Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  During the flight he and Johnstone drew up lists of their prospective evacuees. Each contributed ten names. If everyone on them wanted to leave and bring out ten family members, it would mean spiriting two hundred people out of South Vietnam. While they were in the air, the State Department cabled Martin requesting that he order embassy security officers to find and expel them. After reading the cable, Martin asked Lehmann, “Who do these guys think they are? They’re not welcome here.” Lehmann barged into a meeting of the political section and asked Joe McBride and the others if they knew Rosenblatt and Johnstone, demanding that they report any sightings. Martin asked the South Vietnamese police and security agencies to join the hunt. Rosenblatt thought it was not “a friendly thing” to do, because if the South Vietnamese arrested them, they could have been sitting in a South Vietnamese jail when the Communists marched into Saigon.

  Rosenblatt was a founding member of the State Department cafeteria cabal. He had become less sanguine about what the group could accomplish after Ken Quinn delivered his gloomy report on the state of the embassy’s evacuation planning. The final straw had come on April 18, when he read a cable from Kissinger to Martin saying, “There is strong domestic and congressional concern that we must put a higher priority on ensuring the safety of Americans in Vietnam.” This meant an “accelerated departure,” Kissinger said, so that no more than 2,000 Americans remained by April 22. In the same cable Kissinger asked Martin for “more details of what you have in mind for evacuation of Vietnamese,” adding, “We are particularly concerned about the safety of Vietnamese associated closely with us, including our employees, and relatives of American citizens and resident aliens.” In his response, Martin cited Ford’s pledge to protect Vietnamese who have been associated with the United States—a number that he estimated could involve as many as 200,000 people. In light of this large number, Martin said, “We do not believe it feasible to try to assume responsibility to lift all the Vietnamese to whom the President refers directly from Saigon,” adding, “We will instruct our own local employees to make their way to designated spots on the coast where they may be evacuated. Many may not make it, but we do owe those who do the chance to escape.”

  But what Martin considered a realistic way to satisfy his and Ford’s humanitarian instincts, Rosenblatt viewed as a callous strategy promising to leave tens of thousands of Vietnamese stranded. Furthermore, if Martin was prepared to tell the embassy’s Vietnamese employees to make their way fifty miles to the coast through Communist-controlled territory, then the people whom he and Johnstone wanted to evacuate would likely receive even less consideration.

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  After Pan Am flight 841 landed at Tan Son Nhut on April 22, immigration officers ordered its pilot to park half a mile from the terminal to prevent unticketed passengers from sneaking aboard. Thousands of Vietnamese stood on the other side of the airport security fence, guarded by soldiers with submachine guns as they watched passengers disembark. One American remembered them being extraordinarily quiet, standing “like ghosts.” Sometimes one cried out, “Can you help me?”

  Vietnamese who had talked or bribed their way into the terminal mingled with the flight crew and departing passengers. A woman cornered flight attendant Valerie Chalk, tugging at her sleeve and begging her to put her four-year-old daughter on board. Chalk asked flight attendants Gudren Meisner and Pam Taylor to help. The mother bent over and kissed her daughter before gently shoving her toward Chalk and Meisner. Each grabbed a hand and knifed through the crowd and past immigration officers. If challenged, they planned to say that she was an unescorted minor whose ticket was on the plane.

  A middle-aged American and his Vietnamese wife asked Taylor for a similar favor. The woman pointed to a skinny boy standing next to their luggage and explained that he was their fourteen-year-old son and that she and her husband had been able to afford only exit visa bribes for two of their three children. They had brought him hoping to get him on the plane. Meisner and Taylor tried to walk him past the immigration desk, but he was too big to hide behind their skirts and a policeman turned him back, dismissing Taylor’s claim that his parents were on the plane. The flight attendants persuaded the Pan Am baggage handlers to drive them to the cargo hangar. From there they made a dash for the plane. Some troops in a jeep intercepted them and ordered them back to the terminal. Taylor took the boy inside and said, “Thursday. Day after tomorrow, we come back. You be here?” He nodded and she promised to evacuate him then.

