Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Quinn’s Vietnamese friends begged him to evacuate their children. Strangers approached him on the street with the same request. Friends at the embassy asked him to carry their valuables back to Washington, and he agreed to take Eva Kim’s jewelry and her fur coat. One young diplomat said, “The jig is up!” Another said, “We’ve probably got until August.” He visited the Defense Intelligence Agency analysts at the DAO who had impressed him with their realistic and reliable reports. They rolled out maps tracking the progress of North Vietnamese units and told him that the Communists enjoyed an almost two-to-one advantage in main force divisions and if the current offensive continued, their superior numbers promised a quick victory. The removal of U.S. airpower had given the North insurmountable advantages. Because the Communists no longer feared B-52s hitting their artillery batteries, they could fire their 130 mm guns with impunity, while South Vietnamese units lacked similar long-range guns to respond.

  Quinn telephoned frequent reports to Bill Stearman, his superior on the National Security Council. Stearman said that the cables from Martin and others on the mission had been optimistic, along the lines of “It’s not looking good, but we think they can hold on.”

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” Quinn said. “It’s over!”

  Stearman shared Quinn’s assessment with the Washington Special Actions Group, the interagency organization chaired by Kissinger that was monitoring the crisis. Its reaction amounted to “Who the hell is Ken Quinn, this junior guy, to be insisting that we don’t have more time?”

  Quinn was only thirty-two, but he spoke better Vietnamese and had lived in South Vietnam longer than anyone on the Weyand mission. He had joined the Foreign Service to become a Western Europe expert but like most new officers entering in 1968 had been assigned to South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive had recently claimed the lives of several Foreign Service officers, and some of his classmates at the Vietnam Training Center questioned whether the war was worth their lives. After a few resigned or requested reassignment, the center’s director had urged anyone with doubts about the war to speak with him privately. Quinn imagined joining a long line at his door, but he was the only one bold enough to discuss his misgivings. The director shouted that he could not fathom why any red-blooded American boy would not risk his life for his country and recommended his expulsion. The State Department was so desperate for bodies that it sent him to Vietnam anyway. He began as a district senior adviser, becoming one of the few American diplomats to command a joint civilian and U.S. military team advising South Vietnamese troops. He drank with his Vietnamese soldiers, met their families, accompanied them on night ambushes, and joined their victory celebrations, hugging them and throwing them into the canals. He participated in so many helicopter missions that he would be the only civilian ever awarded the U.S. Army Air Medal. When Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker invited him and several other field officers to dinner at the embassy, the others offered upbeat reports, but he said that South Vietnam’s pervasive corruption was sabotaging the war. Bunker snapped, “That’s not what I hear from others.” Their exchange added to Quinn’s reputation for being “a rather forward Irishman.”

  He had been preparing to leave to pursue graduate studies at Harvard before taking a post in Western Europe when he gave a Life magazine reporter a tour of his district. The reporter was incredulous that he was leaving. The Vietnam War was the epic event of their generation, he said, and Quinn spoke the language, had stepped through the cultural veil, and was making a difference in these villages. Why trade all that for Harvard and Europe? Quinn changed his mind and stayed four more years, meeting his wife. In 1972 he had climbed a small mountain outside his post at Chau Doc, looked into Cambodia, and seen that every village for miles was in flames. Refugees told him that a secretive group of Communist rebels, the Khmer Rouge, had marched their inhabitants into the countryside, conscripted them into labor battalions, and burned their homes to prevent them from returning. Quinn wrote the first report describing the Khmer Rouge’s genocidal policies, but intelligence analysts in Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Washington discounted it because he had asserted that Hanoi did not control the Khmer Rouge, a position contrary to the consensus of the intelligence community. The U.S. embassy in Phnom Penh even asked the State Department to order him to stop following events in Cambodia. Twenty-five years later, after he had finished his tour as U.S. ambassador in Phnom Penh, Kissinger took him aside, squeezed his arm, and praised his Cambodian report as “brilliant.” But at the time his memorandum had only furthered his reputation for being a forward Irishman.

