Saigon Has Fallen

by Peter Arnett

  Congress also orders the bombing of Cambodia to end on Aug. 15. I travel to Phnom Penh from Saigon to cover the story, and drive with colleagues 20 or so miles into the countryside. We walk through tangled underbrush to a grassy patch on the southern bank of the Mekong River, and wait. Early afternoon we hear the planes before we see them, two U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom jets flying out of a base in Thailand. As they dive toward the village, we see far across the broad river, the sun glinting on silver wings. We see flames and smoke arise from the village, but the aircraft are already climbing and on their way before we hear the bursting bombs. I’d seen a lot of American airstrikes and I would see a lot more in the future. But this is the last I’ll see launched in Southeast Asia in the 20th century. In Saigon, Hoang Duc Nha is alarmed by the news. “To us it was a signal. I tell my president, ‘Hey, this is the beginning. Put it together with Nixon’s Watergate crisis and the unsympathetic view of Congress toward us. We have to be worried.’” Thieu assures him he has confidence in the future.

  Nha, who spent much time in the United States in the 1960s, senses America has lost desire to worry about Vietnam. Through 1974, as bloody skirmishes increase in the countryside between the opposing forces, Nha says he counsels his colleagues on the National Security Council to rethink the strategy of trying to hold provinces from the north to the south. Better to consolidate in a more defensible position. They see him as a Cassandra, a persistent bearer of bad news. Thieu moves him out of the government, but remains his friend. Looking back, Nha says, “Our top officials saw America as the big brother riding the B-52s to save us, the little brother.”

  President Gerald Ford assumes the presidency in August 1974, after the resignation of Nixon. The communists launch an offensive against the important province of Phuoc Long north of Saigon to test America’s intentions. By Jan. 7 the provincial capital of Phuoc Binh has fallen after three weeks of fighting, with the South Vietnamese defenders, by accounts, acquitting themselves well. Ford’s response, the resumption of reconnaissance flights over the north, prompts President Thieu to complain to friends, “He sends doves, not B-52s.”

  Ambassador Graham Martin flies back to the United States to try to explain to Congress the gravity of the situation. He runs into another visitor, Tran Van Lam, the president of the South Vietnamese Senate, who is not well received by the Congress. The senator returns to Saigon and tells President Thieu not only was it highly unlikely there would be any supplemental aid, it was unlikely they would receive any aid at all in the next fiscal year, beginning in June.

  Graham Martin worries that Thieu’s stubborn confidence will crack. “If you try to stiffen someone’s back by giving them assurances you yourself do not believe, you are getting nowhere,” Martin tells me. He explains to Thieu the deterioration of the climate in the United States, trying to be as realistic as possible. But he sees that the Vietnamese leader still has not lost faith in a last-minute American rescue of South Vietnam with its air force armada.

  In an interview in London after the war for a television documentary I was working on, Thieu remembers thinking, “The United States had kept 300,000 troops in Europe for 30 years after the war, had kept 30,000 troops in Korea for 20 years after that war. And now we had let all American troops withdraw. We just asked for help to fight the war. Instead of maintaining half a million troops in Vietnam it would be 20 times less expensive for the American people. What more could they ask from a small nation?”

  10

  A “Shattering”

  Final Offensive

  The rapidly emerging communist military threat to the existence of South Vietnam comes cloaked in an air of mystery. The communist side makes a virtue of secrecy, its generals rarely seen in public while they plan the grand designs of war in nondescript buildings in Hanoi, or, when traveling to the southern battlefields, sometimes preferring to be incognito, dressed in commonplace clothing. Within a closed society where the media is just another tool of government, secrets are easily kept and obedience is mandatory.

  So it is that the 50-year-old General Van Tien Dung, chief of staff of the North Vietnamese armed forces, clandestinely assembles the largest military armada in his country’s long history of warfare. The mission, ordered by the Hanoi Politburo, is to finally liberate the south after a struggle that began in the late 1950s. His planning is helped by the legendary General Vo Nguyen Giap, who orchestrated the successful war against the French, and launched the later war against the Americans.

