The Father of All Things

by Tom Bissell

  —It's not any easier.

  —Then you haven't been drinking enough.

  —It's less painful. That's not the same thing.

  —Semper fucking fidelis.

  —God, we bled. We bled so much.

  —We're still bleeding. And we'll bleed a lot more before this is over.

  VIII

  On President Ford's order, the evacuation of Saigon was implemented at 10:25 a.m. local time. The choppers were supposed to have begun arriving in Saigon one hour after Ford's order. But on the U.S. ships awaiting orders in the South China Sea there was berthing confusion. Many of the Marines assigned to certain details found they were not berthed on the same ships as the helicopters in which they were intended to fly to Saigon. Not until half past noon did the initial wave of thirty-six helicopters depart. The flight to Saigon took forty-five minutes, and the first helicopters did not arrive at the DAO—pegged for earlier evacuation than the embassy—until 2 p.m., almost four hours after Ford's evacuation order. The tense Marines sitting within their ocean-skimming gun-ships were not the only people feeling confused. In Saigon the Western journalists, civilians, and Vietnamese promised evacuation were equally perplexed as to how they would find their way to their departure points. The plan held that everyone would gather at preassigned points, where buses would pick them up and take them to the DAO and the embassy. But the streets were already filling up with panic-stricken Vietnamese. The journalist Ken Kashiwahara, of ABC News, described for Larry Engelmann the morning of April 29 as “an island of one kind of insanity in a world of another kind of insanity. Nothing made sense anymore. Adding to the general insanity was the fact that the signal for the evacuation was the playing of Bing Crosby's ‘I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas’ over the Armed Forces Radio.” If playing a Christmas standard in April did not seem a clear enough indicator that something was afoot, the deejay announced at the song's conclusion, “It's a hundred and five degrees in Saigon and the temperature is rising. Mother wants you to call home.” The decision to play “White Christmas” was that of an Armed Forces Radio employee named Chuck Neil. “Why not play a recording of something that every American will recognize in a split second?” Neil later explained. Even this went awry. Neil learned that morning he did not have Bing Crosby's recording of “White Christmas” on hand. Instead he played Tennessee Ernie Ford's.

  Among the people picked up by bus that morning was Philip Caputo. He arrived at the DAO to find rockets hitting the complex and the DAO's security detail emptying their clips into the sky. The New York Times journalist Fox Butterfield, traveling in the same convoy as Caputo, told Larry Engelmann that as they passed Tan Son Nhut air base “a C-119, a ‘flying boxcar,’ a South Vietnamese Air Force plane … took off to about 600 to 1,000 feet and a rocket hit it and it just came apart. It was filled with people.” After disembarking from the buses, Caputo and his fellow evacuees ran toward the DAO's tennis courts. With shells exploding all around them, Americans, journalists, Vietnamese civilians, ARVN officers, and “even a few old French plantation owners” scrambled for the CH-53 helicopters, known alternately as lolly Green Giants or Sea Knights. Giants, knights. A story holds that when the first French warship wandered into Vietnamese waters in the early 1800s, it was thought by the Vietnamese to be a dragon. So the colonial experience rode into Vietnam on the back of a dragon and now left via giants and knights. Caputo steeled himself against the choppers’ ninety-mile-an-hour propeller wash and climbed aboard. Shortly after his CH-53 lifted off, Caputo noticed on the ground a smoke puff, which was instantly followed by the uniquely terrible corkscrew trajectory of a heat-seeking missile spiraling up at him. A decoy flare was released by the chopper, and the incoming missile went lost in an orb of false heat. Caputo's chopper also took small-arms fire from ARVN soldiers until it cleared Vietnam's beaches and floated over the South China Sea, where Caputo saw “thousands” of fishing junks loaded with refugees. When the blocky silhouettes of the U.S. armada hardened above the watery horizon, he knew: “We've lost.”

