"Escape from Saigon - a Novel"

Life with My Father ABC-TV Journalist Frank Mariano By Tony Mariano, Part II

Part II—The End of a War 

Second of a two-part series — Part I

Tony Mariano came to Vietnam as a teenager to be with his Father, ABC-TV journalist Frank Mariano. Tony finished high school in Saigon and often worked as a sound technician and field producer with network news crews and, as the war came to a close, he was sent to Manila during the massive air and sea evacuation of South Vietnam where he played a pivotal role in transmitting reports of The Fall of Saigon nation’s collapse to the world.

War correspondents are nothing short of heroic as depicted in "Escape from Saigon - a Novel". This is the story of the price one pays to grow up in a family where journalism, and the story, comes first.  

  

Tony Mariano in his words

We were surrounded by total destruction of the buildings especially at the Citadel City of Quang Tri.  

Tony, Dad and Ann in Dong Ha in 1974

The images of dozens of amputees and burn victims stayed with me as we continued up to Hue, Quang Tri, Quang Ngai, and finally to the DMZ at Dong Ha. There I saw thousands of NVA soldiers across the Dong Ha river in tents, washing clothes, and hanging around as loudspeakers blared their propaganda and music with the same happening on our side of the river as a few ARVN soldiers stood calmly by their .30 and .50 caliber gun mounts in small towers along the snaking waterway.

Along the way north we stopped at the exact spot where ABC News cameraman Terry Khoo had been killed by a sniper from a “spider trap” hiding space while filing a story the year before. Meanwhile, it was becoming abundantly clear that the suits at ABC News in New York felt the Vietnam story was basically over despite my father’s vehement objections to the contrary.

The network executives figured a cease-fire was in place, all the American troops and POW’s had been returned home and peaceful elections were going to be held in the future. New York increasingly rejected ] story suggestions and then finally the word came: Dad was ordered to close ABC’s bureau on July 14^th, 1974. He was beyond flabbergasted as CBS and NBC and the wire services among others remained open with the equipment. It was a big blow to him and his staff, which he had come to admire and respect over the years.

Nonetheless, we packed up our things and through the tears and anxiety we said our “So longs! Good luck!”  but not goodbye as it was almost too much to bear. We arrived in Hong Kong in mid-August and moved into a 21-story apartment building on Victoria Peak overlooking the harbor and Kai Tak Airport.

1975

For the full story

Dad continued working for ABC, this time shuttling between the ABC bureau in New Mercury house and Phnom Penh, Cambodia with Jim Bennett and others. But my father had become a pariah with the network. After his eight and half years fighting, working, living, loving and covering the war in South Vietnam he had gotten too close to the story and lost his professional objectivity. He even proposed chartering a helicopter to help former ABC employees get out of the country but the executives in New York, turned him down in no uncertain terms—adding that if he tried it on his own he would be fired and sent back to the states.

Ken Kashiwahara replaced my father in 1974 and Canadian journalist Hillary Brown was assigned to cover the impact of the US Congress starving South Vietnam of the funds it needed to survive. Nixon and Kissinger became my father’s nemeses and dad seethed with anger and clenched fist over how Nixon manipulated President Thieu to delay action so he could win the 1972 election. He was even more disgusted over Watergate.

In 1975, ABC’s Kevin Delany arrived in Saigon and became a savior by helping over 70 members of the ABC News family in escape as the enemy advanced and began its precipitous roll southward. The Central Highlands and Pleiku fell with thousands of refugees flooding the roads while the South Vietnamese army began a retreat which then turned into a full out run for their lives.

