Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  He and Summers were promising to evacuate everyone inside the compound, villains and saints alike. They were promising evacuation to third-country nationals: to Korean diplomats and intelligence agents, a German priest, the young Filipino rock musicians who had arrived lugging their instruments and speakers, the Japanese ambassador who was wearing a white helmet and a bulletproof vest, and the ICCS Hungarians who were terrified that Communist soldiers would mistake them for Americans. They were promising to evacuate everyone who had gotten into the embassy compound because of what Vietnamese called “Big Nose Syndrome,” that is, their Caucasian features. They were promising to evacuate Ross Meador, Brian Ellis, the American women who had arrived in high heels and long dresses, as if flying out first class on a commercial airliner, the American contractors who sat by the pool drinking and spraying around champagne stolen from the Combined Recreation Area restaurant while singing, “We’re going home in freedom birds / Doo dah, doo dah,” to the tune of “Camptown Races,” and the young Vietnamese women who, upon hearing that everyone was going to the United States, had ditched their paunchy middle-aged American husbands and lovers because they no longer needed them.

  They were promising to evacuate Thu Minh Nguyen and her six children. Her husband was still fighting with the army and had ordered his family to escape without him. She had driven her children to the Khanh Hoi wharf, but they had been terrified by the sight of people falling into the water and drowning while trying to board barges. After that, she had used the family’s gold to buy forged documents stating that her husband worked for the embassy.

  They were promising to evacuate Y. I. Ching, an American merchant seaman of Chinese descent who had returned from his native Hawaii to rescue his Vietnamese wife and their five children. He had collected them in Bien Hoa two days before and taken sanctuary in the embassy.

  They were promising to evacuate Binh Pho, a young architecture student who had slipped into the compound with his girlfriend thanks to the help of a friend who had a relative working at the embassy. After making it inside, Pho’s friend said, “Let’s have a party, we’re in America now.” They sat around the swimming pool drinking, and Pho and his girlfriend made paper airplanes out of their soon-to-be-worthless piastres, sending them soaring into the muggy midday air.

  They were promising to evacuate the upper-class Vietnamese women who had come wearing their fur coats and had jammed multiple rings on their fingers and slipped dozens of bracelets on their wrists to prevent them from being stolen from their luggage. They were promising to evacuate the former mayor of Saigon, General Minh’s relatives, President Thieu’s cousin, a millionaire who had played tennis with General Westmoreland, Bui Diem, the former ambassador to Washington, portly General Quang, Thieu’s former national security adviser, who had arrived in a civilian suit with a wad of cash peeking out from his breast pocket, and others whose presence here appeared to confirm the truth of the Vietnamese saying that only when the house burns do you see the faces of the rats.

  The biggest rats stood out because the American newsmen and diplomats knew them. But most of the Vietnamese in the recreation area were embassy employees and their families, friends of Americans, friends of those friends, and anyone lucky enough to have arrived early. Some had been on evacuation buses that had dropped them outside the embassy after the Vietnamese MPs had prevented their buses from entering Tan Son Nhut; others were people whom Air America pilots had collected from rooftops and brought here instead of Tan Son Nhut; others had persuaded the marine guards that they worked for a U.S. agency or were related to someone who did.

  Many feared that the small Air America Hueys that were landing on the embassy roof to discharge evacuees from nearby helipads were also shuttling people out to the fleet. They began pushing and shoving to get closer to the gate separating the recreation area from the rest of the compound. Herrington waded into the crowd with a bullhorn. Speaking Vietnamese with a fluency that amazed architecture student Binh Pho, he said, “Hey everybody, stay in line. You don’t have to elbow each other to try to get in. What we have here is about 3000 people and we have 24 hours to evacuate.” He promised that helicopters would soon begin landing again on the roof and at ground level, adding, “My calculation is that the helicopters will come and go in fifteen-minute intervals, and right now it’s three in the afternoon and we’ll be out of here easily within twenty-four hours. There’s plenty of time, don’t worry about it.” The crowd calmed down, and although Pho and his girlfriend were near the gate, they hung back to help manage their friends’ children.

