He was the last man out the door of the Saigon bureau of The New York Times when the South Vietnamese city fell to communist forces in 1975, an unheralded but indispensable guide whose photo credits in small print on the newspaper page belied his other vital journalistic contributions.
As he left the bureau, Nguyen Ngoc Luong retrieved the office handgun from a desk drawer, tossed it in a garbage can on the street, and stepped into an uncertain future. He had rejected The Times’s offer to be relocated to the United States, preferring to remain in the country he loved and where he had seen so much suffering.
Hundreds of unheralded guides and translators like Mr. Luong have served in war zones around the world, their contribution to journalism as essential as it is anonymous. Many are remembered fondly by the reporters who rotated into the battlefield and then returned home. Some are forgotten. Most go their separate ways, and contact is lost.
So it was with Mr. Luong. Even in this digital age, it took weeks for many of his former colleagues to learn that he had died Oct. 27 in what was Saigon but is now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He was 79.
The cause was complications of a urinary tract infection, his daughter Nguyen Thi Hop said.
On an organization chart, Mr. Luong would have been listed officially as a photographer and interpreter for The Times during the Vietnam War, but he was much more than that.
His dozens of published photographs in The Times vividly brought home to American readers the brutality of the jungle war and then the frantic efforts of thousands of South Vietnamese to flee Saigon as the communist forces descended on it. His faithful translations of battlefield interviews also punctuated the prose of Times correspondents.
In one harrowing instance in 1970, two years after US troops had killed hundreds of civilians at My Lai, Mr. Luong “had to probe, then translate, what the villagers of My Lai told us about the massacre,’’ Times reporter Gloria Emerson recalled in a memoir, “Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins From a Long War.’’
Outside the bureau, Mr. Luong’s street smarts safeguarded reporters from the communist Viet Cong and even from rogue South Vietnamese soldiers who mistrusted Western reporters. With his winning demeanor, he often coaxed reticent Vietnamese to agree to candid interviews.
There were times, Emerson wrote, when even Mr. Luong, a South Vietnamese man ostensibly allied with the United States and working for a New York newspaper, was not necessarily safe from US soldiers.
“The soldiers were keyed up, the sight of any Vietnamese might make them open fire,’’ she wrote.
She recalled one occasion when two swaggering Green Berets dragged her from a safe berth on the floor of a helicopter and made her sit instead on the vulnerable door gunner’s seat.
“Luong could not help me,’’ she wrote. “We had an agreement that he must never try to interfere when I was in trouble, even if I called out and looked for him, because there was nothing an ordinary Vietnamese could ever do.’’
Mr. Luong said he had remained in Vietnam because of his pride in his country and his respect for what ordinary Vietnamese had endured. “I cannot stand Vietnamese who have no sign of suffering on their faces,’’ he would often say.
His politics were opaque. When Hanoi became communist after 1954, he said, he resettled in Saigon for personal rather than political reasons. But as a young boy, he tried to enlist in the anti-colonial and communist-dominated Viet Minh; he was told at the time that he could serve his country best by finishing school.
“Without American intervention there would have been no war,’’ he said. “Reunification one way or another would have happened in 1956.’’
Right after the war, he wrote to Emerson, he looked forward to “no more killing, no more foreign advisers of all kinds.’’ He hoped, he said, that “each and every person’’ would be allowed to “really be himself, to feel really useful.’’
But he was not allowed to be under the victorious communist government. He was barred from working as a journalist and placed in what David K. Shipler, a former Times correspondent, called “a kind of occupational cage,’’ eking out a living by crafting trinkets and teaching English.
“The communist government wasted his precious devotion to his country, silenced his poetic eloquence and blinded his artistic eye,’’ Shipler wrote in an online eulogy this month.
Nguyen Ngoc Luong was born on Nov. 26, 1936, in a suburb of Hanoi, in what was then French Indochina. His parents were poor farmers who had survived the Japanese-induced famine that claimed many of their neighbors during World War II.
He contracted tuberculosis as a teenager, and after Vietnam was partitioned in 1954, he moved to Saigon, he recalled, both to escape an alcoholic father and to spare his family the expense of a funeral if his disease proved fatal. Instead, his lungs cleared.
He was a social worker from 1954 to 1960 and married Tran Thi Bach Mai, whom he leaves. Besides her and Hop, he leaves three other daughters, Nguyen Thi Bich Chi, Nguyen Thi Bich Chieu, and Nguyen Thi Bich Lien, and six grandchildren.
