by Tom Bissell
It had not yet been determined whether to keep a small staff in the U.S. Embassy after the Communists moved into Saigon. Martin felt strongly that the United States should; it was a matter of international dignity. Complicating matters was Article XXI of the Paris Accords, which required the United States “to contribute to healing the wounds of war.” If the United States had a diplomatic presence in Saigon after its government's collapse, it would likely be held accountable for Article XXI. During the Paris peace talks, Kissinger and Nixon had promised, but had not committed to paper, a $4.25 billion aid package to North Vietnam, the awarding of which they neglected to mention would depend on congressional approval. Hanoi's Liberation Radio had the temerity to keep bringing this up and on the morning of April 29 asked “whether the U.S. imperialists agree to compensate for and heal the deep and extensive wounds they have caused the Vietnamese people.” If the United States stayed, it would not only lead to a diplomatic relationship but the promise's violation, since Congress would never authorize such an aid package. It would also mean that the United States would have no standing to hold North Vietnam to Article VIII(b) of the Paris Accords, which concerned the return of U.S. soldiers designated as missing in action. The inevitable decision was made: full evacuation.
The evacuation's code name was initially Operation Talon Vise. When that code name was compromised, another, unintentionally flatulent code name was settled upon: Operation Frequent Wind. It was also called Option IV Options I, II, and III all involved fixed-wing aircraft, whereas the last-resort Option IV called for an evacuation exclusively reliant on helicopters. The one helpful aspect of Option IV was how much more difficult it would be for the Vietnamese to storm helicopters. Among the many unhelpful things about Option IV was the design of the embassy grounds, likened by more than one pilot to a well. As a Marine put it to Larry Engelmann: “They [the helicopter pilots] had about a seventy-foot vertical descent to get into the embassy. They had to come over, hover, then descend seventy feet into this hole, and there wasn't that much room.” For these overloaded helicopters to lift off would be no easier. “[Ijnstead of doing what they call a ‘translationai’ maneuver, where you get the bird off the ground and then lean it forward, they had to go straight up. There was no room…. They literally had to go straight up seventy feet.” If one helicopter failed to execute this midair slalom, Option IV would be over. There was no Option V.
The morning's one beam of sunlight was news from Moscow, which Kissinger received. The Soviets let it be known that the North would let the U.S. evacuation continue until midnight of that day, with the strong insinuation that it did not mind if many thousands of South Vietnamese were also evacuated. (Later the North's leaders would admit, with disturbing honesty, that the expatriation of so many southerners had helpfully prevented them from having to reeducate them later.) The Soviets’ note mirrored an earlier note from April 22, which read, “The position of the Vietnamese side on the question of evacuation of American citizens from South Vietnam is definitely favorable…. We are told that the Vietnamese do not intend to damage the reputation of the United States.” In those final words stands the colossal folly of the Vietnam War. The most powerful nation in the world, hotfooting it out of one of the poorest, being assured that no one intends to “damage” its reputation.
VII
In Saigon it is morning. But in Michigan it is night. What connects these places across mountains and seas, you feel certain, is a cord of bright endless pain that happens to feed directly into your collapsing nervous system. You sit staring at the television. Around you and within you everything ends, yet Escanaba itself is a cocoon of maddening stillness. Muff is upstairs, bathing the boys. You can hear, over the television's low volume, the sloppy, glorious sound of children in water. It is just after 9:30 p.m. Aunt Grace is long asleep. Your little sister Alicia, wearing an untucked red gingham shirt and knee-torn blue jeans ratty with denim tendrils, had wandered downstairs, taken one look at you on the couch, and retreated back up to her room. Your younger brother Paul has not yet come home. As usual these days, you find yourself all alone. You hate solitude until you have drunk past it, drunk until your grief becomes purely, endurably chemical and a mysterious chorus of conversation fills your skull. Then you cherish your solitude. Protect it. Get away from me.