  The ground hostess who had accompanied passengers from the terminal whispered to Taylor and Meisner that she would stay on the plane. The infant she was carrying in her arms and the toddler hidden behind her skirt were her own, and she had pretended to be bringing them aboard for a passenger. Her husband was fighting with the army, she said, and she had not had time to explain to him or her parents that she had decided to put her children’s future ahead of her marriage, ahead of everything. The flight attendants seated her children with other Vietnamese passengers, and she hid in a toilet while immigration officers made a final check. The flight attendants alerted the pilot, and he ordered the door closed and started the engines.

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  Rosenblatt and Johnstone were unsure how to evacuate their two hundred Vietnamese. Before leaving Washington, they had collected dozens of expired U.S. passports from friends with an idea of turning them into documents convincing enough to get their people out. Not knowing that Martin had ordered them detained and expelled, they went straight from the airport to the embassy to confer with Lacy Wright and others. As they were climbing a back staircase, they ran into Joe McBride. “You’d better get the hell out of here,” he said, explaining that their arrest and deportation had been discussed at that day’s staff meeting. He suggested that they funnel their people through the Dodge City gymnasium, bringing them to him or Ken Moorefield.

  They went underground. Rosenblatt shaved off his bushy mustache, and Johnstone began wearing a heavy French overcoat, an absurd garment given Saigon’s steamy April weather. They carried two clunky French-style briefcases and borrowed a friend’s 1940 Citroën. Another friend at AID gave them access to an apartment building whose American residents had left. Jim Eckes of Continental Air Services, who was playing a role in several underground railroads, lent them a white van with his company’s logo and Huu, a fearless young Vietnamese driver who asked only to be evacuated with her family in exchange for her services.

  They met some of their friends at the cathedral. It was dark and empty, but they still whispered. They did not pressure anyone to go but pressed them to make a quick decision. They told those who wanted to leave to return the next day with their families and a single suitcase. The disguises and clandestine meetings were melodramatic, but the stakes were too high to leave anything to chance. Some friends asked for a few weeks to put their affairs in order. “No, no, no, we’re not here for long,” they said, “and we don’t think the situation is that stable.”

  They picked up their people from the cathedral or main post office and drove them to the apartment building. Once they had collected enough for an airport run, they led them out the back entrance and piled them into Huu’s van. Upon reaching the gate, she grabbed a fistful of piastres from a shoe box and thrust them at the MPs. Sometimes she waved a sheaf of Air Vietnam tickets for Can Tho that Johnstone had bought with his American Express card.

  At first, Rosenblatt manufactured counterfeit exit visas and laissez-passers on an ancient typewriter at the safe house, embossing them with a stamp purloined from the consulate. But after escorting his first group into the processing center, he realized that he needed only to hand Moorefield or McBride affidavits of support. One evacuee changed his mind after noticing that many of the others were wealthier and spoke better English. “I don’t qualify,” he told Rosenblatt, “and I’m worried I’ll starve to death.” Rosenblatt handed him a $20 bill an
d told him to accept it as a symbol that he would stand behind him after he arrived in America. The man took it, boarded the bus, and became a machinist in Minnesota.

  Rosenblatt and Johnstone took catnaps and ate nothing in two days except a bowl of soup. They decided that the cloak-and-dagger meetings at the cathedral were too cumbersome and drove directly to their evacuees’ homes and gave them five minutes to decide whether or not to go. By April 24, they were returning to collect the grandparents, siblings, and aunts and uncles whom they had left behind. They also evacuated strangers, among them a group of American-educated pharmacists and some pedestrians who had seen the Continental Air Services logo on their van, assumed they were going to the airport, flagged them down, and left with the clothes on their backs. By the time they departed on April 25, they had evacuated more than their planned two hundred people. They feared that if they stayed longer, they might end up occupying seats on an evacuation helicopter that could have gone to two Vietnamese. They finagled places on a chartered plane flying Air America executives to Singapore. It lacked authorization to land, so they were met by policemen pointing submachine guns.

