“The bombs are definitely closer,” Thu said softly, her face half-buried in the pillow.
“Yes. Are you going into work today? We need to think about what we will do when the inevitable comes.”
“As long as the embassy is open, I will go to work. It’s my job. I’m part of the embassy staff now, and that will protect us when the time comes. Some evacuations have already begun, and we will go when our time comes.”
“America has bigger problems than to worry about my little country girl. Your embassy friends will not protect you. Not only will the communists know you worked for the Americans, they will know we are Catholics, too, and they hate our religion. They will not be kind. You will be tortured until you give them information. We may both be killed. I know how they work.”
“If our army can’t stop the North, we will have to leave, I know that. There will be nothing left for us here. But I have been loyal to the United States. The Americans will stand by us. We will go to America and raise our children in a new world, where there is no war.”
“But we have to have a plan—”
“Here is my plan. You go out and get pho for our breakfast and I will get dressed. After that, I’ll go to the embassy and you can decide what will fit into one suitcase for each of us. We have saved some U.S. dollars—that will help. When I get to my office I will talk to Carwood. He will tell me about the evacuation plans and where we are on the list. My job is important, and I am sure we will be among the last to go, but we will be evacuated when the time comes. We have to be ready. And brave.”
“You are the brave one. I am the worrier.”
Thu jumped from the bed, lithe and alert, and struck a martial arts pose.
“You can be the worrier! I am a warrior—a warrior goddess!” she said, laughing. “Now go—and buy some pho for breakfast while I dress. We need to be strong.”
* * *
“Big Dog, this is Glorybird Star One-Six inbound! Mark your position!”
The Huey’s pilot gradually reduced airspeed as they approached Saigon. When they reached the streets where the buildings were taller, the chopper then ascended from its on-the-deck flight path above the highway and continued at rooftop level toward the center of the city.
“Smoke popped, Star One-Six,” came the reply.
A plume of bright green smoke appeared on one of the rooftops in the distance. It expanded rapidly in the still morning air, and then slowly began to dissipate.
“I see green smoke, Big Dog.”
“That’s affirmative, Star One-Six, and I have eyes on you at five hundred meters. I’ll be guiding you in.”
“I read you Lima Charlie, Big Dog—loud and clear. I am on visual approach.”
The Huey banked toward the man standing with upraised arms on the flat roof of the U.S. Embassy, a low, sprawling, white-brick building located in what appeared from the air to be a park-like estate. A similar building stood across from it, separated by tennis courts and a swimming pool. As the chopper closed on the embassy’s rooftop helipad, the pilot could see armed Marine guards positioned at the gates and around the estate perimeter.
The pilot headed straight toward the tiny landing zone, pitching the chopper’s nose up as he flared at the last second and dropped to the roof. The rotor blades created an instant maelstrom of wind and flying debris that pasted the clothing against the man with the upraised arms.
It was McWhorter, the ambassador’s chief of staff, who fought to hold his ground against the buffeting wind. Roaring ferociously, the Huey swooped in and touched down in front of him, the ship’s nose inches from his chest. McWhorter knew these Air America pilots—young hot dogs, all of them, who loved nothing more than to scare the crap out of shirt-and-tie embassy types like himself. Their little game of chicken didn’t scare him. They were damn good pilots and he knew they wouldn’t hit him. Or so he hoped. He didn’t flinch.
Squinting against the hurricane, he could see the two pilots inside the now-stationary but still roaring Huey grinning broadly beneath their visors. Grinning back, McWhorter flipped them the bird, followed by a quick salute, then ran around to the side to help the passengers offload.
“Welcome to Saigon, General!” he shouted above the turbine roar.
As the last officer stepped down from the Huey, McWhorter backed away and gave a thumbs-up to the pilot. The chopper lifted straight up, ascending far out of reach in seconds, then banked sharply to the left and zoomed away in a wide arc over the city’s rooftops.
