Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Other Americans who drove, guarded, or rode in the evacuation buses witnessed similar heartbreaking scenes. DAO intelligence operative Frank Aurelio had persuaded Nelson Kieff, the plainclothes military intelligence agent who had rescued people from Pleiku and had teamed up with Martindale during the Nha Trang evacuation, to serve as an armed guard on an SPG bus. Aurelio told Kieff that the Vietnamese driver had been trained and given a predetermined route and list of evacuees. Kieff’s job would be to prevent unauthorized passengers from boarding his bus. Crowds besieged his bus the moment it stopped, crying and begging to be allowed inside. It was half-full when Kieff picked up a young Vietnamese woman on his list. The people surrounding the bus looked menacing, and some were armed. After the young woman boarded, Kieff shouted for the driver to slam the door and accelerate. She screamed, “My brother!” and Kieff looked back to see a young man running after the bus, frantically waving his arms and shouting. He had to make a split-second decision. Fearing that armed deserters might hijack the bus, he told the driver not to stop. While recounting this story four decades later, he began to cry, saying through his tears, “I thought I was doing the right thing. I didn’t even know if he was on my list or not, and I don’t know what happened to him, or to her.”

  It was late afternoon when the buses that had become separated from Moorefield parked near the embassy. A female Vietnamese passenger saw the crowd and despaired of getting over the wall. She told reporter Keyes Beech that the Communists would cut her throat, adding, “I’ve worked for the United States government for ten years, but you [Americans] do not trust me and I do not trust you.” Even if she made it into Tan Son Nhut, she doubted that Americans would let her board a plane. “I’m going home to poison myself,” she said.

  The marines at the front gate told correspondent Ken Kashiwahara to go around to the back, where their comrades would let him in. He was worried about being mistaken for a Vietnamese and decided to shout, “The Dodgers won the National League pennant!” to prove his nationality. Luckily, a marine recognized him and hauled him over the wall. Keyes Beech tried entering through the rear gate. As he pushed through the crowd, his attaché case hit a baby, and its father punched him in the back. A teenager grabbed his arm and begged to be adopted. Beech yanked his arm away, and a marine pulled him inside. Beech reported, “Once we moved into that seething mass we ceased to be journalists. We were only men fighting for our lives, scratching, clawing, pushing ever closer to the wall. We were like animals.”

  Moorefield abandoned his sedan near the embassy. It was around five o’clock and the men on the outer fringes of the crowd were a volatile mixture of deserters, street toughs, and “Saigon Cowboys,” young men whose wealthy families had bribed their way out of the draft. Some had come to steal or cannibalize the cars that evacuees had abandoned and to loot the embassy after the Americans left. Moorefield felt uneasy. He was wearing a blue jumpsuit and looked vaguely military, and his face was smudged with dirt that resembled smoke or gunpowder. Someone asked why he was not inside with the other Americans. Feeling vulnerable, he said he was a Canadian journalist. He felt ashamed of himself and thought, “I think I’ve played my hand.” He pushed through the crowd and caught the attention of marines guarding the side gate. They opened it a crack, and he squeezed inside.

  Joe McBride returned to the embassy about half an hour after Moorefield and found it even harder to get inside. He and Lacy Wright had been collecting people from safe houses in embassy vans and driving them to Khanh Hoi so they could board one of Ryder’s barges. Most were U.S. mission employees and their families, relatives of State Department personnel, or members of the political class and intelligentsia. McBride and Wright had begun making runs to Khanh Hoi around noon. Wright was summoned back to the embassy, but McBride stayed out all afternoon. He crammed twenty-five people into a van seating twelve, bribed police, and siphoned gasoline from parked cars. Each time he returned to the safe house, he found more people waiting. He shouted, “Don’t worry! We have room for everyone!” While he was loading people into his van, a well-dressed middle-aged man stepped forward and asked whom he wanted to take. “People who put themselves in harm’s way,” McBride said, “people who were courageous.” The man helped him control the crowd and load the van but refused his offer to put him on a barge.

