Soon after Hasty arrived at the dock, his radio came alive, and he and McNamara heard the deputy CIA base chief saying, “Received permission from Saigon to use the helicopters as Air America choppers no longer needed in Saigon.” McNamara was furious. Saigon was desperate for helicopters, and he doubted that the situation had changed within an hour. His aide Hank Cushing shouted that the CIA was to go by boat, adding, “The CG [consul general] orders this at once.” The deputy CIA chief replied that Saigon had approved their helicopter evacuation but did not say who had approved it. McNamara heard a whomp-whomp and looked up to see an Air America Huey heading for the fleet. Years later he would call the CIA contingent “perfidious spooks” and write of watching them “abandon a battlefield, running for safe haven.”
What really happened was more explicable and complicated. Before Jacobson called McNamara, two Air America helicopter pilots who had overnighted in Can Tho had flown the CIA’s remaining KIP to the fleet. Shortly after Delaney and his officers left the consulate, one of the pilots had radioed the deputy CIA chief to report that both helicopters were returning to Can Tho to evacuate their CIA friends. The pilots had forged close friendships with the agents during the war in Laos and wanted to make sure they escaped. One pilot later admitted that Air America operations had ordered them to fly to Saigon to assist in the evacuation but added, “We said we had some good customers in Can Tho and had to return there for at least one trip before we headed in.” Before the deputy chief could say that the CIA contingent had orders to join McNamara on his boats, he saw the helicopters approaching the Coconut Palms tennis courts and radioed back, “I wish I had as much money as I’m glad to see you.” He and Delaney had not planned to disobey McNamara, and the helicopters had landed without their encouragement, but given the opportunity to escape by helicopter, they understandably took it.
By noon, 17 Americans, 3 Filipinos, and 294 Vietnamese had boarded the LCM and the rice barge at the Delta Compound. Most were on McNamara’s A- and B-lists, but there were some last-minute additions. Can Tho’s deputy air force commander arrived in uniform with his family before slipping into civilian clothes. The Vietnamese crew of McNamara’s LCM never appeared, so he took the helm. As a joke, the marine guards presented him with a helmet liner saying, “Commodore. Can Tho Yacht Club.” When Cary Kassebaum asked where he had learned to pilot a boat, he mentioned his World War II service in the navy. Kassebaum probed, and he admitted having been a cook on a submarine.
Mud began appearing along the shoreline, but whenever McNamara prepared to cast off, another evacuee arrived or another passenger begged him to wait for a relative. Milford, the CIA communicator, refused to leave without his fiancée, and Hank Cushing was about to drag him aboard when a shout came up from the LCM that she was already there. The mistress of a CIA officer arrived in tears, crying that her lover had disappeared. The others persuaded her to jump aboard, and she left with nothing but her ao dai. Hank Cushing’s house overlooked the dock, and his cook ran outside at the last minute, weeping and begging to be included. She was on McNamara’s C-list, but he agreed to take her anyway. She insisted on fetching her son from school. McNamara gave her five minutes, but at that moment the boy wandered into the compound carrying his book bag. The moment McNamara shouted “Cast off!” six of the CIA’s Filipino employees arrived. By the time they boarded the LCM, it was stuck in the mud.
* * *
—
Richard Armitage drove between Tan Son Nhut and Newport several times that morning to smuggle some of his Vietnamese friends into Dodge City. During one of his trips a deserter outside the gate held a gun to his head and shouted, “You take me inside!” Armitage answered in Vietnamese that he was turning around and driving back into Saigon. The deserter muttered “motherfucker” and disappeared. At Newport, Armitage briefed Captain Kiem on the deteriorating situation at Tan Son Nhut and suggested advancing his departure from late afternoon to 2:00 p.m. Kiem summoned his captains and told them they could take as many people as they could fit on their ships but must disarm any non-naval personnel. If the Communists attacked them from the shoreline, they should go full steam ahead because a disabled ship could block the channel. He summoned his headquarters staff and, shouting to be heard over the helicopters and artillery, yelled, “It’s time to go! The enemy is closing in. You have two hours to bring your families to the ships. Don’t panic, there’s room for everyone.” Some officers fell to the ground and rocked back and forth, holding their heads and weeping because they had lost the war and would become exiles.
