by Tom Bissell
Under the auspices of a U.S. Embassy contract, World Airways had over the previous few days flown three flights into Danang to evacuate Americans and South Vietnamese refugees. The evacuations, though harried, had been successes. Why, Daly now asked Martin, was World Airways being denied a last flight into Danang? Because, Martin explained, the situation was too volatile. Indeed, the embassy had just lost contact with Danang's U.S. consul general, Albert Francis, who would soon be beaten senseless and left for dead by score-settling ARVN soldiers. The South Vietnamese officials at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut air base had additionally threatened to shoot Daly's 727 down if he attempted to fly to Danang from there. “What,” Daly demanded, “are those bastards at Tan Son Nhut going to do if I take off without their goddamned clearance?” Martin said he imagined that they would hold true to their guarantee and take down Daly's plane. Daly asked Martin what he would do if they did that. “Applaud them!” Martin said. “Who the hell do you think you are?” Daly told Martin that he was “nothing but a used-car salesman.”
Jan Wollett, a World Airways flight attendant, described to Larry Engelmann being awakened in her Saigon hotel room at 6 a.m. the day after Daly and Martin's meeting. She went down to the lobby to find Daly and some others waiting for her. They were going to Danang. Wollett found it ominous that the flight had not been catered and that there were no guards or interpreters along. Inexplicably, some USAID people had assured Daly that the situation in Danang was “fine” and that guards would not be needed. A United Press International journalist named Paul Vogle, along for the ride, spoke fluent Vietnamese, so Daly believed they were covered. At 8 a.m. the 727 took off, carrying Daly, three flight attendants, five journalists (“Hey, the more the merrier,” Daly had said), the pilot, and the copilot. Another World 727 followed Daly's into the sky twenty minutes later.
Daly's recipe for heroism was to land the first plane, remain on the ground for “ten or fifteen” minutes, load up with passengers, and take off. The other World 727 would then do the same. Coming into Danang, Daly's pilot tipped the 727's wings to semaphore friendliness. The plane landed and taxied down Danang's spookily empty tarmac without incident—but the rescue quickly went bad. Wollett knew “something really bizarre was going on” when a small truck loaded with ARVN soldiers pulled up alongside the taxiing aircraft. One man jumped out of the truck brandishing a pistol, which he began to empty into the airplane's fuselage. As the 727 moved on down the tarmac, refugees hiding behind blast barriers and concrete revetments at the tarmac's far edge began a dash toward the plane. Those aboard the 727 place their number anywhere between 1,000 and 4,000. (One says it was 20,000.) David Butler tells us that the refugees “poured out in jeeps and trucks and armored personnel carriers and even in an old bulbous-nosed black Citroen taxi from the late 1940s.” There were many women and children in the onrushing mob, but they had the misfortune not to have been armed. The soldiers among them faced no such disability, and Darwinian improvisation went to work. The soldiers began shooting women and children, then other soldiers, in the back. A pickup truck loaded with civilians pulled abreast of the plane before nearly anyone else had made it there. An evilly quick-thinking ARVN soldier “sprayed it with an M-16,” according to one observer, “and the jeep flipped over and everybody went out of it.”
Daly was standing at the bottom of the plane's aft stairs waving his pistol when the shooting began. In response he fired several rounds into the air. Joe Hrezo, Daly's second in command, was also packing a .38 snubnose, but “figured if I started shooting … I'd have gotten the shit shot out of me.” The journalist Paul Vogle was next to Daly at the base of the stairs, shouting in Vietnamese, “One at a time, one at a time. There's room for everybody.” But there was not. A British journalist named Tom Aspell had jumped off the plane early to photograph the rescue and quickly realized his error. He attempted to make his way back to the 727 but could not fight his way through the crowd. Joe Hrezo, too, left the plane and was similarly unable to get back on board; he sprinted for the airport's control tower, where he established radio contact with Daly's pilot.
