Ron Moreau
George Lewis
Dear friends,
On Tuesday May 13, Ron passed away in his sleep with his loving wife and daughter, Lac and Linh Anh, at his hospital bedside in Houston. As many of you know, Ron received a lung transplant a year and a half ago after a pulmonary fibrosis diagnosis. The lung transplant gave him another eighteen months but ultimately it cost him his life as he succumbed to a variety of ailments associated with the transplant, including a weakened immune system, a collapsed lung in December which landed him back in the hospital, and kidney failure.
Ron wanted to pass, and it is our belief that he wanted to leave us and end his suffering. He did so quietly without wanting to burden his family any longer. He was a committed son, father, husband and journalist. Ron spent his life doing what he loved, reporting and writing from Vietnam, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Latin America, Egypt, Lebanon, the Gulf, Paris, Miami, Bangkok and most recently Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he and his dear colleague Sami Yousafzai broke many stories and won a Clarion Award in 2010 for magazine feature article.
Ron was born in 1945 in Los Angeles. A talented high school basketball player, he played for Hall of Fame coach Denny Crum at Pierce College, before graduating from UC Berkeley. A conscientious objector to the war in Vietnam and, as his father called him "the best educated hippie in the country," he joined International Voluntary Services which sent him to the Vietnamese countryside where he taught English and began his lifelong love of journalism. In 1972, he joined Newsweek and worked there for the next forty years and, later, the Daily Beast. Ron was happiest when he was writing and reporting and traveling, and his disease unfortunately took that away from him. Per his final wishes, Ron will be cremated and his remains will be transferred to the Vietnamese Buddhist Center in Sugar Land.
Ron enjoyed your friendships immensely and he spoke to us fondly of you all.
Thank you for your friendship to Ron over the years.
Best,
Dan & Liz, Lac and Linh Anh
Ron Yates
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Ron Yates Blog: http://j-hawker.blogspot.com/
David Lamb
Dave Lamb
Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 14:38:15 -0700
Subject: Re: Ron Moreau
From: jhaw...@gmail.com
To: vietnam-...@googlegroups.com
David Burnett
Jacques Leslie
What a sadness to hear of Ron Moreau's passing. I had somehow missed him the last few decades, but he remained that young, tall & gangly, glint-in-the-eye IVS'er I met in late 1970 in Saigon. His grasp of things seemed immediate, and he turned out to be a natural reporter. And I remember as if it were yesterday, a lunch at the Hotel Royal, where he tried (with, no surprize, abject failure) teaching Philip Jones-Griffiths how to say "I am NOT am American" in Vietnamese... This life is passing all too quickly.
Chuck Searcy
Loren Jenkins
Loren Jenkins
don kirk
Elizabeth Becker
From: lorenb...@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Ron Moreau
Date: Thu, 15 May 2014 18:17:55 -0600
To: vietnam-...@googlegroups.com
Ray Wilkinson
Jim Laurie
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/15/remembering-ron-moreau-goodbye-to-a-war-reporting-legend.html
Matt Franjola
BHillenbrand
Chanda, Nayan
I am deeply saddened by the loss of a great colleague and friend. I have had the pleasure of working alongside Ron in Saigon, Phnom Penh and in Hong Kong. He was a gentleman to a fault, warm, generous with a great sense of humor.
My heartfelt condolences to Lac, Linh Anh, Dan and Liz.
