They concluded their conversation with an elegiac appreciation of Martin.
Schlesinger called him “a man with a mission.”
“Well, he lost a son there,” Kissinger replied.
“Yes. You have got to admire the bugger.”
“Look, his thoughts are in the right direction.”
“That’s right. Dedication and energy.” Before Kissinger could respond, Schlesinger added, “You weep.”
That night at least, there was no talk of “Madman Martin” or of Martin “losing his cool” or going out like Chinese Gordon. Instead, their remarks were a perceptive summary of his strengths, albeit ones ill-suited to his current role.
He was indeed “a man with a mission”—a dedicated cold warrior who had had the misfortune of being pressured by Nixon and Haig into presiding over Kissinger’s decent interval. Despite a debilitating illness, he had exhibited “dedication and energy,” and as for his thoughts being “in the right direction,” his words and deeds had shown that he believed his country had a moral responsibility to evacuate South Vietnamese. Nevertheless, a Communist disinformation campaign, combined with his pride, stubbornness, errors of judgment, and belief in his own infallibility, had conspired to turn the embassy’s evacuation into a debacle. Schlesinger was right. “You weep.” What else could you do in the face of such tragic heroism?
At 2:30 a.m., Admiral Gayler cabled Martin. “I have been directed to send you the following message from [the] President: ‘On the basis of the reported total of 726 evacuees CINCPAC is authorized to send 19 helicopters and no more. The President expects Ambassador Martin to be on the last helicopter.’ ” Gayler added that Secretary of Defense Schlesinger wanted the last chopper to depart by 3:45.
Just before 3:00 a.m., the helicopters began arriving again on the roof and in the parking lot in quick succession. The line of evacuees snaking up the stairwell to the helipad moved quickly upward as each CH-46 carried away forty passengers. Down below in the parking lot, the CH-53 Sea Stallions were boarding as many as ninety Vietnamese and third-country nationals at a time.
Ross Meador was one of the last American civilians to leave. He had driven from breakfast at the Duc Hotel to the embassy, waving his revolver in the air to clear a path to the front gate. As a favor to his friend Father McVeigh, he had agreed to accompany a Vietnamese family. Their turn did not come until the last nineteen helicopters began arriving. As they jogged toward a helicopter on the roof, the mother’s suitcase burst open, spilling out money, photographs, and other family treasures. She dashed about, dragging a child by one hand while scooping up the remains of her former life. A marine threw her into the helicopter, and Meador watched the wash from its rotors blow her money and photographs into the night.
The Sea Stallions descended to the parking lot through clouds and smoke, red taillights winking and white headlights moving like spotlights across the compound. Marines ran the evacuees up their ramps, and the helicopters lifted off within three minutes. Martin appeared around 3:30 a.m. and asked Madison for a count of the people still in the compound. Before returning upstairs, he was heard telling a marine, “Everyone in that compound is leaving—everybody.”
Madison called Lehmann on his walkie-talkie and reported that they had 420 people remaining and that six more sorties would clear the compound in a matter of minutes. Among the 420 were the embassy firemen, South Korean diplomats and military officers, a German priest, and Y. I. Ching, the Chinese American merchant seaman from Hawaii.
Lehmann said he had been listening to the marines’ communication net and had just heard that the pilots had received orders to limit the evacuation to the CH-46s that could land on the roof and only to board Americans.
“Jesus,” Madison said. “I’ve been telling these people for hours that we’ll get them out. Give the ambassador the numbers. Tell him who they are. Tell him this is the honest-to-God end of it.” He reminded Lehmann that the six choppers could clear the landing zone within twenty minutes and said, “We’re not going anywhere until all of those presently marshaled inside the compound are evacuated.”
Lehmann called back minutes later to report that Martin believed that he could arrange for six more CH-53 sorties. Martin’s special assistant Brunson McKinley came downstairs and repeated Lehmann’s assurances. Madison and Summers walked through the six groups of seated evacuees, promising that their departure was imminent.
