by Peter Arnett
So is my wife, Nina, who explains that my mother, Jane, visiting us in New York at the time, can take care of our children while she accompanies me back to Saigon to take care of her own relatives. Nearly everyone we knew wants to leave because they fear that their connections to the earlier French authorities, and to the Americans, will imperil their future under a communist regime. My father-in-law once worked for the French colonial government, and was chief secretary to the Saigon National Assembly for a time. One brother-in-law is a senior logistics officer in the South Vietnamese army, the other an economic consultant to the current government. Within a week or two, fortunately, they are all able to leave.
Ambassador Martin has a major problem with handling a potential exodus of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who want to leave, while making sure the several thousands of Americans still in country are able to get out. He tells me after the war there was real danger of violence. “The feeling against Americans could have become a very dangerous thing. At this point General Loan, a police chief during the Tet uprising, had told one of our people that if you think you are going to march all the Americans to the airport and leave, you will find you are fighting us on the way out.” General Loan is the Saigon police chief who early in the Tet Offensive of 1968 was caught by AP photographer Eddie Adams executing an alleged communist agent at point-blank range with his pistol.
Later widely criticized for his handling of the exodus, the ambassador explained to me after the war, “My preoccupation was to keep certain stability in Saigon. We did manage that. This meant you could not suddenly pull out all the police, even those who had been helpful to you. Although we had a responsibility to them you did not pull out all of the senior Vietnamese military, without whom there could be no continuity of command for the military cordon, which was formed around Saigon and ready to fight, and still with a considerable combat capability.”
And as the powerful communist military machine that is capturing everything along the coast is preparing to wheel in from the east and west toward Saigon, the ambassador still has to deal with a desperate President Thieu, who remains adamant that America come to the rescue. A quick visit to Saigon is arranged for the last American force commander in Vietnam, General Frederick Weyand, who agrees to recommend to President Ford many hundreds of millions more dollars in financial aid. But no further aid materializes.
For a week or so, hopes and Vietnamese pride are raised by the valiant last stand of the South Vietnamese 18th Infantry Division at Xuan Loc, a provincial center, 50 miles east of Saigon. Xuan Loc holds the key to the gates of Saigon, anchoring the last defensive line that runs in an arc from the Cambodian border to the South China Sea. The 18th Division is the last of President Thieu’s final reserve, and he names it the Supermen Division as he sends it into action against the formidable communist juggernaut that so far has swept everything before it.
Surprising many, the 18th holds. I travel with other reporters to the battle scene a week into the action, our journey beginning badly when we realize the bus driver taking us to our helicopter departure point 15 miles away is crazily drunk. At Xuan Loc we meet the commander, General Le Minh Dao, at his makeshift headquarters amid the tangle of shell-wrecked buildings and destroyed vehicles. The roar of mortars and the crack of machine-gun fire rend the smoke-filled air as the daring general flatly vows to continue stalling the enemy advance, to try and hold on until death. Saigon’s last effective elite marine and ranger units are on their way to help. The Vietnamese air force is also defying anti-aircraft fire with numerous bombing and strafing runs against the enemy.
As we depart on a large transport helicopter sent in especially for us, several dozen local people fight to get on board, and are shoved back by rifle butt–wielding security men. The stubborn resistance at Xuan Loc forces the North Vietnamese commanders to change their final plan, directing units committed elsewhere to the unexpected battle, ordering them to “open the gates” to Saigon. The 18th Division holds on from April 9 to April 21, a heroic 13 days still remembered with pride by the uprooted Vietnamese living in the United States.
President Thieu is advised by his senior commanders that the fall of Xuan Loc has wiped out any further attempts to resist. Ambassador Martin also visits him, to hint broadly that it is time for him to go. Thieu resigns the next morning and flies off with a planeload of his possessions to Taiwan. In his interview in London, Thieu reveals his lasting bitterness toward the United States. “They abandoned us. They sold us out. They stabbed us in the back. It’s true, they betrayed us. A great ally failed a small ally.”