On the plane itself, the first soldiers had begun to board. One ran up and down the aisle screaming, “Take off. Take off! They're rocketing the field!” Jan Wollett, the flight attendant, shouted at this hysteric, “Shut up and sit where I tell you to sit!” and then went to the door. Outside, at the base of the stairs, she saw Ed Daly being clawed by panicking Vietnamese; blood poured from the deep scratches on his arms, and his shirt and pants had been all but ripped off. Wollett then saw a “family of five … running a few feet from me, reaching out for help to get aboard. It was a mother and a father and two little children and a baby in the mother's arms…. I reached back to grab the mother's hand, but before I could get it, a man running behind them shot all five of them, and they fell and were trampled by the crowd.” Wollett, too stunned for any emotion, immediately reached for another woman, but “a man behind her grabbed her and jerked her out of my arms, and as she fell away he stepped on her back and her head to get up and over the railing.” Daly, who witnessed this, hit the offending brute in the face. (Daly would leave Danang with a broken hand.) A “sheet of blood” splashed “across everything,” and the man fell off the stairs and was crushed by the crowd.
The plane, designed to carry a little more than 130 people, quickly filled up with more than 250. All but eleven of the rescued passengers were ARVN soldiers—and not only soldiers but members of the Hac Bao (Black Panthers), “the toughest, most elite unit in the 1st Division,” David Butler writes. The two members of the flight in who had not been able to reboard, Tom Aspell and Joe Hrezo, now attempted to jump back onto the plane. Via the tower radio, Daly's pilot told Hrezo that he would circle back to pick him up. The problem was that the pilot had to wend through the assortment of stalled and burning vehicles strewn across the runway. He also had to travel fast enough to elude those still chasing the plane and slowly enough for Aspell and Hrezo to board. He also had to find enough room to take off. The 727's problems increased one-thousand-fold when an ARVN soldier rolled a grenade under the plane, the detonation of which, in Paul Vogle's words, “jammed the [wing] flaps full open and the undercarriage in full extension.” Other abandoned soldiers began to shoot at the departing plane. One bullet struck the fuel tank (the 727 would leak fuel from Danang to Saigon) but miraculously failed to trigger an explosion.
Soon after North Vietnamese rockets began to hit the tarmac, Joe Hrezo made it aboard while Daly was still beating people off with his pistol. Tom Aspell was not as lucky. “Grab me!” he yelled as he ran alongside the aft stair, now warped and broken from the weight of so many passages. Aspell, “in the very best tradition of the business,” again according to Paul Vogle, threw his camera on board before attempting to climb the stairs himself. When he did, several Vietnamese lampreyed onto him. As the plane accelerated, Aspell lost his grip and fell, along with all the Vietnamese who had counted on his strength to ensure their escape. Aspell would be evacuated by an Air America helicopter several hours later, and his footage would be broadcast around the world the next day. It says something about the day's moral tumult that Vogle could congratulate Aspell for saving his footage, however historically valuable, when Aspell seems to have made no similar effort on behalf of his fellow human beings.
Daly's pilot, who had judged a runway takeoff impossible, opted to take off from the taxiway. But the taxiway ran out of cement, and soon the plane was rumbling along the grass. On liftoff, the 727 struck a vehicle and a fence pole and pulled from its pilings a long stretch of concertina wire. Yet people were still hanging on to the aft stair. One by one they were sucked away. “One guy,” the CBS journalist Mike Marriott recalled to Larry Engelmann, “managed to hang on for a while, but at about 600 feet he let go and just floated off—just like a skydiver. I watched him fly away.” Several men had stowed themselves in the 727's wheel wells. Others grabbed hold of the landing gear. As it retracted, one was crushed, rendering the gea
r inoperable. Another was photographed by a UPI photographer aboard Daly's accompanying plane (which never landed in Danang) losing his grip and tumbling thousands of feet to his death in the South China Sea. Marriott, for his part, had two thoughts. The first was “This is the start of the fall of the country. This country is gone.” The second was his “very strong” doubt that the bullet-pocked, grenade-wracked, fuel-leaking 727 would be able to land in Saigon. They were all going to die.