But tonight solitude will not do. You begin calling your old Marine buddies, the only people who will understand why something happening a dozen time zones and 12,000 miles away can hurt you so profoundly. After three tub glasses of Johnnie Walker, your dialing finger feels as large and clumsy as a foot, and you mash apelike at the numeric keypad before finally getting your first call through. It is to R—— in Chicago, not your closest friend in Vietnam, but okay, he will do, as a start. The phone rings and rings. He should be home. You want him to be home, doing what you are doing, suffering what you are suffering. Or perhaps he wishes, this night above all others, not to talk. Get away from me. But suspecting he is there, and is listening to these rings, angers you.
You feel very lonely sometimes, stranded here upon Michigan's Upper Peninsula—a part of the country tacitly impossible to pass through by accident. Anyone who finds himself in the U.P. meant to find himself in the U.P. Yet you never intended to wind up back here. Your own cruel little paradox. The shabby churches, the clusters of prefab roadside homes, the gas stations on the brink of foreclosure, the shoppes whose hand-painted signs offer some staple (souvenirs, driftwood, smoked fish) of Escanaba's garage-sale economy. Sometimes you feel a hopeless, landlocked dementia take hold of you, and you long for Vietnam. For all its dreads, in Vietnam you never lost your simple human awareness of being alive. It was a young man's land, covered in a dew of terrifying possibility. But among these mute forests of the Upper Midwest it is as though the future never happens. You once believed that a young person growing up here had three options: to go mad, devote oneself to substance abuse, or develop a sense of humor as harsh as a drill bit. The last gambit was a great consolation to those who knew they would one day leave and a great annoyance to those who knew they would not. You seem to have managed all three, a hometown boy after all.
You are dialing G—— in New Jersey when you see Muff descend the stairs and without a word or glance turn at their base and imperially head off to your ground-floor bedroom. It could be that she did not see you. Television flicker sends sputters of color around the room, and you can almost believe that you are invisible in this odd darkness. But you know she saw you, or sensed you, and recoiled. When did you begin this long, impotent slide toward estrangement? In self-defense you have both formed new emotional jurisdictions, access to which requires passwords that change from day to day. You misconstrue the rawness of Muff's need as her loss of faith and know she believes your remoteness to be indifference. Every word you exchange has become an encrypted ultimatum. So you do not speak for days, and then, without warning, you make sudden, detoxifying love, begging for each other's forgiveness. But now, for the first time, your truces refuse to take. You have suffered some massive dislocation. In response Muff has been going on one retail tear after another, trusting that more possessions will form the simplest route to salvation. She wants a better life, a life you are beginning to see you are powerless to give her, because for her “better” means something quite simple: not with you.
You reach G——, a man who in boot was given to dumping an entire box of cornflakes into a huge salad bowl and pouring over this carbohydrate mountain a half gallon of milk. Like you, like all of you, a volunteer. He is sickened by the day's events, which are still being relayed only sketchily by the news. He is not nearly as drunk as you are. In fact, he claims to have not been drinking at all. This seems to you incredible. Before you know it G—— is speaking of betrayal, of how personally he took President Ford's widely noted remarks of April 23, six days ago, in a speech at Tulane University. Ford said this:
Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be ac
hieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the Nation's wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence. … We can and should help others to help themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere in the final decision rests in their own hands.
Decent, sensible, utterly obtuse words. President Ford (“the weakest president in U.S. history,” in the words of North Vietnam's prime minister Pham Van Dong) spoke of the war as some misadventure roughly as regrettable as a bounced check, not the scorching trip through the vortex by which an entire generation was third-degree-burned. “Optimistic self-confidence”? You and G—— know that, in hours, you will be veter ans of the only war the United States has lost—about which there is, apparently, some glee. When Ford said the word “finished,” Tulane's applauding students got to their feet.
