Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Three of the MSC freighters that had evacuated refugees from Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay had been resupplied, repaired, undergone extensive cleaning, and were docked at Newport. Each could carry ten thousand evacuees. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff feared that if they remained at Newport, they might be shelled and captured, and if they waited too long before putting to sea, the Communists might board them as they steamed down the Saigon River. On April 23, the Joint Chiefs ordered Ryder and Dan Berney to send all three freighters out to join the U.S. naval task force in the South China Sea.

  Berney, Ryder, and navy attaché Carmody had been planning to load them with thousands of evacuees, including the families of the river pilots, the Newport post commander, and others with a connection to the MSC. Carmody believed that Martin would approve the operation because earlier that month he had told his military attachés, “I want you guys to draw up a plan to evacuate 250,000 people.” Carmody went to Martin and proposed using the three MSC freighters at Newport to evacuate 30,000 people. He told Martin that he had calculated the risk of coming under enemy fire from the riverbanks, and of triggering a panic by boarding so many people at once, and believed it was worth the gamble. He pointed out that U.S. Air Force transports had been flying Vietnamese out of Tan Son Nhut without inciting riots, that Newport was a closed military facility farther removed from the city than the airport, and that the freighters could be loaded and depart under cover of darkness.

  Martin dismissed his arguments and ordered the MSC freighters to leave empty. In a caustic cable to the State Department defending his decision, he said, “I will once again take time I could better use in other ways to explain why we are not using the MSC lift here.” He argued that the embassy could evacuate everyone through Tan Son Nhut if that proved necessary, and that although South Vietnam’s government had so far overlooked the violation of its immigration laws by Americans who were evacuating their Vietnamese dependents, sending out so many of its citizens at once on the MSC ships could provoke the government into cracking down. He added that everyone on his staff was in agreement that loading evacuees at Newport “would trigger the kind of panic we saw at Da Nang.” He closed, “We have had the quietest night anyone can remember as far as military actions are concerned—almost an undisclosed ceasefire—which I had been counting on.”

  He sent a second cable to Washington reporting that he had ordered one of the MSC freighters to transport seven thousand Nung (ethnic Chinese the United States employed as guards in South Vietnam) to Phu Quoc and that if this intra-Vietnam transfer proved successful, he might resort to a “dodge,” and fill up the ship with endangered Vietnamese when it returned, “and instead of going to Phu Quoc, transfer [them] to other ships outside Vietnamese waters.” He did not tell Ryder and Berney about his “dodge.” Instead, they saw him ordering two empty freighters to sea that could have carried thousands of evacuees to safety. Berney lodged a protest with Admiral Benton, and Benton persuaded the Joint Chiefs to modify Martin’s order to permit two of the three ships to remain at Newport for at least another day in the hope that Martin might change his mind. Martin did not, and ordered the two ships to leave Saigon empty and reach international waters by 11:00 a.m. on April 25.

  Berney and Ryder encouraged the master of one of these freighters, the Green Wave, to board some seven hundred Vietnamese passengers before leaving Newport on April 25. They suggested that once he had cleared South Vietnam’s territorial waters, he should inform the embassy that he had conducted a “stowaway search” and had discovered seven hundred stowaways. It was a completely illegal scheme. They were violating South Vietnamese law by encouraging the evacuation of citizens lacking exit visas and passports, and because some of the evacuees were in the armed forces, they were also guilty of encouraging desertion in wartime. They would be sending the refugees to the Philippines, where they would be illegal immigrants upon their arrival. From there the refugees would continue on to the United States without visas or sponsors. To accomplish this, they were using a ship that the U.S. Navy had chartered at a per diem cost of $12,000 and sticking American taxpayers with the bill. Ryder expected the U.S. Navy to bring them up on charges unless South Vietnamese authorities jailed them first. Berney alerted Rear Admiral Benton to their scheme the night before the Green Wave departed so he could tell the Seventh Fleet’s task force to be prepared to receive the ship after it reached international waters.

