‘It's 105 degrees in Saigon and rising’

George Lewis Correspondent • Profile

Thirty years ago today, I was in the beleaguered South Vietnamese capital, on a telephone hookup with the NBC Nightly News in New York, reporting on how the North Vietnamese had encircled Saigon. 

In those days, we didn't have live TV satellite transmissions from war zones and no Internet, so the phone and a clunky old teletype machine were our only ways of relaying the fast-moving developments.

The Vietnam War was about to end. A decade of U.S. involvement in that war had seen the deaths of almost 60,000 Americans, 224,000 South Vietnamese troops, 1.1 million communist fighters and 2 million civilians.

Anchorman John Chancellor introduced me this way on April 29, 1975:  "NBC correspondent George Lewis, who has volunteered to stay on in Saigon, has this report."

Actually, I had volunteered to stay on only until the U.S. Marines arrived to pull the remaining Americans out of Saigon, something that would happen a few hours later.

Seeing history first-hand
Like a lot of other young white, college-educated men of my generation, I had managed to dance away from the draft via student deferments, marriage and family responsibilities.

But Vietnam was a defining event for my generation and, as a journalist, I was drawn to it because the story of the American role in the conflict there had overshadowed everything else in the late 1960's.  It brought me to Vietnam as an NBC News correspondent for the first time in 1970.

In the months after my arrival, soldiers in the field would often ask me if NBC ordered me to go to Vietnam.

"Do you guys have a choice about being here or is it voluntary?" they'd ask.

"I volunteered for this assignment," I'd reply.

"How long are you here for?"

"My deal is for 18 months," I'd answer, "Although it might run longer."

"Are you nuts?" they'd ask incredulously, often inserting a well-placed obscenity or two. After all, draftees served one-year hitches in Vietnam, most men counting down each day until they could return home, to what they called "the World."

And they would never buy my explanations about how, as a journalist, I wanted to be an eyewitness to history. They didn't quite believe me when I'd say, "It's important for the people back home to know what you guys are going through. In order to tell the story for TV, I've got to go where the action is."

And it's that desire to bear witness that drove me back to Vietnam in 1975. I wanted to see how it would come to an end.

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