There is no national confidence to be restored after this war, after that self-satisfied applause. Where to begin? You and your fellow warriors proved unable to find, with any consistency, an enemy hiding in an area less than half the size of New Mexico. You and your fellow warriors were unable to defeat an enemy outnumbered in active combatants by a margin thought to be five to one. You and your fellow warriors could not crush an enemy with a per capita income of $160, an enemy whose nation's gross national product was one four-hundredth that of your own. “Self-confidence”? In whom? In what? You sought to counter an insurgency and wound up activating a larger insurgency, in effect proving that everything the Communists said about the United States and its “puppet government” in Saigon was right, even though it was not. That is what you did: you made a lie true.
None of which Ford could admit, even if he believed it. Apparently, he did. Robert Hartmann, Ford's counselor, described to Larry Engelmann how the president had “conversationally” mentioned before the Tulane speech that he didn't “know why we have to spend so much time worrying about a war that's over as far as we're concerned.” “Well,” Hartmann replied, “then why don't you just say that?” At the last minute, the fateful Vietnam interlude was added to the text of Ford's speech. Kissinger called the insertion into Ford's speech “a typical inside-the-Beltway bureaucratic victory,” one “masterminded” by gutless “gloaters” who had not had the decency to consult Kissinger about the last-minute addition. (“I don't think Henry would like it,” Ford had worried to Hartmann. Hartmann: “You're the President, and if that's the way you feel, say it.”) Kissinger was angry because the speech signaled with no ambiguity that the United States was done with Vietnam. As Kissinger later argued in his memoirs, “ambiguity about how far we were willing to go [in saving South Vietnamese] was the sole bargaining card left.” In Kissinger we have a man who would strategize how best to escape from a burning skyscraper or issue a position statement from the cabin of a jetliner in free fall. (In fact, Kissinger had already stupidly shown his cards. After the Paris agreement was signed, Pham Van Dong asked him if the United States, like the Mongols, would return to attack Vietnam again. “Once is enough!” Kissinger responded.)
But neither you nor G—— blames him, exactly, for the collapse of all you fought and suffered for. You blame fifteen years of inexplicable decisions. You blame the war planners who forbade firing on any enemy boat larger than fifty feet or smaller than twenty feet. The colonels who on Monday would order that a Communist hill be taken, suffer a dozen Marine casualties in the doing, order its abandonment on Friday, and upon news of its recapture on Sunday order its takeover again. The Air Force majordomos who decreed that no U.S. pilot could shoot at North Vietnamese surface-to-air missile sites until they fired; meanwhile the patient American flyboy was ejecting from a burning metal comet. You blame lohn F. Kennedy. You blame Lyndon lohnson. You blame President Thieu. You blame Richard Nixon. You blame the American people for not understanding war. You blame the journalists for blowing the My Lai massacre out of all reasonable proportion and turning the public against what was a noble and just cause. You could have won the war, you know, if it had been fought the way war was intended to be fought. And for all that, you almost won. But Kissinger? “Had I thought it possible that Congress would … cut off aid to a beleaguered ally,” Kissinger wrote, “I would not have pressed for an agreement as I did in the final negotiations in 1972.” The man was a fly on the manure pile of war, believing above all else that the manure was his. You hang up with G—— even angrier than you were before you called him. lesus, where is Muff? You want to tell her how goddamned angry you are. Then you realize that, in all likelihood, this is why she has avoided you tonight and will be avoiding you for the foreseeable future.
Next you call C——, your closest friend from Vietnam and the man you made the godfather of your second son. C—— wound up in the Marine Corps because of several early indications of his promising career as a hoodlum. In 1963 he had stolen a car or some approximate last-straw offense. The sentencing judge offered C—— a choice of jail or the Marine Corps, a post-Korean War innovation of jurisprudence known as “alternative sentencing.” He wound up surviving three tours in Vietnam. Now, thanks to you, he works in Escanaba, in your own bank. C——‘s lakefront home is only blocks away from where you now sit and dial. He answers after one ring.
