Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

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  While flying home with the Weyand mission, Ken Quinn composed a memorandum for Henry Kissinger, noting in a covering letter that the following were his personal judgments and had not been cleared with Weyand. After reminding Kissinger that he was the only Vietnamese speaker on the mission and had the longest consecutive service in Vietnam of any of its eight principal members, he called the situation in South Vietnam “critical” and predicted that the country “may be totally defeated in as little as three weeks.” He dismissed Thieu as “discredited and almost completely ineffective.” Echoing Alan Carter’s report to USIA, he wrote that morale was “critically low and bordering on national despair” and that the government was “near paralysis.” The only hope lay in Thieu’s resigning and handing over command of the armed forces to General Truong, “the only man who has the confidence of the Army and the population.” He acknowledged that Truong was currently hospitalized but argued that “a sick Truong is probably better than anyone else.” Even then, he wrote, “the short term survivability” of South Vietnam in its truncated form depended on Truong being backed by U.S. airpower. Otherwise, the only way for the United States to halt the Communist offensive would be “an approach to the Soviets and Chinese emphasizing that the humiliation of the U.S. through the capture of Saigon would seriously affect our bilateral relations.” The best result, he thought, would be “formation of a ‘coalition government’ on terms tantamount to surrender.”

  In a second memorandum titled “Evacuation from Saigon,” he reported, “The mood among the Vietnamese is one of increasing desperation mixed with an intense and even passionate desire to avoid falling under Communist control.” He listed the categories of Vietnamese who faced the greatest risk of retaliation from the Communists, calling their possible evacuation “a problem of staggering proportions,” adding, “Clearly the USG [U.S. government] has some type of responsibility for the position these people now find themselves in, since most of the above people would never have become so involved with the GVN [government of Vietnam] or the USG had they known we would not continue to protect them.”

  Weyand’s written report was less pessimistic but bore little resemblance to his parting remarks to the Saigon press corps at Tan Son Nhut, in which he had declared that South Vietnam’s military forces were “still strong and have the capability to defeat the North Vietnamese.” In a covering letter to Ford and Kissinger, he wrote, “The current military situation is critical, and the probability of the survivability of South Vietnam as a truncated nation in the southern provinces is marginal at best.” He added that “the GVN is on the brink of a total military defeat” and proposed two measures to rescue South Vietnam: ask Congress for an emergency appropriation of $722 million “to reinforce Vietnamese capabilities,” and reintroduce U.S. military airpower. He acknowledged “the significant legal and political implications” of resuming the bombing and admitted that it would take forty-five days after Congress approved any supplemental aid to deliver the equipment and supplies to South Vietnam. The principal benefits of the aid would be psychological, he said, giving a boost to South Vietnamese morale. He concluded by acknowledging that $722 million would probably not save South Vietnam, writing, “There is not and cannot be any guarantee that the actions I propose will be sufficient to prevent total North Vietnamese conquest.” But the effort should be made, he said, because “what is at stake in Vietnam now is America’s credibility as an ally.”

  The plane returning Weyand from Saigon stopped in Palm Springs on April 5 so he could brief President Ford at his vacation home. His verbal report was more pessimistic than his written one, and after he recommended renewed U.S. air strikes, Kissinger turned to Ford and said, “If you do that the American people will take to the streets again.”

  While driving to the press center afterward, Kissinger asked Press Secretary Ron Nessen, “Why don’t these people [the South Vietnamese] die fast? The worst thing that could happen would be for them to linger on.” During his press conference Kissinger urged Americans to recognize “that we are facing a great tragedy in which there is involved something of American credibility, something of American honor, something of how we are perceived by other people in the world.”

  David Kennerly arrived in Palm Springs in an emotional state, distressed about the fate of a country where, as he put it, “I grew up as much as I ever grew up,” and of a people toward whom he felt “an almost familial attachment.” He struck Betty Ford’s private secretary as “pale, tired, obviously shaken.” He told journalists covering Ford’s Palm Springs vacation that witnessing the suffering in South Vietnam and Cambodia (which he had visited briefly on his own) had been “the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life” and described the situation as “really shitty,” adding, “And you can quote me.”

