Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Stuart Herrington struggled to find words to describe the “sense of shame” that had swept over him as he flew away that morning. On reflection, however, he decided that it was astonishing how many Vietnamese had escaped and that the evacuation had in fact “exceeded any reasonable expectation of what should have been accomplished.” But like many serving out the final days of Kissinger’s decent interval, he could still see, years later, “the faces of those I knew we were leaving behind” while finding it more difficult to recall those of the Vietnamese he had sent to the United States to begin new lives as American citizens.

  Epilogue

  Six hours after Graham Martin left Saigon, President Minh surrendered unconditionally. He spent the next eight years in his villa cultivating orchids before leaving for exile in France and California.

  After Jack Madison, Stuart Herrington, Bill Bell, and Harry Summers landed on the Okinawa, Summers asked a journalist, “Do you know what you just saw?” When the journalist answered, “The fall of Saigon,” Summers said, “You saw betrayal of the first order.” Herrington was weeping as he told a reporter, “They lied to us at the very end….They promised. They promised….I have never received an order in my life to do something I was ashamed of.”

  Madison and Summers told Lieutenant Colonel Jim Bolton, who commanded the helicopter unit based on the Okinawa, that six more sorties could have evacuated the 420 people left behind. Bolton was appalled and said, “If I had known that, there wouldn’t have been any problem getting those people out.” Colonel Summers said later about the 420, “The fleet thought they were operating with a bottomless pit and that they had to cut it off someplace, because the pilots were dead on their feet….They didn’t know that all that was left was six loads; if they had, they would have pulled them out. I thought it was sort of the Vietnam War in microcosm—great intentions and everybody trying to do the right thing, but managing to screw it up at the end.”

  Madison told Summers and Herrington, “We’ve got to get this betrayal down on paper while it’s fresh in our minds.” They wrote up a report and transmitted it under the guise of their weekly JMT report so it would be routed to the White House, Pentagon, and all commands and embassies around the world. Soon after returning to Washington, Madison resigned from the army. After Herrington retired, he became a military intelligence consultant. The Pentagon hired him to train military interrogators for the Iraq War. In a 2003 report commissioned by the army, he criticized the abuse of Iraqi prisoners as “counterproductive” and “technically illegal” and castigated the CIA for holding “ghost detainees.” In 1996, Henry Kissinger watched a documentary about the fall of Saigon during which Herrington blamed him for betraying the 420 evacuees. Kissinger claimed to be “stunned.” He called Herrington to apologize and insisted that no one had told him that anyone had been left at the embassy.

  Summers retired in 1985 and had a distinguished career as an academic and commentator on military affairs. He later offered a compassionate evaluation of Martin’s dilemma, saying that Martin had to maintain U.S. support for Thieu’s government while not raising suspicions that America was abandoning Thieu, yet also plan how to evacuate Americans and Vietnamese. Summers concluded that Martin had erred on the side of ignoring evacuation planning because he believed that negotiations would make it unnecessary.

  Bill Bell was posted to the Vietnamese refugee processing center at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where he debriefed former South Vietnamese officials. He ran into Lieutenant Colonel Pham Xuan Huy, the officer he had seen lurking outside the JMT offices. Soon afterward he married one of Huy’s daughters. His own daughter, Andrea, survived the injuries she had suffered on the Babylift crash. During the next ten years Bell interviewed hundreds of Vietnamese refugees in the United States and Southeast Asia while searching for information about American MIAs. In 1988 he was appointed senior field investigator for the Pentagon’s first POW/MIA search-and-recovery efforts in postwar Vietnam. In 1991 he opened the U.S. office for POW/MIA affairs in Hanoi, becoming the first American official to be posted to Vietnam since the war ended.