Airborne now, Jan WoUett confronted her passengers. People were sitting three to a seat, bleeding and crying. Wollett pushed the intestines of one injured man back into his stomach. Another man, bleating for help, began to pull on Wollett's pant leg. It was the scoundrel who had pushed the woman Wollett had earlier attempted to help before Daly smashed him in the face and sent him to the tarmac. Wollett aided the man to a seat, discovering only then that his “head was laid wide open, and I could see inside his head and it was just a bloody, pulpy mess.” Wollett tore open a flak jacket and used its sawdust innards to stuff the man's head wound and stop the bleeding.
Somewhat unbelievably, the plane landed safely in Saigon, though the normally forty-five-minute-long flight tookmore than two hours. Everyone cheered when it was clear that the damaged landing gear had held, despite the fact that, in Wollett's words, the “shock of what [the ARVN] soldiers had done to their friends and families seemed to be destroying them slowly…. They had run over each other and shot each other to get on this plane. Now the panic was disappearing and the realization of the horror of what had happened—of what they had done—was beginning to sink in.” All ofthe soldiers were arrested as they exited the plane. “They deserved it,” Paul Vogle wrote. Vogle's vivid UPI account of the flight—a piece of post-traumatic-stress journalism if there ever was one—has been described as “the single most memorable news story ofthe 1975 offensive.” One of Vogle's most chilling lines concerns the mangled body pulled out of the landing gear bay by Tan Son Nhut crewmen. The dead soldier's “M-16 [was] still strapped to his shoulder…. He got his ride to Saigon, but being dead in Saigon is just the same as being dead in Da Nang.”
Later that night, at a restaurant in a Saigon hotel, shortly before an exhausted Joe Hrezo “went across the street to a bar and found a girlfriend,” Daly tried to describe the trip to some journalists. But the journalists kept jabbering and drinking. Daly unholstered his pistol and said, “I want to have your attention here or somebody's going to get shot.” Daly, who died of a heart attack in 1986, would be depressed for years that his rescue mission had managed to save so few civilians. As World Airways’ official history relates, “Daly flew back to the U.S. with 218 Vietnamese refugees—including 57 orphans whom he took personal responsibility for. The U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization was none too pleased with the orphan airlift and attempted to fine World $218,000 for violating immigration rules. No fine was levied as public outcry in Daly's favor changed the government's mind.” Most of these orphans wound up in the care of various fundamentalist Christian churches in California.
Another man was troubled by Daly's rescue mission. After seeing Aspell's appalling footage, President Gerald Ford publicly lamented the “immense human tragedy” of Danang's collapse and privately said to an aide, “That's it. It's time to pull the plug. Vietnam is gone.”
On March 30, several trucks crammed tight with North Vietnamese soldiers moved into Danang, which the Communists would later call the most “gigantic development” in their push toward Saigon. Most of the soldiers were women. To the people of Danang they were an unfamiliar blur of pith helmets, green fatigues, rubber sandals, and Russian rifles. The women formed into units, hit the streets, and fanned out, shouting dogma-enriched instruction in high-pitched northern accents over their handheld bullhorns. The actual “liberation” of Danang did not, as the Communists boasted, “see a single shot fired”—or rather, the only shots fired were self-inflicted, into the skulls of terrified, left-behind ARVN soldiers who feared slaughter at Communist hands. But that particular roundelay of death ended as well. The next day it was Easter.
V
While you stand before the television fruitlessly changing its channels, Muff finally asks what you are doing.
Your response comes softly. —Looking for news.
—John, Muff says. That is all she says, a word containing an entire month's worth of frustration.
—There's nothing you can do about it, Johnny. This is Grace, speaking from the other side of the room. You have almost forgotten she is there. Slowly you turn. She is twenty-five feet and a universe of understanding from you. Her knitting needles are still. She is looking at you with small bright eyes, the face that surrounds them loose-skinned and kind. —You have to go on.