Martin’s request for six more helicopters was met with suspicion and derision on the fleet, in the Pentagon, and at the White House Situation Room. Throughout the afternoon and evening, when asked how many evacuees were left at the embassy, Martin had reported two thousand remaining but had then offered the same number several hours and many helicopter sorties later. Vice Admiral Steele, who commanded the Seventh Fleet and was aboard the Blue Ridge with Whitmire and Carey, decided that Martin’s embassy had become “a bottomless pit” and that “through loyalty to our Vietnamese colleagues he [Martin] was going to keep the evacuation going indefinitely and…force it to keep going by not coming out himself.” In fact, the number had remained constant throughout the early evening because of the difficulty in estimating the size of the crowd in the recreation area and the sympathetic diplomats and marines who had allowed hundreds more South Vietnamese to come over the walls and through the gates.
Gayler forwarded Martin’s request for additional helicopters to the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon. Schlesinger, who had never supported a large-scale evacuation of Vietnamese, believed that Martin was “busily engaged in holding back Americans and putting aboard Vietnamese that he wanted to rescue” and “trying to evacuate all of the people of Southeast Asia.” He called Deputy Secretary Paul Clements, who was representing the Pentagon in the White House Situation Room, and said that in his opinion the embassy was out of control and that even if they continued the evacuation for another twenty hours, it would still be full. He did not tell Clements, or Ford and Kissinger, that Martin was requesting only six more helicopters to make a clean sweep.
Why Martin had instructed Lehmann and McKinley to tell Madison that six more Sea Stallions were en route remains unexplained. Perhaps he misunderstood a radio message, an understandable mistake given the state of his health and the gimcrack nature of the communication network after the antenna at the DAO went down, or perhaps he assumed that the White House would accede to his demand, as it had to his other ones, or perhaps someone in the chain of command had promised him the phantom helicopters as a way to persuade him to leave.
At 4:30 a.m., after learning that the limit of nineteen helicopters had been reached, Lieutenant General Carey ordered Captain Gerry Berry, the pilot of “Lady Ace 09,” to evacuate only Americans and not to leave the roof without Ambassador Martin. He also gave Berry and Major Kean permission to use force to remove Martin from the embassy. When Vice Admiral Steele asked Carey what they should do if Martin refused to leave, Carey replied, “We put a Marine on either side of him and carry him out if we have to.”
After Berry landed, a marine corporal at the helipad summoned Kean to the roof. Kean read Berry’s orders and borrowed the corporal’s headset so he could speak with Carey. Knowing that his transmission would be broadcast over the loudspeaker in the war room of the Blue Ridge, he told Carey that his marines were guarding the embassy walls and that between these walls and the chancery’s front door “there are some four hundred people who are still waiting to be evacuated.” Kean did not want their betrayal on his conscience, and so, speaking slowly and carefully, he told Carey, “I want you to understand clearly that when I pull the Marines back to the Embassy those people will be left behind.”
Carey repeated that the order to remove Martin and restrict the airlift to Americans came directly from the president.
Kean walked downstairs to Martin’s office and relayed the president’s order, adding that a helicopter had landed on the
roof and would not leave until he was on board. Martin stared back for several seconds, not saying anything or showing any emotion. He had already received a message from Kissinger informing him that President Ford wanted him on the next helicopter, and to that he had replied, “I don’t take my orders from you, I only take my orders from the President.” Now that Ford had given him a direct order, he would have to obey it.
Replying to Kean, Martin drawled in his southern accent, “Well there’s a little more to be done, Major.” He wrote a final message on a legal pad informing the White House that he would close the embassy at 4:30 and destroy its communications equipment. He concluded it, “This is the last message from embassy Saigon.” Turning to Lehmann, he said, “Wolf, let’s go upstairs.”