  On the evening of April 24, Berney and Ryder gathered hundreds of the Green Wave’s prospective stowaways in the MSC offices to conceal them from the South Vietnamese Army stevedores who might attempt to block the ship’s departure unless their families were included in the evacuation. After the evacuees boarded in the middle of the night, the ship started down the Saigon River at 5:30 a.m., passing downtown while it was still dark. Half an hour later, the second ship departed empty. Upon reaching the three-mile limit, the master of the Green Wave notified the embassy that he was carrying seven hundred stowaways. With their evacuation a fait accompli Benton persuaded Martin to claim that he had approved it. It was either that or admit that Berney and Ryder had outfoxed him. Still, there was grumbling at the embassy and Pentagon and talk of bringing Berney and Ryder up on charges.

  Benton followed up with a message to CINCPAC warning that the task force should prepare to receive tens of thousands of refugees who were likely to travel down rivers and put out to sea in anything that floated. He cabled, “Possibility substantial outflow of South Vietnamese refugees via water craft to offshore U.S. ships in near future,” adding that a dozen MSC merchantmen were in the vicinity and could accommodate 58,000 people and that “approximately 1000 refugees aboard MSC ship SS Green Wave on route Subic [the U.S. Navy base in the Philippines] with Ambassador Martin’s approval.”

  CINCPAC replied that Berney or Ryder should join the Seventh Fleet’s command ship, USS Blue Ridge, and set up a command post to coordinate the activities of the MSC ships. Berney went because he was ill, leaving Ryder in Newport to manage the evacuation on the barges. Berney was relieved to be leaving because, he admitted later, “I was scared silly.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “I Won’t Go for That”

  After Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, rumors of widespread executions swept through Can Tho, terrifying the Vietnamese working at Terry McNamara’s consulate and other U.S. agencies. During a staff meeting earlier that month, McNamara had suggested that if the Communists seized the Mekong delta, some of his American consulate employees should stay behind to act as witnesses to any atrocities. He argued that their presence might inhibit the Communists, and if not, they could testify at war crimes trials. Although the Communists might imprison them, he doubted they would “kill them out of hand.” Afterward, his deputy Hank Cushing, the former English professor, was grinning when he told McNamara, “You scared the shit out of them.” McNamara’s suggestion reinforced his staff’s preference for an evacuation down the Bassac River, which was undoubtedly his goal.

  The Khmer Rouge victory gave McNamara his vessels. A friend in AID who had been sending supplies up the Mekong to Phnom Penh offered him two LCMs (landing craft, mechanized), the World War II workhorses that had landed troops and tanks on invasion beaches. Both were sitting idle in Saigon and were perfect for McNamara’s scheme. They were eighty feet long, could carry several hundred people, and had a shallow draft, two strong diesel engines, and armor plating and high walls filled with sandbags that would protect the crews and passengers against small-arms fire. McNamara agreed to take them, and their crews drove them down to Can Tho.

  On April 22, McNamara sent Averill Christian and David Sciacchitano from his staff to Saigon to check that the embassy was evacuating the Vietnamese whom he had already sent there. They found that instead of the well-planned and comprehensive embassy evacuation operation they had anticipated, the U.S. mission’s agencies and individual Americans were competing for seats on the U.S. Air Force tran
sport planes. Meanwhile, the Can Tho Vietnamese were stuck in hotels, at the bottom of the evacuation totem pole. They complained about the situation to Jacobson, who struck Sciacchitano as glassy-eyed and detached from reality. He told them, “Everything will be all right, there’s no problem…nothing’s going to happen….Your people aren’t in trouble. Why bother getting them out? There won’t be a bloodbath….It’s all a bunch of nonsense. Go back to the Delta. The big transport planes and helicopters will get you out.”

  McNamara found their report so alarming that he helicoptered to the embassy the next day to inform Jacobson that he had his ships.

  “Terry, you’re not going out by boat. It’s too risky,” Jacobson said. “You’ve got to go out by air, and you’ll only be able to take Americans because you won’t have enough helicopters.”

  “No. I won’t go for that,” McNamara said, adding that he would disobey any order to that effect and that given what was happening in Phnom Penh, leaving any of his people behind amounted to signing their death warrants.

