the South there was quite a degree of political freedom.

Carl Robinson: That’s right.

Gerard Henderson: You sort of describe it in your book, don’t you? You’ve got all these various factions but if all these different groups are competing there’s some degree of political freedom.

Carl Robinson: There was supposed to be an election in 1956, with that disastrous land reform program in the North. There was such animosity towards the Communist regime that Ho Chi Minh himself had to finally step in and draw that to a halt. It’s how that election would have gone. It’s just a point of speculation of course.

Gerard Henderson: Oh, come on Carl. There was never any communist regime of the Stalinist kind or the Maoist kind or the Ho Chi Minh kind that ever had a free election. Or the North Korean kind.

Carl Robinson: Well you’re right.

Gerard Henderson: It couldn’t happen, could it?

Carl Robinson: Not likely.

Gerard Henderson: So that argument was going nowhere. As you will recall the argument, also in the 1960s from the left, was that the Viet Cong or the National Liberation front was completely independent and there weren’t any North Vietnamese forces in Vietnam. Now, how did you see it when you arrived there in 1964? To what extent was the National Liberation Front or the Viet Cong independent?

Carl Robinson: I always saw them as just a front. That’s what they were. They even called themselves a front. The communists jazzed it up, they called themselves the Workers Party. They didn’t become the Communist Party until after 1975. But there was another model that we could talk about – we sat around talking seriously all the time – and it was the Tito model. If that was a possibility. But it would have taken a lot more nuance the Americans were prepared to accept.

Gerard Henderson: You’re talking about Tito the leader of Yugoslavia who wasn’t quite aligned with Moscow but he wasn’t quite hostile to Moscow either. So, as you know, the Americans go in, as you point out in your book, and combat forces go in in 1965, and Australian combat forces around the same time. Our forces performed very well in the circumstances in the areas they were given. So you’re there 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967 and then comes the Tet Offensive in 1968. At that stage, you get out of USAID and become a journalist. But Owen Eather – one of our members here – made a point to me today and I agree with it substantially but I’m interested in your opinion. The Tet Offensive was a total military failure; the North Vietnamese suffered more than 60 per cent battle casualties, half killed in action. They did not overthrow the South Vietnamese government. The Viet Cong were virtually annihilated as an effective military force and there was no mass uprising as had been expected. So, In a military sense, the Tet Offensive what not a victory. Yet, as you and many saw it, it was a huge defeat for the US. So how do you put those two together? Did the United States win on the ground but lose the argument?

Carl Robinson: Well, my beef was more the way that they were running the war, frankly. That was always my argument. We never really paid close enough attention or even tried a decent level relationship with the South Vietnamese. I saw that Tet was a military defeat for the communists; they were seriously wiped out. Going back to Go Cong province for the first time after Tet, I could go anywhere because most of the communists were killed. At the same time, the Saigon government had an unparalleled opportunity, after the Tet Offensive, to create a broad coalition government. But they couldn’t do it. Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, the President, was fighting with Nguyễn Cao Kỳ. There was a lost opportunity after 1968 where the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army had been defeated. A good government after 1968 would have made a big difference, it would have made South Vietnam a viable and strong state. But that didn’t happen.

Gerard Henderson: And that goes back to the earlier point that after Diem there was no effective government. I mean, whatever his faults, his government was reasonably effective for the time.

Carl Robinson: That’s right.

Gerard Henderson: You then you lead on to a gradual American withdrawal but the Americans keep supplying the South Vietnamese. Meanwhile supplies to the North Vietnamese come in from the Soviet Union which the Americans never really stop, although they could have – and to some extent from China. But then, came Watergate and all that, American pledged to supply the South Vietnamese regime which was fighting, for all its faults, quite bravely against a very well supplied force. As you know, the North Vietnamese had the capacity to knock the most developed US fighter warplanes out of the sky with Soviet supplied weapon. So, this was a very sophisticated army at a certain level. But once the US virtually abandoned military supplies to South Vietnam at that stage, there was nothing much left was there?

