by Tom Bissell
What finally ended my parents’ marriage? Neither claims to remember the precise event that drove them both toward the false rescue of infidelity, and there the matter hangs. My birth, in January 1974, a little more than a year before the fall of Saigon, was, as they say, an accident. My mother had always had irregular periods and had no idea she was pregnant with me until a routine checkup. At the time my mother was on a hard-boiled-egg-and-wine diet, which was, according to her, “the big guru fad diet” of the day. When told the news, she exclaimed, “I'm going to deliver a pickled egg!” Neither she nor my father wanted or expected another child. As if to embody their apprehension, I was born a sickly, tiny thing and contracted pneumonia immediately. At one point a priest was summoned to give my days-old Catholic soul its last rites. My father spent that night in the hospital's chapel, praying. During the first, frail year of my life, I kept them together. When my condition improved, my mother remembers a near rebirth of goodwill between her and my father, then its sudden inexplicable collapse. But what caused this collapse? Again, neither remembers.
Once, after an argument of considerable megatonnage, my father gave my mother a charm bracelet. She still has it and sometimes even wears it. Attached to this bracelet are a poodle, a Labrador retriever, a sailboat, a tandem bicycle, my brother's and my birthstones, two baby boots, a diaper pin, a thimble, two enjoined hands, all of them references to the secrets and shared enthusiasms of a relationship neither much wishes to recall anymore. My father gave my mother the bracelet's first charm in a full champagne glass. She almost accidentally swallowed it. This first charm, my father's desperate attempt to mend what was clearly and hopelessly coming undone, was the pair of enjoined hands. He presented it to her on her birthday. My mother recalls this as one of the last truly happy moments in their marriage. She also recalls how soon things degenerated afterward. My father had engraved upon the charm my mother's birthday, followed by the year. My mother's birthday is March 20. The year is 1975.
VI
On April 3, 1975, Saigon was closed to all Vietnamese but those who could prove they lived there, a measure taken to slow the influx of refugees and prevent NLF guerrillas from establishing terrorist cells within the capital. On the day Saigon was sealed, officials in the U.S. Embassy, beginning to ponder the possibility of emergency evacuation, finally got together a list of all the 6,000 Americans known to live in Saigon and its environs. This number was arrived at by, among other methods, poring over records at the embassy's commissary that tracked liquor purchases. In Saigon's Presidential Palace things were relatively quiet. One of President Thieu's few formal orders in the first weeks of April decreed the closure of Saigon's plentiful saloons and whorehouses, apparently to encourage Saigon's men to save money for ammunition. The Western journalists recently dispatched to Saigon by magazines, newspapers, and networks left the city's hotels awash with more correspondents than at any time since the United States had withdrawn its soldiers. In the meantime, as the journalist David Lamb notes, the insurance premiums covering the lives of these journalists had increased by 1,000 percent.
Ambassador Martin did not believe Saigon would fall. He was certain that Vietnam's recently discovered offshore oil deposits would convince Congress to come to its senses and allow aid to South Vietnam. (When the local employees of two Western oil concerns, Esso and Shell, asked for embassy permission to be evacuated, Martin forbade them to leave, fearing it would render one of South Vietnam's most important industries inoperable overnight.) The ambassador's optimism was incurable, and possibly demented. As David Butler writes, Martin “spoke [to an NBC journalist] with evident sincerity about the prospects of holding a truncated South Vietnam, from Nha Trang south, living off the riches of the Mekong delta.” Martin diagnosed the disastrous retreat from the Central Highlands as “a minor problem” and boasted that in a year's time he would take a leisurely tour of one captured city.