The CIA agent who escorted Thieu to the airport has a different assessment. “Thieu was far too tolerant of corruption. He was a weak leader. He made countless military errors for which lesser men would be drawn and quartered,” says Frank Snepp in an interview with me after the war. “But all that being said, he was lied to by the U.S. government.”
With Thieu gone, and thousands more jeopardized Vietnamese still to be evacuated, a flurry of wishful thinking pervades American officials in both Saigon and Washington. They begin to hope that the emergence of a nonaligned political leader in Saigon might persuade the North Vietnamese to end their military assault and accept some kind of political arrangement that will guarantee the neutrality of the city. The source of these fallacious ideas, reported seriously in some mainstream American newspapers, is apparently the French Embassy in Saigon and Russian diplomats trusted by Henry Kissinger in Washington. The appointment as president on April 28 of the aging General Duong Van Minh, the man who led the coup d’état against Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, is seen to be the ideal choice to bring such a deal to fruition. But an hour after he makes his first official speech calling for peace, captured South Vietnamese fighter-bombers flown by communist pilots make several bombing runs against the city. It is the North Vietnamese response to the wishful thinkers.
Frank Snepp is the senior CIA analyst in the embassy at that time. He learns through a classified intelligence system that General Van Tien Dung, his forces now firmly in control around the whole of Saigon, has begun thinking that the evacuation delay is deliberate. Snepp tells me, “He radios his field commanders. He thinks we are trying to pull a fast one, trying to hold up the evacuation, to buy time. He orders that if the Americans are not out of Saigon by 6 o’clock this evening, his people must use their artillery to blast the center of the city.” Snepp remembers that “panic reigned in the embassy that night.”
Officials did not pass on the threat information to the dozens of foreign journalists still working in Saigon. Within a few hours, they would find out for themselves what was on the impatient mind of General Dung.
Conclusion
War Ends, But
Vietnam Still Calls
The fall of Saigon, ending South Vietnam’s 20-year struggle for survival, comes with unforeseen suddenness, as I describe in the opening chapter of this book. An overwhelming blitz by the enemy, a chaotic scramble to evacuate by vulnerable Vietnamese and Americans still in the capital, then looting and a strange calm: All of this plays out before my eyes in a final, surreal day of this war.
The assault that brings this conclusion begins with an early morning bombardment of Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport on April 29, ordered by the commander of North Vietnamese military forces, General Van Tien Dung. His tanks then quickly roll in to take over the city. In the countryside, the few South Vietnamese military forces still reasonably well organized see further combat as pointless, either because of the overwhelming power of the communists’ heavy weaponry brought against them, or by the collapse of political will in Saigon.
Wire copy filed as an “Urgent” to New York by AP Saigon bureau chief George Esper on Apr. 29, 1975. It reads:
URGENT. Surrender (TOPS). (Saigon) - South Vietnam tonight announced its unconditional surrender to the Viet Cong. The announcement was made by President Duong Van “Big” Minh who said in a radio speech addressed to the Viet Cong: “We are here to hand over t
o you the power in order to avoid bloodshed.” He ordered the South Vietnamese Army to stop firing - and to remain in place.
(AP Corporate Archives)
Second wire copy filed as an “Urgent” from AP Saigon bureau chief George Esper on Apr. 29, 1975. It reads:
URGENT. Surrender (take 2). The surrender came only hours after Americans had left Saigon in an armada of helicopters guarded by some 800 Marines. The evacuating Americans had dodged random shots fired by bitter South Vietnamese soldiers and had fought off desperate civilians. Viet Cong gunners had sent rockets into Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut (Tahn Suhn Yuht) air base as a rear guard of American Marines had been evacuated from the rooftop of the abandoned US embassy in downtown Saigon. The shelling continued. And the Viet Cong claimed they had captured the big Bien Hoa (Byen Hwah) air base 15 miles north of the capital. Then came the announcement from Saigon: unconditional surrender.