“This way, General,” McWhorter said as the aircraft’s roar subsided, guiding Weyand and his aides through the rooftop door to the internal stairs. “Ambassador Martin is waiting for you. I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you again.”
“That remains to be seen,” the general replied. “It always depends on whether the news is good or bad, doesn’t it?”
* * *
“No, I don’t think I need to be introduced, young lady. The ambassador is expecting me.”
General Frederick Weyand, with his two aides trailing in his wake, didn’t break stride as he bounded down the stairs leading to the ambassador’s office suite, marching quickly past the flustered receptionist and through the doors to the inner office.
“General! How good to see you!” Ambassador Graham Martin rose from his desk. He didn’t extend his hand, instead waving the officers to seats at his conference table.
“The damn ARVN is falling apart—disappearing as fast as they can run. Pretty much what we expected,” Weyand growled. “Our intel says the South has lost 150,000 troops in the past three weeks alone! Lost them! What we didn’t expect was that General Giap and his army would be so quick on the uptake. Hue is gone, Da Nang was overrun on Sunday, and Quang Ngai will be next. Meanwhile, Hanoi’s got Lord knows how many men and a couple of tank brigades pushing through the Central Highlands like shit through a goose! If the ARVNs give up Kontum and Pleiku without a fight, Ban Me Thuot doesn’t have the defenses to hold them. Then the only cities standing between the NVA and Saigon will be Phan Rang and Xuan Loc.”
“I’ve seen the reports,” Martin said, taking his seat at the head of the table. “President Thieu wants us to use our B-52s to slow the advance, give them time to regroup.”
“Regroup! Christ on a cracker, Martin! There are no damn ARVN troops left between here and the DMZ to regroup! And we’ve already got Arc Lights”—Weyand used the military code word for the heavy B-52 Stratofortress bombing sorties—“working round the clock just to keep the NVA’s heads down! It may slow them but it won’t stop their advance. If Thieu can’t pull a military miracle out of his ass, and we seriously doubt he will, it’s all over—for him, for Saigon, and for South Vietnam.”
Martin said nothing for a moment, letting the general’s words hang in the air. Then, “Thieu wants more than bombers. He wants us back in the fight—use the Seventh Fleet to provide air cover and offshore bombardment while we insert our troops into strategic locations to shore up the South’s forces. He believes the North won’t engage us for fear that we’ll restart our war with them, and this would block their plans to capture the country once and for all.”
“What!? There’s no way the U.S. can get back into this fight without creating a political shit storm back home—not like the president isn’t dealing with that already!”
“Nevertheless, Thieu may be right. Hanoi can’t afford a second round with us. We had them on the ropes before and they won’t want to risk it again.”
“You tell Thieu there’s no fucking way—no, I’ll tell him myself! It’s time he understands that we have the power but our people back home no longer have the stomach to fight South Vietnam’s battles. It’s game over for us. And if Thieu can’t muster his people to stand up to the North Vietnamese Army, it’s over for him as well!”
“We’re scheduled to meet with President Thieu in a half hour. Is that really what you—what we—are going to tell him?”
“Don’t forget that I am a soldier, Martin,” Weya
nd said, softening his tone. “I didn’t fly the hell out here from Washington without some kind of a plan.” He nodded to one of his aides, who pulled several maps from a briefcase and spread them on the table.
“We know that Saigon is Giap’s target, and as you know there are three major land routes into and out of the city—Highway One along the coast, Highway Four between here and Cambodia, and the overland trade corridor heading south from Phan Rang. Unless the North Vietnamese want to wade all the way here through rice paddies along the coast or hack their way down through the jungle …”
“I would think they’ve done enough of that coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail,” Martin interjected.
“Yes, well then they have no choice but to use these routes to advance on Saigon,” Weyand continued. “The coastal and Cambodia highways are choke points—even the damn ARVN should be able to hold them there long enough for Thieu to call up reinforcements, if he can find any. As for the central route, Phan Rang is almost four hundred klicks north of here, and it’s defensible. The ARVN can stop them there long enough to let our B-52s—yes, Thieu will get his wish—carpet bomb the shit out of any forces that mass against them.”
