Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Kissinger cabled back that in the judgment of officials attending the Washington Special Actions Group meeting that morning, “we could have as little as one to three days before a military collapse and Tan Son Nhut become unusable.” He added diplomatically that this was “at some variance” with Martin’s cable. In response to Martin’s arguments for maintaining a large diplomatic presence in Saigon, he said, “It is my feeling that Minh will be pushed fairly rapidly into giving in to a pro-Communist or Communist dominated government and our people would end up as hostages.”

  Martin would be spectacularly wrong about how the war would end, but he was right to be concerned about the Pentagon’s reaction to the attack. Two C-130s had been minutes from landing at Tan Son Nhut when it began. Smith asked them to remain in a holding pattern while his people assessed the damage. In the meantime, the Pentagon decided to suspend the flights indefinitely, leaving over three thousand evacuees stranded at the airport.

  Washington was twelve hours behind Saigon, so it was early on the morning of April 28 when Ken Quinn heard that the Pentagon had stopped the flights and was recommending that Ford halt the evacuation of Vietnamese by fixed-wing planes and concentrate on rescuing Americans. He called Lacy Wright, who confirmed that thousands of Vietnamese were stuck at Tan Son Nhut. Quinn ran into David Kennerly’s office and explained the situation. Kennerly hurried into the Oval Office and told Ford that a reliable source had informed him that thousands of refugees were stranded at Tan Son Nhut.

  Ford ordered the flights resumed. The two C-130s that had been in a holding pattern landed and collected 360 evacuees, leaving 2,800 at Tan Son Nhut. Admiral Gayler informed Smith that beginning the next morning and continuing for twenty-four hours, there would be an around-the-clock airlift of sixty C-130 sorties. Ten thousand people would be evacuated, including the remaining DAO staff, at-risk Vietnamese, and all U.S. civilians and government personnel except those needed to staff a bare-bones embassy.

  Before returning to his residence for the night, Martin told his staff to prepare to move American citizens, third-country nationals, and the U.S. mission’s Vietnamese employees and their families to Tan Son Nhut the next morning. Jim Devine, the embassy’s political-military counselor, passed the word down the chain of command, telling everyone to contact the people on their evacuation lists and begin assembling them in the embassy and agency compounds so that buses could take them to Tan Son Nhut. The embassy’s plan depended on fixed-wing planes continuing to land at Tan Son Nhut, the roads between downtown and the airport remaining open and safe, and South Vietnam’s police and military remaining a cohesive and disciplined force prepared to protect an evacuation that did not include them—precisely the scenario that Generals Smith and Baughn had considered so unrealistic when they read a version of this plan following the fall of Phuoc Long.

  * * *

  —

  At 11:25 a.m. Washington time on April 28, five hours after the raid, Ford asked Kissinger if the A-37s had inflicted enough “major damage” to impede the next day’s ambitious airlift.

  “No. They hit the Vietnamese Air Force side,” Kissinger said.

  “How many are out now?” Ford asked, referring to the evacuees.

  “Thirty-five to forty thousand,” Kissinger said. “It’s remarkable.”

  Ford agreed, saying, “It really has been magnificently done.”

  The evacuation would have been far less “magnificent” had Bill Ryder, Walter Martindale, Al Topping, Richard Baughn, Homer Smith, Ken Moorefield, Andy Gembara, Bill LeGro, Lionel Rosenblatt, Craig Johnstone, and others followed State Department guidelines and obeyed Ambassador Martin and the immigration laws of the United States and South Vietnam. By April 28, according to U.S. Air Force records, 43,439 evacuees had left Tan Son Nhut on chartered aircraft or U.S. Air Force planes. About 5,000 had been Americans. Most of the rest were South Vietnamese. If you also counted those who had escaped on the CIA’s and the DAO’s black flights, or had hidden behind the skirts of Pan Am flight attendants, or left on Ed Daly’s flights, and all the others not making it onto the official list, the actual number of evacuees leaving in the thirty days prior to April 29 probably approached 50,000.

