by Tom Bissell
A northerner by birth and trained by the French (and married, for a time, to a Frenchwoman), Air Marshal Ky had been made the first Vietnamese air squadron leader when France allowed Vietnam an independent military in the 1950s. He had been one of South Vietnam's most popular—which is not to say beloved—political figures. (Many young men in South Vietnam, for instance, grew jaunty mustaches in imitation of Ky.) The presidential age requirement initially written into South Vietnam's constitution had been lowered from forty to thirty-five explicitly for Ky. But his fighter-pilot arrogance—and he was, by all accounts, a brilliant pilot—had turned many of the Americans in Vietnam against him. It did not help that when Ky was once asked by a journalist which historical figure he most admired, he instantly answered, “Hitler.” Thieu finally tore power away from Ky and made him his vice president in 1967. Ky began plotting to remove Thieu, but many of his fellow malcontents were killed during the Tet Offensive, forcing him to abandon his plans. He spent the next few years stewing and flying around the country in his silver jet. Of the South's staggering surrenders in the spring of 1975, Ky in his memoir writes, “Ho Chi Minh couldn't have done it better.”
Emboldened by Shaplen and other allies, Ky was hosting luncheons shortly after Danang fell in which he discussed with equally outraged ARVN officers the prospect of deposing Thieu. Word of this instantly got back to the Presidential Palace, distracting Thieu at the moment he could least afford to be distracted. In early April, Ky approached General Le Minh Dao, commander of the 18th ARVN Division and the man who would later lead the stand at Xuan Loc. General Dao refused to help Ky (“Too busy fighting the communist, cannot participate”), and Ky was informed by Thomas Polgar that if he attempted a coup there would be no CIA support for it. For a man who had come to believe that Vietnam was merely an unloved puzzle piece in a Cold War jigsaw, this was too much.
“If only we had had time,” Ky writes in his memoir, “if only the Americans had not stopped us, we might have done something. Even if we had not lost Saigon, we still had the Mekong Delta. My plan was really to make Saigon a Stalingrad. All the women, all the children, all the old people would be evacuated. The only ones to remain in the city would be volunteers, but there would be half a million of us to defend our capital as the Russians had defended Stalingrad.” Lest one think that Ky is unaware that his plan was to replicate one of the bloodiest slaughters in world history, he goes on, “An American correspondent said [to Ky], ‘If you try to turn Saigon into a Stalingrad, thousands will die. Finally you will die. Do you really consider that to be a useful act?’ “Ky's response? “You mention the word Stalingrad. Do you realize after all these years people still know that name? That is enough for me.” Ky does not much bother to contemplate the possibility that South Vietnam's incessant political instability had more to do with its defeat than anything the Americans did.
Ky was growing so flamboyant in his coup plans that Ambassador Martin finally had to go see him. Ky's memoir is generally to be taken with a metric ton of salt, and it is not likely, for instance, that Martin really said to Ky things such as “I know you are extremely well-informed” and “I am inclined to think you are right.” Martin himself said, “[T]he whole point of that trip was to talk about a bloody coup that wouldn't have served any purpose on God's green earth at that stage except bolstering Ky's ego. So I just talked around the subject.” Martin walked out of the air marshal's house having succeeded in suggesting that while the embassy might conceivably support an eventual coup, it would be a good idea to hold off on such attempts for now. The chapter of Ky's memoir in which Martin's visit is discussed is titled “Graham Martin: Formula for a Double Cross.”
On April 17, President Thieu had what was likely the worst morning of his life. First he was told that his ancestral graves in a village outside the city of Phan Rang had been accidentally destroyed during an ARVN retreat. Ancestor worship is practiced by many Vietnamese, even those, like Thieu, who were nominally Catholic. Upon receipt of this news, David Butler writes, Thieu's face “writhed with agony. He walked from the room as if in a trance, retreated to the basement bomb shelter and was not seen again for twenty-four hours.” But he did not go into his bomb shelter before being told by his aides that he should probably resign. Three days later Ambassador Martin, under strong pressure by Kissinger, Ford, and Martin's contacts in the South Vietnamese military, dropped in on President Thieu in the Presidential Palace. There Martin made the tactical claim to “speak as an individual only, not as the representative of the President or the Secretary of State, or even as the American ambassador.” In David Butler's account, he then said, “Mr. President, I have reason to believe that if you do not step down, the [ARVN] generals will ask you to.” Thieu inquired of Martin whether, if he resigned, Congress might finally be persuaded to allow aid to South Vietnam. Martin said he did not think that was likely. Later that night, Martin returned home and wrote a dispatch to Ford and Kissinger detailing the completion of his distastefully passive-aggressive chore. He ended with this: “I went home, read the daily news digests from Washington, took a shower, scrubbed very hard with the strongest soap I could find. It didn't help very much.”