“And after that … ?”
“Who knows? We go back to the table in Paris? Try to negotiate a settlement that will satisfy the North and let the South Vietnamese government hold on to whatever it can? That’s not up to me and it’s not up to you. Right now our job is to keep the South—or what’s left of it—intact, which means keeping the NVA out of Saigon. After that, it’s Washington’s problem.”
Wednesday, April 2
UNLIKE THE HUNDREDS OF NEWS CORRESPONDENTS who converged on South Vietnam when the American Marines first came ashore in the early 1960s, Lisette Vo immediately stood out from the pack. Her name and features were Vietnamese, but she was taller, which made her look more American. She spoke the language perfectly in an upper-class style that revealed her boarding school upbringing. This was a tribute to her Vietnamese father, who came to Washington as an executive with the French oil conglomerate Total and married Lisette’s mother, an American of French descent and daughter of an H Street lobbyist.
She arrived in 1963, right after graduating from Georgetown University, and found her way to the NBS News bureau on the eleventh floor of the Caravelle Hotel. It took the bureau chief no more than five minutes to decide to hire her. He needed something to distinguish NBS—the North American Broadcast System—from the competition. Lisette Vo was perfect. He saw her as a rising star covering the Vietnam War, America’s first television war.
Since then, Lisette had earned a couple of Peabody awards and become a ratings hit back in the States. Against the advice of her parents, she used a big chunk of her first year’s salary to buy a new blue-and-cream-colored Citroën DS. Whenever she pulled up in front of Le P’tit, everyone noticed. “Lisette’s here,” was often heard throughout the bistrot.
She fell in with the routine of life as a war correspondent—morning coffee and a pastry at Givral’s, find a chopper to take her out on a mission so she had something to cover for the day, then get her film out of the country that afternoon. Whenever there was a lull in the fighting and she needed to feed the TV news maw, Lisette covered the daily press briefing conducted by the Joint United States Public Affairs Office, or JUSPAO.
In no time at all, the Saigon press corps sardonically nicknamed the briefings the Five O’clock Follies and the name stuck. Even the folks at JUSPAO used the term, shortening it to “the Follies.”
Over time, the Follies devolved into a cacophony of government briefers speaking in officialese while jaded American and other foreign correspondents and local Vietnamese journalists—including the communist press—shouted out questions and made snide comments. In addition to the official program, Army and Air Force PR types worked the room, pitching story ideas about their respective branches of service to any reporters who would listen. The mix included suspected undercover VC operatives, who watched from the sidelines, hoping to gather intelligence on troop movements.
The Follies were both work and a daily social event for journalists, military people, and civilian government employees. Everyone met their friends there and decided where to go drinking that night—the Rex Hotel’s rooftop bar, the veranda of the Hotel Continental, or Le P’tit Bistrot, a piano bar tucked into the first floor of the Caravelle Hotel, where Lisette counted on running into the Washington Legend’s Sam Esposito—the correspondent she’d met the day she arrived in Saigon.
Lisette and Sam had become nearly inseparable. Sam liked driving around with Lisette in her Citroën with the windows open, watching her long black hair blow in the wind. Her hair had a slight wave to it that she inherited from her mother. Though she’d heard Sam’s corny pun a hundred times, Lisette laughed whenever Sam said, “Let’s make ice cream,” as he pressed the essuie glace button on the dashboard, making the wipers slap back and forth over the dusty windshield.
As Sam and Lisette drove to a news conference at Tan Son Nhut, the car windows were rolled up tight. Today’s rumor mill said there were North Vietnamese sappers in the city riding on bicycles, pulling alongside foreigners’ cars, and then tossing hand grenades into the backseats.