* * *
—
Terry McNamara gunned the engines of his LCM and jerked its rudder from side to side. He freed the ship from the mud just as a mob of civilians rushed into the Delta Compound. The rice barge broke its propeller getting free from the mud, and he took it under tow. At 12:30 p.m., he met the LCM from the Shell Oil dock. An ARVN translator who was familiar with the channels was at the helm, so he decided to follow him down the river. Half an hour later, three Vietnamese Navy gunboats closed on his flotilla, firing their machine guns across the bow of the lead LCM. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Quang, shouted that General Nam believed McNamara was evacuating soldiers and military-age men and had ordered him to escort his vessels back to Can Tho and screen their passengers. The sailors were upset that men their age were escaping and kept their guns trained on the LCMs.
McNamara persuaded Quang to contact his superior officer, Commodore Thang, and request instructions. The week before, McNamara had evacuated Thang’s family through Tan Son Nhut, telling him, “If we do have to evacuate I’m intending to go down the river and we may need your help.” After Quang disappeared into his cabin to radio Thang, McNamara asked Whitten, Sciacchitano, and his other Vietnamese speakers to circulate among the evacuees and confiscate their weapons. Many were armed and he feared a massacre if Quang ordered them back to Can Tho. He also used the time to transfer passengers from the damaged rice barge to the LCMs.
Commodore Thang arrived an hour later and remained in his launch. He knew that if he boarded McNamara’s LCM, he would see military deserters and would have to arrest them and impound the boat. Speaking in a low voice, he told McNamara that General Nam believed that senior military officers were aboard his ships and had ordered them all back to Can Tho. Then he smiled and added, “Under the circumstances, I will not obey the general’s order.” Raising his voice so everyone could hear him, he shouted, “Do you have any military men, civil servants, or Vietnamese of military age in your boats?”
McNamara shouted back, “Of course not! The people in our boats are all my employees and their families.”
“That being the case, I do not believe it is necessary to enforce General Nam’s order.”
Thang had purposely included in his crew a sailor whose father was aboard McNamara’s LCM. Thang encouraged him to board the vessel and bid farewell to his father. They embraced and wept. Thang’s crew looked down to hide their tears, and McNamara’s eyes watered. The tension between the sailors and the evacuees evaporated. Thang and his men saluted as the LCMs pulled away. McNamara and his staff stood at attention.
Despite losing two hours, McNamara could still reach the South China Sea by nightfall. He had survived one of the CIA’s objections to a river evacuation, interdiction by South Vietnam’s navy. Thirty minutes later, he faced a second—a Communist attack. The channel wandered from side to side, so the LCMs seldom traveled in the middle. He was fifteen yards from the south bank when he heard a whoosh and saw a black rocket trailing fire and smoke heading for his boat. He pushed the levers to full speed, and the rocket passed six feet to his aft, exploding on the opposite bank. The LCMs were armored against small-arms fire, but a well-placed rocket-propelled grenade would have left scores of casualties. Sergeant Hasty likened the possible result to “tossing a grenade into a garbage can.” His marines opened fire on a patch of tall grass and bamboo, becoming the la
st U.S. servicemen to fire hostile shots during the Vietnam War.
McNamara’s greatest fear had been that the Communists would attack them when they reached a stretch of the river where the navigable channels wound through a maze of islands, forcing boats to hew close to the shoreline. As he was entering this treacherous area, the skies opened and a gray wall of water enveloped his boats. The wind and rain drowned out their engines, and his passengers emerged from the islands soaking wet but safe.
David Whitten, the former navy officer who spoke Vietnamese, had chosen to ride in the well of McNamara’s LCM with the Vietnamese. The hurried departure from Can Tho, confrontation with the navy patrol boats, and rocket attack had distracted the passengers, but after the storm passed, Whitten noticed them becoming somber. As their country slipped past for the last time, some began weeping. Their grief was contagious, affecting even the children, even Whitten. He was twenty-eight and had spent most of his adult life in South Vietnam. As the familiar landscape passed, he realized that he would never see it again and wept along with them.
McNamara arrived at the mouth of the Bassac at sunset. As an orange sun set over the delta, he thought, “God, this is beautiful,” and then, “This is probably the last time I will see this.”
