by Tom Bissell
At the Defense Attache Office complex, 2,700 Vietnamese and Americans were suffering occasional, nonspecific potshots from disillusioned ARVN snipers. The specter of dying at the hands of South Vietnamese soldiers grew so dire that one American joked that “we were going to lock ourselves in a room … and pray for the arrival of the North Vietnamese Army.” One sniper was finally shot by Air Force officers. Another firefight, in the words of Sergeant Kevin Maloney, took place “right outside Tan Son Nhut. They made a big deal at the time about us getting out of there without firing a shot—well, I'm telling you what, the people who were saying those things weren't in Saigon.” This was not the only instance of fighting between the United States and Vietnamese. As President Ford later sheepishly admitted to Congress, U.S. and North Vietnamese forces engaged in combat at several places on Saigon's outskirts. PAVN missiles were fired at U.S. Phantom jets, for instance, and the jets responded with missile barrages of their own.
Frank Snepp wrote that, as the DAO evacuation neared completion, one U.S. official took “one final look” at Tan Son Nhut air base: “As far as he could see, the airfield was littered with fireballs, each going from blue to green to brilliant white as it rolled its way through rows of parked aircraft. He stared out at these Disneyesque images for a few moments, unable to believe that they, and everything else he had witnessed this day, were now part of the irretrievable past.” Shortly before midnight, the last of the Marines guarding the DAO were extracted, and the explosives placed throughout the complex were detonated by remote control from the DAO evacuation's final helicopter. The sky filled with magnesium-fed fire. Five miles away from the DAO, those within the steel wombs of Marine helicopters rising from the embassy's roof and courtyard felt their eyes fill with flames. Keyes Beech: “Tan Son Nhut was burning. So was Bien Hoa.” Lacy Wright: “[Y]ou could look out to the west and see Long Binh Base burning. A huge, huge fire…. Everything that we had tried to do was going up, literally, in flames.” Ken Kashiwa-hara: “It looked like the entire countryside was exploding in flames…. It really looked like all of Vietnam was burning.”
Two hours before the DAO was destroyed, Ambassador Martin, his hair (in the journalist Bob Tamarkin's words) “perfectly combed,” appeared to survey the damage done to his embassy. He said nothing, was not recognized, and vanished back inside. By now those at the embassy were waiting as long as fifty minutes between helicopter landings. When the White House asked if Martin might not be able to speed things along, he responded by cable: “Perhaps you can tell me how to make some of these Americans abandon their half-Vietnamese children or how the President would look if he ordered this. For more than 50 minutes there have been no CH-53s here. And only one CH-46.” The ambassador never lost his barbed nature, removing a photo of Henry Kissinger from an embassy wall and replacing it with a map of Hanoi. “May as well let them feel at home,” Martin said. Two hours after his previous cable, he was again hectoring the White House: “There is now a long lull. Nothing in last twenty minutes…. I sure don't want to spend my May Day here.” The North's evacuation deadline of midnight had now passed, which General Dung, waiting on the edge of Saigon, equated with the raising of “a divine hammer.” (“Once the bamboo is notched,” PAVN soldiers were told by their officers of the assault on Saigon, “one blow is enough to break it”) By 12:30 a.m., the approaching rumble of PAVN artillery could be heard within the embassy's reinforced walls. Parties of eighty Vietnamese at a time were slowly making their way upstairs to the embassy roof “like toothpaste through a tube,” in the words of one American. On the roof itself, a few Marines, no doubt driven to something resembling madness by the day's activity, began to “conduct” the crowds of Vietnamese to sing. The Marines, CIA agents, and embassy factotums not on the roof were going through the embassy destroying everything of possible use. One Marine was seen reading a copy of The Fall of Rome. Frank Snepp himself found a book: Don Oberdorfer's Tet! Snepp left the book where he found it, believing the embassy's next tenants “might be somewhat amused to learn what the Americans had thought of that last great offensive.” By 3 a.m., the evacuation was twelve hours behind schedule.
At 4:15 a.m., Martin cabled the White House for the last time: “Plan to close mission at about 0430 30 April local time. Due to necessity to destroy commo gear, this is the last message from embassy Saigon.” Minutes later, the embassy's communications officer whacked the “commo gear” with a sledgehammer, and Marines destroyed the rest with explosives. Martin made his way to the roof, which was, in Snepp's account,
a vision out of a nightmare. In the center of the dimly lit helo-pad a CH-47 was already waiting … its engines setting up a roar like a primeval scream. The crew and controllers all wore what looked like oversize football helmets, and in the blinking under-light of the landing signals they reminded me of grotesque insects rearing on their hindquarters. Out beyond the edge of the building a Phantom jet streaked across the horizon as tracers darted up here and there into the night sky.