The next afternoon, Thieu resigned. During his lachrymal, hourlong speech, Thieu openly defied the United States. “You ran away,” he said, “and left us to do the job that you could not do. We have nothing and you want us to achieve where you failed.” He also said: “The three hundred million dollars that the Congress won't approve is what they used to spend to support their troops here for ten days.” And: “Kissinger did not see that the Paris Peace Accords led the South Vietnamese people to death. Everyone sees it and Kissinger does not see it.” Aware that the United States wanted the supposed neutralist General Minh to replace him, Thieu decreed that his replacement instead be his vice president Tran Van Huong, who was seventy-one years old, and blind. The negotiations that would supposedly begin with Thieu's resignation did not open up. From their headquarters at Tan Son Nhut's Camp Davis, the Communists’ Provisional Revolutionary Government (whose water, somewhat pathetically, Thieu had shut off) said that nothing was changed. There would be no negotiations. Thieu escaped to Thailand, where his brother served as South Vietnam's ambassador. It was also as far as Thieu's DC-6 plane could fly without refueling. Thieu had to escape for many reasons, not the least among them Air Marshal Ky's pledge to kill him. Henry Kissinger would later write, with considerable understatement, “Thieu had every reason to resent America's conduct…. [H]is country deserved a better fate.” Thieu himself would lament, “It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States, but so difficult to be a friend.”
At Xuan Loc, as the Communists were pushing from the city the last of the ARVN's stubborn remnants, the leaders of South Vietnam's military unleashed weapons so horrible they had only rarely been used in combat. The first were five-hundred-pound “daisy cutter” bombs designed to annihilate not human targets but Vietnamese jungle. A daisy cutter detonated above ground, evaporating everything within hundreds of yards, resulting in a charred, barren area perfect for Hueys to set down on. When the daisy cutters did not deter the Communists, a weapon called the five-ton cluster bomb unit was dropped. It was the first time that the five-ton CBU—called by Frank Snepp “one of the most lethal non-nuclear weapons in America's arsenal”—had ever been used in Vietnam. When the decision was made to deploy the “earthquake bomb,” it was discovered that not one of the South's ancient C-30 planes had bomb racks big enough to carry it. But Air Marshall Ky, “working throughout the night with Vietnamese maintenance men,” rigged up a new bomb rack. The five-ton CBU was then dropped. Anyone near its blast radius was perforated by the many thousands of flechettes and pieces of shrapnel the bomb hurled in every direction for half a mile. It also sprayed an eight-foot-thick wave of burning kerosene that traveled nearly as far. Those who did not perish from the shrapnel or kerosene wave were asphyxiated within the deoxygenated vacuum created by the five-ton CBU's apocalyptic detonation. “T
he destruction was so enormous,” Ky writes, “that for three days there was no fighting.” Despite the devastating effectiveness of the CBU, the South Vietnamese military command resisted using more of them. Air Marshal Ky then called in a favor with an old friend. The result? “No problem. Use the bombs when you need to.” Ky: “It did not change the outcome of the war, but perhaps some of us found a modest sense of achievement, of satisfaction, in being able to hit back at the hated enemy, even if it was now too late.” There were numerous international protests at the use of the five-ton CBU, and the Communists finally responded by destroying the runway of Bien Hoa's nearby airfield, from which the CBU-carrying C-30s were taking off.
