Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  He returned to the States, served a stint as a drill instructor, and left the army rather than return to Vietnam as a replacement. He worked in his father’s lumber mill, finished college, married, joined the CIA, and served as a case officer in Laos while his wife lived in Thailand. He asked to be reassigned to Vietnam because “naive as it might sound,” he said, he felt he could make a difference. He also had “a lot invested” in the country, including Ayers and Castro-Carrosquillo. The CIA posted him to Chau Doc, a remote provincial capital on the Cambodian border. Saigon Station (“an insulated, bureaucratic institution”) ignored his reports and in 1974 transferred him to beleaguered Vi Thanh. The agent he was replacing warned him that it was the most dangerous provincial capital in the country. The Vietcong controlled the countryside, and venturing out was evidence of a death wish. He recommended that Parker double the size of his night guard and keep a loaded revolver handy. “It’s all over,” he said in parting. “The country’s lost.”

  Despite months of combat and losing Ayers and Castro-Carrosquillo, Parker felt comfortable among Asians. He and his wife, Brenda, had adopted two Thai orphans, and his favorite place in Vi Thanh became a shady orphanage run by Filipino nuns that sat across the river from the town. He spent hours there playing with the orphans, giving them piggyback rides, and throwing them parties with gifts and ice cream. He also spent his days playing chess, Ping-Pong, and tennis with Loi, who commanded his detachment of Nung guards. Their friendship was one of equals, although the tall and rangy Loi usually beat him at tennis. Loi slept outside his bedroom window, and when the Vietcong fired rockets into Vi Thanh and Parker failed to wake up because he had his windows closed and air conditioner on, Loi broke down his door and threw his body across him.

  Parker believed that Asians like Loi could sense that he liked them and in turn felt comfortable around him. This probably explains his friendship with Brigadier General Le Van Hung, who commanded the Vi Thanh–based ARVN Twenty-First Division. During lengthy dinners at Hung’s quarters they discussed their families, Vietnamese history, and American literature. Hung spoke softly, flashing a pained smile while agonizing over his casualties and complaining about his limited resources. He knew that Parker would report his observations back to the CIA and hoped they might lead to more American military assistance. He was candid, and his predictions were accurate. By the winter of 1975 he had become the CIA’s best source of intelligence in the delta.

  After Ban Me Thuot fell, the high command put Hung in charge of defending Can Tho and transferred him there. He was courteous and correct with Delaney but clearly preferred dealing with Parker. Delaney ordered Parker to close down Vi Thanh and move to Can Tho so that Hung could brief him. Soon after leaving Vi Thanh, Parker returned to distribute severance pay to his employees and to ask his KIP to move to Can Tho for possible evacuation. Loi gave him a meaningful stare, waiting to be included in the invitation. When Parker called him into his office to receive his money, he refused to take it, burst into tears, and said he wanted to continue working for Parker. Parker’s eyes watered and his voice broke. He increased Loi’s severance pay, but not enough to ease his conscience. Like many of the guards working for Americans, Loi was a Nung, an ethnic Chinese minority known to be fierce fighters and fiercely loyal. The Communists despised them, and a Nung working for the CIA was doubly damned. Parker capitulated and told Loi to drive the two KIP interpreters to Can Tho. After he arrived, Parker nourished his hopes, telling him to return to Vi Thanh, collect his family, and come back to Can Tho.

  By mid-April, Vietnamese officials in Can Tho were abandoning their offices, the line of visa applicants at the consulate was lengthening, and the pile of car and apartment keys that departing CIA agents had left on Jim Delaney’s secretary’s desk was growing higher. CIA station chief Tom Polgar chose this moment for what he imagined being a morale-boosting visit. Instead, his briefing confirmed the agents’ suspicions that Saigon Station was either dangerously out of touch or deluded about conditions in the delta. Polgar assured them that there was “nothing to worry about” and promised that there would be work in the delta “for generations of CIA case officers.” The agents recalled Terry Balls making a similar boast when he delivered his optimistic briefing in February. They had considered it nonsense then, and it seemed even more absurd now.

  When Polgar said “South Vietnam will survive,” agent Tom Fosmire interrupted to say that he doubted that South Vietnam’s military had sufficient morale to survive.

  Parker told Polgar that after fighting for decades to unify the country, he doubted that the Communists would halt outside Saigon and “sue for peace.”

  Polgar brushed off their objections and said that South Vietnam had “a bright future.”

  Parker and Fosmire met at the CIA club afterward. They agreed that either Polgar was crazy or they were. “But crazy or not,” Fosmire said, “the North Vietnamese are going to win this war, flat out, whether that desk warrior likes it or not.”

  In mid-April, Jim Parker received his first angry and expletive-filled briefing from Brigadier General Tran Van Hai, who commanded the Seventh ARVN Division, the unit responsible for protecting the northern approaches to Can Tho. Hung had given Parker an introduction to Hai. The two generals could not have been more different. Hung was sensitive, reticent, and soft-spoken; Hai was a pudgy-faced, hard-eyed man who had acquired an impressive lexicon of battlefield obscenities from his American advisers. He greeted Parker by condemning the United States for “abandoning us on the fucking battlefield, in our darkest hour…just political shit on top of political shit, so that it all stinks,” adding that there was “not a breath of honesty or honor among you guys. And that includes you, you turdy American piece of shit.”