During South Vietnam’s final month of April 1975, I was in Hong Kong, Dad was covering events in Phnom Penh and Ann was in Saigon on assignment for Associated Press radio. She arrived right after the Operation Babylift C-5A Galaxy plane crashed with over 300 infants and accompanying adults on board including many from the Defense Attaché Office. The crash killed 138 people including 78 children among whom were friends of both Ann’s and Dad’s. Kashiwahara was already there covering the story when Ann arrived on scene. With in days, Dad was safely evacuated out of Phnom Penh with legendary cameraman Yatsune “Tony” Hirashiki and US Ambassador to Cambodia John Gunther Dean on April 12^th. They boarded the last chopper out of Phnom Penh and headed to an awaiting Marine helicopter carrier in the Gulf of Siam with our US Embassy flag neatly folded on Dean’s lap.

On April 29th the recording of Bing Crosby's White Christmas began playing over Armed Forces Radio which signaled the beginning of Operation Frequent Wind and the end for the remaining Americans, members of the press, staffs and families in Saigon to get to their prearranged pick-up points around the city to be flown off to the Navy's 7th fleet just offshore in the South China Sea. As the exodus was getting started, a call into the Hong Kong bureau's office from ABC News in New York and I was hired as a Field Producer to go to the Philippines with instructions to manage logistics for the network in Manila. My job: arrange and coordinate a satellite feed for ABC after picking up Ken Kashiwahara at the US Navy base in Subic Bay.

I also was told to cover the first evacuee allowed off the USS Blue Ridge. The TV station was ready and I got word the chief enlisted man had left the ship and I was on my way. I scrambled to an awaiting helicopter at the station and I took a quick flight to Subic Bay to meet Ed Bradley of CBS News who had drawn the lucky short straw for this assignment. The first thing he did was to hand me very heavy Navy duffle bag. It was stuffed with every piece of raw film from every news agency covering the evacuation and mass exodus out to the Navy fleet. The recorded history of the end of an era was in my hands and I it was my responsibility to get it back to New York as quickly as possible for distribution, processing and broadcast.  By now I had gone for over three days without sleep as New York and Manila were 12 hours apart I had to work around the clock. I finally was able to find a courier to take the film with him from Manila to New York.

Once we were back at the TV station, we processed 200 feet of 16mm film Ken had shot and selected for his fast-approaching satellite broadcast. Although Ken was obviously very tired he thoughtfully penned his script as the film was processed and converted to video tape. Ken did his voice over to narrate the images. All that was left was to wait for either the PanSat or TeleSat communication satellites to pass overhead. We all watched and listened to Ken’s harrowing tale of chaos, tears, anger and relief during the last moments of our involvement in Vietnam. We all feared for those who either decided to stay or were left behind. All Ken wanted to do now was to get back home to Hong Kong, his family and get some sleep. So I drove him to the airport and when we got to customs he was asked why his entry visa stamp was missing from his passport. He told them he didn’t have one because he had just been evacuated from Saigon by helicopter. We then had to run over to the Foreign Minister’s office to get Ken squared away with his papers and get him on the next flight.

While the advancing NVA were shelling Tan Son Nhut on a regular basis during their march toward the city, Ann gathered her

Frank Mariano ABC-TV News

things into a small case, and boarded the bus to be flown out of the airfield on the morning of the 29^th before it became too dangerous. I had returned to Hong Kong on May 1^st and slept for the next 24 hours. We were soon reunited with my father, Ann and my sisters again.

When ABC asked my father to interview Hillary Brown about the reporting she did during the last days in Saigon, dad refused to do so saying in part that the story which had consumed him over such a long time was his to tell but not hers.

We then left Hong Kong to arrive in Los Angeles.  Dad had gone from being a freelance stringer to bureau chief and was now relegated to doing what he called “Mickey Mouse” stories for ABC at KTLA-TV.  Of the more than  3,000 accredited members of the press who covered the Vietnam War, many found themselves in similar situations as my Dad’s or unemployed and unable to find work during the post-war recession. My father realized it was time for him to move on again so he left KTLA to become a teaching fellow at Harvard's JFK School of Government the next semester. He focused on the Vietnam War and the media and addressed the important question of the time: Could our nation ever be able to effectively engage in future conflicts with an unfettered, free press recording it for all to read, listen to and watch?