  While the JMT was promising to evacuate everyone, a work party of marines and Seabees began cutting down the huge tamarind tree in the parking lot. Weeks before, contractors from Pacific Architects and Engineers had surveyed the compound as a possible evacuation site and had recommended that the embassy keep several chain saws at hand. Instead, there was only one and it immediately broke. It took this impromptu work party more than an hour to fell the tree with fire axes and sweep up the chips and branches so that the helicopters’ rotor wash would not blow them into the faces of the evacuees.

  Martin had ordered that the evacuation be first-come first-served and that no preference be given to Americans. Some in the U.S. mission were ignoring him and putting their Vietnamese friends and co-workers at the head of the lines leading to the parking lot and the roof. Nevertheless, during a meeting in his office Martin said, “I’m not aware that anyone is being given priority in terms of seat space. Everybody is supposed to be equal here.” One of Marvin Garrett’s mission wardens shot back, “Obviously you don’t know what’s happening out there.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Ken Moorefield’s Odyssey

  When rockets began hitting Tan Son Nhut, Ken Moorefield grabbed his getaway bag, moved to an apartment on a lower floor, and watched the explosions from its balcony before driving to the DAO. The evacuation had become the last battle of his Vietnam War, and today would be the last day of that battle—his last chance to repay the Vietnamese blood brothers who had saved his life in that flooded paddy field. After hearing that a lack of drivers and escorts had stranded some of the Special Planning Group’s buses at the DAO motor pool, he helped to assemble a makeshift convoy. The gas pumps were locked, but the buses had enough fuel to begin making runs. He persuaded a middle-aged Vietnamese man whom he had met in a ditch where they had both taken shelter from the bombardment to drive a bus. By mid-morning he and the SPG’s captain Tony Wood had left Tan Son Nhut in charge of a three-bus convoy. Wood had recruited Sergeant Maloney, the now born-again Christian who commanded the DAO’s marine guards, to lead the buses with him in one jeep while Moorefield brought up the rear in another jeep.

  The streets were already busy with people who were ignoring the curfew to search for food, relatives, and escape. At some roadblocks security forces waved the buses through; at others they stopped them and hassled the drivers. Some soldiers robbed pedestrians, looted stores, and stole civilian clothes from washing lines and tailors’ shops; others fought on, mounting a brave rear-guard defense. Moorefield and Wood collected evacuees from the SPG’s downtown pickup locations and brought them to the DAO, where they came under sporadic artillery fire. Moorefield believed that a North Vietnamese forward observer was targeting the buses.

  Wood and Maloney exchanged their jeep for a Chevrolet with flashing police lights and led the empty buses and Moorefield back into town. Just beyond the gate they stopped for a roadblock. As traffic backed up, a sniper opened fire. Maloney grabbed his rifle, and he and Wood ran toward the gunfire, hoping to hunt down the sniper. Moorefield intercepted Maloney and persuaded him to return to his jeep and keep the convoy moving. In the meantime Moorefield’s driver had vanished with his jeep, taking his getaway bag with his West Point class ring. He jumped into the passenger seat of Maloney’s jeep, and they continued into Saigon, stopping at the SPG collection points and filling up the three buses.


  They returned to find a new and un-bribed MP detachment manning the gate. A nervous young lieutenant stood in the road with his arm extended, his palm facing outward. After Moorefield stopped, he shouted, “You turn around!” Moorefield said he was an American official and wanted to drive a short distance to a U.S. military facility. The lieutenant drew his .45, pointed it at Moorefield’s head, and ordered his men to lock and load. One of the American bus drivers got out and began to argue. The MPs shouted, “We’re not letting you in,” and fired at his feet.

  Fearing a massacre, Moorefield led his convoy back into the city. Pedestrians pounded their fists on the sides of his buses. An ARVN officer waved a revolver and threatened to shoot him unless he evacuated his family. The buses were low on gas and Moorefield overheard a dispatcher at the Evacuation Control Center warning drivers to avoid the embassy because a mob had surrounded its walls. The dispatcher radioed Moorefield and said that the ambassador wanted him to collect his household staff from his residence. Moorefield remembered that a fuel truck was usually stationed there and agreed to go. He collected some of Martin’s staff, gassed up the buses, and called the embassy to ask what he should do with his three busloads of evacuees. Jim Devine answered and suggested putting them on one of the MSC barges that should have arrived by now at the Khanh Hoi wharf in downtown Saigon. This was the first that Moorefield had heard about Bill Ryder’s barges, and he was upset that the embassy had kept him in the dark.