Xuan Loc fell on the morning of April 21. Six hundred South Vietnamese soldiers voluntarily stayed behind to provide cover as the survivors of the remaining ARVN units were evacuated by helicopter. These courageous souls peered over their barricades to see 40,000 North Vietnamese troops rushing at them across a cratered, gray, altogether lunar city. They were quickly done away with, finally allowing the Communists to cut off Saigon from all incoming and outgoing land routes. The city could now be left to starve or suffer invasion from all sides.
Events now gathered a dreadful momentum. After a week in office, Thieu's replacement resigned and was replaced by the neutralist Duong Van Minh, also known as “Big” Minh. The literally though not figuratively toothless General Minh was said to have ordered the murder of South Vietnam's president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother after the coup that deposed Diem in 1963, and Minh's personal bodyguard is believed to have been one of the killers. (The bodyguard later committed suicide in highly suspicious circumstances.) But that was all hiero-glyphically ancient history now, and General Minh became president on April 27. His first act was to put off his inauguration because his astrological chart was not promising. In his eventual inaugural speech the neutralist promised that in “the days ahead we will have nothing but difficulties, terrible difficulties. The positions to be taken are grave and important[;] our position is a difficult one.” Minh read robotically from a prepared speech that for the first time in the history of South Vietnamese politics acknowledged the existence of the Communists’ Provisional Revolutionary Government. He spoke of negotiation, of implementing peace on the basis of the Paris Accords, the need for “reconciliation” and ending “the coercive system imposed on the press.” Those listening to Minh are said by David Butler to have felt their hearts shrivel. Minh then paused and looked out upon his Presidential Palace audience. “In these difficult hours,” he said, no longer reading, “I can only beg of you one thing: Be courageous, do not abandon the country, do not run away. The tombs of our ancestors are here, it is here that we all belong.” “The room,” Butler writes, “applauded emotionally.” Minutes after the applause ended, the North launched a rocket attack and aerial assault on Tan Son Nhut air base—the final proof, if any were needed, that there would be no negotiation, no cease-fire, with or without President Minh, between North and South Vietnam.
The air attack on Tan Son Nhut was led by Nguyen Thanh Trung, the same defector to the North who weeks earlier had attempted to assassinate President Thieu by dropping a bomb on the Presidential Palace. (Trung now flies friendlier skies for Vietnam Airlines.) The North's General Dung called the attack on Tan Son Nhut “the most perfect joint operation ever by our armed forces and branches.” Much of the equipment used to attack Tan Son Nhut belonged to North Vietnam's enemies. During the North's drive on Saigon, billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. and ARVN equipment had been scooped up. Among the haul were 550 tanks and more than 1.5 million rifles. The planes Trung and his fellow pilots used to strafe Tan Son Nhut were almost all captured American warplanes, many of them picked up on the runways of the cities PAVN forces took without struggle. At Pleiku more than sixty working aircraft were captured, and at Phu Cat the North picked up fifty more.
Ken Moorefield was at the Defense Attache Office near Tan Son Nhut when the American-made bombs began coming down. “I remember thinking throughout how ironic this was,” he told Frank Snepp. “How many times in my two years as a combat officer in the delta had I called in air strikes against the VC! Now I knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end, and totally defenseless.” For those at the DAO that afternoon, the attacks were more terrifying than deadly. “We were grinding away,” Henry Hicks, the man in charge of evacuating the DAO, told Larry Engelmann, “flying people out, when all of a sudden there come these goddamned airplanes and they bomb us.” (The next morning Hicks was shot at by the “goddamned” South Vietnamese guards guarding Tan Son Nhut's entrance gate.) The people of Saigon, however, panicked. It was the first time they had ever been bombed in force, as the North had lacked offensive airpower for the vast majority of the war. In response President Minh declared martial law and followed that order by asking Hanoi for a cease-fire. The request was refused. Minh then demanded that all Americans in Saigon leave within twenty-four hours. This was a godsend. As Martin put it in a cable to Washington, “President Minh's request will permit the announcement of [our] departure to be by request, not from our panic.” In his memoir Kissinger takes a similar tack: “Since this coincided precisely with our withdrawal schedule, it in fact helped our extrication by avoiding the charge that America was abandoning its friends.”
