Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  While the Galaxy was climbing to cruising altitude, the locks on its rear loading ramp had failed due to negligent maintenance by U.S. Air Force mechanics. As the clamshell-shaped rear doors blew off, the decompression triggered a loud explosion that passengers mistook for a bomb. A whirlwind of debris flew through the lower cabin. Passengers not strapped down or holding on to something were sucked out; passengers unable to grab an oxygen mask passed out. Pilot Bud Traynor turned back to make an emergency landing at Tan Son Nhut, but the explosion had damaged his controls, forcing him to reduce speed and lose altitude in order to control the plane. Five miles from the runway he lost too much speed and altitude and landed in a rice paddy. The plane skidded and became airborne before crossing the Saigon River and slamming into a dike. Most of the orphans, escorts, and crew members riding in the upper level survived, most of those in the lower cargo hold perished. Nova Bell was among the forty adults who died, and Michael Bell was among the more than a hundred orphans and dependent children killed in the crash. Arriving at an accurate death toll was difficult because some children had been slipped aboard at the last minute, and no one knew how many had been sucked out after the decompression. The official death toll of 155 made it the most lethal crash in U.S. aviation history to date.

  The crash site was boggy, and the nearest road was a mile away. The first medical teams and journalists arrived by helicopter. They found toys, baby bottles, luggage, and mud-covered infants. Some children screamed; others were silent and in shock. Most had only wristbands identifying the addresses of their adoptive parents. After they reached the hospital, nurses threw them in the shower and said, “This one’s alive. This one’s dead.” Some soldiers who had been fighting Vietcong units nearby helped evacuate the wounded; others rifled the dead. Captain Stuart Herrington, Bill Bell’s fellow interpreter on the JMT, was among the first on the scene. He found the corpses of two American JMT secretaries and the body of another young woman he knew. A medic told him that rescuers had found Andrea Bell sitting on the dike and sobbing.

  Bell wandered through the DAO’s labyrinthine corridors, experiencing what he later called “a surrealist fantasy” and a “life flashing before your eyes” review of his life showing what had brought him to this moment. There had been his hardscrabble childhood in rural Texas, during which a train had hit and killed his father, an impoverished cotton farmer, and a neighbor had appeared at the family’s back door with a pail holding his remains.

  Like many boys in the 1950s, Bell had grown up on war movies and Westerns. His favorites starred Audie Murphy, the World War II hero turned actor who came from his county. Bell had attempted to join the army at fifteen, at sixteen, and finally persuaded his mother to sign his enlistment papers on his seventeenth birthday. He soon discovered that it was difficult to become the next Audie Murphy during the peaceful early years of the 1960s. He left the army, reenlisted to escape a boring civilian job, and volunteered to be a helicopter door gunner. The army sent him to Vietnamese language school instead, and so began the rest of his life.

  During his walkabout through the corridors of the DAO, he saw himself learning Vietnamese at army language school and lying awake in the Central Highlands and wondering how a kid from Greenwood, Texas, had ended up speaking Vietnamese. He saw himself serving as a plainclothes intelligence operative, studying nights and weekends to earn a B.A. in Asian philosophy, religion, and political science from Chaminade University in Honolulu while still on active duty, serving as an interpreter in Hanoi during the repatriation of American POWs, accepting the position as head interpreter for the U.S. JMT delegation, and deciding to move his family to Saigon instead of sending them home to Tennessee. He flashed back to firefights in the Central Highlands and saw his comrades crying over dead comrades, weeping after killing a man in hand-to-hand combat and throwing enemy corpses into pyres ignited with mosquito repellent. Because he had smelled burning flesh, seen mangled bodies, and felt the scorching heat of napalm, he could imagine Nova, Andrea, and Michael’s skin blackening and curling in the postcrash fire.

  He emerged to find himself outside the DAO. Rescue workers told him that the plane had crashed on its belly, where most of the wives and dependent children had been seated. A medic reported having seen Andrea at the Adventist Hospital. He found her lying on a litter outside the emergency room, fell to his knees alongside her, and wept.