While she drove, Sam reminded Lisette, “Ten years ago—hell, a year ago—you wouldn’t see half the correspondents in South Vietnam rushing to attend an embassy news conference. We’d be out on patrol with the Army. When we wanted to get to a battle, see things for ourselves, the chopper pilots were more than willing to take us. We could always hop on a Huey. We’d ride out with the troops and report what we saw with our own eyes. Remember, we didn’t learn about My Lai because some information weenie told us about it at the Follies!”
Sam never tired of reminding Lisette and anyone else within earshot how it was when Americans were running the war. Access was easier then. The Pentagon ordered every field commander to make sure correspondents had complete freedom to go wherever they pleased—including into the field with the troops. The brass wanted the press and the American public to see lots of pictures on TV and in the newspapers of Army helicopters taking U.S. servicemen to the fight. They wanted the public, and of course Congress, to see how quickly our choppers could move soldiers into and out of battle.
While Sam rambled on, Lisette noticed how empty the streets had become. Every shop’s security gates were down. A few were guarded by teenagers armed with antiquated rifles.
“Sam, look,” she said. “Where is everyone? This looks pretty ominous. Maybe they know something we don’t.”
Where dozens of pedicab drivers normally hung out in front of the Continental, there were now none. The local police had rounded up all the pedicabs—or cyclos—and corralled them behind concertina wire at the old Brinks Hotel, the Visiting Officers Quarters for Americans that had been abandoned since 1973. The cops feared that the cyclo drivers, who were mostly destitute, would be easy prey for Northern infiltrators, who would turn them into saboteurs for a few piasters.
Farther up the road, they saw a teenager siphoning gasoline from a Renault taxi, whose wheels were gone and windscreen shattered. At a makeshift tire-patch stand, its owner sat on a plastic stool hoping a passing vehicle would have a blowout. He also sold gasoline, which he stored in one-liter glass bottles next to the open charcoal fire he used to vulcanize the tire patches.
Nearing the civilian side of Tan Son Nhut, traffic slowed to a walk. The roadway was packed with bikes, Hondas, a group of children carrying suitcases, and mothers with their daughters dressed in silk ao dai. An elderly couple wearing peasant pajamas shuffled along in the middle of the roadway. On the shaded esplanade in front of the terminal a man, who looked to be in his eighties, was sleeping in a pushcart between cardboard suitcases and using a burlap sack as a pillow. A dozen nuns in gray and white habits were arguing with two Air Force sergeants at a table that had been set up in front of the terminal. Like everyone else, the nuns crowded the sergeants’ table, desperate to get on a ref
ugee flight and flee South Vietnam—the sooner the better.
As Lisette inched forward, a Honda with a man and two toddlers sitting astride the gas tank sputtered past the Citroën. A young woman sat sidesaddle behind the man, her ao dai tunic blowing in the wind. She carried an open parasol to shade her face from the sun.
Sam gestured toward the overloaded motorbike. “Appearances still matter here. I bet she thinks if her complexion is too dark she’ll look like a Montagnard and they won’t let her on the plane.”
“Café au lait is not so popular in the U.S.,” Lisette quipped.
“Well, I hope she gets out, I hope they all do,” Sam remarked. “And I hope we’ll learn something that I can use for the next edition. The embassy has been stonewalling until now. Maybe something is going on. They wouldn’t call us all out here for nothing.”
“Sam, the word I got was that there had been a big meeting yesterday with Thieu, Martin, and someone sent out from Washington. No matter what, I can get some footage.”
* * *
As they broke through the crowd and headed to the military side of the air base, Sam asked, “Are you going to film this yourself? We didn’t pick up Tuan. Where’s Tuan and your camera gear? In the ten years that I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you cover a story without him.”
“He told me he would go out to the base to set up ahead of time. He has been going off on his own lately, always with some excuse about a sick aunt, or sister who got in a moped accident, or some other excuse. But if there’s a story, don’t worry, he’ll show,” Lisette told Sam. The guard at the gate, who had seen Lisette and her Citroën come and go numerous times, waved them on to the flight line to where the news conference would take place.
Escape from Saigon Page 2