Amid the tension, I was distracted by a big frog hopping and splashing through pools of thick blood on the lawn. It was one of those images that never gets properly filed away and keeps coming back at odd times.

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A long burst of automatic-weapons fire snapped me back to reality. The last VC still in action rushed up the stairs firing blindly at Colonel Jacobson, but he missed.

The colonel later told me: We both saw each other at the same time. He missed me, and I fired one shot at him point-blank with the .45. Jacobson later admitted that his Saigon girlfriend had been with him at the time and witnessed the entire drama from beneath the sheets of their bed.

The death toll from the embassy battle stood at five American soldiers killed along with 17 of the 19 sappers. The two surviving but wounded sappers were later questioned and turned over to the ARVN.

On the last 30 feet of film, I recorded my closing remarks in the embassy garden: Since the lunar New Year, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese have proved they are capable of bold and impressive military moves that Americans here never dreamed could be achieved. Whether they can sustain this onslaught for long remains to be seen. But whatever turn the war now takes, the capture of the U.S. Embassy here for almost seven hours is a psychological victory that will rally and inspire the Viet Cong. Don North, ABC News, Saigon.

A rush to judgment before all pieces of the puzzle were in place? Perhaps. But there was no time to appoint a committee to study the story. I was on an hourly deadline, and ABC expected the story as well as some perspective even in those early hours of the offensive — a first rough draft of history.

My on-the-scene analysis never made it on ABC News. Worried about editorializing by a correspondent on a sensitive story, someone at ABC headquarters in New York killed the on-camera closer. (Ironically, the closer and other outtakes ended up in the Simon Grinberg film library, where they were later found and used by film director Peter Davis in his Academy Award–winning movie Hearts and Minds.)

The film from all three networks took off from Saigon on a special military flight about noon. When it arrived in Tokyo for processing, it caused a mad, competitive scramble to get a cut film story on satellite for the 7 p.m. (EST) news programs in the States. Because we had only 400 feet to process and cut, ABC News made the satellite in time, and the story led the ABC-TV evening news. NBC and CBS missed the deadline and had to run catch-up specials on the embassy attack later in the evening.

Meanwhile, at 9:15 a.m. in Saigon, the embassy was officially declared secure. At 9:20, General Westmoreland strode through the gate in his clean and carefully starched fatigues, flanked by grimy and bloody MPs and Marines who had been fighting since 3 a.m. Standing in the rubble, Westmoreland declared: No enemy got in the embassy building. It’s a relatively small incident. A group of sappers blew a hole in the wall and crawled in, and they were all killed. Nineteen bodies have been found on the premises — enemy bodies. Don’t be deceived by this incident.

I couldn’t believe it. Westy was still saying everything was just fine. He said the Tet attacks throughout the country were very deceitfully calculated to create maximum consternation in Vietnam and that they were diversionary to the main enemy effort still to come at Khe Sanh.

Most journalists in Vietnam at that time respected Westmoreland — he often generously gave long interviews, which would invariably explain the success of his command. But an incident about six months prior to Tet left questions in my mind concerning the commanding general’s understanding of the role of the media in wartime.

The military and the media have since the beginning of recorded history had a difficult and conflicting relationship. The reporter’s job is to gather information, while the soldier’s concern is to hold back in-formation that could possibly help the enemy or demoralize the home front and — sometimes — to hide his own mistakes or incompetence. A U.S. military censor in Washington, D.C., in 1938 expressed the ultimate military disdain for the American public’s right to know: I wouldn’t tell the people anything until the war is over and then I’d tell them who won. In 1914, Richard Harding Davis of the New York Herald wrote, In war the world has a right to know, not what is going to happen next, but at least what has happened.

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