--------------------
Nayan Chanda
Editor-in-Chief
YaleGlobal Online
Room 334
The MacMillan Center
PO Box 208206
34 Hillhouse Avenue
New Haven, CT 06511
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Tel: (203) 432-1903
Fax: (203) 432-9383
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Carl Robinson
Stanley Cloud
Simons
Bruce Palling
John Giannini
I was fortunate to enjoy the hospitality of Ron and Lac on various occasions in Saigon and Bangkok. Over the years we sometimes saw each other on assignments around the world. One always thinks of Ron as a fixture in SE Asia, but my most vivid memory of him was in Nicaragua, when we were covering the fall of the Somoza Dynasty and the victory of the Sandinistas. Things were falling apart fast and Ron was catching a ride on a cargo plane to San Jose, Costa Rica to file his story. All the photographers had put their film into one packet to give to Ron. Arnaud Borrell from Sipa and I raced to the airport. As we arrived we could see that the plane was starting to pull away. Ron was standing in the cargo door of the C-47, with the crew chief trying to close the door. Arnaud drove onto the runway along side the plane. I jumped out of with the packet and ran along side as the plane picked up speed. I made a pretty pathetic throw, but Ron managed to snag the packet and the plane took off. Despite the Newsweek stringer in San Jose trying to loose the film of the non-Newsweek photographers, we all managed to make our deadlines in New York and Paris. I recall later that Ron was pretty angry when he found out that the stringer had tried to sabotage colleagues.
On Friday, May 16, 2014 4:26:42 PM UTC-7, Simons wrote:
Farewell, Ron.Lew
John Giannini
Denis Gray
William Thatcher Dowell
email: wtdo...@gmail.com
personal contact info: http://williamdowell.com
ozt...@ozemail.com.au
----- Original Message -----To:<vietnam-...@googlegroups.com>Cc:Sent:Sat, 17 May 2014 16:40:03 +0700Subject:Re: Ron Moreau
ozt...@ozemail.com.au
----- Original Message -----To:<vietnam-...@googlegroups.com>Cc:Sent:Sat, 17 May 2014 16:40:03 +0700Subject:Re: Ron Moreau
jpri...@loxinfo.co.th
Ron Moreau was one of the very best in our business, yet was unassuming and
a friend to all hacks in the fray, whether in Vietnam or the Middle East. I never
heard him say a cruel word about anyone. He was a gentleman.
Knowing how ill he was, his passing was not a surprise. For a while, Ron
responded to email messages only tersely in a line or two, which served to
make it clear he was terminally ill. Nevertheless his death is a tremendous
blow to all of us and we willl miss his gentle humor, and his way of being,
greatly.
As a fellow correspondent of Newsweek, I was able to follow Ron's career
closely. I thought his greatest story was the cover he wrote on the Iraq war
when he almost fell into the hands of Saddam Hussein's forces as he made for
the Turkish border where he collapsed while still quite a bit away.
Whatever you think of Turkish soldiers, you have to hand it to them this time.
From a trench on the Turkish border, they watched through binoculars this
large Caucasian man collapse, and they sent a stretcher party quite deep into
Iraq to pick him up and carry him to safely. He recovered quickly and wrote a
masterpiece cover story which was one of the best reports of war I ever read.
He was a great man in many ways, not least in the way he looked after his
family, his wife Lac, his daughter Linh, and his son Dan. Milly and I send our
deepest condolences to his surviving family.
His perfect literacy in Vietnamese and French made him a great asset to all of
us, as he helped all and sundry, including correspondents from competing
journals - something that rarely happens these days.
We will never forget him.
Jim Pringle
Orleans, France
Tom Fox
On Thursday, May 15, 2014 5:34:42 PM UTC-4, George Lewis wrote:
Tom Fox
It deeply saddens me to learn about Ron’s death. He was always a decent, warm and caring person, a good friend, and, of course, a first rate journalist, as comments here echo loudly. I feel a certain special kinship to him as we both sneaked into journalism, unexpectedly, having first volunteered to go to Vietnam for International Voluntary Services. As we got closer to the people, as IVSers most often did, as we began to learn the language, hear their stories, learn about their lives, it became clear to most of us we needed to do more. We needed to help give them greater voices - and this eventually, one way or another, led us into journalism in Vietnam.