Carl Robinson: Well by that stage, by that stage the Democratic Party controlled Congress and was running foreign policy. One of the very perverse things, just after the Paris Peace Agreement, was that Congress voted not to offer reconstruction funding to the North. Something like that might have mellowed things or at least calmed things down. There were also political provisions in the Paris Peace Agreement. Had the Americans put pressure on Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, he would have signed the Paris Peace Agreement. What the South Vietnamese needed in the end was a highly motivated, highly mobile force with some good anti-tank weaponry. It wasn’t necessarily more money and more weapons. It’s just, in the end, they were poorly led. Nguyễn Văn Thiệu fancied himself as a political strategist. But when the crunch came he certainly couldn’t do it. But if Nixon had not been involved in Watergate, there’s no question he would have done something. Then Congress banned any further military action in 1974. Where they said no more US troops. So even if Nixon had been president in 1975, he probably wouldn’t have done anything. Maybe he could’ve blustered his way and done something but he was really doomed after Watergate frankly.

Gerard Henderson: Tell us about your own experiences in 1974, particularly April 1975 with the fall of Saigon pending. You had a good reason to evacuate. You weren’t in love with communism. You’d married a gorgeous woman Kim-Dung. And you had a family and you wanted to get out and they got out and then you got out, for good reason. The leading left wing journalist at the time John Pilger, who sort of spoke about the fall of Saigon as the liberation of Vietnam, jumped on one of the American helicopters and went off on the Blue Ridge. I thought he should have stayed and welcomed the liberation. I can see why you left. But what was the feeling like?

Carl Robinson: When the airport came under artillery fire, they switched to the US embassy which they had never planned to use as an evacuation point. They used it to pick people up from the roof. They had to cut down a tree to make room. But the original plan was for the evacuation to take place out near the airport which is where I left.

Gerard Henderson: But the airport had fallen around the time you were going, had fallen to the North Vietnamese?

Carl Robinson: Yeah it was coming under increasing attack. Artillery fire. But, going back a moment, I would have liked, after spending all that time in Vietnam, to have been there to see the end, right? It’s like not watching the end of an all-night movie; I had to see the end of it.

Gerard Henderson: The tanks crashing through the gates –

Carl Robinson: I think I deserved to see that. I always laugh that Pilger, for all of his leftie bluster, was on one of those choppers too. He should have stayed. But, in the end, I like to say it was my Confucian duty to get out some of Kim’s family out or not at all. And, of course, , the follow up story is that Kim-Dung’s father ended up in a communist re-education camp.

Gerard Henderson: For how long?

Carl Robinson: For four and a half years

Gerard Henderson: Hang on just one second, was he a very vocal opponent of the regime? Or was he just someone who wasn’t a supporter of the regime?

Carl Robinson: He was a member of the popularly elected Provincial Council which was an attempt at grassroots democracy. And he was in the government recognised labour union before that. But he wasn’t a government official or in the military.

Gerard Henderson: But he still got four and a half years?

Carl Robinson: He got four and a half years. And it was thanks to Australian diplomatic intervention that he was released. Thanks to Andrew Peacock, Australia’s foreign minister at the time.

Gerard Henderson: Who asked Andrew Peacock to intervene?

Carl Robinson: I did.

Gerard Henderson: So you succeeded there?

Carl Robinson: Yes, when I was with Newsweek in the 1980s.

Gerard Henderson: Well as you know the Fraser government was very good in trying to get diplomats and others out, and friends of Australians out. The Whitlam government of course had a miserable record, it didn’t want to get anyone out, apart from people who weren’t under any threat. Whitlam didn’t want to get anti-communists out. So, you jump on a helicopter and you land where? On an American ship?

Carl Robinson: I landed on a US navy ship that was closest to the shore.

Gerard Henderson: And then you went to?

Carl Robinson: Eventually we went to the Blue Ridge

Gerard Henderson: John Pilger was on the Blue Ridge, did you meet him there?

