CHAPTER 21
The 420
Once Ken Moorefield got inside the embassy, he went to work. It was late afternoon, and the smaller CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters had started landing on the roof, and the larger CH-53 Sea Stallions would soon be arriving in the parking lot. When the sky began darkening, Moorefield realized that the parking lot’s lights would be too weak to illuminate a nighttime evacuation. He rummaged through the embassy and found a 35 mm slide projector. He installed it on the roof of the fire station and trained its bright rectangle of light on the parking lot. He warned the marines guarding the gates that they were sniper targets and should stand behind the concrete wall instead.
He went into the chancery and answered a telephone ringing on an empty desk. A woman cried, “My God! I’m Vietnamese but I got American citizenship in 1973. I’ve got three kids. What can I do?” He mumbled, “I don’t know what you can do. I’m sorry.” He joined a cocktail party of CIA agents and eavesdropped on their gloomy conversations until one of them begged him to leave them alone in their misery. He ran into Tom Polgar, who said, “If only we hadn’t cut off their supplies. If only we’d continued to provide them with the support they needed.” He was in no mood for Polgar’s autopsy and continued down the corridor. He looked into offices whose former occupants had trashed them by smashing watercoolers, pouring liquor onto rugs, and sweeping papers onto the floor. Like the abandoned champagne, cars, and military equipment, the rooms showed how lavishly Americans had been outfitted and how little it had mattered. He picked up a tin of tobacco for his pipe and searched for a souvenir to replace the ones he had lost in his getaway bag. He settled on a copy of Clausewitz’s On War.
After returning downstairs, he sat on the steps by the chancery’s rear entrance and watched the Sea Stallions land in the parking lot. Their official capacity was thirty-five combat-loaded marines, but this evening they were lifting off with as many as seventy civilian refugees. Some pilots shouted, “Put on some more!” Others struggled to get airborne and had to off-load passengers. As the clouds lowered and the rain increased, so did the danger. The helicopters had to fly straight up for two hundred feet to clear the surrounding buildings. If a pilot clipped a wall or collided with another helicopter and fell back into the landing zone, the evacuation would end.
Moorefield joined an impromptu party in Martin’s outer office. Journalist George McArthur, Eva Kim, and others were drinking from paper cups. Martin emerged from his inner office and asked McArthur to join him. McArthur noticed that Nit Noy was tied to a chair leg and offered to take the poodle out with him. Martin thanked him effusively before launching into a bitter attack on Polgar. If newspaper articles are history’s first draft, then Martin wanted the draft appearing under McArthur’s byline to pin the evacuation’s shortcomings on Polgar. He blamed him for using New York Times reporter Malcolm Browne as an intermediary for his own private negotiations with the Communists, charging that his shenanigans “might have cost us an extra day”—a day he had been counting on to complete the fixed-wing evacuation. He blamed Polgar for monopolizing the Air America helicopters to rescue his VIPs, arguing that otherwise one could have flown him to Tan Son Nhut that morning to make an earlier and more convincing case for continuing the fixed-wing evacuation. Finally, he blamed Polgar for undermining morale by sending his personal goods out of the country, remarking caustically, “Well, the smart ones like Polgar got their stuff out early.”
Polgar walked in as Martin was excoriating him for shipping out his furniture, and McArthur left them alone. Their conversation could not have been pleasant. Several days earlier, after learning of Polgar’s back-channel negotiations with the Communists, Martin had delivered his favorite threat, promising to cut off his balls and stuff one in each ear unless he stopped. Earlier that evening he had been overheard telling Polgar, “If I ever hear you say anything like that again you’re going to spend the rest of your career in Antarctica.”
While Martin was blaming Polgar for everything that had gone wrong with the evacuation, Kissinger was becoming increasingly impatient and testy. Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General George Brown had promised him that the helicopters would arrive within an hour of being ordered in, but that had not happened. The Pentagon had assured him that the evacuation from the embassy would be confined to a hundred American marines and diplomats, but at a WSAG meeting that had ended at 9:20 that morning (9:20 p.m. Saigon time), Brown had admitted that between five and six hundred Americans still awaited evacuation from the embassy and that Vietnamese were coming “over the wall and through the gates.”
