September 2: Press reports contend that a Cambodian military tribunal has sentenced two high school students to death and has given ten others long prison terms for the June 4 murders of Education Minister Keo Sangkim and top aide, Thach Chea.

September 3: North Vietnamese Defense Minister Gen. Võ Nguyên Giáp, 62, is rumored to be critically ill; Hanoi denies it.

September 4: U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams, the former commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam (from July 1968 to June 1972), dies at 59 from complications of cancer surgery. Intelligence reports contend that the Soviet Union, Eastern European nations, and China have increased their economic aid to North Vietnam.

September 6: President Gerald Ford announces he will create a clemency review board to evaluate the records of deserters and draft evaders on a case-by-case basis.

September 7: VC Col. Võ Ðông Giang says his cadres will take action “at the appropriate and necessary time” against oil companies that bought offshore drilling rights from Saigon.

September 8: Ford grants Richard Nixon an unconditional pardon, saying he did so to spare the country and the former president further punishment as a result of the Watergate coverup. White House press secretary J.F. terHorst resigns in protest. In Saigon, the newly formed Committee Struggling for the Right of Freedom of the Press and of Publication accuses the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu of “oppressing and terrorizing the press, newspapermen, writers, and artists.”

September 12: Ford asks congressional leaders to restore hundreds of millions of dollars cut from the foreign-aid request for Southeast Asia.

September 14: The An Quang Buddhist faction puts its support behind the loosely knit noncommunist opposition’s “peace and national reconciliation” program. Sources report Lon Nol has replaced 11 older generals in Cambodia who were retired with colonels promoted to generals in a secret ceremony.

September 15: An Air Vietnam 727, reportedly hijacked by a man demanding to be flown to Hanoi, explodes near Phan Rang airfield, killing all 70 aboard. In Hue, some 5,000 Roman Catholics protest government corruption and police action during a rally.

September 16: Ford offers conditional amnesty to deserters and draft evaders willing to take part in the “earned reentry” program, which requires two years in public-service jobs. Ford names former New York Republican Sen. Charles Goodell as head of a nine-member clemency board to look into cases in which a person has already been convicted or punished. White House Chief of Staff Gen. Alexander Haig, Jr., is named by the president to be the NATO Supreme Allied Commander and Commander of U.S. Forces in Europe.

September 17: Attorney General William Saxbe orders 95 convicted draft evaders released from prison on 30-day furloughs while a clemency board reviews their cases. The Defense Department announces that 600 military deserters presently incarcerated will be released pending completion of administrative paperwork.

September 18: American civilian pilot Emmet Kay is freed by the Pathet Lao after 16 months as a POW. Ford hails the release as a positive step in carrying out the 1973 peace agreement but says the North Vietnamese are not complying with the accord to help account for the nearly 2,000 Americans still listed as MIA.

September 19: The most severe budget crisis in its 19 months of operation causes the International Commission of Control and Supervision to start making plans to withdraw 400 observers from 40 sites in South Vietnam. The group is reported to be $5 million in debt. At Phonsavan airfield in Laos, the Pathet Lao release 150 Thai volunteers and 20 Royal Laotian troops while the government sets free 173 North Vietnamese soldiers in a long-delayed prisoner exchange.

September 20: After the government orders the confiscation of issues of three newspapers containing the text of a Catholic priest’s “indictment” against alleged corruption by Thieu, hundreds take to the Saigon streets in protest. A Gallup poll shows 59 percent favor the conditional amnesty proposed in Ford’s deserters and draft evaders amnesty plan.

September 23: The Saigon government pledges $2.8 million to the ICCS.

September 25: U.S. District Judge J. Robert Elliot overturns the murder conviction of 1st Lt. William Calley, Jr., and orders him released from Ft. Leavenworth. The Department of the Army announces it may appeal the decision and says Calley will not be released pending disposition of that appeal. The U.S. commits $4 million to ICCS. The State Department says that the funds will come from AID’s allocation for Vietnam’s postwar reconstruction.

September 26: Federal Appeals Court Judge John R. Brown orders a four-day delay in Calley’s release.

September 27: Saigon military leaders express concern over increased momentum shown by communist troops in the northern and southernmost provinces. Hanoi claims U.S. planes have flown two reconnaissance missions over North Vietnam in violation of the ceasefire.

September 28: Testimony by Haig to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is made public, in which he said that, while serving as an assistant to Henry Kissinger during his tenure as Nixon’s national security adviser, Kissinger asked the FBI to put several people who later were targets of government wiretapping under surveillance.