After an aide checked the courtyard to make sure he didn't “see any white faces,” Martin climbed aboard the Lady Bird 9 carrying the American flag. It was 4:47 a.m. With Martin were various embassy personnel, including Ken Moorefield, and two missionaries. The chopper rose into a morning sky filled with monsoon-spawned lightning and headed for the USS Blue Ridge, the Seventh Fleet's flagship. Only months later, in a Hanoi museum, Ambassador Martin's departure from the embassy roof would be depicted in a primitive diorama, to the delight of Vietnamese children.
Unfortunately, anywhere from 400 to 420 Vietnamese were still in the embassy waiting for their promised evacuation. Army Captain Stuart Herrington was with some of them. As Martin's helicopter left, Herring-ton screamed at them in Vietnamese, “Khong ai se bi bo lai!” Nobody's going to be left behind! “And I believed it,” he later told Larry Engel-mann. Among those left behind were Vietnamese firemen who had been providing crowd control (their families had gone out earlier), a gaggle of drunk and unconscious South Korean diplomats, and a German priest, who, in Herrington's words, “helped out.” Before they could board choppers, the evacuation was terminated by White House order. The remaining Americans were told to be on the next flight out. Herrington argued, but it was no use. He informed the Vietnamese waiting with him that he was going to the bathroom and ducked away for the roof. On his way there he passed the embassy plaque that was inscribed: “In memory of the brave Americans who died defending this Embassy during the Tet Offensive, 1968.” Such was Herrington's bitterness that he said to himself, “To hell with the plaque.” It was later salvaged by an American journalist who had stayed in Saigon to cover the Communist takeover.
By 5 a.m., Herrington and three American civilians were the only non-Marines left in the embassy. One was the journalist Bob Tamarkin. The others, an American man and an American woman, refused to give Tamarkin their names. History will know them only for their deluded bravery, as they had come to help their Vietnamese friends escape the country before realizing the situation was hopeless. “You know,” Tamarkin heard the man say, “I had ordered $100 worth of tailor-made clothing yesterday when I arrived, and I paid for it in advance.” The last civilian helicopter left the U.S. Embassy with only four people on it. Herrington: “I was sickened, naturally. I never in my life felt worse, never will feel worse than at that moment walking away from those people…. I just couldn't stop crying.” In his memoir, Henry Kissinger would claim that he had no idea how the roughly four hundred Vietnamese had been abandoned. This is strange if only because the military officials present at the embassy said the evacuation had been terminated “by presidential order” after it had been made clear that many Vietnamese were being left behind. As he was borne aloft, Tamarkin looked down into the embassy courtyard. There, “hundreds of Vietnamese looked up,” waiting for the next helicopter.
In Decent Interval, Frank Snepp mentions “the legacy and shame of total defeat” that many Americans felt while abandoning Saigon to its fate. “There is a s
imple truth,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once wrote,
which one can learn only through suffering: in war not victories are blessed but defeats. Governments need victories and the people need defeats. Victory gives rise to the desire for more victories. But after a defeat it is freedom that men desire—and usually attain. A people needs defeat just as an individual needs suffering and misfortune: they compel the deepening of the inner life and generate a spiritual upsurge.
Operation Frequent Wind was not, by any metric, a victory, despite its success in extracting from Saigon 1,373 Americans, 5,595 South Vietnamese, and 85 third-country nationals. The largest helicopter evacuation in history, Frequent Wind saw only two fatalities, when exhausted pilots were forced to ditch their helicopter over the South China Sea and were never found. Even General Dung, in his memoir, marveled at the success of the evacuation, the last thirteen hours of which were far from the entire story. Over the month of April, 51,888 people (45,125 Vietnamese and 6,763 Americans and other foreigners) had been airlifted from South Vietnam. Another 6,000 left by barge, and an unknown number thought to be in the low thousands escaped on unrecorded “black flights” engineered mainly by the CIA. Another 65,000 South Vietnamese escaped on their own. But the number of Vietnamese abandoned must exceed this total number by factors of five, ten, fifteen. In a war of such endless ambiguity and suffering, it is somehow fitting that even the stunning success of the evacuation was qualified with so many dismal failures and betrayals.
