Richard Dudman, covered Vietnam

Reporter was taken prisoner in Cambodia

“If we get out of here alive,” Richard Dudman said to two other journalists as they were being marched into the Cambodian jungle at gunpoint, “we’re going to have one hell of a good story.”

It was May 7, 1970, days after President Richard M. Nixon announced that U.S. forces would enter Cambodia as an outgrowth of the war in neighboring Vietnam. Dudman, on assignment for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, left the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon for the Cambodian border, less than 40 miles away.

He was accompanied by Elizabeth Pond of the Christian Science Monitor and Michael Morrow of Dispatch News Service International.

Dudman, who died Aug. 3 in Blue Hill, Maine, at age 99, was the Washington bureau chief of the Post-Dispatch and had made several previous trips to Vietnam.

After the three reporters crossed into the Parrot’s Beak region of Cambodia, they reached a bridge that had been destroyed. As they attempted to turn around, armed Viet Cong-aligned guerrillas emerged from the forest and ordered the reporters out of their Jeep. They were forced to surrender their press credentials and were put into the back of a truck.

Bald and bespectacled and rarely seen in Washington without a bow tie, Dudman was then a 52-year-old father of two girls. He may not have had the image of the intrepid international reporter, but he had already covered wars and revolutions from Cuba to Burma to the Middle East for the Post-Dispatch, which then had a national reputation for ambitious journalism. He knew how to remain calm under pressure.

He and the two other journalists were accused by their captors of being CIA agents and were taunted as prisoners of war. Dudman and Morrow, then 24, were tied by a rope to motorbike and forced to run behind it through a gantlet of angry villagers. They linked hands to keep each other upright.

“Blindfolded, stumbling, fearful of breaking an ankle, we ran as fast as we could to keep up with the bike,” Dudman late wrote in an account for the Post-Dispatch. “Fists and hands hit and shoved us from both sides.”

The motorbike stopped after half a mile. Dudman and Morrow, still blindfolded, were taken to a darkened building.

Pond fended off an attempted rape.

As the reporters feared for their lives, a higher-ranking guerrilla officer came to their rescue. The officer, known to the reporters as Anh Ba, assured them that they would be safe. They were shuttled from one place to another in the Cambodian countryside, eating rice, wild oranges and, on at least one occasion, roast dog.

They were sometimes at risk from U.S. bombing missions and helicopter attacks. One time, the Americans were in a house camouflaged by tree boughs while a U.S. helicopter hovered overhead.

During the six weeks of their captivity, a kind of rapport developed between the journalists and their captors.

“Before we were released,” Dudman wrote, “they were describing us as ‘not prisoners of war but travelers who lost their way.’”