  At Newport earlier that morning Bill Ryder had destroyed his files and asked his tugboat and barge captains to board evacuees onto the barges and the Korean LST Boo Heung Pioneer. Most of his Vietnamese employees had already left as stowaways on the Green Wave, so many of the barges and the LST would be evacuating port officials and members of the military and their families. The LST’s Korean officers had already left, so Ryder persuaded Nguyen Bao Truc, a former navy commander and future Lodi, California, school janitor, to pilot the ship down the Saigon River.

  The LST cast off at noon. The tugboats and barges followed within the hour. Each of the five tugs towed a two-thousand-ton barge capable of carrying six thousand people. The barges had transported munitions to Cambodia, and to protect their crews and cargo, the Military Sealift Command had surrounded them with ten-foot steel walls filled with sandbags. Ryder had promised Lacy Wright and AID officials Mel Chatman and Russell Mott, who were operating the embassy’s Evacuation Control Center, that he would evacuate any U.S. mission Vietnamese personnel unable to reach Tan Son Nhut. The battle for the Newport Bridge had made it too dangerous to bus evacuees to Newport, so Ryder agreed to collect the embassy’s people at the Khanh Hoi wharf. As he was preparing to leave Newport, two CIA officers radioed to report that they had collected five hundred of the agency’s up-country employees and their families in a fleet of yellow school buses and wanted to put them aboard the barges. Ryder told them to meet him at Khanh Hoi.

  Martin and Jacobson feared that Ryder’s barges would ignite riots and had kept them a closely guarded secret, alerting Lacy Wright and a select group of embassy officials but not Alan Carter, Ken Moorefield, and others. As a result, many of the people boarding them at Khanh Hoi would be passersby, deserters, those hearing rumors about them, and embassy employees whom Lacy Wright and Joe McBride would drive there. Because no one knew how many barges would arrive, they fought to get aboard the first ones, and because there were no stairs or gangplanks, evacuees had to climb over the barge’s ten-foot-high sandbag walls. Ryder saw a grandmother holding an infant fall between the pier and the barge. They never resurfaced, and he realized at that moment that he would never forget them. Nor would he forget that once his barge became overloaded, he and his crew had threatened to shoot anyone attempting to board it, nor that they had fired into the water to discourage people from swimming after them, nor that he had asked himself, “Who the hell am I to play God?” But at least he had been an egalitarian God who had dispensed with VIP lists, visas, and bribes.

  His tug pulled its barge into the middle of the river and waited as the others docked their barges. By the time the last tug arrived around 5:00 p.m., the crowds had thinned, and its captain was shouting through a bullhorn that anyone wanting to go to the United States should jump aboard. AID officer Mel Chatman, who had driven to Khanh Hoi, called the embassy evacuation center and said, “We’ve got two huge barges here. Call everyone and tell ’em that if they got any people who are still looking for a ride, we’ve got the space. All they gotta do is get down here to Khanh Hoi.”

  Some Vietnamese at the Khanh Hoi wharf hesitated, immobilized by the irrevocability of their decision. Like many on April 29, they had to choose between living in a Communist Vietnam or as exiles in the United States. Those boarding a bus for Tan Son Nhut could change their minds during the drive or after arriving at the airport, and some did. But anyone boarding one of Ryder’s barges could not. Climb aboard, and you faced a perilous journey down the Saigon River; stay on the dock, and you might face years in a concentration camp, or worse. Climb aboard, and you could become an American citizen and never see your country again; stay on the dock, and you might become a second-class citizen in a Communist Vietnam, an exile in your own land. Some people stepped back from the edge of the dock and returned home, telling themselves they could leave later, as many would try to do in the coming months and years. And so the last barge departed from Khanh Hoi with room to spare, while a mile away several thousands were besieging the embassy.

  * * *

  —

  Soon after Moorefield left Ambassador Martin’s residence, Martin arrived to collect his poodle Nit Noy (“little thing” in Thai) and destroy classified documents. He had asked his marine bodyguards to drive him, but the moment they opened the embassy’s rear gate, the crowd surged forward and Major Kean ran over and said, “Sir, with all due respect, there is no way in hell that you are going to drive that car out of here. I recommend that you move back upstairs.”