  * * *

  —

  Ken Moorefield felt responsible for the Vietnamese and Americans who were marooned in the Dodge City processing center. He recruited a consular officer to help him break into the commissary. They carried sacks of rice and beans to the mess hall and persuaded some former army cooks among the evacuees to make dinner for several thousand people. After everyone had eaten, Moorefield walked around the DAO’s perimeter fence, checking for incursions. As he approached the main gate, a man shouted that he and forty people were trapped outside. Moorefield could see them lying flat on the ground. He realized that if there was another air strike, they would be exposed; if North Vietnamese troops attacked or South Vietnamese troops mutinied, they would be caught in cross fire, but if they stayed in place, North Vietnamese sappers might infiltrate them.

  Major James Kean, the commander of the embassy’s marine guards, had sent sixteen of his men to the DAO to help manage and protect the Dodge City processing center, direct traffic, and erect a barbed-wire defensive perimeter around the compound. Two of these marines, Lance Corporal Darwin Judge and Corporal Charles McMahon, manned a forward position just inside the perimeter fence and adjacent to the road leading to the main gate. Moorefield walked back down this road to warn them that he was about to escort forty Vietnamese civilians into the DAO. He noticed that their skin was pale, marking them as recent arrivals. They struck him as very young (Judge was nineteen, and McMahon was twenty-one), very nervous, very green, and lacking the experience to distinguish friendly Vietnamese from the enemy. As he spoke, they flicked their eyes back and forth between him and the buildings they were guarding.

  “Guys, look, I’m going to go out there and collect these Vietnamese families so they can be processed,” he said. “Things are tense and we don’t know what’s going to happen tonight. You don’t want them in front of you if something happens, and if there’s any combat, you could have sappers coming with them, so stand fast because I’m bringing them in.”

  They stood fast. They were good boys, both of them. Judge was an evangelical Christian and a former Eagle Scout, newspaper boy, grocery bagger, and snow shoveler for the elderly of Marshalltown, Iowa. McMahon was a local football hero whom the Boys’ Club of Woburn, Massachusetts, had named “Boy of the Year.” They had fired their weapons in anger for the first time that evening, pumping off some shots at the A-37s. After the attack ended, Judge had persuaded Sergeant Kevin Maloney, who commanded the marine guard unit at the DAO, to accept Christ as his savior. Until the previous day, Maloney had been Ambassador Martin’s personal bodyguard. That morning Major Kean had exiled him to the DAO because of some shenanigans that could have led to his court-martial. Kean had promised to “lose” his paperwork if he behaved. Maloney admitted being a “hard-drinking, hard-living type of Marine.” But thanks to Judge, he says, “I became a believer that day.”

  Moorefield rounded up the Vietnamese and walked them through the gate and past Judge and McMahon. He added them to the others without checking their papers and left the DAO at midnight, driving through the curfew-emptied streets and scattering packs of cigarettes at roadblocks. Before falling asleep, he packed a getaway bag with a pistol, ammunition, currency, passport, and his West Point class ring.

  * * *

  —

  Jake Jacobson convened an evacuation planning meeting at the embassy that commenced around midnight. He presided because Martin had returned to his residence. Lacy Wright, Shep Lowman, USIA head Alan Carter, and a dozen other senior officials attended. Jacobson reported that the White House had approved an evacuation of ten thousand people the next day on U.S. Air Force transports and said that Martin believed that the Communists would hold off for another forty
-eight hours before deciding whether to attack Saigon. In the meantime, Martin wanted these ten thousand to be genuine high-risk people, no household staff and personal friends. Jacobson turned to Lowman, who had been compiling and collecting the embassy’s lists, and said, “See if you can dredge up the names of 2,000 Vietnamese who really deserve help.”

  As the meeting was ending, Lowman asked Alan Carter to give him a list of his “priority” evacuees. Carter, who had already gathered over a hundred of his most endangered employees at the USIA office, exclaimed, “For God’s sakes, Shep! I turned a list in days ago!”

  So many Americans had wanted to save as many Vietnamese as possible that they had flooded Lowman and his team with lists. “Our tabulations have broken down,” Lowman admitted. “We’ll have to start again.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Frequent Wind

  At 1:00 a.m., Stuart Herrington, Jack Madison, and Harry Summers of the JMT began busing evacuees from the Dodge City processing center to the Tan Son Nhut flight line. Smith had told them to expect sixty sorties of C-130s during the next twenty-four hours, with the first transport arriving at 1:30 a.m., and they wanted to marshal the evacuees near the runway so the planes could make a quick turnaround. Before returning to Dodge City, Herrington stopped at Judge and McMahon’s post and asked, “How are things going, guys?” They answered, “Fine, sir, no sweat.”