  When Parker attempted to steer the conversation to the military situation, Hai said, “You want information, U.S. government man. I want helicopter parts. I want ammunition.” He was a chain-smoker, never without a cigarette. He stared at Parker and said through a cloud of smoke, “You Americans don’t always keep your word to us Vietnamese ‘slope heads.’ ”

  His division faced General Tich, the best field general in the North Vietnamese Army. “You know what the slogan of his division is?” Hai asked. “ ‘Obliterate the enemy.’ That’s me. You know what the slogan of the army helping us is? ‘Fuck your friends.’ ”

  Parker helicoptered to Hai’s headquarters several times a week to listen to his arias of insults. Hai criticized the United States for not sending troops into Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese sanctuaries, calling it a “simple military situation” and asking, “What do you think of that, CIA man?” Parker thought about the tens of thousands of U.S. troops who had died trying to keep South Vietnam’s corrupt government afloat, but held his tongue. Like other Americans serving out the final days of Kissinger’s decent interval, his job was to accept the blame and do penance for the mistakes and broken promises of Americans who had long since left or had made a mess of the war without leaving Washington.

  During one briefing Hai shouted at Parker that the American government “stinks like leper shit” and that Americans had violated a soldier’s code of honor by abandoning their comrades in arms on the battlefield. Hai would have preferred to tell Kissinger or Martin that they stank of leper shit, but had to settle for Parker. Another time he stood up, and putting a hand on the butt of his revolver, he said, “I should kill you in the name of all the good men who died in this war.”

  After Congress rejected Ford’s request for $722 million in additional aid, Parker wondered if Hai really might shoot him. The Air America pilots flying him to Hai’s headquarters preferred not to remain on the ground because it put their helicopters within range of North Vietnamese artillery. This time Parker told pilot Cliff Hendryx that he was afraid Hai might become violent and persuaded him to stick around. Hendryx set down near Hai’s tent so Parker could make a quick escape, and he and his co-pilot held
automatic rifles at the ready. Hai glared at Parker before standing up and approaching him. His right hand was inches from his sidearm, but instead of shooting him, he delivered a tirade that concluded with his calling Senator Frank Church, who had loudly opposed Ford’s request for $722 million in emergency assistance, “worse than Hitler.”

  On April 17, Hai told Parker that the North had massed fresh units and additional armor, artillery, and portable bridges across the border in Cambodia. It was a larger force than necessary to defeat Hai’s division, so he assumed Saigon was the target. Two days later, he told Parker that once the North had placed heavy attack tanks and bridging units in front of these fresh troops, an attack on Saigon was imminent. On April 22 he reported that this repositioning had just occurred and fresh troops had fallen in behind the tanks. He predicted that Saigon would fall in seven days. Raising a cup of lukewarm coffee, he proposed that he and Parker toast all the soldiers who had died in the war. Nine days later he committed suicide by drinking a shot of whiskey laced with poison.

  Delaney believed Hai’s forecasts but was in a bind because Saigon Station was discouraging reporting that contradicted Martin and Polgar’s line that the Communists intended to capture Saigon through negotiations. When Parker reported Hai’s predictions, Delaney sometimes made a show of putting his hands over his ears, signaling that he did not want to hear anything contradicting the “party line”—a gesture perfectly symbolizing the reaction of earlier American military and political leaders to bad news from Vietnam. Delaney’s and Parker’s earlier cables had tempered Hai’s brutal message, but they relayed his warning that the Communists would take Saigon on April 29 in unvarnished terms. To Parker’s surprise, neither Saigon nor Langley pushed back. The CIA graded intelligence reports on a scale from one to twenty with twenty being the highest score possible. After Saigon fell, Parker’s report received a twenty.

  After weathering Hai’s verbal abuse, Parker often stopped on his way into Can Tho from the airport at a small wooden bungalow where he received another lecture about American treachery from “Chau,” the mother of two Amerasian children whom he and his wife, Brenda, had agreed to adopt. “Is this the American way to be a friend?” she demanded. “You don’t care about us. You used us. Yes, you and your countrymen. I cry inside all the time. I will die soon because of you. You destroyed my life. My country. We trusted you. You used us and now you leave. Good-bye, Vietnam. Sorry.”

  He listened without complaint because she was right. Two Americans had impregnated her and broken their promises to marry her and bring her to the United States, leaving her alone to raise her two outcast Amerasian children.

  For weeks Parker had been trying to avoid meeting someone like Chau. Every morning he walked into the consulate past a gauntlet of young women waving the tattered letters from former American lovers that they hoped to transform into visas and plane tickets. He knew that he was susceptible to their entreaties and avoided reading their letters or meeting their eyes. On April 14, his friend Glenn Rounsevell asked him if he would consider adopting the two Amerasian children of a female acquaintance. Rounsevell, who knew Parker was partial to orphans, said that the woman was already in the consulate and waiting to meet him. Parker found a beautiful woman in her early thirties sitting in an interview room off the lobby. She said that she adored her children, was afraid that the Communists would harm them, and had heard that after taking over the North in 1954, the Communists had murdered some Franco-Vietnamese children. After crying, “I don’t want my children to die!,” she burst into tears.

