Jan 11, 1975, a Saturday, it was snowing in Seattle. A white haze filled the distance between big windows of The Seattle Times newsroom and the tall apartment buildings perched high above the freeway south of the Ship Canal, like modern cliff dwellings. Given the weather I would rather have been duck-hunting. But I had a noon-to-nine shift on the national copy desk and was waiting for the slot man to start dealing wire-service copy for the Sunday paper….
— Excerpt from The Duck Hunter Diaries
Saigon Replay: Pack and Burn Papers
This century I turned to my hunting logs and other notes from the previous one to write a novel about newspaper life. I chose the Seattle snow-day to open a chapter about the day the protagonist made a life-altering decision that ended his career in daily journalism.
The fact behind the thinly fictionalized: the snow-day coincided with my annual review after working weekends for a year on the so-called “extra board.” I was a dues-paying Newspaper Guild member, and the Guild had a strong contract in place. But management had created the “extra board” for new hires to avoid Guild probationary protections. Extra-board employment was “at will.”
The news editor’s annual review was positive: he offered me a full-time job — for one year. No guarantee beyond that. The kicker: if I declined the “full-time part-time” offer, even my weekend employment was over. In my fiction, the protagonist was given the snow-day shift to decide. And went back to work.
The slot man dealt him a piece of wire-service copy. Buck read it and started laughing.
“What?”
“Flying it in just wasn’t their bag,” Buck said. The UPI story reported two hapless marijuana smugglers had a rough landing in their small plane on Whidbey Island — so rough that the heavy bales of dope had shifted and pinned them, helpless, until the cops showed up.
The slot man laughed too. “Very cute, Buck. You think it’ll fit?”
“Well, give me a head count and I’ll play with it.”
Other copy editors wandered in from lunch or a smoke break, and the conversation immediately turned to the impending advent of Visual Display Terminals. “I’ll retire before I try to learn those damn things,” one of the old-timers said flatly. “You can’t hang paragraph markers on a damn TV screen!”
“It’s the coming thing,” the hippie said.
“Yeah, like that damn paste-up nonsense they’re starting in the back shop,” the old-timer sneered. “Those little girls trying to teach linotype operators how to use paste and scissors like kindergarten kids.”
“Young women, not little girls,” the hippie said, with a tsk. “And you could have said ballerinas trying to teach gorillas to dance, if you wanted to be colorful.”
“Oh, grow up. And get a haircut.”
“Don’t be bitter ’cause you’re bald,” the hippie shot back, to general laughter.
The slot man dealt more copy around. Buck thought the weekend copy-desk crew, with their perpetual stoops from bending over the desk all the time, and lead smudges from copy pencils on their elbows below rolled-up sleeves, could have come right out of Central Casting for a newspaper story. Excluding the hippie, they were virtually interchangeable with copy-desk men on the three previous dailies he’d worked for. But the presence of the hippie — and the threat of VDTs — were evidence the times they were a’changin’.
The slot man turned and leaned on an elbow to address them all. “You know, while I don’t look nearly as old as some of you yahoos, due to clean living and righteous thoughts, I’m old enough to remember, when I was breaking in, how upset the real old-timers were about having to use typewriters.”
“You mean electric typewriters?” the hippie said.
“I mean typewriters, period,” the slot man said. “They hand-wrote their stories on copy paper. The copy desk and the linotypers could read their stuff. The old-line reporters thought typewriters were a big waste of money.”
“My god, you must be old,” the bald copy editor said. “Are you my long-lost daddy?”
Buck worked through a convoluted story about the American retreat in Southeast Asia — another embassy on red alert to get the hell out, quotes from officials denying they were leaving, so on and so forth. He wrote the headline, “Saigon Rerun: Pack and Burn Papers” and got an approving nod from the slot man.
“May as well take your lunch hour now, Buck. If you’re going out like you usually do. Before you need snowshoes…”
I liked my headlines about hapless dope-smugglers and the embassy evacuation in Southeast Asia so well I used them in my fiction. This week the latter headline came strongly to mind as American helicopters engaged in another embassy-rescue replay, contradicting Joe Biden’s airy reassurance nothing like that would happen in Afghanistan.
News reports baldly stated “Biden’s claim that no US embassy staff would be evacuated from Kabul by helicopter has been proven false.” (He had asserted there was “no circumstance” in which US citizens would be evacuated from Kabul by helicopter. “The Taliban is not the North Vietnamese army,” he was quoted as saying. “They are not remotely comparable…There is going to be no circumstance in which you are going to see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan…”)
I meant to include a photo of the Kabul helicopter evacuation along with the famous Saigon one with this story to draw the obvious parallel. Interestingly, internet photos of helicopters above the Kabul embassy are “protected” from copying, according to their properties notation. To control history by avoiding proliferation in memes about Biden’s gaffe? George Orwell would think so.)
The snow-day was not my last on the copy desk; in my fiction I compressed four months into a single day. I still was on the desk in April when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and Americans fled by helicopter. Six years ago, the retired American diplomat whose post it was gave a bitter interview, calling it “the day the United States abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher…” expressing crushing shame and guilt over the genocide that followed. Taliban mullahs will have to go some to equal the bloody “killing fields” of Cambodia, if they elect tribal vengeance and twisted religiosity on their victims abandoned by the U.S. A fresh report of a woman gunned down in the street for not wearing a burqa is a straw in the wind — things could get very ugly. It’s their call — the U.S. has gone di di mau again.
My Saigon Replay headline was brief weeks after the Pnom Penh debacle, when Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. Iconic wire-service photos of desperate Vietnamese mobs trying to reach American helicopters are easy to find on the internet. The photos were accompanied by reports of diplomats hastily destroying classified documents before lift-off. News photos this week show smoke rising from American installations in Kabul —another replay.
Cambodia collapsed first but appears largely forgotten except by those who were there. An Associated Press reporter who escaped by chopper with the diplomats said “I left behind more than a dozen Cambodian reporters and photographers — about the bravest, may I say the finest, colleagues I’ve ever known. Almost all would die…Mean Leang, an ever-jovial, baby-faced AP reporter who had refused to seek safety…wrote about the brutal entry of the Khmer Rouge into the city, its surrender, and gunpoint evacuation. ‘I alone in office, losing contact with our guys. I feel rather trembling. Do not know how to file our stories now …maybe last cable today and forever….’”
Messages this week from the desperate in Kabul are almost indistinguishable from Cambodia 1975. Once more the U.S. has “bugged out,” as Henry Kissinger cynically called our retreats back then. Taken a powder. Shown the white feather. It’s deja vu all over again. My old headline remains valid:
Saigon Rerun: Pack and Burn Papers.