  General Dung is to accompany his troops into the first battle area in the Western Highlands, and he travels by road, his command group code-named A-75. Once in South Vietnam he uses the highway system his forces have covertly constructed in the years since the 1973 Paris Agreements, a new network that replaces the old Ho Chi Minh Trail and is later revealed to have been constructed with 30,000 combat soldiers and “shock youth,” including women. One 25-foot-wide paved stretch reaches from the border to Loc Ninh, near Saigon, and is the terminus for 3,000 miles of oil pipelines and a cable-telephone link with Hanoi.

  General Dung’s first target is Ban Me Thuot in the southern Central Highlands of South Vietnam, a nondescript city with a population of 150,000, a political and economic center and the headquarters of the South’s 25th Infantry Division. Saigon intelligence is vaguely aware of communist troop movements in the highlands, but assumes they are directed at the two more important and better defended cities farther to the north, Pleiku and Kontum. The presence of the highest-ranking communist general, if known, would immediately have set alarm bells ringing in Saigon, but Dung’s concealment holds, helped by an elaborate subterfuge in Hanoi that has his Volga sedan making trips from his home to military headquarters at 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. each day, and at 5 p.m. soldiers going to the courtyard at his home to play volleyball, a recreation he is known to enjoy.

  General Dung provides graphic details of the opening shots of the final communist offensive in a series of articles published in Hanoi the following year. He says he personally commanded the battle from a nearby observation point. At 2 o’clock on the morning of March 10, 1975, Dung’s forces assemble under the towering forests of the Cambodian border mountains, move through the tangled undergrowth around primitive villages and abandoned rubber plantations, and head toward Ban Me Thuot. His intelligence has determined that his attacking force has an advantage of 5.5 troops to 1 over the other side.

  Dung writes, “Our long-range artillery begins destroying the military targets in the city. No sooner has it opened fire than the lights go out. The airfield is ablaze. From 40 kilometers away our tank units start their engines; modern ferryboats are rapidly assembled to cross rivers, as queues form of waiting armored vehicles and anti-aircraft guns. The mountains and the forests of the Central Highlands are shaken by our firestorm. Basically, the battle was over by 10:30 the next morning.”

  Shaken also is President Thieu in Saigon. He makes a decision that many see as a major strategic error. He orders that his forces abandon the whole Central Highlands area and regroup along the populated coast. By March 16, thousands of panicked soldiers and their families struggle over a sometimes impassably rough highway to reach the coast. Hundreds die. This “vale of tears” sets the emotional climate for the weeks to follow. General Dung writes that he can’t understand that his unexpected blow against Ban Me Thuot has produced “such a shattering impact” on the enemy. But it is a blow that is constantly repeated in the next 50 days, to its victorious conclusion for General Dung in Saigon on April 30.

  An enthralled world watches throughout April 1975 as the high drama of South Vietnam’s destruction plays out in international newspaper and television reports. Depending on the point of view, what transpires is either the shameful betrayal by a superpower of one of its most vulnerable allies, or the glorious triumph of a long, bloody struggle by communist revolutionaries fighting to secure the independence of their country.

  For North Vietnamese Ambassador Ha Van Lau, watching from his post in Hav
ana, Cuba, and hearing cheers in the streets from supporters in this close communist ally, the news is intoxicating. “We are becoming the masters of our own land. Independent. The most glorious moment in our history,” he says in an interview after the war for a television show I am writing.

  For Nguyen Ngoc Linh, an old friend of mine, who as a student in New York City in the early 1950s sometimes helped out the monastic Ngo Dinh Diem, who later became the doomed president of South Vietnam, the events are heartbreaking. Linh returned to Saigon to establish a renowned English language school in the 1960s, and worked with the government for a few years before building a successful fishing business. In the closing weeks of the war, unable to get permission from a panicked government for his family to leave, Linh puts his wife and children in the locked-down hatch of one of his fishing boats and has the captain sail through Saigon River security patrols to the open sea and safety in Singapore. “I saw it as the end of my dreams for me and my country,” he tells me in an interview for this book in Arlington, Virginia, where he lives with many other educated Vietnamese who made new lives for themselves in America after the war but still feel themselves “losers.”