  Parker suggested that the Communists might not take the delta.

  She predicted that soon a North Vietnamese official would be sitting in this same room, interviewing her and weighing the fate of her children. “Let them live!” she begged. “Send them to your wife!”

  Parker visited her home and found “grand-looking, healthy, everyday children.” The house was bright and neat. Toys and stuffed animals filled her children’s rooms—proof of how much she loved them. The four-year-old girl had penetrating, intelligent eyes that reminded him of his daughter. The two-year-old boy was rambunctious and beguiling. Parker was smitten. He called Brenda and she agreed to take them. Her only concern was that Chau might reach the United States and try to reclaim them. She said that Chau must agree that the adoption would be final, adding, “I will not be used.”

  Parker stopped at Chau’s house to become acquainted with his future son and daughter. The girl gripped his hand, examining his fingers and watching his lips as he spoke. Her brother tried on Parker’s glasses and rummaged through his pockets. With each visit Chau became angrier and more emotional. He sensed her beginning to hate him.

  He asked her to take the children out of school so they could be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. She packed their clothes and birth certificates into two small plastic suitcases plastered with Disney cartoon characters and lined them up by the door so they could grab them and run. When he left her house for the last time, he looked back to see his future daughter standing in the doorway next to her Disney suitcase, ready for America.

  CHAPTER 15

  Kissinger’s Cable

  NBC Vietnam War correspondent David Butler has written that if Ambassador Martin’s critics among the “aggressive young activists” in the U.S. mission could have read the “eyes only” cable that Martin received from Henry Kissinger on the morning of April 25, they might have been “more forgiving of the ambassador’s calm, his seeming inaction.”

  More than any single cable, this one would determine how many Vietnamese would escape during the next five days, and when. It began, “We have just received a reply to our initiative to the Soviets which is quoted below.” The “initiative” was an oral note—a written but unsigned document that has the diplomatic status of a conversation. President Ford had addressed the oral note to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, and Kissinger had delivered it to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on Friday, April 18. It asked that the U.S.S.R. “use its good offices to achieve a temporary halt to the fighting” and said that a “temporary cease fire” would “save lives and permit the continued evacuation of American citizens and the South Vietnamese to whom we have a direct and special obligation.” In exchange, Ford said, the United States was “prepared to discuss the special political circumstances that could make this possible,” an artfully couched promise to seek Thieu’s resignation and his replacement by a leader prepared to negotiate with Hanoi.

  The note cautioned that “the situation in Vietnam has now reached a point, that the United States and the USSR must consider the long term consequences of further developments there for Soviet-American relations,” a veiled threat that the current détente between Washington and Moscow could be imperiled unless the U.S.S.R. used “its good offices to achieve a temporary halt to the fighting.” Kissinger had helped engineer the détente, and it had culminated in President Nixon and Soviet premier Brezhnev signing the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks Treaty. The two nations had also signed agreements on East-West trade, human rights, and other areas of dispute, ushering in a hoped-for era of peaceful coexistence. The détente had become frayed since then, but encouraging the Soviet Union to exert pressure on Hanoi remained Kissinger’s last best hope for a cease-fire.

  After delivering Ford’s oral note to Dobrynin, Kissinger expanded on the arguments for a temporary cease-fire in Vietnam, telling Dobrynin that the United States was not going to the Chinese but directing its appeal solely to Moscow “because it is in our long term mutual interest that the situation be brought to its conclusion in a manner that does not jeopardize Soviet-American relations.”

  He did not cable the text of the oral note to Martin until Wednesday, April 23. At that time he informed Martin that Dobrynin had reported that the note was receiving “urgent study” in Moscow and had been passed to Hanoi.

  The Soviets answered on April 24, telling Kissinger that
“the position of the Vietnamese side on the question of evacuation of American citizens is definitely favorable” and that Hanoi would not “put any obstacles” in their way. In what Kissinger considered the most significant sentence in their response, the Soviets stated, “It was emphasized [by Hanoi] that in the struggle for achieving a political settlement, the [North] Vietnamese side will proceed from the Paris Agreement, we are also told that the [North] Vietnamese do not intend to damage the reputation of the United States.”

  Kissinger read the Soviet reply to an April 24 afternoon meeting of the National Security Council. He said that he interpreted it as meaning that “as long as we keep the dialogue going we have an assurance against military action as we pull our people out.” He added that the possibility of tripartite negotiations between North and South Vietnam and the PRG “gives us the hope of a coalition solution which can be better than surrender.”

  President Ford suggested that the Communists’ willingness to negotiate might explain the lull in the fighting following Thieu’s resignation and said, “This looks like they are willing for an agreement within the framework of the Paris Accords and that we can keep our people there, and reduce them until such time as we decide to remove them.” Although the Soviet note had mentioned only the evacuation of American citizens and not Vietnamese, Kissinger told the NSC that he interpreted it as saying, “Get them [all] out.”