I want to share with you Ron’s personal path from IVS to Newsweek. Some of you, no doubt, have already read his own personal account, which he wrote on Gloria Emerson’s memorial page in September 2004. That story also involves his good friend and colleague, the late Alec Shimkin who in July 1972 died in Vietnam covering the wary. Oh, the losses. Alec, Gloria, and now Ron.
So here’ Ron in his own words. It’s typical Ron writing, empathetic and clear. He was a fine storyteller.
RIP Ron. Condolences to Lac, Lin Anh, and all of Ron’s family.
A Letter from Ronald Moreau in Islamabad (Newsweek Magazine) Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Something horrible was happening and we didn't know how to stop it. Alexander Shimkin and I were community development volunteers in Vietnam for International Voluntary Services, a Washington-based, humanitarian organization that was largely funded by USAID. In 1971, we were working in Tinh Bien District, near the Cambodian border, which at the time was one of the few Mekong Delta regions that still had a significant presence of North Vietnamese Army soldiers and their southern Viet Cong allies. Tinh Bien was also unusual in that it was the only part of the horizontal Delta that featured a range of long, brush-covered, rocky hills, called the Seven Mountains, running along the border.
North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers, who were infiltrating into the Delta from Cambodia, had set up an important way station and military base in the mountains that were honeycombed with caves and dotted with huge, rock outcroppings. Naturally, the communist-led troops visited the local villages at night, asking for food and supplies and spreading anti-Saigon government propaganda. To help secure their mountain redoubt from Saigon attacks, the guerrillas had seeded the hillsides, the scrub brush and the largely abandoned fruit orchards surrounding the hills with landmines and booby traps.
A handful of US military advisors were stationed at a small South Vietnamese Army base in Tinh Biens Ba Chuc village, not far from the foot of the highest hill, called Nui Dai, or Long Mountain. Periodically, North Vietnamese gunners shelled the camp. The Americans and their Saigon allies had tried just about everything to dislodge their foe from the mountains. But the carpet of landmines and booby traps hampered any ground assault toward the hills. If Saigon’s soldiers tried to clear the mines, the NVA/VC would rain down barrages of mortars. Next Saigon’s troops tried heliborne assaults onto the top of the mountains. But the choppers were driven away by heavy anti-aircraft fire from well-camouflaged gun emplacements. B-52 Arc-light bombing strikes were called in. That didn't seem to work either.
Finally, US and Saigon C-47 helicopters tried to burn the enemy out. The large, two-rotor choppers flew high over Nui Dai with dozens of 55-gallon drums of diesel fuel, dangling from the aircrafts’ bellies in rope nets. The helicopters released the slings, dumping thousands of gallons of diesel fuel on the mountainside, some of which would run into the caves, or so the Americans hoped. Then Cobra helicopter gunships attacked, firing rockets that ignited the fuel, setting great patches of the mountainsides on fire. The theory was that the walls of fire would not only cause the landmines and bobby traps to explode but would also burn the enemy out of, or suffocate him inside, the caves. But when Saigon soldiers attempted another ground assault the next day, they quickly found that the landmines were still lethal and that enemy gunners were as active and as accurate as ever.
Then, suddenly, the American advisers and Saigon’s officers had a new idea. They believed that the poor, local villagers who lived scattered around the base of the mountains were sympathetic to, and in close contact with, the communists. They reasoned that since the villagers did manage to grow some rice and pick some fruit from their war-damaged orchards near the mountains, then it followed that the villagers knew where the NVA/VC had placed the mines and booby traps. To rid the land around the mountain of these hazards to Saigon’s troops, American and Saigon officers devised a cruel plan to force the local villagers at gunpoint to clear the minefields by hand. For their trouble the villagers would be given sacks of US-donated rice.
The operation proved to be a disaster for the villagers from day one. It soon became obvious that the peasants didn't have the slightest idea where the NVA/VC had planted the mines. Almost immediately, the poor farmers began being fatally wounded and maimed when their sickles and hoes hit and detonated the nearly invisible explosives. Nevertheless, the US advisers and Saigon troops didn't relent and continued forcing the villagers to labor in the minefields. The communist forces took no pity either, mortaring the work crews if they ventured too close to the mountain. The village men were not the only victims. Many women and children became casualties, too. Either out of loyalty to the head of the family or because Saigon’s officers coerced them, many wives and children accompanied the men on their deadly, daily detail.