  “Well,” Caputo was told by a seaman when he climbed off the chopper, “that's one country we don't have to give billions of dollars to anymore.” He walked across the deck as Vietnamese—pilots, civilians, and generals—were frisked at gunpoint. The choppers that were no longer in use had their rotors locked and were pushed over the carrier's edge into the sea. Some Vietnamese, shocked into the realization that they were not going back to their homeland, attempted to jump after the drowned helicopters. An officer aboard the USS Denver took a long look at Caputo. He was wearing a dirty shirt and a beard he had not trimmed for days; his only possessions were some maps and his notebooks. He was assigned his berth in the ship, to which he quickly retired. He had been awake for thirty hours. He found other men in the berth, who paused as he entered, then nodded at him. As Caputo climbed into his cot, they resumed talking. Ambassador Martin was “nearly certifiable” for delaying the evacuation, they said. Did anyone else know he was walking his dog around Saigon as recently as yesterday? Did they realize how many classified files had fallen intact into North Vietnamese hands at Danang and Nha Trang? Caputo then realized that his bunkmates were CIA field agents. The deck officer had assigned Caputo to what he assumed was his fellow agents’ room. Caputo said nothing. Eventually he was too tired to listen and fell asleep.

  Back in Saigon, Ken Moorefield was driving one of the evacuation buses. It says something about Operation Frequent Wind that although Moorefield had never driven a bus before, this somehow did not disqualify him for bus-driving duty. Moorefield quickly lost his patience with the journalists he was picking up, many of whom, he later told Frank Snepp, “were getting all tangled up in their equipment. ‘Leave it!’ I yelled to them. ‘For chrissakes, leave it!’ But not one of them would part with his precious tripods or tote bag—or raise a hand to help with the Vietnamese.” Later in the evacuation, as Snepp writes, one journalist “tried to elbow aside an old Vietnamese woman and push his cameras and tripods” into a helicopter. An embassy official walked up behind the journalist, “tapped him on the shoulder, flattened him with a roundhouse in the jaw, and threw his cameras into the bushes.”

  The journalist Ken Kashiwahara, also on a bus, told Engelmann he saw “a Vietnamese man … running up alongside the bus. He was carrying a baby. And he held out the baby and was pleading, ‘Please take my baby! Please take my baby! Please take my baby!’ And the bus kept moving. And the man fell. And the baby fell, too, obviously. And the man dropped the baby. And the rear wheels of the bus ran over the baby.” Kashiwahara then had the bewildering thought that he and the rest of the bus's occupants might not escape the country. (Elsewhere in Saigon, others had been coming to identical conclusions. An American husband-wife team employed by the CIA as analysts made the decision that if Saigon filled up with pith-helmeted North Vietnamese before they escaped, the husband would put a bullet through his wife's brain and then turn the gun on himself.) Many of the buses traveled in circles, their drivers having no idea how to navigate Saigon's roadblocked streets. The journalist Ed Bradley, trapped on one bus, described to Engelmann how “every time our driver turned a corner with his bus he wiped out about three restaurants. This went on for seven hours!”

  In the streets, Saigon policemen beat American “big noses” and when that grew tiresome opened fire on buses and cars carrying evacuees. The New York Times’ Malcolm Browne, who three years earlier had been expelled from South Vietnam by President Thieu, reported finding “a blanket on the sidewalk next to the Continental Hotel, in the heart of the downtown foreign quarter. On the blanket lay a sleeping baby, beside it a small plastic bag containing ragged clothing and some toys.” Browne wrote of Americans wandering the streets in search of old Vietnamese friends, then abandoning their searches when set upon by angry Vietnamese for whom no one was looking. Eventually Browne had the thought to call his contacts at the Provisional Revolutionary Government headquarters “after a particularly heavy shelling” of Tan Son Nhut a
ir base. He asked how they were doing. “I cannot tell you how grateful we are for asking,” his PRG friend responded, “especially considering the circumstances. We hope you all get through this somehow.” Before boarding his designated bus, Browne was told by a weeping Vietnamese man, “You may hear after you leave that some of us here have died, perhaps even at their own hand. You must not spend the rest of your lives with that guilt. It is just a part of Vietnam's black fate, in which you, all of you, became ensnared for a time.”