Brown accused Martin of putting only a few Americans on every helicopter while holding back others to keep the Pentagon from ending the airlift and asked Kissinger, “Can’t you tell him to get them [the Americans] out of there?”
“Those are his bloody orders, goddamnit!” Kissinger exclaimed, adding, “Yes, I’ll instruct the Ambassador to get those people out, but he’s been ordered to get those people out a hundred times.”
Kissinger later said that he and Ford had been “spectators of the final act,” staffing “a command post with essentially nothing to do.” He spent several hours in his West Wing corner office, enveloped by “the eerie silence that sometimes attends momentous events,” while Ford watched updates on television, later remarking that it had been “the first time since the Civil War that an American President could see the immediate consequences of war.”
Kissinger strolled into White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld’s office and indulged in some black humor. Referring to Cambodia and South Vietnam, he said, “I’m the only Secretary of State who has ever lost two countries in three weeks.” He had lost one in his capacity as secretary of state, he explained, and another as national security adviser.
Ron Nessen asked, “If we give you another title, will you lose another country?”
David Kennerly, who was photographing the fall of Saigon vigil, joked, “The good news is that the war is over. The bad news is that we lost.”
Twenty-six members of the congressional leadership arrived at the White House for a briefing at 11:50 a.m., almost midnight in Saigon. Schlesinger boasted that the Pentagon (thanks to von Marbod) had flown $300 to $400 million in equipment out of South Vietnam, including many Vietnamese Air Force planes, and had arranged (thanks to Armitage) for a number of naval vessels to escape. Kissinger reported that among the administration’s accomplishments was having “moved out over 45,000 high risk Vietnamese nationals,” people “to whom we owed an obligation for their association with the United States.” Although the administration had asked numerous countries to accept some of these Vietnamese, he predicted that 90 percent would come to the United States. The president had granted parole authority for 130,000, but he assured the congressmen that “it now looks like 50,000 will be the top number.” One of them remarked, “Fifty thousand is all this country can absorb at any rate.”
Kissinger did not know that the South Vietnamese Navy ships that Schlesinger had boasted of saving had thirty thousand refugees on board, or that the planes that von Marbod had rescued were bringing out the families and friends of the pilots, or that Ryder’s tugs and barges were carrying over twenty-five thousand new American citizens, or that during the next several days the U.S. Navy would pick up another twenty thousand or so self-evacuated refugees in the waters off South Vietnam. He told these congressmen, who had made no secret of their opposition to accepting Vietnamese refugees, “There is no way the total number can go much beyond 50,000.”
* * *
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At 9:00 p.m., Rear Admiral Whitmire suspended the evacuation until dawn and ordered the helicopter pilots back to their ships for servicing and rest. He had navy regulations and common sense on his side. The weather had deteriorated, and his pilots had exceeded the flight hours permitted in a twenty-four-hour period and were complaining of hostile fire, a small landing zone, and a gim
crack lighting system. A CH-46 Sea Knight that had been flying over the task force on a search-and-rescue patrol had crashed into the sea, killing both pilots.
At 9:41 p.m., Martin received a cable from Scowcroft that put him in full honey-badger, go-for-the-balls mode. Scowcroft berated him for not evacuating the remaining Americans fast enough, cabling, “Understand there are still about 400 Americans in embassy compound. You should ensure that all, repeat all, Americans are evacuated in this operation ASAP. Warm Regards.”