Nor was it over. Shortly after Herrington and Tamarkin's helicopter cleared the roof, Kissinger learned that “elements of the 9th Marine Amphibious Brigade protecting the evacuation—comprising 129 Marines—had been left behind for some inexplicable reason.” The airlift was resumed. Major Jim Kean, the commanding officer of the Marine unit responsible for protecting the evacuation, later told Larry Engelmann that he knew the Marines’ withdrawal could trigger “a big donnybrook in front of the embassy door.” After slinking away from their posts unnoticed, many of the Marines in Kean's command were thinking, “My God, we're only thirty seconds away from pulling this thing off without a fight.” Of course, “all hell broke loose. The crowd outside realized what was happening … and they panicked.” The Marines retreated deeper into the embassy, locking out the Vietnamese charging after them and littering the stairway to the roof with “big old fire extinguishers” to slow any who made it past the bolted doors. A CH-46 arrived, and the Marines were forced to leave behind their flak jackets and helmets in order to squeeze more men on board. Soon only eleven Marines were left. They were, as Major Kean notes, the last U.S. ground forces in Vietnam.
For a dismayingly long time no more choppers arrived. My father in Michigan was just returning home from work as dawn arrived in Saigon, where some Marines slept on the embassy rooftop as the sun came up. Others watched President Minh's “cavalcade of cars” pass by the embassy on its way to the palace. Before driving away, a few of Minh's guards shot at the looters tearing apart the open floors of the U.S. Embassy. While some Marines were counting ammunition in case they had to make a stand against the sixteen PAVN divisions driving into Saigon, Major Kean did “something kind of funny,” which was to whip out his .45 and pump into the embassy's satellite dish antenna every bullet he had. Eventually the Vietnamese smashed through the barriers the Marines had established and were now pounding against the locked rooftop door. “An arm smashed through the window of the door under the helipad,” David Butler writes. One Marine “got to it fast and pulled the arm into the broken glass, and it was yanked back with a cry…. More arms reached through the broken window. So they kept a man there to grab the arms and jam them into the glass.” This Marine also sprayed the intrusive Vietnamese with Mace. One Vietnamese man had succeeded in crawling up the side of the embassy, but someone dropped something heavy and knocked the man off as though he were nothing more than a barnacle. The final chopper set down on the roof at 7:53 a.m. Major Kean ordered that the helipad be teargassed as they lifted off. The last Marines to leave Vietnam thus caught a rotored-up miasma of gas while keeping their weapons fixed on the Vietnamese still trying to break through the rooftop door. The last words spoken by a Marine in South Vietnam: “Hey, Major, they want to know what kind of pizza you want in Manila!” Kean was not sure if he would be court-martialed for using tear gas. “Ultimately,” he told Engelmann, “they gave me a medal.”
The last, fiercest fighting of the war occurred on the northern edge of the city, near Tan Son Nhut air base, as the Marines were leaving. “I really had no idea we were fighting the last battle of the war,” one PAVN colonel would tell the journalist David Lamb years later. “We had been fighting for so long it was hard to believe the war would not go on forever. That morning the enemy fought well. The fighting was very heavy. There were dead on both sides. Then just like that the firing stopped and the war was over.”
As the war ended, a thirty-year-old Australian journalist named Neil Davis was eating a croissant on his hotel's patio. Davis was a beloved figure in journalistic circles. He had given thousands of dollars of his own money to war orphans throughout Southeast Asia and secretly paid for an operation that corrected the crippled leg of an eleven-year-old Saigon girl. He had been in Cambodia as Phnom Penh fell to the Communist Khmer Rouge earlier in the month, an experience that had hardened his determination to stay on in Saigon. “No more running,” he had said, according to David Butler. “It's fucking humiliating.” After finishing his coffee, Davis walked over to the Presidential Palace. Save for a few looters, the city around him was as empty and silent as an asteroid. Throughout their efforts to conquer the South, the Communists had counted on a popular general uprising or, in Communist argot, a Popular General Uprising, that would throw off Saigon's puppet government. The Tet Offensive had been the North's first major attempt to trigger the general uprising. Its failure was total. The Communists tried again during the Easter Offensive of 1972. Again the only southern response was acrimony, directed toward both the Communists and the Saigon government. Even on this day, with the Communist victory complete, there was in Saigon—” always the home of the entrepreneur and the collaborator,” in Frances FitzGerald's words—no uprising, only silence. On the radio were twelve-hour-old broadcasts from the Voice of America. At the U.S. Embassy, amid the shells of scorched sedans, people were still waiting to be evacuated. Snepp's Nung guards were there. In a few hours they would all be rounded up and many of them shot. As the morning progressed, a message recorded by President Minh began to play throughout the city over loudspeakers that had previously been used as air-raid sirens: “I believe firmly,” Minh's voice announced to the quiet city, “in reconciliation among all Vietnamese. To avoid bloodshed I ask the soldiers of the Republic to put an end to all hostilities…. I also call on our brothers, the soldiers of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, not to open fire.”