  The journalist Keyes Beech, of the Chicago Daily News, drove around Saigon in a packed bus after having been turned back at Tan Son Nhut's first checkpoint, where security conditions “were out of control.” The scene beyond his window was incomprehensible. The American PX had been broken into, its protective layer of barbed wire torn away while men with raked and bloody arms carried away refrigerators in rickshaws. Bicycles and scooters tore down wide avenues shedding contraband soap and candy bars at every turn. One witness described ARVN soldiers walking around with wristwatches “strapped all the way up to both elbows.” Some children were armed with pistols. “You could find almost anything that night,” Andrew X. Pham would write years later. “The defeated army discarded guns, ammo, helmets, knives, uniforms, boots, water tins….” Looters were stripping every American business of carpets, sofas, faucet fixtures, filing cabinets, and rolling chairs. The sharp stench of smashed whiskey cases blew through the streets. Through these Boschian tableaux Beech's bus journeyed. “We were a busload of fools,” he wrote, “piloted by a man who had never driven a bus [not Moorefield] and had to wire the ignition when it stalled because the Vietnamese driver had run away with the keys the night before.” A number of cars began trailing Beech's bus in the vain hope it would find some way out of the bedlam. “At every stop,” Beech wrote, “Vietnamese beat on the doors and windows pleading to be let inside. We merely looked at them. We already had enough Vietnamese aboard. Every time we opened the door, we had to beat and kick them back.” The bus—” our prison and our fortress”—was nevertheless overrun. “I found myself pushing a middle-aged Vietnamese woman who had been sitting beside me on the bus and asked me to look after her because she worked for the Americans and the Viet Cong would cut her throat.” At last, out of options, Beech's bus drove down Thong Nhut Boulevard (today Le Duan Boulevard) and stopped at the U.S. Embassy, around which 10,000 Vietnamese had formed a violent, writhing bracelet of grief.

  The six-story embassy had been built in 1967. A year later, during the Tet Offensive, it was widely (and erroneously) reported that several shoeless NLF commandos had made it as high as the embassy's upper floors, which the CIA occupied, but apparently none had made it beyond the first. Since then its already fearsome armature had been considerably strengthened. The embassy's concrete artillery shield was possibly the strongest in the world, and in the last few days its ten-foot-high wall had been dressed in barbed wire. A break had been made in the wire, which eight Marines were guarding. This was essentially the only way inside, as the embassy's front gate had been reinforced with steel bars that, for good measure, were welded into place. The embassy's 160-Marine security force had set up in the courtyard a .30-caliber machine-gun nest, its barrel trained on the gate in case the Vietnamese broke through. The compound's inner concinnity had been equally disturbed. The embassy restaurant was in the alpha stages of being ransacked, and its swimming pool was doing double duty as a toilet and dumping site for whatever bullets and firearms any Vietnamese had managed to get inside, as there were rumors that NLF “assassination squads” were intent on killing American officials.

  After the Vietnamese woman he had sat next to on the bus announced she was going home to poison herself, Beech and his fellow journalists beat and pushed their way through the crowd toward the wall. They “ceased to be correspondents. We were only men fighting for our lives, scratching, clawing, pushing ever closer to that wall.” Beech, at the time, was sixty-one years old. And this thought occurred to him: “Now … I know what it's like to be a Vietnamese. I am one of them.” The Marines at the wall had their orders: grab and pull up Americans first, third-country nationals second, and then, only then, approved Vietnamese. How anyone was to communicate his or her approved status is difficult to imagine, and there are many stories of ethnic-Vietnamese American citizens futilely waving their passports at the Marines. Ken Kashiwahara, as an Asian, was particularly worried about his chances of getting over the wall. He screamed the only thing he could think of that would convince the Marines he was an American: “The Dodgers won the pennant!” Luckily, he was recognized and pulled up.

  Despite one American general's belief that there was “something about a United States Marine that demands respect from the Vietnamese people,” many Vietnamese climbed atop the wall and exchanged blows with the Marines before being heaved back into the crowd. The Marines did not treat only Vietnamese ruthlessly. One went so far as to smash an American journalist's television camera after the journalist caught on film a particularly brutal repulsion. When another Marine was pulled into the crowd by the Vietnamese, the journalist Bob Tamarkin wrote, “the mood … turned from bare tolerance to fitful rage.” The Marines broke children's noses with their M16 butts. They beat old women. The wall became so chaotic that other embassy officials were forced to pitch in. Tamarkin wrote, “One official drew his revolver, stuck it point-blank in the face of a young Vietnamese boy and screamed: ‘Get down, you bastard, or I'll blow your head off. Get down!’ “And: “One official who had thrown a young girl from the wall three times finally gave in. ? couldn't take it anymore. I feel sorry for her.’ “(The man was named Jeff Kibler. He was a twenty-four-year-old embassy accountant.) This is from Frank Snepp: “[Ojne Vietnamese woman, in an effort to climb over the surrounding fence herself, had become pinioned on a metal upright. Now she hung there like a speared fish, blood slowly oozing across the front of her [dress].”