The most dangerous place in the embassy had proved to be its helipad. There were no guardrails, and it was slippery from the rain, buffeted by the helicopters’ propeller wash, and connected to the roof’s lower level by an eighteen-step metal ladder. At 2:00 a.m., the marine ground controller had fallen from the helipad onto the lower roof and had to be medically evacuated. Moorefield volunteered to replace him and spent the next several hours guiding in the helicopters and loading them. Before Kean went downstairs to tell Martin that he had to leave, he informed Moorefield that no more CH-53s would be landing in the parking lot and that the remaining CH-46 sorties from the roof would be Americans only. Moorefield looked down at the 420 evacuees sitting on the ground, waiting for helicopters that would never arrive and thought, “Why isn’t someone from the embassy saying, ‘Hell no! We’re not leaving until they go!’ ”
Martin appeared on the roof carrying a folded American flag under one arm. Shouting to be heard over the rotors, Moorefield said, “Mr. Ambassador, they say you have to take this helicopter. Presidential order.” Martin looked spent, but his shoes were shined and his gray suit was pressed. Moorefield put a hand underneath his elbow, as he had while helping him down the metal stairs at Tan Son Nhut when they had arrived together in 1973. After walking him to Lady Ace 09, he put both hands underneath his armpits and gently lifted him into the helicopter. Polgar and Lehmann followed. Moorefield decided that there was, at last, nothing more he could do and joined the remaining American civilians on the next helicopter, leaving behind the marine guards, the 420 evacuees in the parking lot, and Colonel Madison and his JMT delegation.
It fell to Major Kean to tell Madison that during the last sixteen hours Madison and his men had been lying to the 420 people sitting on the ground in front of them.
Madison swore and said, “I’m not leaving until these people leave. We’ve been promising them they’d go all day. We have a firm number now and there’s no reason we can’t get them out.”
“Presidential order,” Kean said, “and I’m not going to risk my men any longer.”
“Those helicopters were promised to us. We were promised six lifts to get these people out. I’m going to take this up with the ambassador or his deputy.”
“You can’t!” Kean pointed to the sky and said that Martin and Lehmann were aboard the helicopter that had just departed.
Herrington, Bell, Summers, and others on the JMT had been sitting on the hoods of cars that had been positioned so that their headlights illuminated the landing zone. Herrington saw Madison throwing up his arms in frustration as Kean walked back into the chancery.
Madison went from one man to the next, explaining the situation and saying they had no choice and should drift into the chancery one by one. He asked Herrington to leave last because he spoke Vietnamese, meaning he would be the last American to tell the last lie to a Vietnamese.
Herrington briefly considered staying and making himself a hostage but decided it would be a pointless gesture. The marines would never land helicopters in an unsecured area, and the North Vietnamese would take him prisoner. “Don’t be a fool,” he told himself. “You’ll never get these people out. You have a wife and kids, and an army career. You won’t get these people out so what good would it do?”
He spent several minutes on his walkie-talkie pretending to talk with the helicopters. He finally turned to a Vietnamese man and said, “I’ve got to take a leak.” The man laughed as Herrington disappeared into the bushes.
A plaque in the lobby commemorated the embassy personnel who had lost their lives when the Vietcong stormed the building during the Tet Offensive. Herrington had asked an embassy engineer to crowbar it off the wall so he could take it with him. He thought, “Those guys would roll over in their graves if they could see what was happening now,” and decided to leave it behind.
Summers and Madison had already left by the time Herrington arrived on the roof. He, Bell, Pace, and a single marine were the only passengers on a helicopter that could have brought out dozens of Vietnamese. Bell was so tired that he crawled aboard. He had accomplished what he had promised himself: see the war through to its end and rescue as many people as he could as a tribute to Nova and Michael. No one in the helicopter spoke. Bell and Herrington were so embarrassed that they avoided each other’s eyes.