Martin—along with Henry Kissinger, who was similarly doubtful of the prospect of Saigon's fall—had something resembling an excuse in the person of Saigon's CIA station chief, Thomas Polgar, who throughout April fed Martin and Kissinger selective intelligence that turned out to have a crippling effect on the embassy's ability to operate under what no one could bring himself to realize fully was siege conditions. The balding, bespectacled Polgar had been born in Hungary, escaped to the United States, and posed as a Nazi for U.S. intelligence during World War II. Although a committed anti-Communist, Polgar paid undue attention to the talk making its way around Saigon in the spring of 1975 that the North would allow a “transitional government” in South Vietnam, albeit one dominated by Communists, rather than conquer Saigon outright. This would permit the Communists a period of months, even years, to take over slowly, without alienating their longtime enemies. For this to happen, however, President Thieu would have to resign and preferably be replaced by Duong Van Minh, an ARVN general considered a neutralist—he was known to have argued against bombing the North, for instance—in South Vietnamese politics. Polgar held firmly to this ignis fatuus and used it to seed the stories of his chosen journalists, particularly Malcolm Browne of The New York Times. Polgar's deeply conjectural reading of the situation thus wended its way up to presidents Ford and Thieu, among many others, with seeming authority, creating what is called in intelligence circles a “false confirmation.” This helps to explain a high-ranking NLF officer's postwar comment that the Communists found that their “infiltrations of the American Embassy and the Central Intelligence Agency were not that important, because they really didn't know much about what was going on.”
Initial talk of a transitional government mainly came through French intermediaries, though the North's leadership, especially Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, had hinted for years that a transitional government after North-South negotiations was possible. (Whether a negotiated end to the conflict was ever possible is still being debated by scholars. By the 1970s, however, any talk from the North about its willingness to “negotiate” was a calculated untruth.) It is fitting that the French, the authors of so much disaster in Vietnam, would appear, as the curtain fell, with another garland of woe. Apparently it was not enough for the French to have essentially created the Communist insurgency by assailing the Vietnamese people's long-standing Confucian traditions, imposing ruthless taxes on staples such as salt, banning the distillation of Vietnamese rice into alcohol, forcing the Vietnamese to import pricey French wine, introducing the Brazilian rubber plant to Vietnam's ecology, throwing up dozens of brutally managed rubber plantations, establishing among the Vietnamese an impressive 5 percent literacy rate in what had previously been one of the most literate cultures in Asia, and designing a colonial policy that by design ensured that the Frenchmen who emptied the trash bins of Vietnam's leading universities were paid more than the Vietnamese professors who taught Zola and Hugo. (In neighboring Laos the situation was even worse. After the better part of a century of French rule, Laos, by 1960, had three Lao engineers, two Lao doctors, and one telephone for every 4,300 Laotians.) The French mission was so confident about the inevitability of a transitional government in South Vietnam that the 10,000 French citizens in Vietnam were told to stay put. This as many foreign embassies—among them the United Kingdom's, New Zealand's, Canada's, South Korea's, and Taiwan's—were burning their files and leaving.
In early April, sixteen PAVN divisions, or about 150,000 soldiers, were bearing down on Saigon—except for the single PAVN division that had been left behind to guard Hanoi, an attacking force that constituted North Vietnam's entire military. Only two years before, the ARVN had been one million strong. Of that million, a half-dozen infantry divisions, an airborne brigade, an armored brigade, and some harum-scarum ranger units were all that was left. Fewer than 90,000 ARVN troops remained to defend South Vietnam—others put the number as low as 60,000—almost none of whom had much spleen for fighting.
The leader of the assault on Saigon was General Van Tien Dung. Among the mummies of North Vietnam's Po
litburo, the fifty-eight-year-old Dung cut a dynamically youthful figure. He was also pragmatic and took orders well. This was especially crucial, as the North's policy as how best to deal with the South was never a settled matter within the Party. Le Duan—arguably the most militant member of the Politburo, a southerner by birth, and the leading Hanoi light after Ho Chi Minh's death in 1969—had long demanded an attack-dog course of action toward South Vietnam, which many of Duan's more moderate comrades opposed.