  “I am going to walk once more to my residence,” Martin said. “I shall walk freely in this city. I shall leave Vietnam when the President tells me to leave.”

  He and his bodyguards slipped through the door connecting the embassy’s recreation area to the French embassy. After paying his respects to Ambassador Mérillon, he walked four blocks to his residence, collected Nit Noy, and supervised the marines as they destroyed classified documents. After returning to the French embassy, he considered asking Mérillon to allow him to move into his wife’s bedroom. That way, he reasoned, he could force Washington to keep the helicopters flying until they had evacuated the Vietnamese inside the embassy, leaving him the honor of being the last man out. But even for a man who had defied McNamara and Rusk, disobeying Kissinger and Ford at this crucial moment was too much, so he returned to the embassy with Mérillon’s parting gift, a large head of the Buddha.

  After leaving Martin’s residence, Moorefield had led his buses toward the embassy, only to find that the crowd surrounding its walls made driving inside impossible. He led his convoy to political officer Shep Lowman’s villa to see what Lowman suggested. Lowman begged him to evacuate the fifty embassy employees, intellectuals, and politicians whom he had told to gather at his villa. “Shep, I don’t have room,” he said, “and if I try to squeeze them on, we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

  He continued to the Brink Hotel, now a bachelor officers’ quarters. A hundred and fifty Vietnamese sat in the courtyard, lobby, and ground-floor public rooms. Some were hotel employees; others said that their American friends had told them to come with their families and await buses for Tan Son Nhut. Moorefield thought they were doomed. He picked his way around them to the reception desk, avoiding their eyes. He called Martin’s office and told Eva Kim that he had several hundred people in his buses and had just encountered 150 more at the Brink Hotel. “What am I going to do with these people?” he asked. After putting him on hold, she returned a minute later and reported that no on
e could help him. He walked back through the courtyard murmuring, “Stand fast. Stand fast. Stand fast,” and thinking, “There’s no plan, or if there was, it’s been overtaken by events. And now I’ve got three buses filled with people.”

  He returned to find a mob besieging the buses. The metal grilles covering their windows could be lowered six inches for ventilation, and a mother had slipped her infant into one bus through this opening and was screaming, “My baby’s on the bus!” Instead of driving to the wharf through Saigon’s chaotic streets, Moorefield decided to park near the embassy and walk everyone to the main gate. He assumed that the bus drivers would follow his jeep. Instead, they lost him in the traffic.

  One of these buses had collected a contingent of journalists from the Caravelle Hotel that included Ed Bradley of CBS, Hilary Brown and Ken Kashiwahara of ABC, and Keyes Beech, a veteran Chicago Daily News war correspondent. They had ridden in Moorefield’s haphazard convoy for several hours, witnessing his standoff with the MPs and becoming increasingly impatient as they waited outside the Brink Hotel, Lowman’s villa, and the ambassador’s residence. Their American expat driver had careened through Saigon’s narrow streets, sideswiping cars and knocking over the carts of sidewalk vendors. He had no ignition key and had to hot-wire the bus whenever they stopped. Several times he turned around to shout, “If there’s a bus driver aboard I’d be glad to let him take the wheel.”

  After becoming separated from Moorefield, he and the other drivers headed to Khanh Hoi, believing that Moorefield had gone there. They had the misfortune to arrive as a large crowd was battling to get aboard an overloaded barge. The driver of the journalists’ bus suggested that they either try to board it or wait for a helicopter. Ed Bradley thought that no helicopter pilot in his right mind would land in the middle of this mob, and he and the other Americans stayed on the bus. Some Vietnamese passengers disembarked, quickly realized their mistake, and ran back. Ken Kashiwahara noticed a helicopter flying toward the embassy and persuaded their driver to head there. As they were leaving, Bradley saw one of the Vietnamese passengers attempting to rejoin them. The man carried a suitcase in one hand and was holding on to his wife with the other. She was dragging along their two children so that the family resembled a string of paper dolls. Decades later, Bradley could still see the terrified expression on the man’s face as the bus pulled away.