The sky was lightening, but the lights remained on in the parking lot. Herrington saw the abandoned evacuees staring up at his helicopter. The firemen stood out in their yellow slickers and helmets. Their families were already on the ships and would be watching as helicopters landed with evacuees, hoping to see their husbands and fathers. Herrington could not pick out the German priest, or the Vietnamese nuns, or the Korean diplomats and intelligence agents, but he knew they were there. Also there, although he did not know their names, was Rhee Dai Yong, who headed the South Korean intelligence agency in South Vietnam and would spend five years in Communist prisons, and Dr. Huynh Trien Vo, the assistant minister of information whom Lem Truong had seen boarding one of the embassy buses that afternoon and who would spend ten years in concentration camps. There was cabinet minister N. D. Xuan, who would die in one of the camps, and Minister of Finance Chau Kim Nhan, who would escape on a boat, and Y. I. Ching, the Chinese American seaman whom the marines would teargas in a few minutes when he tried to follow them as they withdrew into the chancery and who would spend six months in a Communist internment camp. There was architecture student Binh Pho, who for years would wake in a cold sweat, his heart racing, from nightmares featuring helicopters, and there was Thu Minh Nguyen, the wife of a U.S. mission employee, and her six children. She had been at the top of the stairs when a marine told her that the helicopter currently on the roof had room for only two of her six children. She decided to keep her family together and leave on the next helicopter, so she offered their places in line to the two people behind her. The next helicopter was Lady Ace 09. After Martin left, a marine told Nguyen to go downstairs and join the others in the parking lot. Her husband would spend twelve years in a concentration camp, and in 1978 she and her oldest son and daughter would escape on a fishing boat. Also left behind was twelve-year-old Carina Hoang and her mother, who had bought the fake papers claiming that their father worked for the embassy. Carina and her older siblings would be barred from attending school because her father had been an ARVN officer, and he would be incarcerated for fourteen years. Like Nguyen’s children, Carina became a boat person, escaping in 1979. A decade later, her family was reunited.
The abandoned 420 were a fraction of the South Vietnamese who should have been evacuated. These included Alan Carter’s USIA employees and their families, the people at Shep Lowman’s villa, 9 justices of South Vietnam’s Supreme Court, the 250 Vietnamese CIA employees marooned at a distant supply depot, the 70 CIA translators who never made it over the embassy wall, the people gathered at the Brink Hotel whom Moorefield had told to “stand fast,” the 150 senior policemen whom Martin had promised to evacuate from police headquarters and who had waited there all day before giving up and fleeing, leaving behind files identifying their double agents.
Luck, contacts, perseverance, courage, and the bravery and resolve of thei
r American and Vietnamese friends and employers played a part in determining who escaped. And so the Vietnamese working for Pan Am and the Military Sealift Command got out, while those working for IBM and the USIA did not. The 150 Vietnamese employed by the CIA’s propaganda radio station escaped with their families because their American supervisors had moved the entire station to Phu Quoc on April 20 and had arranged to evacuate them on an MSC freighter, while the 150 Vietnamese CIA agents and employees who had been told to assemble at the Duc Hotel were abandoned.
Still, it is difficult to imagine how an evacuation that until its final days and hours was conceived and executed largely in secrecy and in defiance of senior U.S. and Vietnamese officials, and was managed by people who were sleepless, hungry, and fearing for their lives and careers, could have been perfectly equitable. Considering what was accomplished, and against what odds, and how quickly South Vietnam and its armed forces collapsed, evacuating so many Vietnamese in such a short period of time was a significant achievement. Nevertheless, many Americans left South Vietnam burdened by guilt. Sensing this, a Vietnamese man who had come to say good-bye to an American friend who was waiting to board an evacuation bus told a group of Americans gathered on the street, “You may hear after you leave that some here have died, perhaps even at their own hand. You must not spend the rest of your lives with that guilt. It is just part of Vietnam’s black fate, in which you, all of you, became ensnared for a time.”
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