Martin knew that many of these Americans had Vietnamese wives and children whom they refused to abandon, and he knew that in his April 25 cable Kissinger had encouraged him to “trickle” the remaining Americans out with the endangered Vietnamese. This was precisely what he was doing—holding some Americans back and sprinkling them in among the Vietnamese to keep the airlift going. He cabled Scowcroft back at 10:00 p.m., asking, “Perhaps you can tell me how to make some of these Americans abandon their half-Vietnamese children, or how the President would look if he ordered this?” He complained that during the previous fifty minutes only one CH-46 had landed on the roof and not a single CH-53 had set down in the parking lot and that Whitmire had informed him that he wanted to suspend the operation until 8:00 a.m. He continued, “I need 30 CH-53 sorties damned quick and I have received nothing but silence since I asked for them….Do you think you can get the President to order CINCPAC [Admiral Noel Gayler] to finish the job quickly[?] I repeat I need 30 CH-53s and I need them now.”
Fifteen minutes later he sent a similar message to Admiral Gayler, repeating that he needed thirty CH-53 sorties, adding, “I can’t come out until the 29th or 30th sortie, so please get them moving,” a statement making it clear that he planned to leave on the last or second-to-last helicopter, thus confirming Kissinger’s fears.
Gayler replied that more helicopters should already be arriving. They were not, and at 10:20 p.m. Martin fired off another cable to Scowcroft in the White House Situation Room. He warned that evacuating only Americans and leaving the Vietnamese behind would be a public relations catastrophe. “Among Americans here is Father McVeigh, head of Catholic Relief Services [CRS], who will not leave without his Vietnamese staff,” he cabled. “How will President explain to Bishop Swanstrom, US head of CRS, or Fr. McVeigh’s great and good friend Cardinal Cooke, why I left him? I repeat I need 30 sorties tonight. Please get them for me.”
Scowcroft replied at 10:40 p.m., “Defense promises 30 CH-53s on their way.” But instead of thirty sorties, Martin received a browbeating over his failure to evacuate IBM’s Vietnamese employees. Ambassador Dean Brown, who headed the government task force managing the evacuation and resettlement of Vietnamese, cabled, “IBM headquarters reports its personnel still in Saigon and is most disturbed.” At 11:06 p.m., Ford’s chief of staff, Donald Rumsfeld, badgered Martin to evacuate the IBM employees, cabling, “I understand that 154 IBM employees, including their families, are still awaiting removal from Saigon.” He added that they were “now standing in front of the IBM building” and asked Martin to “do your utmost to see that they were evacuated with the current helicopter lift.” Martin read Rumsfeld’s cable and said, “Shit!”
He cabled Gayler at 11:45 p.m. to report that although the CH-46s were again landing on the roof, “they carry about two-fifths of CH-53 capacity. I needed thirty CH-53 sorties capacity. I still do. Can’t you get someone to tell us what is going on?” Fifteen minutes later he complained to Scowcroft and Gayler that even the CH-46s had ceased arriving, and said, “We need the capacity, repeat capacity, of 30 CH-53 sorties to get us out of here.”
Martin was exhausted and gravely ill. He could easily have obeyed the White House and evacuated the remaining Americans and left with them. Earlier that day he had contemplated moving into the French embassy and remaining until all the Vietnamese who had sought refuge in his embassy had left, and now he was attempting to blackmail the White House into continuing the evacuation by warning that prominent Catholic clerics in the United States would be outraged if any Vietnamese were left behind.
But it would not be Martin’s bitter, threatening cables that would bring back the CH-53s. Instead, they returned because Lieutenant General Carey and other Marine Corps officers insisted on an honorable exit. Carey flew back to the fleet at 10:50 p.m., leaving Colonel Gray in command of the marines who remained at the DAO. After learning that the helicopters had stopped arriving at the embassy, Carey went up the chain of command, searching for an explanation. His attempts to contact Whitmire were stymied by a temporary glitch in radio communications, and it was not until 1:30 a.m. that he stormed into the combat operations center on the Blue Ridge shouting, “Who in the hell stopped my helicopters?”
Whitmire said he had.
“You don’t have the authority to stop my helicopters!” Carey thundered. He demanded to know why Whitmire had done it.