You look away and say nothing. You are choking on your anger, your simple human desire to be understood.
Muff is bouncing Johno, who has started to mewl and fidget, more roughly now. —Have a drink, she says, looking at Johno, the floor, her index fingernail. Anywhere but you.
A drink. It has been a bad month for that as well. The less you cared about Vietnam, the more necessary it became to forget everything else. The point man in your quest for amnesia was Pfc. Johnnie Walker. You have been leaving home, as though hypnotized, in the small of the night, wandering into bars, getting in fights. You had not remembered how easy getting into a fight was. Merely look at someone so hard they are finally obliged to inquire, What are you looking at? The answer: “You're pretty fucking ugly, you know that?” There is your fight. The last two you lost and came home laughing, your face a bouquet of bruise blooms, your lip seeping, your gums lined in red. Muff refused to take care of you those nights. She could not abide violence. But what did she think her father did there in Danang? The man was not eating prawns all day. He sent B-52s on bombing runs, a mass murderer from 17,000 feet.
Within you violence still prowls, and lately it has needed very little encouragement to slip through the bars of its cage. For instance: Dennis, your other brother, the second oldest, visited home a few months ago. Dennis was in the Air Force. This had been what had made it so easy for you to resign your commission. Dennis's Air Force service—in Thailand, primarily, building roads—meant that the Bissell family was contributing its share to the war effort, and your final clearance came through quickly. But you did not like how easily Dennis parlayed having flown over Vietnam, however hazardous this was, into having “fought” there. Over this very issue the two of you nearly came to blows—until Muff, cradling your son, inserted herself between the two of you, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!”
Of course you know that if you keep behaving this way you are going to lose Muff forever. You know that as you stand before the television and stare at her as she tries to prevent Johno's small, explosive whimpering from turning into an emotional mushroom cloud. She looks so pretty tonight! You honestly don't know what you would do, or where you would be, without her. You have lived, died, laughed, cried, reveled, and moped with her for years now. You want to continue to do so for two thousand more. Yet running contiguous to this certainty are rivers of far inkier thought. They flow through the black, treeless landscape of your mind and feed into your heart, changing its electricity, coarsening it. Fuck her. She does not know. She cannot know. And your mouth is so dry. You need a drink. You pacify yourself by thinking of that drink, the way the scotch-soaked slivers of ice will melt against your teeth. You breathe and wait until the darkness passes through, but before it can do so Muff stands and walks out of the room, dragging Johno by the hand, both of them suddenly allied in tears. Grace goes after her, throwing a disappointed look your way before disappearing around the corner.
GUENELLA
You are standing triumphantly alone in the middle of your television room, listening to the spectral sound of the windows deflecting the wind, when your black Labrador Guenella comes trotting up to you, her tail sweeping happily back and forth. You named her after a young woman with whom you fell in love in Geo
rgetown, during college. She spurned you for a Washington Redskins tackle, which at the time had seemed both remarkable and not at all remarkable. Naming your dog after her had been a crude form of revenge, but you now love this dog so much you cannot imagine what, at the time of its naming, you could have possibly been thinking. You crouch and run your hand over Guenella's sleek black brow. Her coat feels as soft as mink, and her long bologna tongue drops contentedly from her mouth. The tongue steals to your face, runs pink and frictionless up your cheek. Your eyes close, and your forehead presses against hers. She is a beautiful dog, the best you have ever had. You love the totality of her loyal ignorance. After a long while you look outside onto frozen Lake Michigan, the horizon beyond it preserving a fading hem of candied red light. Everything else is a different hue of dark, the snow low mounds of gray against endless black lawn. The room itself fading but for the blue flicker of the television. Darkness upon darkness, and nothing but this faint cathode fire to hold it back. You are sitting there with Guenella when the news, at last, comes on. In Saigon, you are told, it is morning.