—You watching?
—Clusterfuck.
—Jesus Christ.
—I feel ill.
—Nothing we can do about it now. Dang di fucking good-bye, Vietnam.
—I'm ashamed of my country. For the first time in my life I'm ashamed to be an American.
—We hung those people out to dry. Every last one of them.
—Thing was won when I left, for Christ's sake. It was practically over. The VC were almost all dead. You could walk through VC villages in 1969 and there wouldn't be a single shot fired. There were roads I wouldn't even bother carrying a weapon on anymore. How did this happen?
—We didn't have the balls to see it through. It's politicians. Journalists. You can't fight a war if you're afraid of photographs. Or if you're listening to some goddamn poll.
—Where were the photos of the hospitals we built? The medicine we gave out?
—You know what we should have done. Invaded the North. Bombed Hanoi. I mean really bombed it. The Big One. War over. If the Russians and Chinese wanted to take issue with that…. The thing is, we never defined what we were going to do.
—It was defined. If you were in the Army, you were killing Communists. If you were in the Marines, you were trying to pacify the families of the Vietnamese guys the Army killed.
—Which means there was nobody with enough guts to define anything.
—You watching alone, or is she with you?
—She won't watch. She went to bed. Says she's sick of it. Says she hopes it really is over.
—That sounds familiar.
—She said the same thing to you?
—If we were on speaking terms, yeah. She might have said something very much along those lines.
—What do you suppose Caputo is doing right now?
—I don't know. Getting the hell out of there, I hope.
Philip Caputo, who before becoming a journalist had gone through Officer Candidate School with you and served a tour in Vietnam, was in Saigon in late April, wondering whether or not he should flee. “[H]ow would we, American correspondents,” Caputo wondered, “be treated by the Communist victors? In the final moments of chaos, would the South Vietnamese, feeling betrayed by Washington, turn their weapons on every American they saw?” On April 28, Caputo found himself on South Vietnam's main artery, Highway 1, outside Long Binh, writing “a personal account of what must be one of the great tragedies of modern times…. A hundred yards away, North Vietnamese mortar shells and rockets are slamming into government positions guarding the bridge over the Dong Hai River.”
Caputo was covering the long, desperate march of South Vietnamese peasants from the North's blitzkrieg toward Sa
igon. Many of these peasants were “refugees two and three times over—people who ran from Xuan Loc, from Da Nang and Ham Tam and Qui Nhon. Now they are running again, but this is their last retreat.” Caputo described the procession: “They shambled in the rain and heat: barefoot civilians, soldiers whose boots were rotting on their feet, some still carrying their weapons and determined that their little bands would stick together, most without weapons, broken men determined only to escape.” The previous night, Caputo could hear in his Saigon hotel room the crackle of small-arms fire, rockets hitting the airport, the thunder of field guns. He wrote that through his hotel's top-floor window, “I could see the flames of a burning fuel dump. Gekko lizards clung to the room's white walls, the walls quaking from the secondary explosions set off by the bombs, the lizards immobile in their reptilian indifference.” Seeing everything so obviously falling apart moved Caputo to reflect on the deaths of his friends: “Those men had died for no reason. They had given their all for nothing.”
—I feel like—
—I know what you feel like.
—Can you honestly tell me what we really did?
—We fought. We did our duty. We were Marines, and we did what Marines do. And sometimes Marines die.
—All so we could sit here and watch this.
—It's over. It doesn't have to mean anything.
—It has to mean something.
—Then it means what you want it to mean.
—You know what? I have no idea, no clue, what that could be. I think I want… my God. I want my friends back. I want the men I saw die to be alive again. I want every letter I wrote the parents of my boys to have never been sent. I want to walk around with normal thoughts in my head and not all this—
—Look. Drink.
—I have been. I am.
—Drink more. It's easier. And quit crying.