Bernard Edinger and Nguyen Van Vinh: Different views of Saigon's fall

Bernard Edinger reports that during a visit to Hanoi last month he was invited by bureau chief John Ruwitch to a party in honour of Nguyen Van Vinh, who was retiring after 17 years as a cameraman-producer for Reuters in his native Vietnam as well as elsewhere in Asia, including in Afghanistan.

Vinh told Edinger they had covered the same major story, but did not remembering meeting at the time, in Saigon in 1975.

Vinh, then a cameraman with (North) Vietnamese state television, was on the first flight from Hanoi to Saigon on 1 May, a day after Communist troops entered the city. Edinger had arrived on 28 April because then-editor Jonathan Fenby believed his French passport might allow him to work more freely after the expected Communist takeover than bureau chief David Laulicht, an American, and reporter Jeremy Toye and fireman Patrick Massey, both Britons, who were helicoptered out of the country on 29 April.

“I remember meeting a BBC crew but had no idea that a large part of my subsequent career would be with Reuters,” Vinh said.

He is being replaced at Reuters by his son, video-journalist Nguyen Ha Minh, who has already worked abroad for international media. 

Vinh and fellow veteran Vietnamese journalist Nguyen Van Than have created their own Asia Vision agency which, among other projects, is interviewing eyewitnesses to the last days of the Vietnam War. Vinh and Edinger (accompanied by his brother Charles, a former Reuterian now a senior producer for SNTV in London), met several times in Hanoi, including once when Vinh videotaped Edinger’s recollections of the dramatic last days of Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City.

Edinger was in Asia as organiser for a 10-member delegation from the French Defence Correspondents Association which spent a week in China at the invitation of that country’s armed forces, visiting army, navy and air force bases and schools in Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. He then met his brother in Hanoi for a two-week tour of northern Vietnam including the former battle site at Dien Bien Phu.

PHOTO: Bernard Edinger with Nguyen Van Vinh in Hanoi. ■