  For me, a pessimist about the South’s chances for survival in recent years, the news is galvanizing. I am reading about it in The New York Times as I ride a bus down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan from my East Side apartment to the AP headquarters at 50 Rockefeller Plaza. I rush to the foreign desk on the fourth floor, where an editor thrusts news copy at me and says, “Look at this. Total chaos.” I read a stream of information coming over the telex machine from our man in Saigon, George Esper, an indefatigable professional reporter I’d known for the 10 years he’s been based in Vietnam. I tell Wes Gallagher that I believe the end is near and that I need to go there. Gallagher has spent much of his AP presidency involved in the Vietnam story, spending millions to obtain the best coverage. His reporters and photographers have won five Pulitzer Prizes. “Get over there,” he tells me, “and we’ll need a helluva lot more people joining you if you’re right.” I’m on my way the next day.

  George Esper meets me at the Saigon airport, and tells me the government has just written off the northern quarter of the country, the provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien, including the old capital of Hue. I’m aware the Central Highlands are already gone, so South Vietnam is halved in a week. The Vietnamese people I know in Saigon are stunned and angry, realizing they are supporting a government that is continuing to stubbornly disregard the obvious arithmetic of the battlefield. They ask me where the Americans are, and where are the B-52 bombers that have rescued them in the past?

  On March 24, I hitch a ride on an Air America courier flight to Danang, a city second only to Saigon, with a million people, and where the retreating defenders from abandoned cities to the north are regrouping. The U.S. Marines I saw wading ashore in 1965 fired their first shots here, and the city since has become what is commonly described as a bastion. I notice as I land the rows of sleek fighter-bombers and helicopters at the airport, on call to assist the many thousands of defenders in camps on the outskirts. But in town I see a city on the verge of collapse as crowds gather at intersections, arguing and shouting, and soldiers walk the streets aimlessly, their weapons at rest. The picture darkens as barges and boats carrying the bedraggled military evacuees from Hue pull into the harbor. The main streets of the docks are soon mobbed by half-dressed soldiers, their weapons discarded or lost, their shoulders bent in weariness.

  I meet the American consul, Al Francis, who is hopeful that a planned airlift will soon fly tens of thousands of refugees to more secure locations in the south. That plan is soon quashed by the thump of exploding rockets that wakes me the next morning, the first shots fired by the communists against Danang. I marvel at the speed of the advance. Hue was 50 miles to the north and fell the previous day. Al Francis urges me and a few other reporters to hasten to the airport in a consulate van, and we push through crowds of people on the road heading in the same direction. By midmorning the terminal is crowded with men, women and children trying to leave. They are on the verge of hysteria, and mob the first plane to arrive, a chartered World Airways 727 we are booked to fly on. Airport security police begin shouting and firing their weapons in the air, and eventually push the crowds back, and I board the plane, grateful to be on my way back to Saigon to cover the worsening war as it moves closer to the nation’s capital.

  Three days later George Esper scoops his competitors with the news that Danang has fallen, but “thrown away” is a better term. A Vietnamese stringer photographer shows us his photographs of Danang’s China Beach and Marble Mountain areas that tell the truth of what happened. Scores of large artillery guns and tanks, shipped to Vietnam from American supply arsenals to defend Danang, are abandoned on the yellow sands. Their guns point not to the mountain valleys from where the communist attackers are emerging, but nose down into the rippling waters of the South China Sea where their crews are swimming on inflated inner tubes to waiting rescue barges offshore.