(AP Corporate Archives)
Thirty-five miles north of Saigon, the high drama of the North Vietnamese military campaign unfolds at Lai Khe, home base of the 1st Infantry Division, President Thieu’s old outfit. The unit has guarded vulnerable Route 13, but is sidelined now because the lightning attack on Saigon comes from other directions. With his unit’s capabilities still intact, the division commander, Brigadier General Le Nguyen Vy, begins weighing his options, according to surviving officers I meet in Saigon a week or so later. His military command headquarters is not responding to his messages, however, and he is relying on Radio Saigon news broadcasts for tactical information. It was at this location, Lai Khe, where a brigade of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division was based during the American war, that I made the acquaintance of its innovative commander, Major General William DePuy, in 1966. His massive helicopter assaults on the enemy made military history. But there are no helicopters to assist General Vy today.
General Vy decides to regroup all units, in preparation to move the whole division south to Saigon to join in the fight. But by early morning of April 30 the fight is clearly over, as Saigon Radio reports communist troops moving toward downtown. At 7 a.m., General Vy calls a staff meeting. All are present except the deputy division commander, who has fled in an American plane. Vy turns the command of his division over to Colonel Tu Van, and tells them Saigon will soon fall, and adds, “As an officer of the South Vietnamese army I must act for the honor of the army, but you must protect the lives of the soldiers. Good luck to you all.” He returns to his quarters, lights a cigarette, takes his pistol and blows his brains out.
General Vy is buried with full military honors, the whole division assembled at the Lai Khe flagpole. A participating officer later tells me it was “a short but emotional service, his body buried, and the honor of the division is saved.” At 1 p.m. that day, after hearing of the government’s surrender, the division boards 200 trucks and drives over to the town of Ben Cat, newly occupied by the communists. The soldiers dismount, drop their weapons and take off their uniforms as about 50 enemy soldiers carrying Russian AK-47 rifles stand watching them. They stay for two days under guard at Ben Cat, and then all but the officers are released to their families.
The collapse of South Vietnam is noted for what didn’t happen as well as for what did. For weeks some American officials in Saigon are warning of a probable “bloodbath” against the population if vengeful communist soldiers are let loose, citing reports from the 16 provinces captured in the first six weeks of the offensive. Young embassy aides lobby journalists with tales of “horrendous crimes” and hand out pink copies of reports to Washington claiming the execution of 300 soldiers and policemen on the streets of Ban Me Thuot, and the wholesale killing of half-American babies in the coastal city of Nhatrang. The Saigon government will say only that it has “some confirming reports.”
But in an enterprising North Vietnamese initiative to discredit the accusations, several American journalists are invited to Danang where brutalities are allegedly being committed. A former AP senior executive, Dan De Luce, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his World War II reporting, and his wife Alma, a photographer, accept the invitation and fly in from New York. Their stories for the AP report on a calm Danang returning to normal. I challenge one persistent embassy official, whom I have known for 10 years, to tell me the truth. He acknowledges there is a political motive: “Well, honestly, we are making a lot of this issue because it can affect ongoing deliberations of the aid program here. We know some congressmen are already wavering to our side,” which is for the approval of a substantial financial package. The vigorous fear campaign helps panic Saigon’s already nervous population. Within a few weeks after the war’s end, at least 1,000 of the Vietnamese evacuees who fought their way out of the country on American aircraft and Navy transports are petitioning officials at the holding camps in Guam to return them home.
The North Vietnamese do have a punishing blueprint for their vanquished enemy, primarily an extensive program of re-education camps, which will eventually imprison hundreds of thousands of military and political opponents, sent to live precariously in remote parts of the country. Some remain incarcerated for years, including Brigadier General Ly Ba Hy, a 25-year veteran of the South Vietnamese army who, upon his release in 1987, writes a book titled, “My 4,584 Days of Re-education in Vietnam.” He will die in Paris in February 2015.
