Journalism professor reminisces about war

By Kristopher Hanson, Special to the Online Forty-Niner

Monday, November 16, 1998

A bomb blasts in the near distance, and people pour onto the dark streets of Saigon.

A man runs out of his apartment to investigate and is almost stampeded by a group of soldiers marching toward combat. It is Jan. 31, 1968, and Ron Milligan is experiencing first-hand the beginning moments of the Tet Offensive, the most aggressive confrontation of the Vietnam War.

However, Milligan is not in Vietnam as a soldier, he is there because he loves adventure and is getting paid for it.

Milligan is a career journalist having done foreign correspondence across the world, travel shows on television, sports writing, editing and teaching at the university level. He has also been a lumberjack in the Sierra Nevada, an accountant, a dock worker on the ports of San Francisco and Chicago, a truck driver, a laborer in the oil fields of Louisiana and Texas, and a watchman in the Navy during World War II, among other things.

"I wanted to do everything when I was younger," explains Milligan, a journalism professor at Cal State Long Beach. "From the time I was a little kid I wanted to go around and see the whole world, and I eventually did."

Ron Milligan is a native of California, but a citizen of the world. He was raised in the San Francisco area and as a young man enlisted in the Navy at the end of World War II, serving in the Philippines for a year and a half.

"For me it was a great adventure ... the tropics, the hot nights, surf on the corral beaches, palm trees, a different kind of people," reminisces Milligan, a man whose spirit an energy are much younger than his years.

After returning from his tour of duty, he enrolled in college. Although he had always loved fiction writing, he received a degree in business from UC Berkeley.

"I knew I could at least get a job with the business degree if the writing didn't work out," Milligan said.

However, he did not immediately go into the typical business world as many of his fellow graduates did. Adventure and travel were calling to him and he soon found himself all over the country working in a wide range of jobs, including working in the forests of the Sierra Nevada's.

"I was very strong then," Milligan said, referring to the backbreaking work of the timber industry.

After marriage, he rethought his career. "I didn't want to go back to business ... I wanted to write." That is when he started his life as a news reporter.

He got a job at a semi-weekly newspaper in Norwalk, the Call Advertiser.

"Since I hadn't majored in journalism, I went to the library and got a bunch of books on how to write news stories. I took my own crash course on newspaper writing," Milligan said.

He worked hard at his new profession and soon was with The Sun in Las Vegas, where his wife Damita was working in theater. After refusing a position as city editor at The Sun, he and his wife packed up and headed for Spain.

In Spain, he became editor of an English-language magazine (although he speaks fluent Spanish), which served the thousands of Americans living there at the time. United Press International wanted his services, so he became a radio newsman for the military personnel stationed in Spain, Morocco, and Libya.

"Ironically, we were on friendly terms with Libya at the time, and we actually had military bases there," chuckled Milligan, noting how U.S.-Libyan relations have soured over the years.

Yearning to explore more of the world and freelance report, Milligan, his wife, and two young daughters headed for a rapidly escalating fight in the jungles of southeast Asia known as the 10,000 Day War, or The Vietnam War.

After establishing a residence on the island of Luzon, Philippines, where his family would be safe, he headed for Saigon. There, he became the Saigon Bureau Chief for Group Westinghouse, a prominent news agency.

"I wasn't there to take sides," assures Milligan. "I was there to deliver unbiased news reports for Group W (Westinghouse)."

His assignments included interviewing military personnel, recording sounds of the war, collecting information and delivering it over the radio in short segments. His broadcasts were heard in various spots worldwide.

On the night of the Tet Offensive, he found himself in the middle of a gunfight at the radio station where he worked.

"The NVA (North Vietnamese Army) had infiltrated the station ... they tried to play a tape of their propaganda, but a technician had flipped a switch, turning off the broadcast," he said.

"I carried a .45 pistol, even though it was against the rules (of the Geneva Convention)," Milligan said. "I saw an unarmed member of the media get killed in Vietnam. I decided I was going to at least get a chance to defend myself if the time came."

Another time, he set out into the jungle with a group of young Marines, digging his own foxhole and awaiting combat with the NVA.

After three action-filled years covering the war, Milligan and his family returned to the U.S. and he enrolled at Columbia University in a program for mid-career foreign correspondents.

"I went to work for ABC, traveling the country, Puerto Rico, Canada, and I wound up with WTIC in Hartford, one of the biggest stations in the Northeast," recalls Milligan.

This led to a job doing "Milligan's Stew," a program similar to Charles Kerault's "On the Road." He also began a radio program for handicapped people during this time. Realizing the harsh winters of Connecticut were not for him, he returned to California in the 1980s and started teaching at Cal State Long Beach and Cal State Dominguez Hills.

Aside from that he has worked for The Wave, a weekly newspaper based in Los Angeles, and as a copy editor for the Daily Breeze in Torrance, where he still works part-time.

"He has a vast breadth of experience, and a wide range of knowledge on subjects," said co-worker and friend Ron Logsdon, also a copy editor at The Breeze. "I would give my left arm to have had his career."

His days now are not quite as adventurous as in the past, but he still finds time to have fun.

"I still love to travel," Milligan said, adding that he and his wife of twelve-years Ursula ( Damita died in 1983) recently took a trip to Germany, Ursula's homeland.

His future plans are to write some fiction, possibly a novel. "That was something I've always planned on doing," he remarks.