NETWORKS TROOP BACK TO VIETNAM

Steve Bell once covered the Vietnam War. So did George Lewis, Richard Threlkeld, Ted Koppel, Jim Laurie, Garrick Utley, Neil Davis, Liz Trotta, Bruce Dunning and Peter Arnett. Some are back in Vietnam now. The others are due there later this month.

The reason: They’re part of the network television coverage of the 10th anniversary of the fall of Saigon--now known as Ho Chi Minh City--to North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. The city surrendered on April 30, 1975.

The networks’ 10-years-after coverage, peaking near the end of this month, will include reports both in the United States and Vietnam on the origins of America’s longest war, and the war’s impact and aftermath in both countries.

At least two networks, NBC and ABC, plan a first in television history--live reports from Ho Chi Minh City. The reports will be for their evening newscasts and for NBC’s “Today” show, and ABC’s “Good Morning, America” and late-hour “Nightline.”

Live telecasts weren’t possible during the war because there were no satellite facilities in Saigon. Network stories were filmed and flown to bureaus in Hong Kong or Tokyo for air shipment or satellite relay to the United States.

This time, NBC says it has obtained permission to bring in its own 2,000-pound satellite ground station for its live reports, which will be relayed via an Indian Ocean satellite to London and then to the United States.

ABC plans to use a Russian-built satellite facility installed in Ho Chi Minh City one and a half years ago. The network’s transmissions from Vietnam will be sent via Moscow or Prague to London, and then to New York, says ABC News executive Robert Murphy.

One potential problem: ABC’s crews won’t know until they get to Vietnam in mid-April whether the facility has been tested and works, according to Murphy, who is overseeing ABC’s operation. “This is an iffy-type thing,” he says.

Surprisingly, CBS has no plans--at least now--for live reports from Vietnam. The bulk of its reportage on the anniversary of Saigon’s fall and the aftermath of the Vietnam War will be done in the United States, says CBS News spokeswoman Ramona Dunn.

She says CBS correspondents Liz Trotta, Bruce Dunning and Bob Simon now are seeking Vietnam entry visas, and if they get them, they will go to Ho Chi Minh City, tape their reports and ship them out.

(CBS-owned KCBS-TV in Los Angeles has sent anchorman Jess Marlow and a crew to Vietnam for a two-week tour there. His taped reports on Vietnam will start airing on April 21.)

No live reports, either, are planned by Ted Turner’s Cable News Network, whose correspondent, Peter Arnett, left last week for Vietnam.

A Pulitzer Prize-winner, Arnett is the dean of the TV corps in terms of Vietnam experience, although all his time there was as a print reporter. He began covering the war in 1962 for the Associated Press and was there for AP when Saigon fell in 1975.

CBS, NBC and ABC already have aired several Vietnam reports pegged to the anniversary of Saigon’s fall. Two of them, broadcast last month on the “CBS Evening News,” were by former CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite.

During the war, his gloomy forecast on United States’ involvement in the war, reported from Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968, was considered a major factor in President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decision not to seek reelection.

Cronkite’s recent tour of Vietnam was to gather material for a “CBS Reports” documentary. He was accompanied by a former prisoner of war, Rep. John S. McCain III (R-Ariz.), who spent 5 1/2 years in POW camps after his Navy A-4 attack jet was shot down over North Vietnam.

The Cronkite program, “Honor, Duty and a War Called Vietnam,” will air on April 25.

A day later, NBC starts its big, ambitious Vietnam push with a live report from Saigon, followed by a one-hour documentary, “Vietnam: The Unwinnable War,” on April 27, and then on April 28, a Washington-based “Meet the Press” special on the war and its consequences.

On April 29, NBC’s “Today” show will begin the first of a weeklong series of live broadcasts from Ho Chi Minh City by co-host Bryant Gumbel, who is on his first trip to Vietnam. He’ll be aided by George Lewis, who covered the fall of South Vietnam, NBC says.

NBC’s evening newscasts that week also will feature taped stories on Vietnam--now being put together--by Garrick Utley, reporting from the Mekong Delta, and by John Hart.

According to NBC News Vice President Gordon Manning, Hart’s travels began in Hanoi and will end in Ho Chi Minh City after stops--luck and transportation permitting--in Hue, Da Nang, My Lai and possibly two famous battlefields of the war: Khe Sanh, near what once was the Demilitarized Zone, and Dak To in the Central Highlands.

On May 5, “NBC Nightly News” anchorman Tom Brokaw--who is doing a series of special segments on the war’s effect on Vietnam veterans and the families of men killed in Vietnam--will anchor a one-hour retrospective of the week’s reports from Vietnam.

No dates are set yet for ABC’s Vietnam broadcasts, the network says, but they will air near the end of this month, with Koppel anchoring his acclaimed “Nightline” from Ho Chi Minh City, and filing other reports for “World News Tonight.”

Another experienced Vietnam correspondent, ABC’s Steve Bell, is scheduled to report on the 10th anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh (Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge 13 days before Saigon’s surrender). He also will report from Ho Chi Minh City for “Good Morning, America.”

Unlike the two other networks, ABC has no plans to air a documentary this month about the Vietnam War and its aftermath. ABC is delaying that, a spokeswoman says, until September, when it will air a three-hour special about events in Vietnam from 1945 to the present.

That prime-time broadcast, to include panel discussions about the war and the United States’ long involvement in it, is tentatively entitled “45/85.”

NBC’s Manning agrees that various critics may accuse the networks of being taken on a propaganda ride this month by Hanoi.

That’s inevitable, says Manning, who in February spent three weeks in Vietnam arranging for the installation of the NBC’s portable satellite station in Ho Chi Minh City and for visas for NBC’s correspondents.

But “all we can say is that we’ll try to be as honest as we can,” he says, even though the Hanoi regime will be saying where print and TV correspondents alike can and cannot go, and will try to encourage favorable reports.

While the authorities in Vietnam “are interested in rapprochement with America,” they “realize we’re going to be critical of some things they’re doing,” he says.

Besides, he adds, if news organizations feared accusations of succumbing to a country’s propaganda, “you’d never go to a country that critics don’t approve of. We go where the news is . . . we think it (the Vietnam coverage) is a public service.

“It’s a part of the world we haven’t seen for a number of years.”