Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  The embassy had a priority departure list of U.S. mission personnel who were being encouraged to leave South Vietnam and a list of “mission-essential” ones who were being asked to stay to the end. With the Iranians gone, Moorefield feared he might find himself on the departure list and began searching for a way to make himself mission essential. Al Francis meanwhile became the embassy’s Cassandra, a spectral presence haunting its corridors and warning his colleagues what awaited them when the Communists attacked Saigon. His pessimism spooked Martin, who believed that the shell-shocked members of the U.S. mission from the Nha Trang and Da Nang consular districts were undermining embassy morale and should depart as soon as possible. Francis hung on until the middle of April. The day before he left, he handed Don Hays, the embassy financial officer whom Martin had ordered expelled, a check for $15,000 and asked him to spend it to help the Vietnamese employees of the Da Nang consulate escape.

  Theresa Tull refused to leave Saigon until she had arranged for the departure of General Truong’s children. They were staying with their mother in a house in Saigon while Truong was in a hospital recovering from nervous exhaustion, although his principal affliction was probably shame. Tull needed him to sign a letter making her the children’s legal guardian and to arrange for their passports and exit visas. Martin, however, had issued a directive forbidding embassy officials to visit Vietnamese officers from their previous posts without his permission. There was talk of a coup against Thieu, and he did not want his diplomats meeting with possible conspirators. Tull explained that she was taking Truong’s children to the United States and needed to see him to arrange for their departure. “Well, you know, this is a problem, Terry,” Martin said. “There are rumors that people want General Truong to replace President Thieu; there are rumors of a coup that would put him in Thieu’s place.”

  “Unfortunately, Ambassador Martin, he’s not the type,” she said.

  Martin relented and Tull visited Truong in the hospital. After he signed a letter giving her guardianship of his children, she went to his house, where his wife introduced her to fifteen-year-old Trinh, eleven-year-old Tri, and nine-year-old Tran—the children she expected to be hers for the rest of her life. Mrs. Truong had knit a heavy sweater for each child and had packed in their bags a Vietnamese-English phrase book, some of their favorite books, recordings of Vietnamese music, several of the family’s treasured Chinese-style bowls, and other mementos and keepsakes to remind them of their heritage and of the parents they might never see again.

  The Truongs were willing to risk being permanently separated from their children because, like many Vietnamese tainted by their associations with the United States and the Thieu government—and like Theresa Tull, Ken Moorefield, Major General Smith, Brigadier General Baughn, Walter Martindale, Ken Quinn, David Kennerly, and other Americans who feared for their Vietnamese friends, relatives, and co-workers—they believed that the stakes were high and American “lackeys” faced execution, or at best years of imprisonment and harsh treatment in a North Vietnamese gulag.

  Some Americans and Vietnamese believed that the Communists would begin seeking revenge the moment the South surrendered; others thought they would expel foreign journalists, seal the borders, and operate behind a Bamboo Curtain. Some predicted mass executions, a literal bloodbath; others forecast targeted killings. Some believed that every South Vietnamese government official, military officer, and intelligence operative would owe a “blood debt”; others thought that the Communists would punish the hundreds of thousands of “class enemies” who had worked for Americans in any capacity. Stephen Hosmer, a Rand Corporation researcher, concluded his 1970 book, Viet Cong Repression and Its Implications for the Future, by writing that it was “difficult to believe that the number [of executions] would be much less than 100,000.”

  The imagined score settling following a Communist victory in South Vietnam was sometimes called the bloodbath theory or bloodbath scenario. Some in the U.S. antiwar movement used the term derisively, insisting that only the most corrupt and wicked South Vietnamese officials would be punished and that claims to the contrary were propaganda spread by the American and South Vietnamese governments to stiffen resistance. U.S. officials supporting additional aid to the Thieu government did sometimes fall back on the bloodbath scenario. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger told a congressional committee in April that the Communists might kill as many as 200,000 people. Two days later, a Pentagon spokesman claimed that “secret reports” claimed that the Communists were carrying out “bloody reprisals” in occupied provinces. Kissinger informed the House of Representatives International Relations Committee on April 11 that he had read “plausible reports” of South Vietnamese officials being executed, adding, “We expect to see the Communists try to eliminate all possible opponents.” Vietnamese newspapers reported his statements, and a headline in Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military newspaper that was widely read in Saigon, warned, “At Least Million Vietnamese Will Be Slaughtered.”

  But just because the U.S. and the Thieu governments employed the bloodbath theory did not make it entirely spurious. A January 5, 1975, memorandum from the North Vietnamese Ministry of the Interior ordered its armed forces to encourage South Vietnamese soldiers and government personnel to enter “liberated areas and join the revolution” and “punish stubborn leaders (officers from the rank of Captain up and government officials from above or on the district level up).” The memorandum stated that South Vietnamese leaders “could be killed immediately or arrested, tried, and sentenced to death, imprisonment or reeducation camps.” Ten days before Kissinger cited “plausible reports” of executions, he had read a National Security Council memorandum reporting that a double agent had provided the CIA with the “new COSVN [Central Office for South Vietnam] resolution for 1975.” Under the heading “Specific missions for Party members to follow,” it instructed them to “induce the masses to kill GVN [government of Vietnam] officials” and “kill some GVN officials, develop some of the progressive dignitaries and try to eliminate the reactionary ones.”