Meanwhile, PAVN tanks and Chinese-built trucks were filling up central Saigon, many covered in foliage to ward off the air attacks that never took place. Some of these tanks’ occupants climbed out into the sunshine and were approached by worried, curious Saigonese. The soldiers were mostly bumpkinish boys. They were surprisingly friendly, though one witness to the liberation noted that most of these short, pale young men were wearing ill-fitting uniforms: “You know what they looked like? They looked like tourists who were lost.” Faced with the wonders of Saigon, many of the Communists had questions for their defeated countrymen. According to David Butler, one question was “How could an army from a city like this not fight for it?” Another was “Why did you let us win? It will be terrible now.”
Neil Davis wandered into the Presidential Palace, which within days would be renamed Reunification Palace. There, in a “wide, carpeted marble stairway,” he ran into President Minh. Again, David Butler's The Fall of Saigon:
[Minh] was dressed in a darktan safari suit, and was unshaved and red-eyed. Davis was certain that the new president had not slept that night. He was almost as certain th
at he had recently been weeping.
“Oh, Mr. President,” Davis said, not in commiseration but in the tone of voice with which one says, “Oh, fancy meeting you here.” The two men had known each other for years. They shook hands. And then Davis’ mind went almost blank as he wondered what one said to a president, and a general, who had just surrendered after thirty years of war. Finally he asked, “What are you doing?”
“I'm waiting for the other side,” Minh answered.
“Are they going to come here?”
“Yes, very soon.”
Davis now could think of no way to carry the conversation forward. He initiated a parting handshake. Minh turned and walked toward the president's office down a long, open passageway colonnaded with marble columns along the front of the building. Davis filmed the retreating figure, thinking it was one of the saddest shots of his career.
Minh had an abundance of circumstance over which to weep. Waiting for the Communists to arrive at the Presidential Palace was not what the South's leaders had envisioned. They had recently remodeled a penthouse in the riverfront Majestic Hotel, which they had planned to use as a negotiation room. On April 24, the penthouse was destroyed in a PAVN rocket attack. As David Lamb notes, Minh also had trouble summoning his cabinet due to the fact that all of the palace's switchboard operators had fled. In a final indignity, the general who had that morning transmitted President Minh's cease-fire order, Nguyen Huu Hanh, was a secret Communist agent.
Davis drifted back outside. It was a beautiful, blue-skied day. Dragonflies, hundreds of them, floated about in the air. About fifty ARVN soldiers were lounging beneath the many trees on the palace grounds. None was holding a weapon, and some were in their underwear, having shed their uniforms in the optimistic wish that they would be mistaken for civilians. Then Davis noticed a T-34 tank—which he initially believed was an ARVN tank—coming down the street toward the Presidential Palace's front gates. Its treads clapped harshly against the pavement, and it fired one artillery round—the last such round fired during the war— over the palace. A few blocks behind the lead tank was a T-54 that contained Colonel Bui Tin. Colonel Tin was the only member of the 203rd PAVN Armored Brigade who had ever been to Saigon. He had with him a photo of the Presidential Palace, “so I knew what we were looking for,” as he would tell Larry Engelmann. The tankers did have orders, however, that read: “Cross the Thi Nghe Bridge. Proceed straight ahead on Hong Thap Tu Street. Go seven blocks and turn left. [The palace] is right in front of you.” Despite this, the 203rd had gotten lost in Saigon's streets. The lead tank had overshot the palace by a block on its first attempt to find it, and its crew sheepishly accepted the guide services of a Unemployed Vietnamese photographer, who would later wind up in a reeducation camp. The lead tank, Tank 844, was driven by Bui Due Mai. Emblazoned on the helmets of Mai's crewmen: “Onward Saigon!” Davis, fumbling to get his sixteen-pound camera up onto his shoulder, hurried over to the palace's entrance in order to get a better shot of Mai's tank as it bore down upon the heavy iron gates. The world suddenly shrank to fit within his camera's lens.