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  The U.S. government’s first official evacuation from South Vietnam had ended with American women collecting pillowcases to be used as infant body bags. What Ford, Kissinger, and Martin had imagined being a propaganda victory for the United States became one for Hanoi. North Vietnamese officials condemned the Babylift as kidnapping; South Vietnamese accused Americans of stealing their children while refusing to evacuate adults more likely to suffer reprisals. Leaders of the U.S. antiwar movement criticized the Babylift as unnecessary and culturally insensitive. Ambassador Martin accused “alarmists” of stampeding the government into a hastily organized evacuation on a military plane unsuitable for children. Some of the “orphans” disembarking from Babylift flights in the United States turned out to be the children of well-connected South Vietnamese. Like General Truong and his wife, and the parents who handed their children to O. B. Harnage on the roof of 22 Gia Long Street on April 29, their parents were prepared to risk never seeing them again so they could escape Communist indoctrination and receive a Western education.

  Bell’s colleague Stuart Herrington thought that the loss of so many women shattered the morale of the American community. Among eight U.S. women who had recently attended a dinner party at his house, seven had died, including the ebullient twenty-two-year-old Barbara Kavulla, a popular secretary who had stayed up late the night before while typing General Weyand’s report. The disaster convinced Herrington that the American enterprise in Vietnam really was cursed and that evacuating his Vietnamese friends was more urgent than ever.

  USIA director Alan Carter had sent his “palpable fear” memorandum to Washington on April 3, a day before the crash. Martin saw it and telephoned Carter on April 5 to complain. “You know, I never would have authorized the use of that particular plane,” he said. “I’ve been around planes long enough [he had served in the U.S. Army Air Forces] to know that the Galaxy has problems. I never would have allowed it, but Washington didn’t ask me. I’ll tell you why they didn’t ask me. They didn’t ask me because they’re getting other reports that misled them. If, for example, they hadn’t felt there was ‘palpable fear’ here, they might have asked me.”

  “My God!” Carter exclaimed. “You’re suggesting that I’m responsible for the crash?”

  “You can read it any way you want,” Martin said. “I’m telling you that if I had been consulted…”

  Four days after the Babylift crash the morale of Vietnamese and Americans in Saigon suffered another blow. Lieutenant Nguyen Thanh Trung took off from the nearby Bien Hoa air base on the morning of April 8 with three other South Vietnamese Air Force F-5E fighter-bombers on a mission to bomb North Vietnamese positions. He turned back, claiming mechanical difficulties, and flew to downtown Saigon, where he dropped two of his four 250-pound bombs on President Thieu’s Independence Palace. The first missed, exploding harmlessly on the palace grounds. The second failed to detonate. His Communist handlers had ordered him to drop his last two bombs on the American embassy. Had he succeeded, the next three weeks might have unfolded very differently. Instead, he made a second run on the palace. He had been a teenager when South Vietnamese police killed his father, a minor Communist functionary in the delta. After seeing his father’s mutilated corpse, he had promised himself, he said later, “When I grow up, if I have the opportunity I will become a pilot. And I will bomb the palace of the leader of South Vietnam.”

  His second run on the palace was almost as ineffectual as his first. He hit a roof, causing some minor damage. He then flew to Phuoc L
ong province, where he received a hero’s welcome while South Vietnamese police were arresting his wife and children. His one-man raid inflicted little material damage but considerable psychological harm. Tens of thousands of people in downtown Saigon heard or witnessed the attack. The bribe price of an exit visa skyrocketed, the line of U.S. visa applicants outside the consulate grew longer, and a delegation representing the U.S. mission’s Vietnamese employees met with Ambassador Martin to demand their evacuation. He promised them that if an evacuation became necessary, he would fly them and their families to safety, and he would not leave Saigon until they had.