  Jacobson suggested that he plead his case to Martin. During McNamara’s eight months in Can Tho, Martin had always been away or too busy to see him, so he was surprised when Eva Kim immediately ushered him into his office. He told Martin that obeying Jacobson meant abandoning his employees. “I’m not going to do it, Mr. Ambassador,” he said. “I’ve got about five hundred locals who deserve to get out, and I’m getting them out.”

  Martin jumped up from behind his desk and said, “Let’s go and see Lehmann.” With McNamara in tow he stormed into Lehmann’s office. “What’s this about Terry being told he can’t get his Vietnamese out of the Delta?” he demanded.

  “Oh, no, that isn’t right,” Lehmann stammered.

  “Tell Jacobson it’s OK,” he said before abruptly marching out.

  Lehmann knew Commodore Thang, who commanded the naval detachment at Can Tho. He suggested that McNamara cultivate him, because his friendship might prove invaluable during a river evacuation.

  McNamara returned to Jacobson’s office to report that he had secured Martin’s support.

  “That’s all very well,” Jacobson said. “But when the time comes and you have to get out of there, and the pressure is on and the time is short, don’t be surprised if you get an order saying that you have to go by helicopter, and you won’t be able to take any Vietnamese.”

  It seems odd that Martin would order Ryder and Berney’s MSC freighters to travel down the Saigon River empty yet would support McNamara’s evacuation down the Bassac. But there were differences between these schemes. McNamara’s operation did not threaten to spread panic in Saigon, and it involved evacuating Vietnamese working for the U.S. government, instead of private American contractors. It is also possible that there really was no rational explanation for why Martin treated these two requests so differently. Both were judgment calls involving the increasingly erratic judgment of a prickly, sickly, stubborn, chain-smoking insomniac whose pride and temperament made it hard for him to second-guess himself.

  After returning to Can Tho, McNamara accelerated his preparations. He persuaded the manager of the Shell Oil dock to fill the LCMs’ fuel tanks and docked one LCM and his rice barge, the Delta Queen, near the consulate at the Delta Compound dock. He parked the other at the Shell Oil dock near Coconut Palms, the CIA living quarters and club that were serving as temporary housing for Vietnamese evacuated from outlying provinces. He took command of the Delta Compound’s LCM and rice barge and put a former South Vietnamese Navy lieutenant commander in charge of the other LCM. He summoned Sergeant Hasty, the youthful string bean who commanded the consulate’s marine guards, and announced that his men would be protecting an evacuation down the Bassac River. “It sounds dangerous, sir,” Hasty said, “but no guts, no glory!” He turned smartly on his heel and marched out of McNamara’s office. He had just married his Vietnamese girlfriend and was planning to put her mother and siblings aboard one of the LCMs.

  CIA base chief Jim Delaney and his agents were less enthusiastic. They continued to believe that McNamara’s scheme was needlessly risky and placed them in additional peril because of their profession. In mid-April, Delaney had asked his deputy to compile a list of the base’s key indigenous personnel (KIP)—Vietnamese who had served in sensitive positions—and bring them into Can Tho from the provinces. Delaney’s KIP were similar to McNamara’s A- and B-list evacuees, and like McNamara with his C-list he had excluded from his KIP category cooks, drivers, and guards. His list was shorter than McNamara’s A- and B-lists because he had already sent many of his KIP to Saigon and because McNamara’s priority evacuees included third-country nationals, U.S. citizens, and the Vietnamese relatives of U.S. citizens.

  Delaney and McNamara continued arguing about the evacuation. The consulate’s walls were thin, and CIA agent Jim Parker overheard one of their exchanges. After Delaney insisted that helicopters were “the safest, surest means of evacuation,” McNamara shouted, “There are not enough helicopters to go around; there are too many Vietnamese that we must get out.” When Delaney asked which Vietnamese McNamara was planning to evacuate, McNamara shouted, “I do not answer to YOU….If we have to evacuate, this consulate goes out by boat down the Bassac River. Period. End of discussion.”