September 30: CBS correspondent Haney Howell and AP photographer Neal Ulevich, while covering an anti-government demonstration in Saigon, are beaten by ten men they believe to be undercover police officers, and that nearby law enforcement personnel did nothing to stop it. The ACLU calls Ford’s amnesty program “worse than no amnesty at all,” and says it will challenge it. The Army asks the court to keep Calley behind bars pending an appeal of Elliott’s order to free him. The Defense Department reports that, thus far, only 70 deserters have volunteered to take part in the amnesty program.

October 1: In a televised speech, South Vietnamese President Thieu denies allegations of corruption and offers to resign if “the entire people and army no longer have confidence in me.” The Senate confirms Richard Roudebush as the new VA administrator. The trial against John Mitchell, John Ehrlichman, H.R. Haldeman, Kenneth Parkinson, and Robert Mardian for their part in the Watergate coverup opens.

October 2: Opposition politicians express anger over Thieu’s speech. In Saigon, Deputy Defense Secretary William Clements, after meeting with Thieu, issues a statement accusing Hanoi of “total disregard” for the peace accord, and says he will seek more aid for South Vietnam. Clements is the highest-ranking American official to visit the country since the signing of the ceasefire.

October 4: South Vietnamese military sources say that government troops have lost territory 25 miles northeast of Kontum to the North Vietnamese.

October 6: The Defense Department states that a deserter can still be prosecuted if he accepts an undesirable discharge and leaves the service but refuses alternate service under President Gerald Ford’s amnesty program.

October 9: In Saigon, a march which begins with 200 journalists demanding abolishment of restrictive press laws, turns into an antigovernment demonstration of 2,000. In a speech to the UN General Assembly, Cambodian Premier Long Boret asks the delegates not to “play with fire” by replacing Lon Nol’s government with the government-in-exile led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The U.S. Army says the last 2,500 draftees will be discharged by Thanksgiving because the recruitment of an all-volunteer Army has been successful.

October 10: Three American journalists and several demonstrators are attacked by Saigon police during an antigovernment and anticensorship demonstration.

October 11: A government spokesman denies police took part in the beating that put an American correspondent in the hospital.

October 12: The National Council of Churches claims Ford’s amnesty program “falls far short” of “healing the wounds” from the Vietnam War.

October 14: New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg and Le Monde reporter Jean Claude Pomonti are denied entry into South Vietnam.

October 19: One month after the amnesty program is implemented, only 8 percent of eligible deserters and 1 percent of draft evaders have registered for it.

October 20: In Saigon, hundreds of antigovernment protesters call for the resignation of Thieu, an end to the fighting, and the release of all political prisoners. They throw rocks at police, burn a Jeep, and, after a rumor circulates that a demonstrator was beaten by police, stone the National Assembly building.

October 22: Lower House opposition deputy Ho Ngoc Nhuan and the Movement for Prison Reform chair Rev. Chan Tin make public the names of 14 students arrested for their involvement in the protests. In Cleveland, a jury is selected for the trial of eight former Ohio National Guardsmen accused of violating the civil rights of those killed or injured during the Kent State University shootings on May 4, 1970.

October 24: Information Minister and Thieu adviser Hoàng Ðuc Nhã and three other cabinet members resign.

October 25: Opponents call the cabinet-member resignations “piecemeal changes” that won’t quiet the opposition. South Vietnam’s Defense Ministry announces 377 Army field-grade officers have been dismissed because of corruption charges.

October 26: Shell Oil subsidiary Pecten Vietnam reveals oil and gas have been discovered at a second wildcat well in the South China Sea. Opposition newspaper Dai Dan Toc says it will be indefinitely suspending publication because government confiscation of its papers has pushed it into bankruptcy.

October 29: Tran Quoc Buu, head of the Confederation of Vietnamese Trade Unions, the largest labor union in the country which usually is pro-government, calls for an end to corruption, implementation of the ceasefire, and the establishment of democratic liberties. During their opening statement, government lawyers say they have no ballistic evidence to link any of the defendants’ weapons to the killing or wounding of the Kent State students, but they say their case will contain many surprises.

October 30: Thieu announces that three Army commanders have been transferred from their posts in what may be intended to appease the opposition.

October 31: Seventy-five are injured after violence breaks out during a demonstration in the Catholic neighborhood of Tan Sa Chau when protestors are blocked from marching to downtown Saigon.

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