  He continued living up to his name while serving on the Weyand mission. He told Weyand that South Vietnamese had lost confidence in Thieu, and insisted that during the next three weeks Saigon would fall to the Communists. In response, Weyand uttered a loud and despairing sigh.

  Quinn went from briefing Weyand to dinner with Martin. He hoped to persuade him to formulate a plan for the evacuation of the entire U.S. mission, including its Vietnamese employees, but knew that if he was too pessimistic, Martin would tune him out. He spoke carefully at first, but the moment he uttered the word “evacuation,” Martin leaned back in his chair, templed his fingers, stared at the ceiling, and began drifting off, just as he had the previous April. This time Quinn found his performance even more unsettling because his decisions could mean life or death for thousands of Vietnamese, including his in-laws. He looked around at Martin’s furniture, paintings, and antique French maps and thought, “What’s going to happen to these wonderful things? They’re going to be looted, taken by the Communists. He’s going to lose them all!”

  Before leaving Saigon, Quinn met in an empty office at the embassy with CIA agent Frank Snepp, Shep Lowman, a political officer married to a Vietnamese, and Lacy Wright, a slight, soft-spoken young diplomat who covered Vietnamese politics and had been in South Vietnam for several years. Quinn proposed that because Martin was refusing to plan an evacuation, they should do it themselves. Snepp said he was overloaded with responsibilities and would help out but would have to take a backseat. Wright agreed to come on board and would become the group’s mainstay. He had bounced around in the 1960s, considering the priesthood, studying in Rome, teaching high school in Chicago, and joining the Foreign Service despite opposing the war. He promised to help collect the addresses and telephone numbers of prospective evacuees and establish a phone tree and network of safe houses where they could stash their people before sending them to Tan Son Nhut. He volunteered his own house and promised to recruit other young diplomats. Quinn gave him the names and addresses of his Vietnamese in-laws and, after returning to Washington, forwarded him the names of the Vietnamese relatives and friends of State Department and AID officers stationed in the United States. Because Quinn worked at the White House, his calls to Wright had a “flash preference” and were immediately connected. During the next several weeks, Wright and Lowman encouraged Americans working at USAID, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA), and the embassy to send them lists of South Vietnamese who merited evacuation. The lists poured in. Those on them ranged from prominent intellectuals and politicians to embassy file clerks and drivers and household staff.

  In early April, soon after Da Nang fell, Lowman became involved in a complementary evacuation scheme when he and political-military counselor Jim Devine set up an evacuation control center in the embassy’s fourth-floor communications room. He and Devine recruited two AID officers from the Da Nang consulate, Mel Chatman and Russell Mott, and told them to plan an embassy evacuation. Chatman and Mott recruited a contact person in each of the U.S. agencies, scouted Saigon for American-owned villas and offices with high walls that could serve as safe houses, drew up routes from these houses to Tan Son Nhut, and persuaded the DAO to provide some of its olive-green buses when the time came. But without Ambassador Martin’s approval, none of these buses could head to Tan Son Nhut carrying evacuees from the lists that Wright and Lowman were compiling.
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  Martin’s third houseguest was “Mr. Military Assistance,” the swashbuckling Defense Department bureaucrat Erich von Marbod. Von Marbod knew that American advisers in uniforms impressed South Vietnamese troops, so he had packed the camouflage fatigues that South Vietnamese airborne troops had given him during one of his earlier inspection trips (in part because U.S. advisers in civilian clothes stood out and drew sniper fire). He wore the fatigues and the red beret of an airborne trooper when he helicoptered out to the front lines at Tay Ninh to count artillery shells. After interviewing frontline troops and inventorying their ammunition, he concluded that no government positions had fallen because their defenders lacked munitions.