Another imprisoned officer is one I meet over the years, Major General Ly Tong Ba, the protégée of my friend the American warrior John Paul Vann. The Vietnamese officer’s outstanding generalship of the South Vietnamese 23rd Infantry Division contributes to decisive victory in the 1972 battle of Kontum, the same action where Vann is killed. In the defense of the western route into Saigon in the last days of the war in 1975, General Ba commands the 25th Infantry Division in a fight to the finish. His unit is relentlessly pounded by heavy communist artillery and tank fire, ominously echoing the enormous American Air Force B-52 bomber strikes used in his defense of Kontum three years earlier. I learn later from officers in Saigon that Ba ordered his headquarters’ unit at Cu Chi to hold, allowing a retreat of his surviving few hundred soldiers in the last hours of the war. He is caught about to escape across a nearby river as surrender is being announced in Saigon. The victorious communists do not view him with the same unabashed adoration felt for him by Vietnamese who seek to find honor in their defeat. General Ba is sent to imprisonment in a distant re-education camp, where for 13 years political cadres endeavor to quell his spirit. He is finally released in March 1988, white haired and weak but, according to his friends, unbroken. Within a year he arrives in the United States; he’ll die in February 2015 in Las Vegas with family around him.
The abuses of the re-education camps help fuel the unremitting bitterness of the vast majority of America’s Vietnamese veterans, who see April 30 not as the day of liberation as celebrated by the communist victors but as a date in a Black April that ruined their lives.
In Saigon immediately after the war’s end, the authorities allow us visiting newspeople to move around freely for a few days. Then they begin tightening controls, opening up international communications but restricting travel and closely censoring our stories. All bookstores and magazine stalls close after a government order prohibiting the sale or possession of any literature published under the former regime, a tit-for-tat response to the prior banning of all pro-communist literature. I notice that many soldiers are moving into houses around the city center, particularly those left behind by the evacuees. Sixteen soldiers occupy a house owned by my departed Vietnamese in-laws, where I had lived off and on for the previous 14 years. The soldiers’ leader explains, “Our policy is to cohabit with the people.” Then he asks that I give up my room. My days here now are clearly winding down. I present my white Karmann Ghia sports car, which served me well in covering the war in the early years, to our loyal office assistant, Huan, an eager, diminutive man who is not evacuated with the rest of our local staff. That’s because it turns out he is a polygamist, with two families, one separate from the other, and
he can’t decide which one to take.
Along with most of the press corps, I leave on May 24 on a Russian-built Ilyushin aircraft with Hanoi’s yellow-striped red flag painted on the tail. The night before my departure, I am summoned to the Saigon Giai Phong (Liberation) newspaper, the only publication now allowed in town. The editor greets me warmly and says, “I have read your dispatches while I was in the jungle, Mr. Arnett. I welcome you to the new Vietnam. Everything is perfect, isn’t it?” His comments have the moral certainty I’ve found in the views of most of the communist officials I’ve met in my three-week stay in the new Vietnam. I don’t argue with him. The days of arguing in South Vietnam seem over for good.
I believe I’ve put Vietnam behind me when I return to New York City in May 1975, and the AP gives me many other interesting assignments, including several weeks in India in 1976 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is drawing criticism over her repressive rule. But Vietnam will keep tugging me back, like a boat trying to put out to sea while still tied to the dock. The election of Jimmy Carter as America’s 39th president in 1976 comes as Americans are endeavoring to recover from the war and from the Watergate scandal, and he quickly moves with a new initiative to end what he describes as the “Vietnam malaise.” In a foreign policy speech early in 1977, he says, “For too many years we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs. We’ve fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is sometimes best quenched with water. This approach failed, with Vietnam the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty. But through failure we have now found our way back to our own principles and values, and we have regained our lost confidence.”