  Delaney lowered his voice and said, “That is ridiculous. We might have to fight our way out and we are not combatants….We go out by helicopters.”

  McNamara shouted that the Air America helicopter pilots were “wild, uncontrollable animals,” and he did not want them deciding who went and when. “We control our own destiny if we go out by boat,” he said. “I have many, many Vietnamese—and Cambodians—I am obligated to get out, and going by boat is the only way we’re going to do it.”

  McNamara reminded Delaney that he was “the senior man on the scene here.” Delaney replied in an even voice, “I have my people to protect, and I have helicopters. My people go out by helicopter.”

  McNamara screamed, “You will do what I say.” There was a loud crash that sounded like McNamara’s large glass ashtray hitting the floor, followed by McNamara screaming, “Get out of my office!”

  Delaney continued to prepare for a helicopter evacuation. He told his agents to carry their passports so they could be ready to leave at a moment’s notice and ordered the trees surrounding the Coconut Palms tennis court felled so helicopters could land on it. He asked agent Jim Parker to contact CIA deputy air operations officer O. B. Harnage and request that he base three Air America helicopters in the delta on a twenty-four-hour basis.

  None of the CIA agents in Can Tho had more at stake in the evacuation than Parker, who was planning to bring out the two Amerasian children that he and his wife had agreed to adopt. Until recently Parker had been based in Vi Thanh, a remote provincial capital encircled by Communist forces. After Phuoc Long fell, the embassy had withdrawn the other official Americans from the province, leaving him on his own, a situation that suited a man who had spent his life seeking adventure and courting danger. He had grown up in North Carolina near Fort Bragg, watching military planes taking off and wishing he was aboard them or jumping from them and seeing trains and Greyhound buses speeding away and wanting to be on them. When he was fifteen, he and a friend had hitchhiked to Florida, caught a boat to Havana, and stayed in a waterfront neighborhood of flickering neon, cigar smoke, and prostitutes. After he returned home, his parents packed him off to a military academy. During his sophomore year at the University of North Carolina, he and some friends left to drive a beat-up jeep through Central America. They ran afoul of pre-Sandinista rebels, escaped to Miami, and returned to Chapel Hill in time for the next semester. Midway through his final exams he enlisted in the army, and by the fall of 1965 he was a lieutenant leading an infantry platoon in Vietnam.

  His troops saw a tall, outgoing man with an easy smile, “a man’s man.” But his laid-back cool concealed a sensitivity at odds with the Vietn
am War. The moral dilemma of fighting an enemy that was indistinguishable from the civilian population made him uneasy, and orders one night to shoot anyone violating a 9:00 curfew in a peaceful-looking village set him worrying that his men would kill a schoolboy running an errand for his mother, or a woman returning late from work, and he prayed, “Please, Lord, don’t test us tonight.” Around midnight a man appeared on a trail they were watching but vanished before Parker’s men could open fire. They grumbled about it the next morning, but he was relieved. Another evening his men wounded a suspected Vietcong sniper. The man groaned in agony and cried for help all night, but Parker and his men remained in their positions, fearing a trap. The next morning they found the corpse of an unarmed young man next to a bag of rice. Parker saw him and thought, “I’ve come halfway around the world to kill a laborer.”

  He was wounded, crawled through Vietcong tunnels, and lost his best friends, Harold Ayers and Miguel Castro-Carrosquillo. He placed them in what he calls “a closed and locked compartment in the back of my mind.” But sometimes they escaped. Two days after their deaths his superior officer announced that the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, was coming to award medals to his unit. There were none pending, so Parker had to choose the men least likely to protest participating in a charade. Westmoreland arrived by helicopter with an entourage of reporters and photographers. His uniform was crisp, his jaw prominent. One of his arms was cradled in a sling, an injury suffered on a Saigon tennis court. As flashbulbs popped, he walked down a line of soldiers, pinning Silver Stars on their shirts. As soon as his helicopter lifted off, a major retrieved the medals. Parker told a friend that he had become “a little sick of this war” and could not find much in it to make him proud. In fact, he said, it was “one big fucking waste.”