  At 3:58 a.m., North Vietnamese gunners fired a barrage of rockets into Tan Son Nhut. One landed on Judge and McMahon. Sergeant Maloney found them first. The blast had scattered pieces of McMahon across the ground. Judge lay next to a pile of burning motorcycles. His ammunition belt was so hot from the explosion that it burned Maloney’s hand as he dragged him away from the fire. Before the day ended, Senator Richard Schweiker (R-Penn.) would accuse the Ford administration of having sacrificed Judge’s and McMahon’s lives, and risked those of other Americans, “as a subterfuge to evacuate South Vietnamese,” and charge that it had been “madness” to have “stalled” the evacuation of Americans to rescue Vietnamese.

  Another rocket exploded near Smith’s quarters, pitching him and his wife out of bed. More rockets hit the control tower, a fuel truck, and the Evacuation Processing Center. Erich von Marbod’s toilet shot into the air, gushing water across the floor. He jumped into a flight suit, threw a submachine gun over his shoulder, and staggered outside, his ears still ringing. Colonel Madison grabbed his helmet and sidearm, ran to the chapel where the mess hall’s waitresses and cooks had been sleeping, and led them into a bunker. His sardonic sense of humor had survived, and he turned to Sergeant Ernest Pace, the JMT linguist who had helped Bell on his evacuation runs, and said, “Call up the Communist delegations and tell them they’re violating our ‘privileges and immunities.’ ”

  Stuart Herrington ran to Judge and McMahon’s post, arriving as an ambulance was removing their remains. A marine standing by a smoking crater said, “I’m Sergeant Maloney, squad leader, manning my post. My two men are dead.” The ambulance delivered their bodies to the morgue at the Adventist Hospital. They would be left there, and instead of the negotiations with the Communists that Martin, Polgar, and Kissinger had imagined dragging on for months, the only talks between the United States and Hanoi would concern the repatriation of their remains.

  Herrington and Maloney jumped into a ditch as 120 mm artillery shells slammed into the South Vietnamese Air Force flight line. One shell exploded so close that Herrington heard shrapnel pinging against the chain-link fence. He grabbed a helmet that was lying on the ground and shoved it on. When he returned to the DAO, Smith’s wife screamed. It had belonged to Judge and had a hole in one side and was smeared with his blood.

  The VNAF unraveled. As the shelling continued, many of its aircraft headed for Thailand. Some pilots were acting on their own; others were obeying commanders who had promised von Marbod that they would not allow the Communists to capture their most sophisticated warplanes. Soldiers and airmen fought to get aboard transport planes. The crew of one overloaded C-130 pushed soldiers off its loading ramp as another plane spun off the runway and burned. Some pilots jettisoned their ordnance and external fuel tanks onto Tan Son Nhut’s runways and taxiways. By 7:00 a.m., a disabled F-5 fighter and hundreds of mutinous soldiers and airmen blocked the last active runway. Their actions were not hard to parse. After capturing ten VNAF intelligence personnel at the Da Nang air base in March, the Communists had executed them on the flight line. This may also explain why VNAF commander Lieutenant General Tran Van Minh and thirty armed members of his staff burst into the DAO at 8:00 a.m. and demanded evacuation to the American fleet. Smith ordered his assistant air attaché, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Mitchell, to disarm them. “If they refuse, tell them I’ll have them shot,” Smith said. General Minh and his staff surrendered their weapons, and Mitchell locked them in an office.

  * * *

  —

  Former VNAF air marshal Ky arrived at the headquarters of South Vietnam’s Joint General Staff to find it virtually deserted. The former chief of staff, General Cao Van Vien, had resigned the day before and flown to the American fleet. His successor, General Vinh Loc, had told his troops not to “run away like rats” and had then joined Vien on the fleet. As Ky was leaving, he met General Truong, the former commander of Military Region I who had entrusted his children to Theresa Tull. Truong had been released from the hospital and given an empty office in the building. He told Ky, “I don’t know what to do anymore.” Ky said, “Come along with me then,” and they flew to the fleet in Ky’s helicopter.