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  On April 9, ARVN troops finally stood and fought, and fought well. The Eighteenth Division, believed to be among the army’s weakest, beat back attempts by North Vietnam’s troops to take Xuan Loc, a provincial capital on a strategic crossroads thirty-eight miles northeast of Saigon. During the following days Major General Le Minh Dao’s outnumbered troops repulsed Communist assaults on the town, inflicting heavy casualties and boosting morale throughout the government and armed forces. The baby-faced Dao sometimes joined his men at the front, playing his guitar and serenading them. He promised a delegation of journalists that no matter how many divisions the Communists sent into the battle, he would “smash them all!”

  President Thieu praised the army for recovering its “fighting ability” and announced a new “fighting administration.” But because he was unable to persuade more experienced hands to move themselves up several places on the Communists’ blacklist by joining the government, his new administration was a group of retreads and minor politicians. At their swearing in, he promised to never surrender and vowed to retake lost provinces. He bet everything on Xuan Loc and gave Dao the ARVN’s best remaining troops. The momentum at Xuan Loc shifted after April 14, when Communist artillery blew up the main ammunition dump at the Bien Hoa air base, forcing the air force to suspend its air support of Dao’s forces and reposition its planes to Tan Son Nhut and other airfields.

  The Bien Hoa explosion spooked Ed Daly, who had returned to Vietnam to decide how to deploy the two World Airways planes that had been under U.S. government contract to fly into Cambodia. Moments before the blast he had received a cable from the Pentagon announcing that his Cambodia contract would end at midnight—and with it the government’s insurance on his planes. He concluded that the Communists were about to take Saigon and seize his uninsured jets. After dictating an obscenity-filled telegram to President Ford, he ordered his bodyguards, two beautiful Japanese women with revolvers strapped to their waists, to rouse his air crews and tell them they were leaving. Once the crews had gathered in his suite, he shouted, “Bring out the hambones!” and one of the Japanese women opened a suitcase to reveal a dozen pistols and automatic rifles. “We may have to shoot our way out to the airport,” Daly said while handing out the weapons. “I’m riding shotgun in the first jeep. Don’t shoot until I do.” He asked a British reporter if he would like to join them. After the reporter declined, he said, “Boy, I’ve got one last piece of advice for you—get the fuck out of here!”

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  On April 10, one day after the Eighteenth Division began its courageous stand at Xuan Loc, Brigadier General Richard Baughn, the former World War II pilot whom General Smith had placed in charge of the DAO’s Special Planning Group and its Evacuation Control Center, asked representatives from the CIA, USIS, AID, the DAO, and the embassy to attend a planning meeting to discuss a U.S. mission–wide evacuation. It was the first time many had heard about the SPG and the ECC, and they struck Baughn as relieved that someone was finally taking concrete steps to plan for an evacuation. Nevertheless, the embassy’s representative announced that Martin wanted any planning suspended until he had approved a written summary of their proposals. Baughn decided there was no time for such bureaucratic nonsense and continued his activities. The next day, April 11, he met with Colonel Al Gray, who commanded the marine amphibious brigade tasked with providing security for an evacuation. Like Baughn and Smith, Gray distrusted the Pentagon’s official evacuation plan. This was the same document that made no provision for the evacuation of South Vietnamese, assumed that South Vietnamese troops and police would protect an evacuation of Americans, even though it did not include them, and had shocked Baughn and Smith when they first read it in January after the fall of Phuoc Long. Colonel Gray considered the plan so pointless and unwieldy that he asked one of his men to construct a wheeled cart in the ship’s welding room so he could more easily throw the revised editions that arrived every evening overboard.

  After visiting the evacuation sites and reviewing the SPG plan, Gray told Baughn that due to the large number of potential evacuees, and South Vietnam’s precarious military situation, he wanted to fly in a marine ground security force to defend the DAO compound once the Communists attacked Saigon. He added that he agreed with a request from Air America management for a contingent of marine helicopter pilots to serve as co-pilots to the company’s civilian pilots when the time came to extract people from rooftops. Baughn wrote a memorandum summarizing Gray’s recommendations and sent it to the embassy’s representative for approval. But instead of circulating it to Martin, as Baughn had assumed, the representative asked a lower-level official to approve it. Baughn suspected that the representative agreed with its recommendations and wanted to prevent Martin from vetoing them.

