Table Of ContentDeath Zones and Darling Spies
Studies in War, Society, and the Military
General Editors Mark A. Clodfelter
National War College
Peter Maslowski
University of Brooks D. Simpson
Arizona State University
Nebraska–Lincoln
Roger J. Spiller
David Graff
George C. Marshall Professor
Kansas State University
of Military History
Reina Pennington U.S. Army Command and
Norwich University General Staff College (retired)
Timothy H. E. Travers
Editorial Board
University of Calgary
D’Ann Campbell
Arthur Waldron
Director of Government and Lauder Professor of
Foundation Relations, U.S. International Relations
Coast Guard Foundation University of Pennsylvania
Death
Zones and
Darling
Spies
seven years
of vietnam war
reporting
Beverly Deepe Keever
university of nebraska press | lincoln and london
© 2013 by the Board of Regents Library of Congress
of the University of Nebraska Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Keever, Beverly Deepe.
Acknowledgments for the use of Death zones and darling spies:
copyrighted material appear on seven years of Vietnam War reporting /
page 325, which constitutes an Beverly Deepe Keever.
extension of the copyright page. p. cm. — (Studies in war, society,
and the military)
Frontispiece: From the New York Herald Includes bibliographical
Tribune, May 28, 1965. © 1965 by the New references and index.
York Times. All rights reserved. Used isbn 978-0-8032-2261-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
by permission and protected by the 1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 — Press
Copyright Laws of the United States. coverage — United States. 2. Vietnam
Th e printing, copying, redistribution, or War, 1961–1975 — Journalists.
retransmission of the Material without 3. Vietnam War, 1961–1975 — Personal
express writt en permission is prohibited. narratives, American. 4. Keever,
Beverly Deepe — Travel — Vietnam.
All rights reserved 5. Women war correspondents — Vietnam.
Manufactured in the United I. Title. II. Series: Studies in war,
States of America society, and the military.
ds559.46.K44 2013
070.4'499597043 — dc23 2012041230
Publication of this volume was assisted
by a grant from the Friends of the Set in Arno by Laura Wellington.
University of Nebraska Press. Designed by Nathan Putens.
Contents
List of Illustrations vii
Preface ix
Introduction: From Midwest Dustbowl
to Mystical Vietnam 1
1 Th e People’s War 23
2 Rice-Roots Reporting 39
3 “Th e World’s First Helicopter War” 57
4 Th e Rise and Fall of Frontier Forts 73
5 Two Ill-Fated Presidents 93
6 “Th e United States Will Lose Southeast Asia” 119
7 Americanizing the War 141
8 Her Story as History Too 163
9 “Destroy the Town to Save It” 183
10 From Khe Sanh to the
“Virtual Equivalent of Treason” 205
11 Two “Darling Spies” and I 233
Appendix 1: Author’s Vietnam Articles
in U.S. Publications 253
Appendix 2: Author’s 1966 New York Herald
Tribune Series (Inserted into the Congressional
Record by Senator Mike Mansfi eld) 273
Notes 289
Source Acknowledgments 325
Index 327
Illustrations
Photographs
1 I wore civilian clothes 9
2 I relied on cyclo pedalers 11
3 My walk-up apartment 12
4 I rode an elephant in 1962 15
5 Th e South Vietnamese government
issued my accreditation card 17
6 Dickey Chapelle was struck down
by an exploding mine 22
7 A Viet Cong provincial committ ee
and Buddhist priest 24
8 Youths probably recruited by the Viet Cong 25
9 A village woman in pajama-styled clothes 28
10 Th e United States heavily funded the strategic
program that fortifi ed hamlets 40
11 Impatient youngsters await the regular
trash run made by U.S. Marines 61
12 Youngsters dive into the marines’
garbage containers 62
13 An unidentifi ed crew chief and I wait at the
U.S. Marine base at Soc Trang 63
14 I visited Kham Duc while it was being constructed 75
15 I talk with highlander women in 1962 77
16 Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu reviews the
paramilitary women’s youth corps 81
17 President Ngo Dinh Diem, his brother Archbishop
Ngo Dinh Th uc, and the Ngo Dinh Nhu family 94
18 Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk,
burns himself to death 100
19 Gen. Nguyen Khanh 123
20 North Vietnamese private Le Phan Hung 128
21 Young U.S. draft ees 147
22 A weeping mother holds her child 168
23 Women played an important role
in the Viet Cong 173
24 An Quang Pagoda surrounded by rubble 193
25 U.S. Marines crouching atop a tower
in Hue’s Citadel 198
26 I saw crumbled aircraft destroyed by
Communist fi re on the airstrip 206
27 U.S. Air Force bombs create a curtain of
fl ying shrapnel and debris 208
28 U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh 209
29 Pham Xuan An 232
Maps
1 Places in Laos and South Vietnam
discussed by author xx
Preface
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but
if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou, at Clinton presidential inauguration, 1993
November 8, 1960. Brisk gusts descended with the twilight hour as Sam
Lubell and I entered Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhatt an, headed
nbc
for the news studio of the National Broadcasting Company ( ). We
were geared up to assess the soon-to-arrive ballots cast in the presidential
election between Democrats Senator John Kennedy and his running mate,
Lyndon Johnson, versus Republicans Vice President Richard Nixon and
Henry Cabot Lodge.
I cradled a dog-eared cardboard box of notes Sam and I had hand-
writt en during the campaign to record his pioneering doorbell-ringing
technique of interviewing voters. My one-time professor at Columbia’s
Graduate School of Journalism and now my boss, Sam was a big name
in political journalism, thanks to his syndicated newspaper columns and
nbc
award-winning book.1 His reputation prompted to contract him to
predict accurately the winner of what proved to be the nation’s closest
presidential race up to that time and to do so ahead of the computers
pitt ed against him by the other two network stations.
Th roughout the night I answered phone calls bringing us latest results
of voting in selected precincts where we had earlier conducted interviews.
By matching the phoned-in results with our earlier statistics, Sam beat
the other networks’ computers to project accurately that Kennedy would
win the popular vote. Not in my wildest dreams did I then imagine that
these four politicians would infl uence so profoundly what would hap-
pen in Vietnam — or even that I would be in Vietnam. Yet Kennedy was
ix
