50th Anniversary Issue — October 1, 1995

By Bob Cutts

I had it all.

I was 19, I thought I was talented, and I knew the gods were smiling on me that May Day when I first appeared, orders in hand, in the Stripes city room.

I'd come straight from a PIO office on a backwoods air base in New York, with my NCOIC's commiserating advice still rolling around in my ego:

"You'll never make it to the Stars and Stripes, kid. They're too good a team for a young cub like you.''

But, of course, the impeccable logic of the military held its majestic sway: As soon as I stepped off the plane in Japan, they assigned me directly to PS&S -- before they were even sure I could spell "salubrious.''

Or "implausible.''

Oh, those were empyrean days. I had a whole city room full of real newsmen, military and civilian, to coach my neophyte steps: my first photo caption, my first rewrite. My first feature story assignment was to find out "who changes the lightbulbs on Tokyo Tower?''

Two days later, the real reporter -- our interpreter and editorial librarian, the exquisite Toshi Tokunaga -- and I were hanging woozily off girders 650 feet straight up, reporting live from the scenery.

And the story got printed!

And the next, and the one after that. And pretty soon I got my first real reporter's pay, that reimbursement every teenage cub lives on and for: a byline.

Pretty soon, they were even sending me out to cover change-of-command ceremonies. I was on the way.

Then I began to hear echoing across the city room an exotic, evocative name: Vietnam.

A good place for a young reporter to make a name for himself. I begged for a chance to go.

They sent me down to help get a bureau started in Saigon.

What crisp, sparkling fun!

We went to the Five O'clock Follies -- the daily briefings -- and thought up trenchant questions.

Too low on priority to get a Jeep, we pushed our old rented Citroen through the streets when it broke down.

We roughed out our copy by candlelight each evening when the power went out. We dined exquisitely at the Caravelle, and we drank too much each night sitting up on the bureau roof, watching the flares and the deadline red firefalls from the gunships all around the city.

I was part of history.

My bylines jostled each other on the front page.

And there was reporting from the field! Nha Trang, where I flew bombing patrols with the Skyraider crews, watching our cannon-fire sparkling around the running, black-clad figures so far below us -- and nearly went down on a beach when an engine started to conk out.

Qui Nhon, where I rode with the coastal patrol trawlers and got ambushed at the entrance to a bay, lying on the wooden decks and watching great white towers of the bullets hitting water, spuming all around us like lawn sprinklers having heart attacks, my ears going deaf in the roar of our own .30 and .50 calibers.

Vinh Long, in the Delta, where I rode behind a burly, broad-humored Irishman named Kelly, who really did play "Ride of the Valkyries'' over the intercom as he fired his rockets and skimmed his helicopter gunship across the hot LZs. We shot up the town; we flew back to the chow hall for steaks; we drank Carling's Black Label and listened to "Eve of Destruction'' on the jukebox.

Nobody but "Charley'' ever got hurt; nobody on our side ever really lost anything. Hell, it was just rice paddies, trees and villages. What could you lose?

It all just made great, heroic copy.

Looking back, I don't think I ever understood what was going on around me.

I never knew the escalation we were pushing our way through in Vietnam was someday going to have a different result, was going to bring us things enough to lose.

I absented myself from the war for a while -- the result of a dumb trick I played in Thailand, when I talked my way on board an airstrike over North Vietnam, a flight that reporters were forbidden to take.

It wasn't all that much of a story. But it got the squadron commander in trouble, and it got me on the surely very short list of American servicemen banned from the war zone by their own side.

But the military has a mercifully short memory. I was back covering Vietnam in 1968. It was right after the Tet Offensive, whose bombs and rockets, from both sides, had cracked Saigon open.

By now, there was much more of the loss and the pain and the real to see inside the writhing, bleeding body of Vietnam.

I went to Binh Hoa and watched the clouds of evac choppers rushing the broken and burned flesh of Americans my own age from the rubber plantations of I Corps to the field hospitals.

I flew north to dusty strips where, chasing taxiing transport planes that never dared stop long enough to give the North Vietnamese gunners in the hills a clean shot, I felt the nakedness of history and of inferior, no longer superior, firepower.

I went to a Special Forces camp in the Delta and saw at dawn the bodies from last night's attack, stretched out in rows of bone and sinew in the dirt, like something for sale at the devil's country market. In forsaken outposts I could see what remained invisible to Americans at home: the courage and pride of our Vietnamese allies dying for their country.

Along the flight ramp at Tan Son Nhut, I could see the long, long flatbeds with aluminum capsules, waiting for the last airlift home.

I smelled the smell you never forget, the stench of death in the jungle heat.

I went back finally to Long Binh, looking again to ride the gunships. And they remembered old Kelly there. The .50 caliber had caught him sitting in his pilot's seat, at the waist just under the hem of his flak jacket, coming up from below and, of course, not stopping on its way out the roof. I don't know if he died well.

How does a man die well 8,000 miles from home, with his guts ripped out by a bullet from an opponent he never saw, fired at him for reasons that were never made exactly clear by administration spokesmen?

I didn't go to Quang Tri province, but one of my Saigon Bureau colleagues did.

And that's where reporter Spec. 5 Paul Savanuck was killed, in a surprise night attack on a forward fire base near the DMZ.

He paid the bill for all of our bylines.

Well, I still believed in the war, because it wasn't me who really had to fight it, I suppose.

Anyway, I still believed in the nobility of the Americans who did, even as I sat on the copy desk in the city room back in comfortable Tokyo again, six years later, and watched the slot man spell it out in the front-page head: ``It's Over.''

Time went by, leaving no clearer explanations behind it.

I still couldn't figure out why it mattered that I had ever been there.

Until a few years ago.

Then some Stripers held a reunion in a Navy chiefs' club in San Diego. We watched the tourists and the sailboats playing on the harbor's late-afternoon waters for a while, then went inside for the serious drinking. The club manager, a rangy CPO, was at the bar that night, just listening to our war stories.

"Man,'' he said, finally breaking in with a softness that was almost an apology. "I really want to thank you guys.

When I was in 'Nam, I got hit and spent some time in the hospital there. I read your paper every day when I was laid up -- and out in the Delta whenever I could get it. For me it was like a letter from home. There were times when it kept me going. I just want to say thanks.''

That was it, of course.

The pieces just came quietly together. It had never been about me, us, any of the writers or the editors, in that war or in any of the places where GIs have waited for their Stripes.

It was about the readers.

They relied on us to be there.

Just as they gave to their country, they gave to us their loyalty, their trust.

So I really did have it all.

For a Stripes newsman or woman, after all, what else would be worth having?