“For safety purposes. The pilots have been flying too long.”
“Marines don’t get tired when it comes to something like this.”
Whitmire, who was Carey’s superior, was taken aback by his defiant tone. Carey pressed his argument, saying that suspending the flights until first light was unacceptable because by then Saigon might have fallen. Vice Admiral George Steele, who commanded the Seventh Fleet and was in the operations center, agreed with Carey.
A similar drama was unfolding at the CINCPAC command center in Honolulu, where Lieutenant General Louis Wilson, who commanded the Marine Fleet Force in the Pacific, was discussing the sudden halt in flight operations with Admiral Gayler. When Wilson heard that the pilots had stood down because of administrative restrictions on the maximum allowable number of flight hours, he exploded, promising, “I will personally see that any Marine that doesn’t fly to continue to finish this operation will be court-martialed.”
Gayler sided with Wilson. He knew from flying World War II combat missions that a pilot could always fly more hours if necessary. He also feared that if the helicopters paused until first light, the operation might never restart. Whitmire reversed his decision, and the marine pilots prepared to resume the airlift. (The air force, whose pilots had also exceeded their twelve-hours-a-day limit, did not send them back into the air.) The only unanswered question was how many sorties they would make.
* * *
—
Only a single helicopter landed at the embassy between midnight and 3:00 a.m. Stuart Herrington circulated among the evacuees, shouting through a bullhorn in Vietnamese, “Ladies and gentlemen, please be quiet. Don’t worry! You will all be evacuated. You will all be evacuated. I’m here with you and I’ll be on the last helicopter. My government will not leave me behind and no one is abandoning you, so relax! In a little while the helicopters will resume arriving and you can cooperate by getting into family groups and stop shoving. Throw away your suitcases and form a double line. Back away from the gate so we can open it.”
The pushing and shoving continued. An American contractor collapsed from a heart attack, and people swarmed around Herrington, battering his arms and legs with their suitcases while jockeying for position near the gate. A Vietnamese man tugged at his sleeve and explained that the Vietnamese wanted to cooperate but the South Koreans were shoving everyone aside. Herrington was ashamed that despite having spent years in Asia, he had failed to distinguish between the two peoples. After he addressed the Koreans in English, a Korean naval officer stepped forward and promised to keep order. Summers and Herron linked arms with Herrington and helped him push people back from the gate. The South Korean contingent, comprising military officers, intelligence agents, and diplomats, formed a double line to one side. A Korean officer took Summers aside and said, “We’ll go out on one of the last helicopters so you can evacuate all these panicky Vietnamese first.”
Shortly after midnight Martin came downstairs and asked Colonel Madison how many evacuees remained. Relying on estimates from Summers and Herringt
on, Madison reported that there were 173 marines, 53 Americans, and about 500 Vietnamese and third-country nationals for a total of 726. In fact, there were around 1,100 people left. The JMT delegation had underestimated the number because it was dark and the evacuees were spread throughout the recreation area, making an accurate count difficult.
At 2:00 a.m., Madison decided to close off the recreation area and bring everyone into the parking lot so that the JMT could organize some of them into seventy-person loads for the CH-53s while sending others into the chancery to board the CH-46s landing on the roof. As the JMT began closing off the recreation area, some evacuees who had been near the gate were rerouted to the rear of another line. This happened to architecture student Binh Pho and his girlfriend. He recalled Herrington’s promises and told himself, “That’s fine. There’s no need to worry, we’re so close.”
As the evacuees filed out of the recreation area, Herrington and others on the JMT made the first accurate count of the evening. They told Colonel Madison that about 1,100 people remained. It was too late. Martin had reported 726 evacuees, and that number had gone to Gayler and the White House Situation Room. Based on that figure, Kissinger and Schlesinger agreed to send nineteen more helicopters and to insist that Martin leave on one of the last ones. Kissinger told Schlesinger, “If you don’t tell him [Martin] that this is a presidential order he won’t come out.”
Honorable Exit Page 39