Carl Robinson: No, we hung around because our ship was carrying landing craft and we were picking up the very first of the boat people.

Gerard Henderson: I see. They were fleeing already? The boat people were fleeing already?

Carl Robinson: Oh yeah. I have pictures. I took pictures of the very first boat people and we were close to shore. We were picking them up and sending them off to freighters that were in the harbour. We stayed on the station. By the time we got to Blue Ridge John Pilger and all the other journos had left. Then from there we were flown to the Philippines.

Gerard Henderson: So, we’re getting to the end. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I mean you got over the heroin addiction, how hard was that?

Carl Robinson: Well I got on a chopper and left.

Gerard Henderson: You went cold turkey on an American chopper?

Carl Robinson: Well, that’s the simplest way to put it. I don’t know how serious an addiction I had, it wasn’t shooting up in a Saigon alley, right? It was just smoking this stuff. I could go off, and I took female menstrual tablets for the cramps. So I was quite used to going on and off. But if I were to give advice to addicts I would say the best thing is to get out of where you are. I had no reason, in New York afterwards, or in Australia, to go back on. I never even had a desire or interest, much less to smoke something that’s so adulterated after the quality stuff that I had used.

Gerard Henderson: Well I’m not experienced in this but I can understand what you’re on about.

Carl Robinson: I got away from it, you know. In the book, you’ll almost understand why and how it happened.

Gerard Henderson: So do you reckon your journalism was better on the smack or off the smack?

Carl Robinson: Oh it was just a drudge, you know, just covering it. But I functioned, I fully functioned.

Gerard Henderson: So you come to Australia, you fell out with Associated Press. Do you want to explain that or not bother about it? Was just another journalistic row?

Carl Robinson: I think it was, I spent two years in New York and then they sent me down here because I wanted to get overseas again. The last place to send a war correspondent is Australia, even now. It was really hard coming up with any news. I wasn’t really performing. My wife was totally torn up over losing her family. But the best thing about Australia was you had diplomatic relations with Vietnam. So, as soon as we got here we were able to send money and letters and eventually get her father out of a camp to migrate to Australia.

Gerard Henderson: So how many of Kim’s family came here?

Carl Robinson: Eventually we got the parents and two brothers out here. But it took ten years.

Gerard Henderson: And who remained?

Carl Robinson: They all got out either here or to the US. And then her sister came out later in 1990.

Gerard Henderson: Apart from your many activities and your many talents, you ended up working on the film The Quiet American which, as you know, has an Australia connection. Tell us about the Australian connection, why were you there and was it good fun?

Carl Robinson: Well Kim-Dung had met Phillip Noyce the director when they were doing a prototype with SBS, do you remember?

Gerard Henderson: Yes

Carl Robinson: They had all these big name Australian directors. Kim and Phillip spent a lot of time putting together some vignettes and they became good friends. Then once he got his hands on The Quiet American he says, “You two are like The Quiet American, aid worker and then journalist with the charming girl.” He had always wanted to do a movie so when he finally did it, he managed the get Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. The filming was here at Fox Studios. One scene had an opium smoking scene. And, in fact, the movie starts with the bubbling, and that was me. So, while they were off shooting in Vietnam, I was working with the crew here in Sydney in Moore Park to come up with something that looked and burned like opium but wouldn’t kill Michael Caine. It was wonderful hanging out with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser as well.

Gerard Henderson: So you start off as a journalist in Vietnam in 1964 and you end up as the heroin adviser to The Quiet American. Opium smoking adviser to The Quiet American. It was a great film.

Carl Robinson: Considering we didn’t have the real product.

Gerard Henderson: What a shame

Carl Robinson: But we all thought we were Graham Greene, you know, hanging out in opium dens.

Gerard Henderson: Well Graham, I’m sorry, Carl. Thanks a lot. Well done. Good luck with the book.

Carl Robinson: Thank you.