Saigon Christmas 1964

Christmas Eve 1964 started auspiciously in Saigon. Father Christmas, a uniformed US Navy commander, came to the Reuters office in the morning with a box of Almond Roca chocolates. It was a gift from the US military mission to the Reuters team and was gladly received by Germaine Loc, my editorial assistant.

At 5:45 pm we heard an explosion. The Viet Cong had bombed the Brinks Hotel two miles from the office. The eight-storey building had about 200 bedrooms housing US Army officers and was also known as the Brink Bachelor Officers Quarters (BOQ).

The explosives, planted in a parked car, were detonated during the “happy hour” in the officers’ bar, killing two American officers and injuring 60. The ground floor was destroyed and the hotel was made uninhabitable.

The words of one American colonel who escaped unhurt have stayed with me. He said he was in the toilet and had just pulled the flush chain when the bomb went off. “My first thought was: my God, they bombed the john!”

The British correspondent of a Fleet Street tabloid rushed into the Reuters office with a story for transmission to London. It was just one paragraph. “I was sitting at a street café in Saigon when a huge explosion tore through a US military hotel … Uppick exagencies.”

With the Brinks bombing, the Viet Cong demonstrated that they could strike in the very heart of Saigon.

Two months later they attacked a US helicopter base in Pleiku and a military installation in Qui Nhon, killing about 30 US military personnel. President Lyndon Johnson ordered air strikes on North Vietnam and sent in the first US combat troops, ostensibly to guard American installations.

Reuters correspondent Courtney Tower, a Canadian, broke off a holiday in Colombo with his Sri Lankan wife to help me and Simon Dring in Saigon.

Attached is a photo of my dispatch on the Brinks bombing from archives rescued from the Saigon tip by the late Nick Turner, Reuters correspondent in Vietnam from 1962 to 1964. His daughter Christine Lanham sent it to me from New Zealand.

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