  The operator at the DAO message center woke Baughn at 2:00 a.m. on April 12 to report that an urgent cable had arrived from Lieutenant General John Roberts at the Pentagon ordering him to leave South Vietnam on the next flight. After Baughn arrived in Washington, Roberts explained that while reading the outgoing cable traffic, Martin had seen his memorandum requesting the marine helicopter pilots and the security force and had telephoned Secretary of Defense Schlesinger and demanded his immediate recall. These measures were unlikely to have panicked Saigon and toppled Thieu, but Martin considered them unnecessary, and because he had not been consulted, he undoubtedly considered them a challenge to his position as the senior U.S. official in South Vietnam. The embassy claimed that Baughn had been “routinely transferred,” but there was nothing routine about his hurried departure. George McArthur wrote in the Los Angeles Times that according to his embassy sources Martin had expelled Baughn as payback for his role in sending undocumented evacuees to the Philippines. Baughn resigned from the military soon afterward out of what he calls “complete disgust.”

  Instead of intimidating the Special Planning Group, Baughn’s expulsion emboldened it. The Marine Corps history notes, “As a result [of Baughn’s expulsion] future decisions concerning preparations of the DAO compound for evacuation and security were kept secret from everyone save General Smith and his immediate evacuation planners.” Captain Jaime Sabater of the SPG told Marine Corps historians that after Baughn’s expulsion the SPG did its planning at night and avoided the embassy. According to the SPG’s Captain Wood, “From that moment forward everything to do with the evacuation went secret (‘black’) and the SPG went into deep cover.”

  The day after Baughn left, Martin hosted a delegation of officers from the Ninth Marine Amphibious Brigade that included Colonel Gray. The principal topic of the meeting was the advantages and disadvantages of different evacuation sites and scenarios. As the officers rolled out maps and diagrams, Martin warned them that he would not tolerate any “outward signs” that an evacuation was imminent lest they become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In his written report on the meeting, Gray criticized “a general lack of concern” on the part of “responsible officials” over the possibility of an evacuation and a “business as usual” atmosphere.

  Gray was sufficiently concerned that he persuaded his commanding officer, Lieutenant General Richard Carey, to return with him to Saigon the next day and meet separately with the SPG, Major General Smith, and Martin. The SPG’s preparations impressed Carey, but he noted that it h
ad become “a kind of sneaky operation” forced into “playing a game of hide-and-seek” with Martin. He later complained that his meeting with Martin had been “cold, non-productive and…an irritant to the ambassador.” A week later, he wrote in his log that Martin “must be convinced the time to evacuate is at hand and any further delay can only result in increased casualties,” adding, “I pray for a silver tongue and the Wisdom of Solomon as he is very inflexible.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “People Are Going to Feel Badly”

  The White House announced that the purpose of President Ford’s nationally televised speech to a joint session of Congress on April 11 would be to persuade lawmakers to approve the $722 million in supplemental aid to South Vietnam that General Weyand had proposed. Cynics said that Ford and Kissinger knew it was unlikely that Congress would vote for supplemental aid and that Ford wanted to pin the loss of South Vietnam on the Democratic-controlled Congress. Press Secretary Ron Nessen, who had been wounded while covering the war, privately feared that sending additional military aid to South Vietnam would only prolong the Thieu regime’s “death spiral.” He would later call Ford’s speech “a symbolic gesture of support to prevent morale from collapsing in South Vietnam,” and Deputy National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft would admit, “Nobody thought we would get the money. It was a way to make it look as if we were serious about the whole effort,” adding, “We were primarily concerned about how to get out and disengage.”