  His friend Nguyen Hung, an American-trained economist who was a special assistant to President Thieu, showed him a sandbag shelter that he had built in his kitchen and told him that South Vietnam was doomed unless President Ford ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb North Vietnamese troops. On March 27, Hung had persuaded President Thieu to show Weyand the letters that he had received from Nixon promising swift retaliation if Hanoi violated the Paris Peace Accords. Hung and Thieu hoped that Weyand would pass the letters along to Ford and that Nixon’s unequivocal promises to Thieu would shame him into intervening. After asking von Marbod to act as an intermediary, Hung pulled three of Nixon’s letters from a burgundy leather attaché case one by one, reading them out loud and sliding them across his dining room table. On October 16, 1972, Nixon had promised Thieu that any breach of a treaty by Hanoi would have “the most serious consequences.” On November 14, 1972, he had written, “But far more important than what we say in the agreement on this issue [North Vietnam violating a treaty] is what we do in the event the enemy renews its aggression. You have my absolute assurance that if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action.”

  Von Marbod was stunned and asked for copies to show Weyand. Hung copied some excerpts by hand. Von Marbod returned several days later and told Hung that Weyand had agreed to show the letters to Ford. Hung handed von Marbod copies of the initial three letters before pulling a fourth from his attaché case. It was Thieu’s ace in the hole, the letter he believed would bring back the B-52 bombers. On January 5, 1973, several weeks before Thieu signed the Paris Peace Accords, Nixon had written, “You have my assurance of continued assistance in the post settlement period and that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.” Astonished that Nixon would have made such an unequivocal promise, von Marbod exclaimed, “Well, I’ll be damned!”

  CHAPTER 5

  “I’d Tell the President That!”

  On March 29, one day after consular officer Walter Martindale had arrived in Nha Trang after leading his convoy of refugees there from Lam Dong province, a marine guard appeared at the house he was sharing with his adopted Vietnamese son and daughter and announced that Consul General Spear wanted to see him at once. “What’s he going to do if I don’t come?” Martindale snapped. “Shave my head and send me to Vietnam?”

  After he reported to the consulate—and he had taken his time— Spear ordered him to pick up David Kennerly at the airport. Martindale knew that Kennerly was a friend of President Ford’s and had won a Pulitzer Prize, but after having seen Chez Walt shelled, battling ARVN deserters, losing Ralph, and watching his province fall to the Communists, his Irish Cherokee blood was boiling, and he was in no mood to chauffeur Kennerly around. He drove home from the consulate, leaving Kennerly stranded at the airport and Spear screaming, “That damned Martindale!”

  He ran into Kennerly at the American club that evening. “I was supposed to meet you, Mr. Kennerly,” he said, “and now I’m in trouble with my boss.”

  “You can call me David,” Kennerly replied.

  “Very well, Mr. Kennerly.”

  He agreed to drive Kennerly to the former U.S. Navy base at Cam Ranh Bay the next day so that Kennerly could photograph refugees from Da Nang disembarking. He also hoped to persuade him to urge President Ford to order back the B-52s.

  The highway from Nha Trang to Cam Ranh Bay reminded both men of World War II newsreels showing refugees fleeing the Nazis. Martindale leaned on his horn and wove around motorbikes, trucks, and oxcarts, passing shell-shocked civilians and surly soldiers. Kennerly believed that he had survived the war by not taking unnecessary risks, and making what he called “the right choices.” Speeding past columns of angry troops, who believed the United States had betrayed them, in a small Ford sedan with American flags fluttering from its front bumpers struck him as a very bad choice indeed. Martindale was afraid that the flags would attract Vietcong snipers and agreed to cover them, although, he says, “normally I wouldn’t have struck the colors for anything.”

  Cam Ranh Bay was the best deepwater harbor in Southeast Asia, and the U.S. military had expanded its docks and built an air base and recreation center. In less than five years it had become a ruin of empty piers, weed-choked runways, and rotting barracks. Martindale and Kennerly arrived as refugees were disembarking from a U.S. Military Sealift Command freighter docked at the end of a long concrete pier. Relief workers doled out food, water, and salt tablets, military police arrested deserters, and crewmen winched passengers from the hold in cargo nets. Two barefoot girls ran down the pier screaming in agony as the asphalt scorched their feet. Their pregnant mother held a baby in one arm and the family pots and pans in the other. Martindale sprinted down the pier and scooped them up. Kennerly took a photograph of him carrying one child under each arm. A week later, the picture would hang in the White House.