Epilogue: 1976

Tony recalls happier times  in Vung Tau, Vietnam with stepmother Ann and his two adopted sisters Mai and Katie.

While in Cambridge, he thought he was having a heart attack, which is what killed his father 11 years earlier.  But it was pericarditis, an inflammation of the heart sac, so his doctor prescribed aspirin to treat it as it was the only anti-inflammatory medication available at the time.

Following Harvard, Dad went to Washington, DC in June and found he was unemployed for the first time in his life. But a few days after watching the bicentennial July 4^th celebration in our nation’s capital he came down with a fever. I drove him to George Washington Hospital to meet with his cardiologist Dr. Michael Halberstam who happened to be David Halberstam’s brother - the author of a seminal book on Vietnam - “The Best and the Brightest.”  Dad would go into the ICU after a procedure to relieve the pressure squeezing his heart. 5 weeks later he died from complications at 45 years old August 8^th, 1976…41 years ago.

He was interred at Arlington National Cemetery with honors and joined only six  years later he was followed by his Vietnamese daughter, our sister, Jane Katherine "Buttons" Mariano. AAnn Bryan Mariano continued her career as a writer and reporter with The Washington Post and remarried in 1995 to Robert E. McKay. She passed away in February 2009 at 76 in Belmont, Massachusetts of complications from Alzheimer’s disease and joined by her widower Robert this year at 91. My dear sister Anna, who now goes by Mai, lives with her husband and teenage daughter in Columbus, Ohio. I work in the culinary  and hospitality industry in Pebble Beach, California where I recently married my second wife and have two adult children from my first marriage.

"Life with My Father ABC-TV journalist Frank Mariano" By Tony Mariano

Part I — Growing up in a War

America’s First Television War

When we embarked on “Escape from Saigon – a Novel,” the authors focused much of the story on the journalists who risked their lives to deliver the good, the bad and the ugly events of what was then America’s longest and certainly most controversial war. Our fictional characters Lisette Vo, NBS-TV’s first female war correspondent and the first Vietnamese- American on-air journalist portends the future of broadcasting and the emergence of cable. Sam Esposito, her colleague and friend, was with The Washington Legend. Sam is the archetypal cynical Ivy League reporter who cuts through layers of military obfuscation until he gets the story.

We also strove to give our readers, especially those who grew up taking the internet, cell phones, IM and Skype for granted, an appreciation of how hard it was to deliver the news halfway around the world only four decades ago. In those days 16mm sound-on-film cameras were the latest technology and satellite transmission was in its infancy and spotty.

While Lisette Vo and Sam Esposito are fictional, Tony Mariano’s story is real. Tony recalls the people who brought the Vietnam War into our living rooms in as close to “live” as possible. This included most especially his father ABC-TV’s Frank Mariano. His relationship with his dad, whom he joined in Saigon in 1973 as a high school age teen, gave him a ringside seat to the war.

Tony Mariano

The elder Mariano started out as an Army pilot, flying helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft and training South Vietnamese aviators, so Tony grew up first as an Army “brat” for the first 12 years of his life. Eventually Frank Mariano, shocked by the My Lai Massacre and other events became disenchanted with the Army. He left active duty, and launched his career in broadcasting as a stringer—freelance reporter—for ABC- News Radio then TV before he was later elevated to Saigon Bureau Chief by the network.

While in Vietnam, his son often worked as a sound technician and field producer with network news crews and, as the war came to a close, he wound up in Manila during the evacuation of Saigon where he played a pivotal role in transmitting reports of South Vietnam’s collapse to the world. Tony's life was an adventure, but he also paid a price for living in a family where journalism came first. Here is his story.