  In Washington, D.C., at this time, the Defense Department is blaming the lack of spare parts and insufficient bullets for the poor performance of the South Vietnamese military, and suggests Congress’s growing coolness toward adequate financing is the source of the problem. But with several thousand Americans still working in Saigon in the defense attaché’s office, officials have to know the sorry state of affairs. Morale is shockingly low in the Vietnamese army, and desertions have been growing over the previous two years. The billion dollars’ worth of military equipment shipped to Vietnam by President Nixon to help win approval of the peace agreement was not accompanied by technicians who know how to use it. The United States has supplied more than 1,200 attack and transport planes to the Vietnamese by late 1973, making it the third largest air force in the world, but even then confidential Pentagon reports state that barely 50 percent of the planes are in working condition.

  President Gerald Ford, endeavoring to put the government back together after President Nixon’s resignation, looks to his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to handle the growing political embarrassment in Vietnam. In December 1973, Kissinger accepted the Nobel Prize for bringing peace and honor to Vietnam, and now there is no peace and little honor. Kissinger turns to his ambassador to Saigon, Graham Martin, to bear some of the burden. At home for medical reasons but ready to return to his post, Martin is called in late March to Kissinger’s office for a meeting that includes the secretary’s principal aides. In a long career in the State Department, Martin has gained the reputation of a skilled, loyal diplomat. He delayed his retirement to take up the Saigon post in 1973.

  In a TV interview I have with Martin three years after the war, the ambassador recalls Kissinger telling him that day, “Well, we want to bid you Godspeed, you know. With the American propensity for the devil theory of history, we have to have someone out there to blame.” If Kissinger is adroitly passing the buck to his ambassador, he succeeds. Martin takes him seriously. He tells me, “This was recognition on his part, and equally on my part, that this is the way the ball bounces. Whoever is in charge assumes a certain responsibility. Like the chap who rescued the little boy who fell off the dock, at great risk to himself, and finally brings him to his mother who says, ‘Well, where is the cap he was wearing?’ That sort of reaction is bound to happen.”

  Gallagher calls me back to the United States to address the annual membership meeting of the Associated Press in New Orleans in early April. I am offered a ride home by Ed Daley, the president of Oakland-based World Airways, often under charter by the U.S. government. Daley is a bulky, beret-wearing character straight out of an old silent action movie, with the pistol tucked into a leather belt around his thick middle adding to the impression. He has upset some of my colleagues with his habit of backing up some of his noisy dinner table arguments by drawing his weapon and smacking it on the table. I like his style, and admire his stated intention to save as many people as he can with his fleet of jets p
arked at Tan Son Nhut airport.

  Daley doesn’t let pesky regulations get in his way. He has gathered up 57 tiny babies from orphanages and from local families. A score of American civilians, the wives of government contractors anxious to go home, agree to tend to them on the long ride to safety. We assemble at a warehouse building far beyond the airport terminal, where a DC-8 cargo jet is discreetly parked in a darkened part of the building. I ask Daley why all the caution and he tells me, “Well, we got the permissions from local families to pick up the orphans, but the authorities are trying to tell me we can’t leave without a lot of paperwork. So this will be a flight without the paperwork.”

  The chief pilot, Ken Healy, tells me of another complication, that our departure clearance has been denied because of a possible guerrilla attack on the airport. Daley brushes that aside, and orders we take off anyway. I go up to the cockpit and Daley hands me headphones. We taxi to the runway and accelerate. I hear the tower shouting, “Don’t take off, don’t take off. You have no clearance,” but by the time the command is repeated for the third time we are in the air. I slide to the back of the plane with the orphans, many of them sleeping as the big jet soars farther into the sky, setting a course first for the Yokota airbase in Japan for refueling, and from there to Oakland, a 25-hour dash to freedom. Daley’s dramatic flight makes large headlines in the United States and helps force officials to face up to the crisis and begin evacuating the most vulnerable people, and sooner rather than later, all Americans, from Saigon.

  To the newspaper publishers in New Orleans I explain, “It is not easy to describe in these lovely surroundings in this lovely American city the total chaos that is enveloping the people of Saigon, who for better or worse participated in America’s grand scheme to make South Vietnam a bulwark against the communism that is now overrunning it.” I’m asked how long Saigon has left. I predict it will fall within the month. They seem stunned.