Allan Maitland in Vietnam: 'The adrenalin was up...'

Saigon, 1969. Another Reuters correspondent arrives in the bureau to join the team reporting the Vietnam War. The previous year, the Tet offensive had ratcheted up the intensity of the fighting and two of his colleagues, Bruce Pigott and Ron Laramy, had been killed in an ambush. The new man is thrown in at the deep end: covering a Viet Cong attack on a South Vietnamese military base. Bodies everywhere - about 150 of them. It’s all work, without a day off for three months to rest and recuperate. How did he cope?

"The adrenalin was up and one got on with it," Allan Maitland recalls.

Forty years after that assignment, his experiences have been recorded for posterity in a multi-media project for the Imperial War Museum, London.

Getting stories out from the field to the office in Saigon was a constant battle “and one could spend literally hours, hours, trying to get a line somewhere to get it routed through…’ he remembers. 

Born in 1931, Maitland joined Reuters as a trainee in 1962 after Cambridge University and military service in Cyprus and Egypt. His first posting was to Brazil. After Vietnam he reported the conflict in Cambodia and then the Portuguese revolution.

Maitland retired in 1990. His last job was associate editor, Reuters World magazine.

PHOTO: Allan Maitland on patrol with American troops in Cambodia, circa 1970.

Imperial War Museum’s “Through my eyes” package on Allan Maitland ■