  Walter Martindale spent the next seven months in the Philippines, Guam, and Hong Kong coordinating the transport, processing, and resettlement of Vietnamese refugees. He had flown his adopted four-year-old son, Luc, and three-year-old daughter, Van, to the United States before the fall of Saigon. Their documents and clothes were misplaced while they were in transit, and they were misidentified as orphans. He finally located them and placed them in the care of his family. Adoptions by single parents were uncommon then, and it took him over a year to complete the process and for his children to receive citizenship and diplomatic passports so they could accompany him on foreign assignments. Martindale says they became “typical suburban kids” during his postings to Washington, D.C. He never learned the fate of the young Vietnamese woman who had fallen onto the iron fence separating his building from the Italian embassy. Four decades later, he said, “I can’t tell you the nights I have dreamed about her and wondered what happened to her.”

  Lionel Rosenblatt left the State Department in 1991 and founded Refugees International, a nongovernmental organization providing humanitarian assistance to displaced persons. Craig Johnstone, who had accompanied him to Saigon, would become United Nations deputy high commissioner for refugees.

  Ken Quinn, Ken Moorefield, Don Hays, Terry McNamara, and Theresa Tull had successful diplomatic careers. Quinn became U.S. ambassador to Cambodia. Hays was appointed U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for United Nations reform. Tull served as U.S. ambassador to Guyana and then to Brunei. Her friend General Truong was reunited with his wife and children in the United States several months after the war and became a computer programmer. Tull retired to Northern Virginia and frequently sees his children, who consider her a close member of their family.

  Ken Moorefield served as U.S. ambassador to Gabon. When asked to reflect on the evacuation a decade later, he said, “There was so much life lived during the final ten days, with the country literally crashing down around our ears. The speed, the rapidity of the events during that experience makes it, in retrospect, almost as if a movie was being run in front of me at a very fast speed.”

  Terry McNamara also concluded his career as ambassador to Gabon. He wrote an account of his experiences during the evacuation that he dedicated to his aide Hank Cushing and to Major General Nam, calling them “both now dead but not forgotten.”

  Bill Ryder remains haunted by the people he prevented from boarding his overloaded barge at gunpoint. Over the years he has asked himself, “You know, who the hell am I to play God?” He adds, “Of course Kissinger and Ford had also played God, but they didn’t have to look into the faces of those people.”

  Glenn Rounsevell learned that only a few of the thirty-three CIA key indigenous personnel whom he had not pulled over the embassy wall on April 29 had escaped on ships and barges. He assumed that the rest would spend years in concentration camps. After returning to Washington “guilt-ridden and saddened,” he resigned from the CIA and pursued a career in education.

  Tom Polgar concluded his CIA career as head of personnel. After retiring, he was hired to investigate the Iran arms scandal. He later became more sympathetic to Martin’s position, telling an interviewer, “The [Ford] administration used Graham Martin as the fall guy, directing him to pursue a policy that simply had no chance of succeeding and for which there was no domestic support.” One of their last exchanges had occurred on the Blue Ridge. After overhearing Polgar tell a group of senior naval officers, “Well, we got our people out,” Martin had interrupted and said, “The fuck you did.”

  Over the next thirty years Richard Armitage served in several senior foreign policy and military positions, including assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the Reagan administration and deputy secretary of state under Secretary Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration.

&
nbsp; Erich von Marbod became the Pentagon representative to the Interagency Task Force for Indochina and traveled across the United States identifying sites for resettlement camps. He has had a long and storied career at the Pentagon. During a 1976 congressional hearing on the evacuation, Martin accused him of having precipitated the shelling of Tan Son Nhut on the morning of April 29 by persuading the VNAF high command to encourage its pilots to fly their aircraft to bases in Thailand following the attack on the airport the day before. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) offered von Marbod an opportunity to respond. He declined because he was on assignment in Iran for the Pentagon and believed that his testimony would destroy Martin’s chances for a senior position in the State Department.