  Kissinger summoned them to his office after they returned to Washington. Before they went in, his assistant Lawrence Eagleburger warned them that Kissinger was unpredictable and the meeting could turn nasty. He advised them to accept their dressing-down and say as little as possible.

  An article about their mission had appeared in The Washington Post, and Kissinger asked if it was true. When they admitted it was, he said, “You realize that you were disobeying a direct order from the United States government, my order. I’m trying to create a disciplined foreign service and you guys just picked up and did what you wanted.”

  They followed Eagleburger’s advice and said nothing.

  Kissinger continued, “You did a very admirable thing. I’m very proud of you. If more people had done what you had done we would have had a better evacuation.” Turning to Eagleburger, he said, “If I get another memorandum like this one from the personnel people, chastising the only people who have done the honorable thing, it’ll be you who’d [be] dismissed.”

  He turned to them and asked what they would like to do next.

  Johnstone said he wanted to return to being a political officer in Central America. Kissinger nodded at Eagleburger and said, “Make it happen,” and it did.

  Rosenblatt said, “We’ve got around 125,000 Vietnamese on our hands and I’d like to work on the refugee task force until every last woman and child evacuee is out of the camps. And I’d like a staff of twenty to help me.”

  “A staff of twenty!” Kissinger exclaimed.

  Rosenblatt explained that he did not want Americans on his staff, only Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Lao.

  Kissinger turned to Eagleburger and said, “Make it happen!”

  Eagleburger protested that it was going to be difficult. Rosenblatt replied that the people he wanted to hire had all been employed by the U.S. government in their native countries, so why couldn’t they be government employees here?

  “Make it happen!” Kissinger said, and it did.

  Like Rosenblatt and Johnstone, Don Hays had been too busy to eat or sleep much during this final week, and he was concerned that time spent eating and sleeping might mean leaving hundreds of South Vietnamese behind. In addition to his embassy day job, he helped friends at AID evacuate the families of their Vietnamese staff, collecting them in buses, maneuvering them through checkpoints, and delivering them to Dodge City. Because AID had made its own arrangements with the U.S. Air Force, Hays did not send his people through Moorefield’s processing center. In fact, although Hays had been living in Moorefield’s building since his wife left for New Zealand, the two men had been so busy with the evacuation that they seldom met.

  On April 22 embassy security officer Marvin Garrett summoned Hays and some Seabees and mission wardens to a secretive 1:00 a.m. meeting at the recreation center restaurant. Garrett poured Hays a triple scotch and handed him a T-bone steak off the fire. It was the first real food he had eaten in days. Garrett said that Thieu’s resignation and loss of Xuan Loc meant that the end was near. He had found a way to evacuate some of his most endangered employees on a special black flight and wanted Hays to give them their severance pay so they could use it to launch their new lives in the United States. Hays said, “I’ll give it a try,” and slipped the rest of the T-bone into his jacket pocket.

  After the Justice Department authorized an immigration parole, Martin started fulfilling his pledge to evacuate some of the embassy’s Vietnamese staff and their families. Hays sometimes rode on the buses to Tan Son Nhut with Martin’s evacuees. He was as generous as Moorefield, turning a blind eye to men of military age and not questioning his passengers about their relationships to embassy employees. He resented Martin’s prohibition against evacuating the military because it could mean splitting up families, perhaps forever. He became so distressed by this that he sometimes lost his temper. As he was picking up evacuees in front of a hotel, an Agence France-Presse photographer began taking pictures. Knowing that Martin would continue his selective evacuation only if it remained secret, Hays ordered the photographer to leave. The man protested and said, “I’m only interested in the news.” Hays shouted, “I’m only interested in your blood,” and picked up a two-by-four and chased him down the street.