Despite Jacobson’s promise to station a ship offshore, the sea was empty. The CIA communicator tried to raise the navy on his radio. No one answered because no one had provided him or McNamara with the password. There was no moon, and the LCMs had only dim running lights and kept losing sight of each other. Their compasses were broken, and their passengers had exhausted their food and water. McNamara had been standing at the helm for over eight hours without a break. Around 11:00 p.m., he steered toward a faint glow on the horizon. Three hours later he pulled alongside the Pioneer Contender.
* * *
—
The Boo Heung Pioneer reached international waters at sunset. Farther up the river North Vietnamese troops sprayed one of the MSC tugs with small-arms fire. Ryder’s tug, the Chitose Maru, ran out of fuel and drifted toward the east bank of the river. Communist troops opened fire, but the barge’s sandbag walls absorbed their bullets. Ryder radioed his boss, Dan Berney, on the Blue Ridge and asked if navy warplanes could buzz their attackers, saying it might persuade them “to put their damn heads down so they don’t get serious and decide that they really want to blow us out of the water.” Rear Admiral Whitmire relayed his request up the chain of command and called back to report that the Pentagon had denied it. He told Ryder, “Now, ain’t that a shit?”
Ryder’s tug had a pickup crew, and the chief engineer was an automobile mechanic. Ryder finally realized that neither he nor the mechanic had understood that you had to pump fuel from the ship’s lower tanks into a main tank above the wheelhouse. Ryder did this, fired the engines, pushed off the bank, and reached the South China Sea that evening.
* * *
—
Captain Flink woke James Parker at midnight to complain that planes had just buzzed the Pioneer Contender. He wondered if they might be Communists sent to kill Parker and his Vietnamese refugees. A crewman interrupted to report that two small boats were approaching. Parker went to the bridge and recognized Terry McNamara’s LCMs. “The consulate is coming,” he told Flink. “You’ve got more guests.”
“See, I told you that you were going to make my life miserable,” Flink said.
Parker leaned over the side and shouted at McNamara, asking why he had taken so long and his passengers were so wet. McNamara was not amused.
After transferring his refugees to an MSC freighter, Bill Ryder collected Terry McNamara from the Pioneer Contender and brought him to the Boo Heung Pioneer. The captain was under Ryder’s command and insisted that he take his cabin. Ryder offered it to McNamara, but he refused, saying that it was Ryder’s “damned ship.” They agreed to share it, and Ryder took an immediate shine to McNamara, calling him “quite a character.” They stayed up late comparing notes and cursing the embassy.
* * *
—
Parker knew it was too late for him to rescue Loi, or Chau’s children, but not too late to atone for abandoning them. He radioed MSC tugboat command and asked if they could use two landing craft. The reply came back that the vessels could mean life or death for refugees crowded onto Vung Tau’s beaches and piers. The Filipino engineers and a Cambodian who had driven the LCMs from Can Tho volunteered to accompany Parker to Vung Tau. As they were leaving, the MSC command ordered Flink to proceed to Vung Tau and collect refugees. Flink followed Parker’s LCMs to the mouth of the harbor, while Parker motored closer to shore.
Harnage had risked his life to rescue anyone on the Gia Long Street roof. Parker was braving Communist artillery fire to rescue refugees from Vung Tau. As he approached the harbor, he saw what he mistook for an island. He drew closer, and it became dozens of small boats packed with refugees. Men paddled toward him using pieces of wood and their bare hands. Women stood in boats holding out their children. Refugees scrambled aboard his LCM from junks, fishing boats, and rowboats. He brought them out to the Pioneer Contender, which was itself surrounded by barges and fishing boats. The first officer shouted down that the U.S. Navy was sending a tender to collect him. He pretended not to hear him and returned for more refugees.
After returning to the Pioneer Contender a second time, he climbed to the bridge and looked across a panorama of death and suffering. Communist gunners were firing shells into the harbor, sending up geysers and killing the unlucky. An ARVN helicopter exploded, raining down debris. He heard a familiar Vietnam War cacophony of explosions, helicopters, and screams and flashed back to slipping his friends into body bags, crawling through Vietcong tunnels, holding a dying comrade in his arms, and having Loi cover his body with his own. He snapped to attention, turned to the shore, and saluted Ayers and Castro-Carrosquillo and the rest of the American dead. Then he noticed riverboats loaded with food and furniture heading up the river to Saigon and realized that although his war was over, life in Vietnam would continue.