Helplessly, Alex and I witnessed what was going on and tried to imagine how we could stop the carnage. When we approached the American military advisers we were told that the villagers were volunteers, and that the operation was none of our damn business anyway. So we thought about writing an article for Dispatch News Service that had made its name by uncovering and publicizing the My Lai massacre. We took our plan to Don Luce, the former director of IVS who had resigned in protest over the war, and who had done some work for Dispatch and had recently uncovered the infamous Tiger Cages on Con Son Island for Life Magazine.
Wisely Don had only two words of advice for us: Gloria Emerson. He said that if we tried to write and publish the story, no one would read it. No action would be taken to stop the bloodshed. He said that not even he had the clout that Gloria had to end this cruel operation immediately. So Alex and I went to the Times office in Saigon with Don’s introduction.
Gloria swung into action immediately. She arranged hotel rooms for her two unwashed sources in rubber flip-fops. She booked Air America tickets to Chau Doc, the provincial capital, and hired the best photographer in the business, Magnum’s Philip Jones-Griffiths. She and her brilliant and courageous interpreter and fixer, Nguyen Ngoc Luong, debriefed us. Within a day or two we were off to the village.
After a long, jolting ride along the potholed road, we arrived at Ba Chuc village and immediately set out along the still dangerous paths to where the villagers were squatting down, clearing away brush in search of mines. Through Luong, Gloria talked to the villagers, both men and women, while Philip snapped pictures with his silent Leica.
When Gloria was convinced that she had heard the villagers’ story, she led the way back to the small military base at Ba Chuc and headed straight into the complex of sandbag bunkers where the American advisers stayed. Gloria immediately asked to see the US infantry captain in charge of the American advisory team. “He’s taking a nap,” an American sergeant replied testily. Gloria didn't hesitate. She blew right passed him and marched straight into the bunker where she found the captain sleeping in his bunk. She kicked the bunk as hard as she could, waking the captain with a start. Gloria glared at him and said, ”Tell me everything you know right now and Ill go easy on you.” The captain knew there no way he could escape or lie to Gloria. He even sounded apologetic as he answered Gloria’s questions like a school kid replying to his teacher.
Gloria wrote her usual first-rate, colorful and emotion-filled story that landed on the front page along with one of Philip’s pictures. In what was unusual for the Times back then, I believe two photos of the peasants working in the minefields were published inside the paper as well. The story had an immediate impact. The Pentagon ordered a halt to the mine-clearing operation at Ba Chuc, although it still tried to justify the unjustifiable by saying the villagers were volunteers who had been paid for their services with rice. But never mind. Gloria had scored a clear victory. Ba Chuc’s peasants were no longer forced to venture into the minefields.
Gloria’s story also changed Alex’s and my life. Gloria quoted both Alex and myself in the story, saying how much the villagers had suffered from the operation. Within days, Alex and I were summoned to the IVS office in Saigon where we were both fired for having talked to the press without permission.
But Gloria wasn’t about to cut us loose once she had her story. No. She marched Alex into Newsweek’s Saigon bureau and told the bureau chief, Kevin Buckley, that he was going to hire the Vietnamese-speaking Shimkin as a reporter/translator. Kevin, seeing a good thing and certainly not wanting to cross Gloria, consented immediately. Then she hustled me across the street to the Washington Post’s office. There she told Peter Jay and Peter Osnos that they now had a new Vietnamese-speaking stringer/ photographer/ translator. They graciously accepted the offer they couldn’t have refused anyway.
So Gloria saved Ba Chuc’s villagers and launched Alex and myself into careers in journalism just like that. She was our hero.