  Families who had arrived at the wall watched as one or two members of their group were selected from the crowd—acts of charity that nevertheless obliterated these families for decades. It is little wonder that while reading about the fall of Saigon, one repeatedly comes across the trope of Americans unwilling to look into Vietnamese eyes. Butler: “On the walls and at the gates, it was hard to look anyone in the eye.” The pull quote from a Harper's cover story entitled “Last Days in Saigon,” written by Dennis Troute, was “Don't Look in Their Eyes.” The scholar Neil L. Jamieson writes of his experience during Saigon's fall: “[Ojne man muttered to his companions: ‘Don't look in their eyes.’ The advice was unnecessary. We left with our heads down, confused, frustrated, and ashamed.”

  Keyes Beech still had not made it in. In the scrum Beech's briefcase hit the face of a Vietnamese baby in its mother's arms. The baby's father began to punch and attack Beech, who “tried to apologize as he kept on beating me while his wife pleaded with me to take the baby.” Beech was finally pulled up the wall by a Marine with “long, muscular arms,” while others pushed and punched the Vietnamese attempting to scale the wall alongside him. Beech had arrived at the wall safeguarding the lives of some Vietnamese and lapanese friends. They were not pulled up. By 3 p.m., things had somehow gotten worse. It took Bob Tamarkin an hour and a half to move three yards through the crowd before he was finally pulled up. Meanwhile, French Embassy officials stood watching from the walls of their own next-door compound. All of those who approached the French Embassy begging for help were ignored.

  The bus convoy system broke down late in the afternoon. Ken Moore-field arrived at the embassy at five and was pulled over the wall while some Vietnamese, as he later put it, “were waving documentation I myself had stamped the day before.” Moorefield found 2,000 people in the embassy compound, mostly Vietnamese but also many third-country nationals and journalists. He armed himself with an Ml6, horrified by how easily a saboteur could have lobbed over the wall a satchel of C-4. Not a single chopper had yet arrived at the embassy. The DAO, with its more implicated Vietnames
e population, many of them high-ranking military people who had been waiting for weeks to be evacuated, was still the first priority. Sometime after 5 p.m., however, the first helicopters arrived. The larger CH-53 landed in the embassy parking lot, with the smaller CH-46 coming down on the roof.

  At 6 p.m. what Tamarkin called the “rampage” began. Those Vietnamese lucky enough to have gained entrance into the embassy and observant enough to suspect that there was no way all of them would be evacuated began to pillage. It began innocently enough, with several hundred cases of soda being stolen from a storeroom, which was emptied, Tamarkin wrote, “within minutes.” The embassy restaurant's freezer was next, and when the looting spread to the storerooms containing cartons of American cigarettes, the Marines finally began beating Vietnamese in the halls and along the embassy's staircases, in some cases stuffing the dropped cartons of cigarettes into their own pockets and duffels. Outside now, it was quiet. The thousands of Vietnamese who crowded every embassy gate were sitting quietly, hopelessly. If any looked up at the roof of the embassy, they would have seen smoke gushing from the chimney of the embassy's rooftop incinerator. Every piece of paper generated since the embassy's founding twenty-one years ago was being burned. As Frank Snepp notes, the Saigon CIA station alone had more than fourteen tons of material to put to the torch. In the days leading up to the evacuation, thousands of laminated name cards for high-risk Vietnamese had been printed up, reserving seats for them on outgoing evacuation planes. They had never been distributed. Now they, too, were being incinerated.

  “ [N] either Ford nor I,” Henry Kissinger writes in his memoir, “could influence the outcome any longer; we had become spectators. So we each sat in our offices, freed of other duties yet unable to affect the ongoing tragedy, suspended between a pain we could not still and a future we were not in a position to shape.” Kissinger describes an “almost mystical stillness” in the White House. He also describes what was tormenting him: namely, his “role in the next-to-last act: the acceleration of negotiations after Le Due Tho's breakthrough offer of October 8,1972. What has torn at me ever since is whether the demoralization of the Saigon structure which led to its collapse in 1975 started with the pace of negotiations we imposed … on the verge of both an honorable end of the war and national reconciliation.”