 

Tony Mariano in his words

Frank Mariano, pre ABC-TV as an Army Pilot

As an Army brat, The Vietnam War experience has been a personal and integral part of my awareness from the time I was a seven-years old Army brat living at Camp Wolters, Texas, where my father Frank A. Mariano was a 34-year-old captain. He was there training South Vietnamese helicopter pilots when he received orders to deploy to Nha Trang, Vietnam in April of 1964 with the 339^th Transportation Company whose motto was “Always in Good Hands” — something my father sincerely took to heart as he was a piloted “Big Daddy” and the “Octopus” Ch-37 Mohave— the largest helicopter in the Army’s inventory.

He was shot down more than once and three AK-47 rounds barely miss his head while piloting a DHC-4 Caribou cargo plane. This was his re-introduction to Asia since leaving Seoul, South Korea, where in 1954 as a young artillery officer he met my mother Vee “Rusty” Russell. She was a beautiful Red Cross SRAO worker, a “Donut Dolly,” at a MASH unit. They were reunited stateside, got married in Carmel, CA and I was born at Camp Gary AFB, TX in 1956.

Dad loved flying, but he also wanted to become a writer. So the Army assigned him to editor of the Army Aviation Digest at Ft. Rucker, Alabama. which was and still is the home of Army Aviation.  His second tour in Vietnam was as a public information officer. During his second  tour in Vietnam he was as a public information officer with the 1st Avn Brigade Headquarters in Bien Hoa, which began in January of '67 and entailed flying members of the press to the battles, writing for the brigade magazine The Hawk and briefing the press. He represented the Army aviation with pride, perspective and his own opinions.  But the growing number of journalists he met, and those with whom he flew, countered much of the positive information he was getting and putting out for public consumption. At the time American casualty rates had become twice the number from the year before.

When his tour came to an end and he was ready to come home. It was January of 1968. He was at Tan Son Nhut airfield getting ready to board his flight home to rejoin me and my mother in La Jolla, when the Tet Offensive erupted and shook my family to its core. Viet Cong sappers had breached the walls of our embassy in Saigon while armed conflict broke out around the country. I imagined it was to be his last overseas tour before serving out his 20 years and retire with an Army pension and move on. What was a young son’s desire for that to happen after so long was not to be.

At home, the Tet Offensive began a paradigm shift that would tear our society’s fabric into many factions. Then Dad learned about the My Lai massacre in March of 1968. He realized he could no longer remain in the military full time so we left San Diego and La Jolla to go back up the coast to Monterey and Ft. Ord where he flew his last military helicopter and then left the reserves as a Major.

He and my mother bought a house in the quaint village of Carmel where they had been married 12 years earlier in 1956.  My mother and I would call that house our home for the first time and we were there all together as a family again.  But my father, now a civilian, was compelled to return to Vietnam. He arrived with about $1,500 in his pocket in late ’68 figuratively trading in his grip on a helicopter’s cyclic and collective to hold a microphone and begin a new career as a stringer for ABC News Radio at age 39. Though he was away from home, I was comforted by the fact that I could hear his voice on the  radio and see him on TV.

Then during the later part of 1969 he surprised when he flew from Vietnam to California to join me on a three-day Boy Scout hike in the mountains of Big Sur. I was so proud to have him share an insider’s perspective of the war with the other fathers as we sat around the campfire.

1970-72

Dad paid his dues in Vietnam for a year and came stateside again to join the ABC affiliate KGO-TV in San Francisco as its political and war reporter, covering many of the protest marches, moratoriums and other anti-war demonstrations around Northern California as the tide and sentiment turned further against the war and our nation’s began to rip, tear and split along so institutional, generational, political, religious, patriotic, racial and class lines.

By now, my parents were separated and would soon divorce. During that time I often joined him in San Francisco where I saw the professional news gathering process up close and was fascinated by it.