  Rumors circulating through Saigon in April stoked the bloodbath fears. It was said that the Communists had cut a Catholic bishop into three pieces, marched twelve naked policemen through the streets of Da Nang before beheading them, bound groups of South Vietnamese officers by their hands and feet and executed them with a single grenade, and ripped out the manicured fingernails of women suspected of prostitution, a story persuading Saigon’s bar girls to cut their nails. A Buddhist monk told the embassy that Communists had executed three hundred South Vietnamese in the Ban Me Thuot market. He was not an eyewitness, but his story was included in an embassy cable cataloging Communist atrocities. Some of the atrocity stories were sketchy and unconfirmed, but the fear they inspired was real and merited. The Vietnam War was a civil war, and had neither side committed atrocities, it would have been the first atrocity-free civil war in human history.

  South Vietnamese knew that the Communists had killed a quarter of a million people in North Vietnam during a 1956 land reform program that was so brutal that even General Giap, who commanded North Vietnam’s army, admitted in a party newspaper that “too many honest people” had been executed, terror tactics had been “far too widespread,” and torture had become “regarded as a normal practice.” They knew that mass graves exhumed when Hue was recaptured from the Communists following the Tet Offensive contained the corpses of over three thousand people who had been shot or buried alive and that when Colonel Tran Van Doc defected from North Vietnam in 1969, he had estimated that if the Communists applied their own criteria for who should be included on a “blood debt” list, it would number three million people. They knew that terror was a key element of Communist strategy, that the Vietcong had executed village leaders in areas they captured during their 1972 offensive, that Communist cadres had “blood debt” lists containing the names of “reactionaries” and “class enemies,” among them defectors, intelligen
ce agents, local administrators, and teachers, and that after taking a hamlet, the Communists would execute the worst officials to make themselves more popular, and the best officials because they represented the greatest threat. They also knew that for years Communist propagandists had warned that anyone supporting the Thieu government or working with Americans would be punished, and they knew that although the spokesman for the Provisional Revolutionary Government had said during his weekly press conference at Camp Davis, “We will treat humanely, generously and honestly all those who have cooperated with the adversaries,” he had added, “provided they stop sabotaging us and stop serving the interests of the Thieu administration.” In other words, to escape punishment, a South Vietnamese citizen would have to become a traitor. After a defector from South Vietnam’s air force bombed Independence Palace, a Liberation Radio announcer encouraged South Vietnamese Air Force pilots “to follow the example set by patriotic First Lieutenant Thanh,” warning that “hesitation means committing crimes against the fatherland” and that “those who deliberately continue to oppose the people in the Liberation Armed Forces will certainly be punished.”

  Americans living in Saigon during the final weeks of the decent interval also knew much of this and were skeptical of Communist pledges to deal with captured South Vietnamese officials and military officers humanely. They knew that when reporters went to Hanoi to cover the release of the final sixty-seven American POWs, North Vietnamese briefers had insisted that all of the U.S. prisoners had been treated humanely, but that once the POWs had left North Vietnam, they confirmed that they had been tortured. They also knew that their nationality could make them targets. After capturing Ban Me Thuot during the 1968 Tet Offensive, the Vietcong had shot and killed three American missionaries who had surrendered with their hands raised. In Hue, they had executed three German professors who had been teaching at the university, another German national, and an American diplomat. Their killers were not rogue soldiers. An order issued to political cadres beforehand had ordered them to “annihilate all spies, reactionaries, and foreign teachers (such as Americans and Germans) in the area.”

  Throughout April, accounts of Khmer Rouge atrocities in neighboring Cambodia also circulated through the American and Vietnamese communities. An American tugboat captain leading convoys of barges up the Mekong to resupply the besieged Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh reported that to save ammunition, the Khmer Rouge were binding the hands and feet of their enemies together before throwing them into the river. U.S. military intelligence intercepted Khmer Rouge communications ordering its forces to execute all Cambodian army officers down to second lieutenant and their wives. A captured Khmer Rouge document said that upon entering Phnom Penh, “we will burn and destroy everything. For sure, we will burn down the markets, ration stocks etc. We will kill politicians as well as officers, ministers, and national assembly members who have no way to defend themselves.”

  This proved to be an accurate description of what happened after the Khmer Rouge defeated the pro-American military government in Phnom Penh on April 17. A Khmer Rouge radio station announced that members of the government had been beheaded, and Newsweek reported thousands of executions, adding that they might be followed by tens of thousands more. Among the rumors circulating through Saigon that later proved true was that Khmer Rouge troops had murdered the doctors, staff, and patients at the main hospital in Phnom Penh, that government officials and military officers had been forced to witness the execution of their wives and children before being killed, and that children had been forced to watch Khmer Rouge soldiers smash their parents’ skulls with hammers. In a Wall Street Journal essay titled “Signing 100,000 Death Warrants,” retired CIA analyst Samuel Adams likened the Cambodian atrocities to what might occur in South Vietnam, writing that if you were “an enemy of the revolution” living in Phnom Penh, or Saigon, “you could face a very unpleasant fate.”