  McBride was doing what he had promised all along—staying out in the street and evacuating “the right Vietnamese.” Several days earlier Marvin Garrett, the U.S. mission security officer, had summoned him and other junior diplomats to another clandestine evacuation planning meeting. Garrett had told them, “Martin thinks there will be negotiations and an orderly departure, but most of us don’t think it’s going to work out that way. We have to be prepared to take care of ourselves.” As he was assigning everyone a different stretch of the wall to guard, McBride told him, “I’m sorry but I won’t do your wall thing, because I’ll be out on the streets.” When Garrett asked, “What are your priorities?” he said, “I think the Americans will get out, but I’d like to get the right Vietnamese out. I’m going to be out there.”

  By the time McBride returned to the embassy, it was dusk. The marines guarding the vehicle entrance told him that if they opened the gate, hundreds of people would try to storm inside, forcing them to shoot. McBride threw his Samsonite briefcase over the wall because it contained grenades and weapons that he wanted to keep away from the crowd. The marines suggested he go around to the consulate, where the gate was a sally port that made it easy to leave the compound but difficult for a large group to go in the other direction. He circulated through the crowd, gathering up stray Americans who had not yet made it inside with their Vietnamese families. Two huge marines, one black and the other white, came out of the sally port and stood on either side of McBride, blocking the crowd with their bodies as he fed his Americans and Vietnamese into the compound. He wrote them up for bravery, and they received awards.

  As soon as McBride was inside, he stripped down to his underwear. Perspiration had drenched the seersucker suit that he had been wearing for the last five days. As he was wringing it out, a platoon of marines jogged out of the chancery. They crossed the compound and stood with their backs against the wall. Some held their M-16 rifles between them, turning them into steps so they could boost their comrades over the wall. Polgar had gathered several dozen friends and VIPs in a safe house across the street and wanted the marines to go over the wall and rescue them. At the last minute Wolfgang Lehmann dashed from the chancery shouting, “Get those men back in here, Lieutenant. No more Vietnamese get in here.” Turning to McBride, who was still in his underwear, he said, “That goes for you, too!”

  McBride dressed and went upstairs to his office. The entire floor was deserted. He saw smashed typewriters and vandalized furnishings and thought, “This is it. There’s nothing more I can do.” He stopped at Martin’s outer office on his way to the roof and smelled whiskey. Martin grabbed him by the arm and pulled him aside. He said he had heard over the embassy radio what he had been doing, braving the streets to bring people to the docks, and wanted to thank him. McBride had never seen the ambassador so emotional, or for that matter emotional at all. McBride was one of the few Americans on the helicopter leaving from the roof. Martin had ordered that each flight include at least one U.S. citizen to counter any criticism that he was evacuating only Vietnamese; in other words, he was trickling out Americans to keep the airlift running.

  CBS bureau chief Brian Ellis had a British passport and was considering staying to cover Hanoi’s victory. He decided to consult friends at the embassy first. He stopped on the way at the Caravelle Hotel to collect his camera and passport and found that someone had locked his room from the inside. Mr. Ba, one of his Vietnamese drivers, shouted through the door that he was there with eleven family members and would let him in only if he promised to evacuate all of them. Ellis shouted back that the barrage had closed the airport. Ba repeated his demands, and Ell
is abandoned his possessions. He arrived at the embassy to find a mob of desperate Mr. Bas surrounding its walls and blocking its main gate.

  Press Secretary John Hogan saw him standing outside the gate and ordered it opened wide enough to let him slip inside. He told Hogan, “Look, I’ve decided it may be time for me to get out of here.” Hogan replied (erroneously) that they were not evacuating journalists from the embassy, only from the DAO. Ellis climbed to Martin’s office and told him that he wanted to leave. “Well, stick around,” Martin said breezily. “We’ll get you out of here.” Ellis left as the sole American passenger on an Air America helicopter that had touched down briefly, leaving before the next group of evacuees could reach it. Its pilot said, “Welcome aboard flight 707 to Havana. I’m not sure where we’re going, but these boys want to go to our ships.” He explained that the three Vietnamese soldiers in the back had hijacked his helicopter at gunpoint. After landing on the Hancock, the helicopter was met by marines who made the Vietnamese and Ellis lie spread-eagled on the deck while searching for weapons.