* * *
—
Some of the passengers on Lem Truong’s cargo ship were military officers who had felt duty-bound to report back to their units on the evening of April 29. They returned the next morning after General Minh surrendered. Because Truong had not contributed to the cost of the boat, she and her family boarded last and slept in the hold. By the time the ship left the dock on May 1, it was carrying a hundred passengers, a number that would double during the next two days as it rescued refugees from barges, canoes, and a cargo ship that was floundering in rough seas.
No one knew how to steer the ship, repair its engines, or navigate. Once in open water, they tried heading for Singapore but traveled in circles, exhausting their fuel. Sharks shadowed them, and they debated whether it would be worse to live in a Communist Vietnam or be eaten by sharks. Other ships gave them a wide berth out of fear they might be pirates or armed deserters. Truong made an SOS banner from a white sheet and a piece of red ribbon. When the ribbon ran out, she used her lipstick to finish the second S. An American tanker saw it and drew alongside. She shouted to its crew in English, describing their predicament. The tanker alerted the U.S. Navy, and an LST took everyone aboard. A week later she and her family arrived in the Philippines.
* * *
—
Richard Armitage left on one of the last helicopters from Tan Son Nhut. He landed on the Blue Ridge wearing a filthy sport jacket and without identification or anything to persuade Rear Admiral Whitmire to give him a destroyer so he could meet Captain Kiem’s fleet. He was saved by remembering that Whitmire had played on the U.S. Naval Academy football team several years before him and that his photograph had hung in the locker room above where he dressed. This was enough to persuade Whitmire to call Schlesinger, who ordered him to give Armitage whatever he needed. Armitage said he needed a destroyer to take him to Con Son Island and escort
the South Vietnamese Navy to the Philippines. Whitmire called the commander of the destroyer escort Kirk, Commodore Donald Roane, and said, “We’re going to have to send you back to rescue the Vietnamese navy. We forgot ’em. And if we don’t get them or any part of them, they’re probably all going to be killed.”
When Armitage arrived, Roane groused that he was unaccustomed to taking orders from a strange civilian. “Sir, I am equally unaccustomed to coming aboard strange ships in the middle of the night and giving orders,” Armitage said, “but steam to Con Son.”
At dawn on May 1, the Kirk rendezvoused with thirty-four South Vietnamese Navy vessels that Captain Kiem had led down the Saigon River. Four were deemed unseaworthy and scuttled. The Kirk shepherded the others toward the Philippines and provided food and medical care to their thirty thousand sailors and civilian passengers. While they were at sea, the Philippine government announced that it would not permit them to dock at Subic Bay because they had become the property of North Vietnam following the surrender. Armitage suggested that because they had once belonged to the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, Captain Kiem could simply return them. Kiem ordered their crews to disable their big guns and paint over their South Vietnamese identifying numbers, replacing them with American ones. Each ship held a changing of the colors ceremony. Their captains delivered speeches and ordered their South Vietnamese flags lowered. Voices cracked and tears ran down cheeks as crews and passengers sang their national anthem for the last time. As the Stars and Stripes went up, the sailors ripped the insignias from their uniforms and hurled them into the sea.
* * *
—
Erich von Marbod had left Tan Son Nhut on the afternoon of April 29 on one of the first Marine Corps helicopters to land on the Blue Ridge. Schlesinger had asked Whitmire to transfer him to the Dubuque, an amphibious transport ship with a large helicopter deck, and station it off Phu Quoc, where it could serve as a way station for VNAF helicopter pilots heading for Thailand. At first light on April 30, von Marbod asked the Dubuque’s captain to broadcast the coordinates for the route to Trat, Thailand, to the pilots. Some had overloaded their choppers with family and friends and needed to land on the Dubuque to refuel. By the time von Marbod had left the ship, he had, over the previous several days, played a pivotal role in sending 224 aircraft and two thousand South Vietnamese pilots and their families to Thailand. The Pentagon awarded him a medal, leading Martin to complain, “It [von Marbod’s operation] wasn’t worth…risking so much. But they finally gave him a medal for recovering the bloody planes.”
Honorable Exit Page 38