Dateline Vietnam, 1973. An American military helicopter lifts off from a fire base. En route to Pleiku, the copter is met by an onslaught of Viet Cong. A ‘ping-ping-ping-ping’ rips across the side of the chopper. The co-pilot shouts ‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!’ as the helicopter drops out of the sky. In the chair beside him, the pilot sits slumped over, a red stain slowly growing around his heart. Two of the four gunners aboard the helicopter rush over to the pilot and rip open his clothes to see where he’s hit. Also aboard that falling chopper is an ABC news crew: a cameraman, a soundman, and a 20-something foreign correspondent named Jim Giggans. ‘I was shot down in a helicopter,’ Giggans tells the Palisadian-Post point-blank with a bemused grin. Today, he sits not crouched within an Army copter but on the Starbucks patio on Swarthmore. The Bruckheimer movie-worthy story he recalls might not jibe with the avuncular image many may hold of the former news anchor, who worked at KNBC through the 1990s. ‘There were bad guys like from here to Ralphs,’ he says, pointing eastward, as he puts a reporter in the mindset of Giggans the foreign correspondent in the middle of the Vietnam War. ‘You are dressed in battle fatigues, wearing a Kevlar bulletproof vest. And you don’t have a gun!’ Although the pilot died, the helicopter crash did not kill the ABC News crew and, with the aid of an American gunship, the trio was able to escape alive. ‘They set the jungle on fire to get us out of there,’ Giggans says. ‘The soundman was crying, ‘I can’t die, I can’t die! I have eight children!’ The tears were running down his eyes. But we never stopped filming.’ The experience rattled him. ‘I was terrified!’ Giggans says. ‘I thought we were going to die.’ But he stuck out his assignment, straight through the fall of Saigon. ‘I had to get back into a chopper. This is what comes with the territory.’ Giggans covered numerous conflicts: the Greeks and Turks in Cyprus, Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge, the Middle East. In Belfast, ‘The IRA bombed the hotel we were staying in!’ While in Entebbe [Uganda in 1976], ‘The city had fallen. The airport was closed. Luckily, you have a wad of cash that the network gives you, and you bribe your way onto the plane. They were shelling the airplane as we were leaving. ‘Oh, my God, the situations that we were in,’ he continues with a chuckle. ‘But would I trade it for anything? Absolutely not!’ Jim Giggans grew up in Bremerton, Washington, and attended the University of Washington. He pursued his graduate studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, concentrating on international politics. He intended to become an ambassador. However, a chance meeting with ABC News president Elmer Lauer at a dinner party changed that. ‘I knew nothing about journalism,’ Giggans admits. ‘But I guess [Lauer] was impressed. He liked the way I spoke. He said, ‘Come and try it out for six months and if I don’t like you, I’ll fire you. If you don’t like it, you can leave.’ At ABC News, anchored by Peter Jennings, Giggans learned every aspect of producing segments. ‘Suddenly, I was on Easter Island [2000 miles west of] Chile with a population of 1,200,’ he recalls. ‘While we were down there, the French had a nuclear test in the South Pacific, which has nothing whatsoever to do with where I was. They cut to me and said, ‘Elsewhere in the South Pacific” From that point on, I was a foreign correspondent for ABC News.’ Divorce and a new start brought Giggans from New York City to Los Angeles in 1980, when he met his second wife, Rosanna Hill, who works for an affordable-housing organization. He sought the routine of working at a local news broadcast starting at CBS affiliate KNXT, anchored by Connie Chung. ‘When you’re a foreign correspondent, your life is controlled by a phone call,’ Giggans says. ‘You’re there for a month waiting for [Francisco] Franco [dictator of Spain until 1975] to die. You don’t have control of your life. You’re getting older. How much longer can you tempt fate?’ Giggans worked at KNXT for three years before moving to KNBC in 1986, where he worked for 15 years, most prominently as the weekend news anchor and correspondent. He forged many friendships in the industry, among them colleagues Paul Moyer and Colleen Williams, Tracy Savage (whose parents are Palisadians), and Jose Rios, a Fox news director. Early this century, Giggans left broadcast news. He became disillusioned with the industry’s ‘infotainment’ direction. Office politics also diminished his enthusiasm. He singles out Carol Black and Bob Long as ‘great general managers’ at KNBC, but others ‘were not so good.’ Giggans overall enjoyed local news. ‘This is where I live,’ Giggans says. ‘I loved covering the L.A. riots, the Rodney King beating, all the stories that are significant here. I always liked the stories that showed the growth of Los Angeles.’ Part of that growth is L.A. arts and culture. Giggans was on the board of the L.A. Opera for six years. He played a part in the development of the Broad Stage in Santa Monica. ‘The first significant donation came from our home in the Huntington,’ he says of a $50,000 contribution made 12 years ago at a fundraiser the Gigganses hosted. The couple has lived in the Highlands for nearly a decade after seven years in the Huntington. ‘This small-town feeling, it’s wonderful,’ Giggans says of the Palisades. ‘I always see people I know when I’m going to Ralphs or Gelson’s.’ The Giggans have two children: Diana Giggans-Hill, 19, a psychology major at Wesleyan, and Nick Giggans-Hill, 16, a junior at Palisades High and an aspiring filmmaker. A graduate of the Archer School for Girls, Diana has spent summers and holidays working at Village Books on Swarthmore, while Nick worked on PaliHi’s last two productions, the musical ‘Honk!’ and ‘James and the Giant Peach/Edward Scissorhands.’ He played a camera man on the former and worked with the ground crew on the latter, helping with set preparation. He has also done some tech crew work at the Pierson Playhouse on such Theatre Palisades productions as ‘The Nerd.’ After leaving local news, Giggans worked as a marketing executive for a California winemaker and for Club Med. He was an ambassador for Santa Monica College, recruiting for what he calls ‘one of the best community colleges in the United States.’ In 2006, Giggans returned to the air with ‘Local Edition’ on CNN Headline News, interviewing local politicians. Today, Giggans teaches broadcast journalism at UCLA Extension and SMC, where students have a food-centric online rating system for their instructors. ‘Apparently, I’m a hot tamale,’ Giggans says, smiling.
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