  Martin told an oral historian that it was “pretty obvious” that von Marbod was responsible for North Vietnam shelling Tan Son Nhut. “Von Marbod was a wonderful guy. I like him very much, but he’s a bloody disaster area,” he said. “He had no authority but he finally persuaded Ky of all people to get the planes out.” Von Marbod could have made a strong case in his defense. Only a small number of VNAF planes left after the April 28 bombing. Most departed the next morning as a consequence of the early morning barrage. Furthermore, intercepts of North Vietnamese communications and General Dung’s memoir showed that by April 19 the Communists had already decided to shell Tan Son Nhut.

  Four months after leaving Saigon, Lacy Wright ran into Jackie Bong in a drugstore near the State Department. She had been spirited out of Vietnam with the assistance of Americans she would later compare to the Righteous Gentiles. They married in 1976 and she changed her name to Bong-Wright, joined the Foreign Service, and accompanied her husband to postings in Italy and Brazil. She blamed Kissinger for abandoning South Vietnam, writing in her memoir that when they crossed paths at the entrance to the State Department in 1980, “My heart beat so loudly that I was shaking. I stopped right behind him, tears running down my face, without the strength to say a word.” They finally met when Kissinger traveled to Brazil in 1995 with a group of American executives. When she told him that she was Vietnamese, he said, “I feel sorry when I see a Vietnamese.”

  The Communists arrested Dr. Lem Truong’s fifteen-year-old son for distributing antigovernment leaflets. He cut his wrists so he could make an escape attempt while being transferred to a hospital. He failed, and Truong sent him money to bribe his way to freedom. In 1987 she finally got him and her husband and youngest son out of Vietnam with the help of a French general who was in charge of France’s Indochina refugee program. After years in Communist prisons her son could hardly walk and had become so sensitive to light that he had to wear dark glasses. Truong’s infant daughter, who had escaped with her on the boat, became a graphic designer at Condé Nast publications.

  The 150 people on Truong’s boat were among the tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees whom the U.S. Navy rescued in the days following the surrender. Most had no documents and were not related to U.S. citizens. After a reporter asked the navy to justify picking them up and bringing them to the United States, a navy spokesman said, “They were there. They were on the high seas. They were rescued.”

  Architecture student Binh Pho and his girlfriend, who had hung back to help their friends manage their children, were among the abandoned 420. Before leaving the compound, Pho collected the piastres that they had turned into paper airplanes. He and his girlfriend broke up soon afterward, and he made several escape attempts. He was arrested, interrogated, and imprisoned for a year. Following his release he escaped to a Malaysian island and spent months in a refugee camp before immigrating to the United States. According to a handsome coffee-table book celebrating his life and work, he has become “a leading figure in the new international movement in contemporary wood sculpture.”

  On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, former president Gerald Ford told historian Douglas Brinkley, “I still grieve over those we were unable to rescue….Yet along with the pain there is pride. In the face of overwhelming pressure to shut our doors, we were able to resettle a first wave of more than 130,000 Vietnamese refugees. To have done anything less in my opinion would have only added moral shame to military humiliation.”

  Henry Kissinger held a press conference in Washington on the afternoon of April 29, just minutes after Graham Martin boarded Lady Ace 09. He said, “Until Sunday night [Monday morning, April 28, in Saigon] we believed there was some considerable hope that the North Vietnamese would not see a solution by purely military means.” He explained that once General Minh assumed the presidency, “we thought that a negotiated solution in the next few days was highly probable.” He called North Vietnam’s shift to a military solution “sudden,” implying that it had not been part of North Vietnam’s long-standing plan. When asked why he believed this, he said that “the battlefield situation suggested that there was a stand-down of significant military activity” and that the Communists’ public statements had suggested that they would negotiate with Minh. Referring obliquely to the administration’s communications with the Soviets, he said, “There were also other reasons which led us to believe that the possibility of a negotiation remained open.”

  In August 1975 the State Department reported that 130,810 refugees from Indochina, most of them Vietnamese, were in its resettlement program. By the end of the year, 120,000 had been resettled across the United States. During the next twenty-five years they were joined by another 1.3 million Vietnamese. Some were boat people; others left under the United Nations Orderly Departure Program, a plan instituted to alleviate the horrors experienced by the boat people.