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  On April 24, one day before Rosenblatt and Johnstone escaped to Singapore, the last Pan Am flight landed at Tan Son Nhut. Among its passengers was Richard Armitage, a former U.S. Naval Academy linebacker, fluent Vietnamese speaker, and multi-tour veteran of South Vietnam’s riverine wars. He was coming on a secret mission to save South Vietnam’s navy authorized by Secretary of Defense Schlesinger. After graduating from Annapolis in 1967, Armitage spent five of his next seven years in South Vietnam, repeatedly choosing combat and danger over safety and career. In 1968, he had requested transfer from a U.S. destroyer patrolling off the coast of Vietnam to one of the South Vietnamese Navy’s river patrol boats. He advised an ambush team, slept on the dirt floors of village huts, wore black pajamas, and learned to speak flawless Vietnamese. He avoided using the term “adviser” because it connoted superiority and instead introduced himself to Vietnamese naval officers as their “comrade in arms.” They called him “Tran Van Phu,” an honorific name evoking a famed seventeenth-century Vietnamese naval hero.

  There was a Lawrence of Arabia flavor to the way Armitage submerged himself in an alien culture, acquiring an honorific title and earning the respect of the men he was advising. But whereas Lawrence had been short and slender with a long thin face, Armitage had a broad face, bull neck, and the brick-wall build of a linebacker. His bull-in-a-china-shop look was deceiving. It suggested a man relying on muscle and physical supremacy, not someone possessing a keen intellect and cultural sensitivity similar to T. E. Lawrence’s.

  He had resigned from the navy after the Paris Peace Accords, a treaty he compared to “getting a lady pregnant and leaving town.” He also resigned because while he was attending an anti-insurgency course in the States, his superior officer had pressed him not to volunteer to return to South Vietnam as one of the fifty uniformed American military personnel permitted by the Paris Peace Accords, arguing that a posting in Vietnam would hurt his career because he needed experience on warships. Armitage shot back, “Well, what other war are you fighting?”

  He returned to Vietnam as a DAO civilian adviser to South Vietnam’s navy, visiting navy bases, collecting and analyzing intelligence, briefing Ambassador Martin, and suffering wounds while traveling on ammunition barges to Cambodia. In the summer of 1974, as the fighting intensified, he visited the front lines with Erich von Marbod, who had been sent by Secretary of Defense Schlesinger to determine how much aid South Vietnam needed. By December 1974, Armitage had concluded that South Vietnam’s military was losing its will to fi
ght. The Pentagon brushed off his warnings, and he resigned, returned home to California, and spent the next several months worrying about his Vietnamese friends. After the defense of Xuan Loc collapsed, he called von Marbod and said, “Erich, I hope people are listening. It’s over.”

  “Ricky, we’ve been looking for you,” von Marbod said. “Get your ass to Washington.”

  When Armitage arrived, von Marbod explained that Schlesinger wanted them to go to South Vietnam, destroy high-tech U.S. military equipment, and encourage South Vietnamese air and naval units to escape with their planes and ships before the Communists seized them. He would save the air force; Armitage would use his contacts at naval headquarters to save the fleet. Von Marbod stopped in Thailand on his way to Saigon, while Armitage flew directly to Saigon on the last Pan Am flight.

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  Pan Am station manager Al Topping was planning to fill most of the seats on the plane that had brought Armitage to Saigon with his Vietnamese employees and their dependents. Topping was a tall and distinguished-looking African American in his mid-thirties, younger than most managers of busy Pan Am stations. He had been working as a ticket agent for United Airlines at Kennedy Airport when his life changed because his dry cleaner failed to finish his uniform on time. After he wore a business suit to work, his supervisor said he preferred him in it and promoted him to customer service. He met VIPs flying through Kennedy and impressed a Pan Am executive who offered him a job as a sales representative in San Francisco. He took it, moved into management, became director of operations for South Vietnam and Cambodia, and arrived in Saigon in 1972, when it was busy with cargo and civilian flights. The Pan Am station manager was a big deal, an ambassador from one of America’s most iconic and prestigious companies. Topping attended diplomatic events, joined the Cercle Sportif, lived in a spacious villa across from the American embassy with his wife and children, and achieved his dream of becoming a disc jockey by hosting a Saturday evening program on the U.S. Armed Forces station that he called Al Topping with Good Vibrations.