  He knew that Weyand was recommending that Ford ask Congress to appropriate supplemental aid and that some of Ford’s advisers would argue that it might save South Vietnam. When he met with Ford alone the next day, he told him the truth: the war was over and no amount of money could save South Vietnam. He showed Ford his photographs, proof of how “shitty” things were. Ford turned over one depressing image after another. He saw dead-eyed South Vietnamese soldiers fleeing the enemy, children near death in a Cambodian hospital, buses crammed with grief-stricken people escaping Nha Trang, and refugees crammed onto the decks of the Pioneer Commander.

  “This is what’s going on,” Kennerly said. “Cambodia is gone [Phnom Penh would fall to the Khmer Rouge twelve days later], and I don’t care what your generals are telling you, anyone who says that South Vietnam has more than three or four weeks to go is bullshitting you. The party’s over.” He concluded by saying, “All my friends know they’re going to be killed.”

  It was not the plea for renewed B-52 raids that Walter Martindale had begged him to make. But telling Ford that his generals were bullshitting him was at least an antidote to Weyand’s bet hedging and Martin’s wishful thinking.

  Ford decided to ask Congress for the supplemental aid as a matter of principle and to demonstrate to America’s allies that he had tried to save South Vietnam. He was so moved by Kennerly’s photographs that he ordered them hung in the corridors of the West Wing. Several days later some White House staffers complained that walking past them on their way to the White House mess was too depressing and had them removed. Ford ordered them reinstated and told Kennerly, “Everyone should know what’s going on there.”

  While flying back to Washington from Palm Springs on Air Force One, Kennerly unburdened himself to a UPI reporter, telling him that his Vietnamese friends were “terrified” because “they know that anyone who had anything to do with the Americans has good reason to know they stand a good chance of getting greased when the Communists come.” He said that many of his friends had begged him to save their children by taking them to the United States, and he asked the reporter, “How in God’s name can you nicely tell a man who once saved your life while you were both covering a war with cameras that, no, you can’t take his kids home to America with you?”

  CHAPTER 8

  Operation Babylift

  The April 4 Operation Babylift flight bringing orphans to the United States would be the first U.S. government–sanctioned evacuation from South Vietnam. Major General Smith supported the Babylift flights as a way of reducing the DAO’s American female dependents by sending them home as escorts for the children. Ambassador Martin called the flights “a good way to get sympathy for additional American aid to Saigon” and told a South Vietnamese official they would “help swing American public opinion to the advantage of the Republic of Vietnam.” President Ford planned to meet the April 4 Babylift flight in California and carry the first orphan onto American soil. Left unaddressed was the irony of sending Vietnamese orphans to the United States on a plane that had just unloaded seventeen 105 mm howitzers, equipment likely to produce more orphans
.

  As more soldiers died in South Vietnam, family ties had become strained. Extended families adopted fewer children, and more ended up in orphanages. Among them were tens of thousands of the children of American servicemen and civilians, Amerasians who were outcasts in a society valuing racial purity. The six U.S. adoption agencies licensed by the government of South Vietnam had matched two thousand Amerasian orphans with parents in the United States but had been stymied by South Vietnam’s insistence on exit visas and passports, documents that were difficult to obtain for orphans often lacking birth certificates. By the beginning of April, an avalanche of exit visa applications had overwhelmed clerks at the Ministry of the Interior, and the cost of bribes demanded to process them had priced out the orphanages.