  A Gallup poll released in May 1975 showed that only 36 percent of Americans supported the admission of Vietnamese refugees. The hostility to the Vietnamese came from working-class Americans, who feared that they would take their jobs, and members of the antiwar movement whose members, according to the noted Harvard sociologist David Riesman, demonstrated “an extraordinary callousness toward the South Vietnamese.” The Seattle City Council voted 7–1 against a resolution proposing that the city welcome Vietnamese refugees, and Governor Jerry Brown of California was critical of the Ford administration’s open-door policy toward Vietnamese refugees. Several days after the fall of Saigon, Senator George McGovern (D-S.D.), who had run for president on an antiwar platform in 1972, told students at Eastern Illinois University, “Ninety percent of the Vietnamese refugees would be better going back to their own land.” He added, “I have never thought that more than a handful of government leaders were in any real danger of reprisals.” He advocated “steps to facilitate their return to Vietnam,” saying that he was planning to introduce legislation to pay for ships and planes to take them home.

  Washington Post writer William Greider called Americans’ hostility to Vietnamese refugees “a last poisonous convulsion from the finished war in Vietnam—so ugly and out of character with an American past when refugees were welcome.” Nathan Glazer, the co-author of Beyond the Melting Pot, a groundbreaking work about immigration, blamed some of the antipathy on American journalists who had portrayed the South Vietnamese as “corrupt” and “unable to defend themselves.”

  The Ford administration and the military refused to bow to public opinion and political pressure. Speaking of the seventy-five thousand or so “self-evacuated” Vietnamese refugees—a number including the passengers on the South Vietnamese naval vessels, Bill Ryder’s MSC barges, the people Jim Parker had rescued at Vung Tau, and the tens of thousands of Vietnamese who put to sea in anything that (briefly) floated—a State Department spokesman said, “The administration believes it has a moral obligation to help these refugees who fled from the Communist takeover in Vietnam.”

  There was no Cambodian-style bloodbath in Vietnam, but there were summary executions. How many is disputed, but they were probably in the thousands. Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese, including military officers, government officials, intellectuals, journalists, and those supporting
the Thieu government and allied with Americans, were incarcerated in so-called reeducation camps where they performed hard labor. Many were incarcerated for between three and ten years, with some spending seventeen years in the camps. Tens of thousands died of malnutrition, mistreatment, and disease. Several months after the war, a Frenchwoman visited a Vietnamese friend who reported that a mutual friend, a former official of the central bank, was in a reeducation camp. When the Frenchwoman asked, “What’s he studying?” her friend shot back, “You idiot! He’s in a concentration camp.”

  Martin gave an impromptu press conference on the Blue Ridge. A reporter described his eyes as “flat” and his skin as “chalky.” He mumbled the answers to a few questions “in a dazed monotone” before bumming a cigarette from a journalist. He spent months in hospitals in Italy and Maryland being treated for congestion in his lungs, cancer, and other ailments. He saw Henry Kissinger for the last time when they spent half an hour together in Kissinger’s office. According to Martin, “Henry spent twenty-five of those minutes talking on the phone with [New York Times columnist] James Reston.”

  Martin told a congressional committee in January 1976, “If I could relive that month [April 1975] I would change almost nothing in the way the Saigon Mission reacted to the realities of the unfolding situation.” He spoke of “dispassionate historians” vindicating the embassy’s performance, and speaking as much to these historians as to Congress, he testified that because he considered the Justice Department’s April 25 decision to grant an emergency immigration parole to fifty thousand endangered South Vietnamese “clearly insufficient,” he had “interpreted the number to mean heads of families and not the families too.” He added, “I thought we had an obligation to these people and I was insisting to the bitter end that we continue the lift until we got out all of the people that we had there ready to go.” Several years later he told an interviewer, “During the last couple of weeks I was doing things that were totally illegal and getting criticized for not doing more.”