He would soon marry Ann Bryan at Sutro Park near the city's famous Cliff House and Sutra Bathhouse on the beach. Ann was now my stepmother and I also gained a new sister to love as my own at the same time—a beautiful 18-month old

Anna and Katie

Vietnamese baby girl Thai Ngoc Bich nicknamed “Buttons” who Ann, as a single woman living in Vietnam, had adopted when she was six-weeks old. Ann had first arrived in Saigon in 1966 to start up the Pacific Edition of the Overseas Weekly as its editor and reporter and successfully sued the Pentagon to allow her publication to be distributed side-by-side with the Stars and Stripes.

Our life together as a family lasted only a few hours after their wedding that day because that same evening my father, Ann, little Buttons and with a small entourage of friends in tow, took the short drive to SFO to board a flight back to Saigon where they would live for the foreseeable future. When the boarding call came we tearfully embraced each other and waved goodbye. My head and my entire world were left spinning at the departure gate as I watched them take off westward over the Pacific into the fading light of dusk. I headed back to an empty house and the next day returned to Carmel and to my mother who was also dealing with what had just happened.

Soon afterward my parents agreed I could join them in Saigon as long as I got my focus back on my schoolwork—the last thing on my mind. It was September 1972.

Things moved pretty quickly after that as The Peace Accords had been signed, our POW’s had been repatriated and all American combat forces had left the country. For them the war was over. Though when I arrived in Saigon there was still a significant contingent of Marine security personnel for the US embassy and other government agencies, American contractors and ex-patriates who would set the stage for what was going to be an exciting time to be there.

I arrived in March and started my senior year of my high school studies through the University of Nebraska, Lincoln Extension, which was an accredited school for American dependents in Saigon. I attended my classes until I had satisfied the minimum requirements for graduation in 1974 and took the GED exam.

Dad gave me an after-school job with the ABC bureau on the 6^th floor of the Caravel Hotel.  I was to monitor and record various English language radio broadcasts from Hanoi and transcribe them for others to cull for information. I also worked as a soundman on a couple of assignments out in the field as well and felt proud to have the responsibility of being a small cog in the news gathering operation. I got to know all of my father’s Vietnamese staff and began to learn how to speak the language.

Shortly after I arrived, my father introduced me to the CBC Band – (Con Ba Cu – “Mother’s Children”) a large family of talented Vietnamese who performed amazing rock ‘n’ roll and who had first started playing music together since 1963 when they won their first talent contest. They did what they had to do to support their family of nine in the slums outside the city. I quickly became endeared to them, their music and they all accepted me almost like a brother in their family. With their help, my language skills improved daily. The band left the country in 1974 and I wouldn’t see them again until 1976 in Washington, DC.

Tony Mariano, part-time sound tech for ABC

I’d also become an amateur photographer and had taken a film production course in Carmel as well as visits to television studios that helped me understand what went into producing and broadcasting a professional news story. Around that time Dad proposed a 10-year retrospective of his Vietnam experiences from 1964 through 1974, which would take about a week to shoot.

Ann and I joined him along with his ABC camera crew. It was on that trip I first saw much of countryside and the ravages of the war. Though I was never under hostile fire I was always aware of my surroundings. It took a drunken South Vietnamese officer to draw his .45 sidearm and put it to my temple to look at the possibility of my death in the face for the first time. In his rant he was frustrated over America abandoning the ARVN and the Rangers of which he was one. His immediate superior talked him down, took his weapon and the soldier lost face. 

For that episode, I was given a special gift as consolation for the embarrassment which still comes back to haunt me every once in awhile. In the darkness, laying in bed next to her warm body, she and I listened to the random chatter of automatic gunfire as nervous guards shot at anything floating down the Perfume River toward the bridge.  Off to the east, there was constant rumbling of artillery fire and we saw mortar rounds hit with plumes of black smoke rising out of range. The following day when we regrouped with my father and Ann. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what had happened because I didn’t want his Vietnamese crew to take the blame for the incident. From that I learned Vietnamese don’t handle Johnny Walker Red and beer very well especially when they are pissed off.

Part II — The End of a War