  Ross Meador and the Vietnamese nurse woke in the FCVN orphanage to the explosions at Tan Son Nhut. He walked onto a balcony at daybreak and saw two men breaking into the compound. They wore black pajamas and could be looters or Communist soldiers. He fired off a shot with his revolver and they fled. He was so unnerved that he drove downtown to have breakfast at the Duc Hotel and ask the CIA agents there what was happening. He was eating alone in the restaurant when an agent ran in yelling, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” Meador protested that he had not finished breakfast. “I don’t know what you think is going on here,” the agent shouted, “but if you don’t leave now, you’re never leaving. This is it, the final evacuation!”

  Jim Parker woke with the sun. The sea was empty to the horizon. The Vancouver had weighed anchor during the night, stranding him on the Pioneer Contender. The communications room was the size of a closet and had a single portable radio. The seaman on duty could not communicate with the navy, only with the Military Sealift Command. Parker listened to the chatter on the MSC frequency and realized that an evacuation was under way and that MSC tugs would be bringing refugees out on barges. He slept a few more hours and returned to the bridge. There were still no ships in sight. He assumed that by now McNamara and Delaney would be heading down the Bassac and that Loi would be waiting for him in his Coconut Palms apartment, telling his anxious family that his friend Jim Parker would not desert them. Chau’s children would be sitting by their plastic suitcases in their immaculate little house while she wept and cursed him, another American who had betrayed her.

  Air America pilot Marius Burke helicoptered from the fleet to Vung Tau. The docks were deserted, and there was no sign of Jim Collins and his Vietnamese orphans. Burke continued to Tan Son Nhut. By the time he landed, VNAF pilots had stolen four Air America helicopters. One had crashed and lay on its side, its rotors spinning while it exhausted its fuel. The Air America fuel truck was locked. No one could find the keys or hot-wire it because its battery was dead. This would mean that throughout the day Burke and the other Air America pilots would have to fly to the fleet to refuel. Because no one had alerted the U.S. Navy that civilian Air America pilots were an integral part of the evacuation, some were harassed and detained when they first landed on the ships.

  Don Hays, the young diplomat whom Martin had ordered out of the country a month earlier, was at Tan Son Nhut supervising the embarkation of p
eople on the embassy lists. He lined up his evacuees in the DAO corridors according to the numbers on baggage tags attached to their shirts. When the first rockets hit Tan Son Nhut, they screamed and ran in every direction, reminding him of “a jarful of lightning bugs.” By daybreak he had resigned himself to becoming a POW. He called the embassy and told Wolfgang Lehmann that rockets and artillery shells were still hitting the air base. Lehmann said that Ambassador Martin planned to inspect the damage personally and that the rocket attack was not happening anymore. Hays thrust the phone out the window and bellowed, “Listen to the ‘non-happening’ rocket fire!” Lehmann accused him of panicking and hung up.

  NSA head of station Tom Glenn signed off for the last time at 6:10 a.m. “Have just received word to evacuate,” he told NSA headquarters. “Am now destroying remaining classified material. Will cease transmission immediately after this message. We’re tired but otherwise all right. Looks like the battle for Saigon is on for real.” Glenn telephoned the general commanding South Vietnam’s twenty-seven hundred cryptologists, only to learn that he had fled to the American embassy. A squad of U.S. marines burst into Glenn’s office shouting that armed South Vietnamese Air Force pilots had forced their way into the building. They hustled him into another office and locked him inside. There was no telephone, and now he had no way to help evacuate the Vietnamese cryptologists.

  Tom Polgar, who had bet Glenn a bottle of champagne that they both would be in Saigon the following year, woke to the explosions and stuffed his camera, passport, and checkbook into an airline shoulder bag. Despite Martin’s insistence that an assault on Saigon was unlikely, his secretary, Eva Kim, had already packed a similar escape bag. Polgar arrived at the embassy at 5:00 a.m. Martin appeared soon afterward. His bronchitis and pneumonia had left him speaking in such a faint whisper that when he telephoned Major General Smith, Polgar had to listen on an extension and repeat his words.