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  Alan Carter, the director of the U.S. Information Agency in South Vietnam, received a telephone call from Washington in early April asking him to write a memorandum describing Saigon’s “mood.” USIA country directors routinely composed situation reports, but in this instance USIA told Carter that because State Department officials did not believe that they were receiving “accurate reports” from the embassy, he should write an unvarnished report and transmit it directly to Washington. Carter detected the hand of Martin’s great bureaucratic foe, Assistant Secretary Philip Habib. When he was last in Washington, Habib had taken him aside and said, “You know, Alan, we’d like to hear from you once in a while.” He assumed Habib meant that he wanted reports that had not crossed Martin’s desk.

  Carter had been reluctant to accept the Saigon post because of Martin’s reputation for demanding absolute loyalty and for disliking reporters. Carter, on the other hand, was a well-known iconoclast who prided himself on his excellent relationships with journalists. He was sufficiently concerned about working with Martin that before agreeing to accept the post, he had lunch with him when they overlapped in Washington. He told Martin he was surprised that he had requested him for the Saigon post. “I understand you are surrounded by a bunch of people who are your acolytes,” he said, “and I want to warn you that I’m unlikely to be one.” Fixing him with a penetrating stare, Martin replied, “Do you think I would have accepted you if I didn’t know everything about you?” When Carter repeated his warning that he was not a “yes-man,” Martin said, “Exactly! I’ve got to have someone near me who is not an automatic yes-man.”

  During a staff meeting soon after his arrival, Carter made the mistake of agreeing with a young Foreign Service officer who had proposed that the embassy be more welcoming to the press. Several minutes later Martin said abruptly, “What we don’t really need are newcomers telling us how to conduct our affairs.” Carter cornered him afterward and accused him of undermining him. Martin insisted that he had been speaking generally. When Carter pointed out that he had been the only newcomer in the room, Martin replied, “I think your ego is large enough for you to trip over.”

  Carter’s next mistake had been to invite a dozen members of the Saigon press corps to dinner. It was the kind of gathering that he had routinely hosted at other posts, and during it he encouraged his guests to voice any complaints, most of which concerned the ambassador. Martin heard about the party and demanded that Carter submit a memorandum describing what each journalist had said and how he had responded to their criticisms. When Carter refused, Martin accused him of being “not really interested in getting on the team” and threatened to deny him “the privilege of talking to the press.”

  Carter’s back-channel memorandum to USIA headquarters in Washington described a mood “bordering on panic” and a city living in the lengthening shadow of a bloodbath and gripped by “a palpable fear.” A March 31 Wall Street Journal headline, “Suppressed Hysteria Underlies Saigon Calm,” coincidentally depicted the mood that Carter described in his memorandum. The undercurrent of fear running alongside Saigon’s appearance of normality made Carter feel, he said later, as if he were “watching an old film roll while a new script is being written.” He woke in his handsome villa and breakfasted in the patio on mango and French coffee while watching graceful Vietnamese women in their ao dais glide past his front gate on motor scooters. Then he walked through the gate and confronted a crowd of anxious people looking to him for reassurance or rescue.

  He sensed the “suppressed hysteria” at nightclubs where young couples engaged in a parody of dancing, moving like zombies and going through the motions to reassure themselves that everything was fine. He sensed it at government offices where officials kept the bureaucratic machinery sputtering along while they planned their escapes. The “palpable fear” was evident at the Cercle Sportif, a club for expatriates and South Vietnam’s elite. Waiters in white jackets still wove through the grounds with trays of gin and tonics, Frenchmen still played boules unde
r the tamarind trees, and Vietnamese girls in bikinis sunned themselves by the swimming pools. But look through the bougainvillea and you saw troops digging trenches and positioning anti-aircraft batteries to protect Independence Palace. Look more closely at the bulletin board and you saw a notice announcing, “Because of the current situation, the board of directors has decided to stop the admission of new members and their families for an indefinite period.” Speak to the club’s expatriate members and you heard that the club’s Vietnamese were “scared to death.”

  There were suddenly more beggars in Saigon, more people selling their belongings on sidewalks, more advertisements in the English-language Saigon Post for foreign husbands, more Europeans flying their national flags from cars and homes so they would not be mistaken for Americans, and more Vietnamese patronizing the best French restaurants, seizing a last chance to enjoy a good meal. People hoarded rice and stood in long lines at the main post office to mail packages abroad. Women who had consorted with American men hoarded pills and spoke of suicide. Parents made their children memorize the addresses of relatives in case families became separated. Pedestrians walked faster while hurrying between markets looking for staples, illegal gambling dens operated openly, soothsayers were busier, and bar girls became more uninhibited. International flights were booked solid but left half-empty because passengers could not obtain passports and exit visas, and a Vietnam expert told The New York Times, “It’s harder for a South Vietnamese to get out of this country, even in normal times, than for an East German to leave the Communist bloc.”