  Embassy officials had come from Saigon to collect American citizens and the Vietnamese employees of the Da Nang consulate. One stood on the pier, a foot propped on a rail as he coolly surveyed the scene. He told Martindale that several babies had been born aboard the U.S. freighters.

  “Then you’d better get them out of here,” Martindale barked. “They were born on American flag ships, so they’re U.S. citizens and should be registered with the embassy.”

  “My God, that’s all we need,” the official said.

  “They’re Americans,” Martindale shouted. “You take care of them. It’s not going to kill you to write their names down in your notebook.”

  Consul General Spear arrived by helicopter, and he and Kennerly flew out to inspect the refugee ships and search for Consul General Al Francis. They flew over the Pioneer Commander. It was carrying 140 Americans and third-country nationals, as well as 5,700 Vietnamese, soldiers and refugees. It had lacked sufficient supplies of food and water, and some refugees had died of thirst and illness, while others had been trampled to death in its dark and crowded holds. After it discharged its remaining passengers at Vung Tau, rescue workers found dozens of corpses, including several little girls still clutching their dolls. Its crew was blameless. The MSC had chartered their ship to move military supplies, not human beings. Because neither the Thieu nor the Ford administration had anticipated Da Nang falling, it had arrived off the city’s shores without the food, water, sanitary facilities, and medicines necessary to carry almost 6,000 people in minimal comfort.

  Kennerly asked the Air America pilot to hover above the Pioneer Commander so he could shoot some photographs. One of his photographs, which would also soon hang in the White House, showed refugees staring up at Kennerly. A few Vietnamese marines, furious that an American helicopter was sightseeing rather than helping them, opened fire. Kennerly heard the crack of rifles and saw muzzle flashes. The incident shook him because the men trying to kill him belonged to an elite marine division. Back in Saigon he would tell friends that the episode had given him an insight into the morale of South Vietnamese troops—namely, that there was none.

  He agreed to take Martindale’s children on his Air America plane to Saigon, where Martindale’s cousin, who worked for AID, would meet them. As he and
Martindale parted, he asked him what he should tell President Ford. Martindale exploded. “You tell the president to unleash the B-52s and honor our commitments to South Vietnam! You tell him this is not the way to leave this country! That’s what you tell the president. Who the hell wants to be the president of a defeated nation? Is that what he wants? Too many people have died here. Tell him to honor the peace treaty that we signed.”

  “Do you really think I’d tell the president that?” Kennerly asked.

  “I’d tell the president that!” Martindale exclaimed.

  General Weyand arrived in Nha Trang the next day, March 31, to consult with General Phu. Phu struck him as “shattered and incoherent,” yet during a press conference at the Nha Trang airport after their meeting Weyand insisted that ARVN forces were “not demoralized in any sense,” “performing well,” “determined to slow the Communists down,” and would “stand and fight.” It is unlikely that he believed this, but speaking the truth would have shattered what morale remained among South Vietnam’s armed forces.

  Soon after Weyand left, gangs of deserters rampaged through Nha Trang. One group burst into a restaurant where Consul General Spear and his wife were dining with friends and demanded food at gunpoint. While Spear and his party were fleeing the restaurant, Nha Trang’s province chief shuttered his office and discharged his staff. The next morning municipal officials fled, the police force disbanded, deserters battled air force personnel at the air base, and Vietcong operatives opened the jail, freeing prisoners who contributed to the mayhem. General Phu, who only the day before had promised Weyand that his troops would defend the city “to the last,” flew to Saigon and checked himself in to a hospital, claiming “nervous exhaustion.”