The bit in that article about him finally getting to Vietnam is just embarrassing;
When the US military began pulling out of Vietnam, Wenner asked Thompson to cover it for Rolling Stone. Thompson agreed but began to lose his nerve as his departure date drew near. Wenner asked New York Times war correspondent Gloria Emerson to try to bolster Thompson’s confidence. The phone calls between them were recorded (Thompson—like Nixon—recorded many of his phone calls and conversations), and Emerson can be heard telling him how to cover the story, passing him the details of her own contacts and translators, and offering to provide him with all the facts about Vietnam that he lacked.
Thompson finally arrived in Vietnam in April of 1975 (more than a decade after the mainstream journalists he hated began covering the story on a daily basis). He took a lot of opium, mingled with prostitutes, and generally behaved like a clown in order to entertain the other journalists, many of whom were fans of his work. But, as Wills remarks, his behavior “wasn’t as funny in real life.” The other journalists quickly realized that his antics might get him—and them—killed. At least 60 Western journalists were killed covering the war and, as Wills points out, “few of them were running around high on drugs.” Tape recordings make it clear that he was hopelessly out of his element. The other journalists can be heard laughing at his ignorance of the facts on the ground. They teased him about the fact that he hadn’t managed to write a word about the Ali-Foreman fight when Norman Mailer had managed to write a groundbreaking piece for Playboy.
Later, by himself, Thompson can be heard spitting out the words, “Fuck them!” on the recorder. At one point, stoned out of his mind and believing he was chasing “four giant fucker pterodactyls,” Thompson wandered dangerously close to the front line. Several journalists had to put themselves in harm’s way to bundle him into a jeep and drive him back to relative safety. Five days after he arrived, he retreated to the safety of Hong Kong. He later claimed that he did this in order to secure some money and drugs for his journalist friends in Vietnam, but Wills points out that this was another lie. Audio recordings show that he left Vietnam because he was afraid. Thompson eventually returned to Saigon, but only because he got the idea he might later be able to pass himself off as the last American journalist to leave Vietnam. Eventually he fled for the relative safety of Laos. According to Wills, Thompson wrote very little about Vietnam. Most of Rolling Stone’s coverage of the fall of Saigon came from Laura Palmer, their other reporter in Vietnam. Without her, they would have missed out on one of the biggest stories of the decade.
quillette.com
