Dick Ellis, currently the public information officer for the Administrative Office of the Courts, was a combat correspondent during the Vietnam War. He was a recent speaker at the John Locke Foundation’s weekly Shaftesbury Society Discussion Club and was interviewed for Carolina Journal Radio (click here to find the station near you) by John Locke Foundation President John Hood.
Hood: Before we set the stage for what you did in Vietnam, let’s talk about how you got there. Were you drafted to go to Vietnam?
Ellis: I was indeed. I was a draftee in 1966. I was drafted in the Army and given about three months to report to Fort Bragg, and I went there for basic training in November, December, and January of ’66 and ’67.
Hood: And what was your assignment? What were you going to do in the Army at that point?
Ellis: Well, before I went in the Army, I was a television announcer. I was a weatherman and actually a clown on a kiddie show down in Washington, North Carolina at Channel 7. So, when I was drafted in the Army, I went through a process in Fort Bragg where they said, “What did you do in civilian life?” And I said, “Well, I was a TV weatherman.” And they said, “We don’t have many of those in the Army, so you might wind up a truck driver.” And I said, “That’s okay, I’m in for two years, and I’ll be the best truck driver you’ve got.” But, fortunately, they recognized that I did have some background and put me in the base public information office at Fort Bragg. Then I started volunteering for Vietnam and wound up with the Armed Forces Radio and Television Network in Saigon.
Hood: That’s worth pointing out. You were drafted into the Army but you volunteered to go to Vietnam.
Ellis: Right.
Hood: What was your motivation for that?
Ellis: Well, I was a news reporter, a broadcaster, and that was the place to be. I had an opportunity to stay at Fort Bragg and work in the post public information office. I was offered an opportunity to go to Armed Forces Network in Europe and be a radio and television announcer there, but it was right in the heat of Vietnam — ’67 and ’68 — and I wanted to go and see. And, if I was going to be in the Army for a couple of years, I was going to get my money’s worth.
Hood: Give us a sense of what it was like in those early days, broadcasting for the armed forces in Vietnam.
Ellis: When at first I worked at the headquarters in Saigon, we had no satellites. We had no dishes that would send signals from one facility to another. We had a teletype hookup that came out of Associated Press I think — or UPI — that came out of California, came through Honolulu, Hawaii, and an undersea cable that came, I guess through the Philippines or wherever, into Saigon. And that’s how we had a teletype hookup. And we knew what was going on in the world, moment by moment, from that teletype hookup, but we had no satellites from Washington or anywhere else. We had what we call kinescope. I remember very distinctly [that] the World Series was played — they would videotape the World Series, then set up a 16-millimeter film camera and film it from the TV screen, and then develop the film, and then put it on the next plane available going through Hawaii, Philippines, whatever, into Saigon. And we would rush to the airport and get this film of the World Series game and start it at one o’clock in the morning. Then we would play it again Saturday, and again Sunday, but that’s how we saw the World Series. It was on film, filmed on a TV screen, and flown over from California.
Hood: Eventually, you were able to produce programming for broadcast in Vietnam — news, information, weather. You even did the weather.
Ellis: Exactly. We had an individual station on the top of mountains, usually where they would have a communications unit. We would go up there and join them and set up a little tractor-trailer truck that had a radio-TV studio in it, literally, and set up our own broadcasting. The radio would come from Saigon. We had a 50,000-watt radio station that covered all of Vietnam. But the local TV would come from the top of the mountain nearest where the units were. And we would film all of these programs out of Hollywood, and [the] World Series and various things, and send them around in a circuit. And all of the TV stations would take turns playing them, and then send them to the next one, and then the next one, down the line. But they all had their own local weather and news.
Hood: Another source of programming was that there were, of course, many people coming to Vietnam — public officials, heads of state, members of the Senate, members of the House, Hollywood celebrities — coming through Vietnam to meet with troops. You were interviewing a lot of these people, right?
Ellis: I had a show. They assigned me a show like the Johnny Carson show at the time called “In Town Tonight.” We had a desk that looked just like Johnny Carson’s desk, and I would interview all the movie stars and various people that came through. Then we would kinescope it, because we didn’t have videotapes out in the field; we had 16-milimeter projectors from our little TV stations. And so we would kinescope it and send it on the circuit again, all the way around to all of our nine TV stations on hilltops all over, and they [soldiers] would get to see the movie stars. If they couldn’t go down and see them put on a show at the local base, they at least got to see them on TV.
Hood: How much information, how much news did you actually broadcast about the war itself — engagements and so forth? You obviously didn’t put information out on television that would have been valuable to the enemy, but you wanted the soldiers to see the conduct of their war.
Ellis: Exactly. We had to be very careful what we put on the air. A lot of times we would broadcast [that] an attack had started, [that] there was a big attack in the Ia Drang Triangle and the 18th Airborne Corps or the 82nd Airborne or whoever it happened to be, and [that] so far, they had gotten all these caches of weapons and they captured so many tanks and guns or whatever. And body counts; we were giving that. But it was all usually in our favor; we didn’t tell about the American casualties, of course.
Hood: Now, you provided an important service — giving service members and others in the country information, news, a little light entertainment sometimes — to try to get their mind off of what was going on, but you also fought yourself. It’s not too strong to say that you were engaged in a lot of firefights. In fact, didn’t you win the Bronze Star?
Ellis: Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, I was awarded the Bronze Star, of which I’m very proud. But it just amazes me. When I got back, people said, “What did you do in Vietnam?” And I said, “I was combat correspondent, combat broadcaster, and combat photographer.” And they said, “Well, did you ever see any fighting?” And I said, “Well, they’ve got some pretty long lenses on the cameras but I don’t recall one that would get that far in the jungle.” Yes, if you are going to be a combat correspondent, you’ve got to go to where the combat is to correspond it, and that’s what we did. And I did. I was a machine gunner on a helicopter, I went on Navy ships, and I went in helicopters and visited, went out with the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard, and everybody — doing stories about them. And that was what we liked to do: spotlight the troops and let them hear about themselves on the radio and television.
Hood: Well, I presume that you’re an avid news consumer now. Here we are all watching what’s going on in Afghanistan, what’s going on in Iraq, in the war on terror. What are your reflections today, looking back, comparing the experiences you had in Vietnam to what you’re seeing today?
Ellis: In Vietnam, we would go out and film. We did a lot of documentation, we would film an attack or whatever and send the raw footage all the way back to the Pentagon and photo lab in Washington D.C. And sometimes we never saw the results of our stuff. We did do local stories in Saigon. But today, it just fascinates me to see these satellites, these guys standing up and bombs going on behind them in Baghdad. And it’s live, it’s happening right that second. And we would have given anything to have that facility in Vietnam.