  * * *

  —

  Many of the Vietnamese outside the walls should have been inside. Among them were U.S. mission employees whose evacuation buses had either never arrived or been turned away from Tan Son Nhut, and KIP from Can Tho whom CIA agent Glenn Rounsevell had promised to evacuate. He and Polgar stood on the wall, searching for familiar faces and telling the marines whom to admit, like bouncers at a nightclub. John Bennett, the acting director of AID, called the AID building and told his Vietnamese employees to rip off the covers of their copies of the U.S. mission phone directory, bring them to the embassy, and wave them in the air so that their American co-workers could identify them and pull them over the wall.

  Women outside the walls wailed and wept. Men screamed, “I work for American ten years in Da Nang and I have letter. Look!” “Vietcong kill me!” “Please, sir, save my son!” and “American boss promise to take me!” Some rolled on the sidewalk in hysterics, crying out the names of the American servicemen, businessmen, and diplomats whom they had served as clerks, drivers, cooks, cleaners, bodyguards, and interpreters. Mothers tried to pass their babies to marines. Teenagers shouted that they had been separated from parents who were already inside. Some people waved expired U.S. government identity cards, letters of commendation from American friends and employers, and letters and telegrams from friends and relatives in the United States promising to support them and from former lovers promising to marry them. They had covered these precious documents in cellophane; the next day they would burn them. A reporter picked up a letter from the ground and read, “He is a person who believes firmly in the values of democracy and the free world. If he should fall into Communist hands his life would be in serious danger.” Another letter commended a Mr. Nha, who had washed dishes at the air force officers’ club in Pleiku in 1967, for having “faithfully served the cause of freedom in the Republic of Vietnam.”

  When the crowd was smaller, the marines had admitted Vietnamese with convincing stories and documents. Some softhearted marines admitted almost anyone. By late afternoon they had become less patient, firing volleys into the air and shouting, “Do not panic!” imagining this might calm people who expected a bloodbath. Because there was no comprehensive list to guide the marines, some tended to admit Americans and non-Asian third-country nationals, turning away people like Dr. Lem Truong, the highest-ranking woman in the South Vietnamese government.

  Truong’s odyssey had been as frantic and frustrating as Moorefield’s, and they could easily have crossed paths. After rockets hit Tan Son Nhut, she had telephoned her husband and teenage sons and begged them to leave with her. Her husband sounded uncertain and said that Communist sympathizers among his friends had promised that he would be safe because he was not in the military or government. Her thirteen-year-old son picked up the phone and said, “Mom, I want to come with you; take me with you if Dad does not want to leave.” She promised to call him back. They spoke next in 1987.

  Her friend Dr. John Evans called from the embassy at 10:00 a.m. and reported that Jacobson had agreed to include her staff in the evacuation but needed a list of their names. Evans was interrupted and said he had to hang up to attend to an important matter. She tried calling back, but the line was dead. After telling her teenage daughter that they were going to the United States, she sat on the couch with her rosary and prayed for divine guidance. Two senior officers from her ministry arrived with a list of evacuees, and after praying four fifty-bead rosaries, she asked her nephew to drive her to the embassy on the back of his motor scooter so she could hand the list to Jacobson.

  A marine guard at the gate refused to admit her without a pass. As she was turning to leave, a retired Vietnamese colonel who worked at the embassy ran to the gate shouting her name. He was shocked that she was still in Saigon. She was a high-risk person, he said, and should have left weeks ago. She explained that she needed to get a list of her employees to Jacobson. The colonel dashed back into the chancery and returned ten minutes later to report that he had been unable to locate Jacobson or anyone in authority. In the meantime a large crowd had gathered behind her. People pushed toward the gate and the marines pushed back. She lost her footing and fell to the ground, breaking her glasses.