  Twenty-year-old Ross Meador, the co-director of overseas operations for Friends of the Children of Vietnam (FCVN), was an unlikely social worker—a lanky West Coast kid whose long blond hair, sunny disposition, and fondness for Hawaiian shirts seemed more suited to surfing than orphan management. He had postponed college to travel through Mexico and India and was searching for another adventure when a friend suggested the FCVN. He inflated his experiences as a nurse’s aide in the eighth grade and persuaded the organization to give him a plane ticket to Saigon. He arrived in 1974 knowing little about Vietnam or orphans but quickly became an effective lobbyist for the FCVN at the U.S. embassy and South Vietnam’s Ministry of Social Welfare. Cherie and Tom Clark, who had adopted a child through the organization, joined him in Saigon, more volunteers followed, and by 1975 the FCVN was among the most successful foreign adoption agencies. Meador divided his time between supervising the older orphans living in the organization’s facility at Thu Duc on the outskirts of Saigon and badgering South Vietnamese bureaucrats and U.S. embassy officials.

  In March 1975, the U.S. government waived its visa requirements for Vietnamese orphans, and Minister of Social Welfare Phan Quang Dan wrote a letter recommending that South Vietnam’s government approve the departure of the two thousand orphans residing at the adoption agencies’ orphanages. The embassy decided to treat Dan’s letter as a laissez-passer permitting the orphans to leave for the United States, but when Meador tried to fly out his children, the commercial carriers refused to ticket them unless each had an adult escort.

  On the morning of April 2, Meador heard that Ed Daly was offering to fly orphans to Oakland on a World Airways DC-8 that had just landed with humanitarian supplies. He rushed to Tan Son Nhut and found Daly holding a press conference in the DAO cafeteria. He was wearing his trademark green beret and safari suit and was already four sheets to the wind, gripping a bottle of Johnnie Walker in one hand and a silver-plated revolver in the other that he banged on the table as he denounced Ambassador Martin for withdrawing his clearance to operate evacuation flights. He berated a nun who had been begging him to evacuate her orphans, reducing her to tears before pressing a wad of cash into her hand and bellowing, “I’m sick of these damn women. I’m not talking to any fucking women.” He saw Meador and shouted, “What the hell do you want?”

  “You have a plane and we have a houseful of kids.”

  Daly had been searching for humanitarian missions to restore his reputation after his Da Nang fiasco. He had given the wife of a physician at the Adventist Hospital a check for $10,000 to care for indigent patients and was concocting a scheme to shame U.S. corporations into donating millions to a fund for resettling South Vietnamese refugees in the United States. He pulled Meador aside and said, “I’ll take care of this.”

  At 9:00 p.m., Tom Clark ran into the orphanage at Thu Duc shouting that the South Vietnamese government had given Daly clearance to evacuate orphans and that he planned to leave in two hours. There was no time to prepare the infants, so he and Meador decided to send out the older children. Meador dashed through their rooms yelling, “We’re going to America right now!” He and Clark jammed fifty excited children into two vans. As they sped to Tan Son Nhut, Meador led them in singing “California, Here I Come,” and soon a chorus of high-pitched voices was shouting, “Right back where I started from!” Among his passengers were the ten-, twelve-, and thirteen-year-old Nguyen brothers. Their father had been killed in action in 1966, and their mother had died in a car accident a year later. The oldest boy was almost fourteen, the age at which the government insisted that boys remain in South Vietnam to be available for military service.

  Ed Daly stood on the running board of a jeep. He gestured for Meador and Clark to follow in their vans. Newsmen photographed him standing on the stairs of his World Airways DC-8 while welcoming the children onto a plane configured for cargo. “We don’t need no stinking seats!” he shouted. “We’ve got blankets.” As the crew was preparing to close the door, an immigration officer stormed aboard and removed the oldest Nguyen boy and his twelve-year-old brother, Than. He walked down the aisle holding each under an arm in a headlock while shouting that they were old enough to fight for their country. Daly blocked the door. As he and the officer argued, Than slipped away and raced to the back of the plane and hid. Daly took out a $100 bill. The officer slapped it away. Daly ripped the bill in two, gave one half to the oldest Nguyen boy, and told him to bring it to him when he arrived in the United States and he would help him. (The boy got aboard a later flight, had his half of the bill laminated, and brought it back to Tan Son Nhut thirty years later on a trip commemorating the Babylift flights.) South Vietnamese authorities closed the airport as Daly’s plane began taxiing, citing an impending rocket attack. An air traffic controller shouted, “Do not take off, you are not cleared for take-off. Repeat. This is the tower, you are not cleared for take-off.” Daly grabbed the microphone and shouted, “Oh yeah? Just watch me!”