In the early hours of April 29, the full last day the world would know the Republic of Vietnam (though few realized this: Thomas Polgar had a May 1 lunch date), we find one of the sadder episodes in the grief-sodden epic of the Vietnam War. Lance Corporal Darwin ludge and Corporal Charles McMahon were the only two Marines guarding a lonely sentry point near the Defense Attaché Office. The Marines were “buddies,” in the words of their sergeant, and had been sent to Vietnam as reinforcements—their unit's only reinforcements. Neither had been to Vietnam before. They had been given sentry duty because it was thought the least dangerous assignment available. Three days before, McMahon had sent his mother a postcard: “After this duty, they may send us home for a while…. I'll try to write when I have time and don't worry Ma!!!!” At four in the morning on April 29, a half-dozen 122 mm PAVN rockets—Soviet-made projectiles famous for their inaccuracy—struck the DAO complex and Tan Son Nhut in rapid succession, one landing less than two feet from where McMahon and Judge were standing. McMahon caught the brunt of the rocket and was reduced to what one witness described as “a charred stump.” Judge's body was in better repair; one of the first Marines to arrive at the scene believed Judge might still be alive. Darwin Judge and Charles McMahon were the last two uniformed American soldiers to die in the Vietnam War.
After the rocket attack, South Vietnamese Air Force pilots scrambled for their planes, unloaded their missiles and bombs, left them on the runway, and made for Thailand. Some pilots shot others for particularly contested planes. Soon after the rockets stopped, Nguyen Cao Ky writes, “the Communists started pounding the runway of the air base with their big Russian 130mm guns. Within minutes thick, oily smoke spread into a huge cloud as the enemy scored a direct hit on the mail fuel depot. Several planes on the ground exploded in gigantic orange flashes.” A huge portion of Saigon's remaining air force was thus destroyed on the ground. Graham Martin would later claim that Tan Son Nhut had been attacked because the South had in previous days been flying too many of its planes to safer havens. A PAVN general disagreed when he addressed the matter with Engelmann: “The real reason we shelled the runway of Tan Son Nhut was not because the Air Force had withdrawn their airplanes. We shelled the airport simply because that is when the artillery units arrived within shelling distance of Tan Son Nhut.”
A few braver Saigon pilots took to the air of their own volition. Air Marshal Ky himself had spent a portion of the previous day taking out batteries of rocket launchers in an F-5. Now, with the airfield of Tan Son Nhut under attack and that of Bien Hoa in flames, many pilots were sur-really refueling at abandoned Shell stations around the city. In some areas the line of planes waiting for gas stretched for bl
ocks. Ky, who hours earlier had announced on the radio, “I will stay here until my last blood, until I'm dying,” flew himself in a chopper to South Vietnam's military headquarters. It was deserted but for one lieutenant general. “I don't know what to do anymore,” the man told Ky. “Come along with me, then,” Ky said. Ky flew to the USS Midway off the coast of Vietnam, where the ship's American commander “very touchingly” allowed Ky the use of his private quarters, in which Ky spent half an hour weeping.
On the morning of April 29, “departure envelopes” (diplomatic emergency kits stuffed with money and the addresses of various embassies throughout Indochina) were prepared for embassy officials in case anyone was separated during the evacuation—the imminence of which no one any longer had reason to doubt. When Ambassador Martin learned that Tan Son Nhut had been adjudged an impossible launching point for the evacuation, he demanded to be taken there in his bulletproof limousine, an errand that squandered two precious hours. At Khe Sanh earlier in the war, Martin later argued, planes had landed at and taken off from its bombarded airfield all the time. Martin would tell Larry Engelmann that he knew “a great deal about what flies and what doesn't fly…. Out at Tan Son Nhut… they were telling me they couldn't land the planes. That didn't make any bloody sense. I went out there to see and it still didn't make any bloody sense. You could have taken a jeep and cleared the runway of debris in thirty minutes.” The “debris” Martin spoke off included hundreds of live munitions, burning fuel tanks, partially exploded planes, and, in Frank Snepp's words, “one F-5 jet, its engine still running … abandoned just in front of the loading ramp.” It was finally impressed upon Martin that an evacuation from Tan Son Nhut's devastated runways would not be possible.