  She jumped on the back of her nephew’s scooter and told him to speed to the Grall Hospital. She hoped that a French institution might offer her some protection. As they were en route, she remembered that the Khmer Rouge had murdered patients at the French hospital in Phnom Penh and changed her mind. She noticed a group of Americans and Vietnamese standing in front of the USIA building and stopped to speak with Huynh Trien Vo, a former colleague at the Ministry of Information. Vo said that a bus was coming to take them to the embassy and suggested she join them. She told her nephew to speed back to her house and bring back her mother and daughters in the family car. As she was worrying about how to contact her husband and sons, the bus arrived. It was already jammed, but Vo somehow squeezed aboard. She realized that getting her aged mother and infant daughter onto it would be impossible and waved good-bye to Vo when she saw her nephew approaching behind the wheel of her blue Datsun.

  She sat in the passenger seat, while her mother, baby, sixteen-year-old daughter, and thirteen-year-old niece crammed into the rear. She asked her nephew to speed to city hall. The former head of her agency, Colonel Ha, had recently been promoted to mayor and might help her. He was out supervising rescue teams. After calling into his office, he told her that he and some friends had chartered a boat and that Truong and her family were welcome to join them. He also agreed that she could bring two other families who had no means of escape and that they should all wait for him at city hall. One of the other families met her there, but when Ha failed to return after an hour, she decided that something must have happened to him and decided to try her luck at Khanh Hoi. Soldiers and police refused to let her near the private vessels chartered by bigwigs and threatened to shoot out her tires. She raced back to city hall with ten people in her Datsun, sharing the passenger seat with two other adults and riding half out of the car, gripping its frame with one hand while holding her rosary in the other and praying. She saw the mayor’s car going in the other direction and shouted for her nephew to follow him. When they arrived at a distant pier, more people joined them, and the men pulled a dilapidated wooden cargo ship from a shed and launched it. It had been built for inland waterways, not for a long voyage in open water.

  * * *

  —

  Colonel Al Gray and Brigadier General Richard Carey arrived at the DAO by helicopter shortly after two o’clock from the navy task force. They were in no mood to have Graham Martin or anyone else micromanage their evacuation. Carey had already tangled with Martin during their meeting at the embassy on April 14, when Martin had made him feel, he remembered, “like an unwanted visitor.” Hours before Gray flew to the DAO, Rear Admiral Donald Whitmire had summoned him t
o his quarters on the Blue Ridge to report having received a cable from the Pentagon ordering Gray’s ground security force limited to a marine company of 150 men. Gray believed that a company was too small to protect Tan Son Nhut and told Whitmire, “Either we bring in a battalion or I don’t go.” Whitmire backed down.

  Gray was as tough as that encounter made him sound. He was a tobacco-chewing, barrel-chested marine from the Jersey Shore who had received a battlefield commission during the Korean War, advised South Vietnamese troops in 1964, and returned to command American marines. In 1973, he had been sent to Okinawa to reform a troubled marine regiment. Racial tensions had led to fights and murders, and after examining the regimental records, he noticed that the men who lacked a high school diploma were responsible for most of the violence. He started an accredited high school on the base and wove its classes into his training schedule. Blacks and whites were soon helping one another with homework, and within four months most of the racial tension had evaporated. He was bringing that same common sense and humanity to the evacuation. He believed that leaving behind South Vietnamese who had been loyal to their country and to the United States was immoral. While briefing his officers before they flew to Tan Son Nhut, he said, “I’m not going to decide if a Vietnamese should go out or not, and I don’t want my people doing it either.” He repeated this admonition after landing at the DAO, circulating among his troops, and saying, “We’re not going to play God. We’re going to take out everyone who wants to go.”