  Photographs of Daly arriving in Oakland with fifty-nine orphans appeared on front pages across the United States, diluting the impact of the Ford administration’s subsequent orphan flights. Daly blasted Ambassador Martin, saying that he “should be out picking weeds somewhere.” Meador thought he had demonstrated that even a drunken fool could succeed. In an opinion piece titled “The New Angels of Mercy,” columnist George Will wrote, “Breathes there an American…who hasn’t to himself said, ‘Right on, Edward Daly!’ ”

  Two days later, on April 4, the first U.S. government Operation Babylift flight left Saigon with 328 passengers on board a U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-5A Galaxy, a double-decker aircraft that was so large that jeeps could drive three abreast into its fifty-yard-long fuselage. The plane lifted off with 200 orphans and 37 official escorts. Most were American women employed by U.S. government agencies and female dependents. Among these dependents was the family of Bill Bell, the Vietnamese linguist on the Joint Military Team who had warned about an imminent Communist attack on Ban Me Thuot after the Santilli family sold its plantation. After South Vietnamese marines ran amok in Da Nang, Bell had purchased plane tickets to California for his wife, Nova, and their children, twelve-year-old Andrea and nine-year-old Michael. Several days before their departure Lieutenant Colonel Conrad Wilson, the deputy commander of the JMT delegation, informed Bell that the Thieu government had given the U.S. Air Force clearance to begin flying Vietnamese orphans to the United States. The first several hundred would be departing on April 4, and the wives of Defense Attaché Office personnel and female DAO employees would be accompanying them as escorts. Bell replied that he felt uneasy about putting his family on a plane lacking the safety features of a commercial jet. Wilson, who was under pressure from the Pentagon to reduce the number of U.S. military dependents in South Vietnam, told Bell that his family would be on the Babylift flight and that he should consider that an order.

  Bell can remember the twenty-four hours preceding his family’s departure with a clarity that escapes him when he tries to recall the hours that followed. He remembers visiting the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters near Tan Son Nhut and seeing the crew of the Galaxy frolicking in the swimming pool with Vietnamese bar girls, driving his
family to the DAO compound the next morning to be processed for the flight, driving past later and seeing them standing outside the base bookstore, stopping to say good-bye again, and hearing his wife say that she had bought comic books for the children, and noticing that his son was clutching a Donald Duck, his favorite.

  He remembers his chauffeur Tran Van Nga driving him to Camp Davis and complaining that Americans were foolish to paint their vehicles black because it made them hotter and then wondering what his life would be like if he immigrated to the United States and expressing amazement when Bell said that because polygamy was illegal, he would have to choose between his wives. He remembers a North Vietnamese officer at Camp Davis handing him the passenger manifest for the next day’s liaison flight to Hanoi, and perusing it while drinking the acidic North Vietnamese tea, and noticing that it listed a large number of senior officials from both Communist delegations flying one way. He remembers black smoke spiraling into the sky east of the runways as Nga drove him back, and his relief when Nga said that someone must be burning the pile of old tires he had seen near the runway. He remembers people rushing out of the DAO buildings and jumping into vehicles, the anguished look on the face of a friend when he asked him about the smoke, and hurrying into the JMT offices to hear air force master sergeant David Boggs say, his voice breaking, “The C-5A is down. It’s bad, real bad.” A voice on Boggs’s radio reported that helicopters were bringing survivors to hospitals, and Bell heard himself say, “This just can’t be happening. I can’t lose my family like this.”