In October 1974, while the North's final offensive was being hatched, the Party issued an internal document known as the “Resolution for 1975.” Widely viewed as a compromise between the North's hard-liners and moderates, the resolution established a fluid plan of attack that would allow the North's policy to be made on the fly, according to battlefield developments. Although the Resolution for 1975 allowed for moderation, Le Duan made sure its intentions were heavily tilted toward all-out military victory. To this end the North began to draft every male up to forty years of age. Even Communist Party members, many of whom had been able to tiptoe around the war's hotter edges, were assigned combat units. Le Due Tho, Kissinger's co-Nobel Peace Prize winner, was sent to Saigon in early April. In Decent Interval— written by Frank Snepp, an analyst of North Vietnam in Saigon's CIA station, and arguably the finest account of the fall of South Vietnam— we learn that North Vietnam's president (as in the USSR, largely a figurehead position) pulled Tho aside as he was setting out. “You must win,” President Thang told the Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Otherwise you should not come back.”
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Through April, the Communists had seen only white flags and what General Giap fondly refers to as “big, very big, annihilation battles” during their campaign (though General Dung did have one genuinely frightening encounter—with a herd of stampeding elephants). Thirty-five miles away from Saigon, however, at the city of Xuan Loc, the North Vietnamese finally ran aground. Xuan Loc was a rubber-plantation bulwark and provincial capital of 100,000 that served as the gateway to Saigon and the nearby city of Bien Hoa, where 60 percent of ARVN's diminishing materiel was now held in a munitions dump. Because of Xuan Loc's location at a triple intersection of roads, including a highway that streaked south to the coast, Saigon could not be held without Xuan Loc's capture.
President Thieu sent to the imperiled city his best remaining divisions. After an artillery attack on April 8, the city emptied of civilians. The ARVN head of Xuan Loc's defense, General Le Minh Dao, who had set up his headquarters upon the grounds of an old French plantation, breathed fire days before the North arrived in force. “I vow to hold Xuan Loc,” General Dao said, according to The Fall of Saigon. “I don't care how many divisions the other side sends against me, I will knock them down.”
On April 9, Dung's and Dao's armies met in what would perhaps be the most horrific battle of the war. “Our troops,” admits the official Communist history of the People's Army of Vietnam, “fought the enemy for control of every section of trench, every house, every city block…. Enemy aircraft, taking off from Bien Hoa, Tan Son Nhat [sic], and Tra Noc airfields, pounded Xuan Loc with bombs. The battle turned into a hard, vicious struggle. Our units suffered heavy casualties.” One PAVN division saw 1,100 men killed in the first two days, its artillery was “seriously depleted,” and half its Soviet tanks were turned into red-hot scrap. In response General Dung sent the majority of his soldiers around Xuan Loc to outflank its defenders and, in some cases, bypass the city completely and move on. Even this proved costly to the PAVN assault. On the doorstep of their capital, the ARVN ceased to be what one writer had dismissed as “a collection of individuals, all of whom happened to be carrying weapons” and became an army. Aware that they were literally fighting for their children's lives, the abysmally outnumbered soldiers defending Xuan Loc would hold off the Communists for two sanguinary weeks.
At Saigon's Defense Attache Office, Vietnamese and “nonessential” Americans had been seeing evacuations for many days now. The DAO was a gigantic complex located on Tan Son Nhut air base, which was itself among the largest U.S. bases in the world. Four thousand Americans had once worked in the DAO, and its (air-conditioned, swimming-pooled, bowling-alleyed) operation had cost upward of $30 million a year. The evacuation protocol available to the Americans was found in a booklet two inches thick. “All of a sudden,” one U.S. Marine major recalled to Larry Engelmann, “people were dusting off plans that had been written in 1973 for emergency evacuation, and they were looking at them and saying, ‘Oh, Jesus, this is bullshit; now what do we do?’ “
The original evacuation plan had envisioned only two embassy airlifts, which would chopper out “between twenty and forty people.” Everyone else would be driven in buses to Tan Son Nhut, from which the evacuees would be flown out in fixed-wing aircraft rather than helicopters. By mid-April it became clear that this was not an adequate plan. So many Vietnamese had been tainted by their involvement with the Americans that a much larger evacuation plan was needed, and quickly. A scenario was gamed up to figure out how many Vietnamese could realistically be flown out of Vietnam. It was determined that 921,000 could be evacuated. However, this would require eight days, involve the participation of an astounding percentage of U.S. vessels in and around the waters of Vietnam, and “would only be practical assuming the following: No interference by either the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] or the VC; full cooperation by the Government of Vietnam; reasonable degree of crowd control.” Unfortunately, there was virtually no public support in the United States for such a massive and expensive airlift of Vietnamese, and the rules determining which Vietnamese could leave their country remained nebulous and often cruelly arbitrary.
The embassy found itself paralyzed with visa requests. As Wolfgang Lehmann, Ambassador Martin's second in command, told Larry Engelmann, “The categories of Vietnamese at risk were virtually endless…. It's not true we had no plan. We missed people; yeah, that's perfectly true. But there was a plan and there was a system. But again, we had no … formal authority to send any Vietnamese to the United States until the twenty-fifth of April.” A young American named Ken Moore-field was not satisfied with such spinelessness. During his first few hours working out of the DAO, Moorefield let through two hundred Vietnamese. Talk began to circulate among the Vietnamese at the DAO that Moorefield was softhearted, and they besieged him. Many families were unwilling to obey when Moorefield asked them to pull from the evacuation line their draft-age sons or elderly parents in the interest of creating space for others. “No, Mr. Moorefield,” one family said to him, “don't ask us to make those decisions. You make them for us.” As often as not, Moorefield was unable to do so. Once the officials within South Vietnam's Ministry of Interior arranged for their own departure, the Vietnamese no longer needed exit visas, and the rubber-stamping proceeded apace. Moorefield's heroics probably led to the evacuation of 10,000 people, and soon Vietnamese were flowing out of the DAO “around the clock,” a hundred people at a time, on both government and commercial flights, according to one U.S. official. Faced with this pressure, immigration officials in Washington were forced to relax visa requirements. Eventually all that was needed to escape was a piece of paper bearing the U.S. Embassy seal and the easily forged names of a Vietnamese beneficiary and American sponsor. There are stories of Americans adopting twenty Vietnamese at a time. One American adopted an eighty-year-old Vietnamese Catholic priest. When asked, “What in the hell is this?” by an Air Force officer at the DAO, the American replied, “Well, that's my adopted son.”
On April 11, Kissinger gathered together his senior State Department staff for a “pep talk” on Vietnam. “This thing,” Kissinger began, “is now going to run its course; its course is reasonably predictable. And what we are trying to do is to manage it with dignity and to preserve a basis for which we can conduct the foreign policy in which people can have some confidence in us…. I think people are going to feel badly [sic] when it's over. I don't think there are going to be many heroes l
eft in this.”
In Saigon, rumor fed rumor. The city, Frances FitzGerald once wrote, “breathed rumors, consumed only rumors, for the people of Saigon had long since ceased to believe anything stated officially as fact. Rumor was the only medium.” Thus: President Thieu was actually an agent of the North. Thus: American B-52s were again seen prowling the sky— haven't you heard? Thus: General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the Saigon police chief infamous for being photographed executing an NLF prisoner during the Tet Offensive, promised that if the Americans did not help evacuate more Vietnamese, the men under his command would kill every American they saw. As the military situation worsened, the Saigon regime broadcast shocking news that, in Hanoi, First Secretary Le Duan had murdered a Party rival, and that thousands of Chinese troops had consequently invaded North Vietnam. This last was a rumor that, for once in Saigon, no one took seriously—except for American journalists.
By now the forever-bubbling talk of a coup d'etat against President Thieu had been brought to a full boil. Those responsible for adjusting the thermostat included CIA Director William Colby and The New Yorker journalist Robert Shaplen. Colby argued that the United States should “jettison” (Kissinger's word) Thieu in exchange for the “unimpeded evacuation of Americans,” an idea for which Kissinger had harsh words:” [T]hose of us who were meeting daily in the White House Situation Room faced real, not theoretical, choices.” The influential Shaplen took a less theoretical view, pressing upon all who would listen the wisdom of replacing Thieu with Nguyen Cao Ky, the former prime minister of South Vietnam, with whom Shaplen was friendly.