Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Kissinger provided more evidence that he had resigned himself to a Communist victory during an Oval Office conversation on August 2, 1972. When Nixon said that he worried about being judged harshly if the Communists took South Vietnam soon after the United States had signed a peace treaty, Kissinger replied, “If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam we can still have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence.” Later in their conversation, he said, “So we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which, after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October [1972], by January ’74 no one will give a damn.”

  The United States, South and North Vietnam, and the Vietcong’s political organization in South Vietnam, the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), signed the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. By the time Phuoc Long fell in 1975, most Americans no longer gave a damn about Vietnam, except those who were there serving out the final days of Kissinger’s decent interval. One of them likened their situation to that of the rear-guard troops who had protected the British army’s 1940 evacuation from Dunkirk. But at least those soldiers had been sacrificed to protect an evacuation that would contribute to their nation’s victory. The rear-guard Americans in South Vietnam had no D-day or V-E day in their futures. Instead, they would be condemned to witness, compressed into these last days, the nobility and perfidy, compassion and brutality, irrational optimism and mendacity marking their nation’s intervention in the Vietnam War.

  The decent interval would be the last chapter of America’s three-decade-long participation in the Vietnam conflict. From 1945 to 1954, Presidents Truman and Eisenhower had supported France’s war against a Communist-dominated insurgency in its Indochina colonies. They and subsequent presidents had subscribed to the domino theory: the assumption that if Vietnam fell to the Communists, other Southeast Asian nations would follow. After the Communists defeated the French colonial army at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the two parties signed the Geneva Accords, a treaty dividing Vietnam at the 17th parallel and mandating elections within two years to choose a national government. Ho Chi Minh led a Communist state in the North, and Ngo Dinh Diem headed a republic in the South. The United States supported Diem, who was a genuine nationalist but had the disadvantage of being a Catholic in a largely Buddhist nation. Communist cadres in the South known as the Vietminh (later the Vietcong) rebelled against the Diem government, prompting Eisenhower to increase military assistance to Diem. President Kennedy increased the number of American military advisers from Eisenhower’s nine hundred to sixteen thousand, and President Johnson sent U.S. combat units to South Vietnam in 1965, an escalation that Kennedy had resisted. During the next several years, Johnson and his secretary of defense Robert McNamara and his national security adviser McGeorge Bundy pursued a strategy of sending more troops, dropping more bombs, and killing more Communists in the belief that North Vietnam would find the price of the war unsupportable and capitulate. They failed to appreciate that North Vietnam was motivated by political ideology, not a cost-benefit analysis, and underestimated its willingness to suffer appalling casualties to reunify the country under a Communist government. When Johnson left office in 1969, the United States had 540,000 troops in South Vietnam, victory remained elusive, and the “light at the end of the tunnel” that a French general had once promised was fainter and more distant.

  President Nixon pursued a “Vietnamization” strategy of reducing U.S. ground forces and transferring their combat responsibilities to South Vietnamese troops. This meant replacing half a million well-equipped American soldiers with a smaller number of poorly paid, trained, and led South Vietnamese ones. Nixon also directed Kissinger to negotiate a treaty that would deliver the “peace with honor” that he had promised during his 1968 campaign. Following an intense December 1972 U.S. bombing campaign, North Vietnam dropped its insistence that President Thieu’s resignation precede any treaty, and Nixon pressured South Vietnam to accept the presence of North Vietnamese troops south of the 17th parallel. In exchange, he promised Thieu continued U.S. military and economic assistance, and military retaliation should North Vietnam violate the treaty.

  On January 27, 1973, the representatives of all four parties—the United States, North and South Vietnam, and the PRG—signed the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, commonly known as the Paris Peace Accords. The accords stipulated that the United States must remove its military forces from South Vietnam within sixty days, except for fifty officers and men assigned to the Defense Attaché Office (DAO) at the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Yet the accords also permitted North Vietnamese troops to remain in place throughout the South in de facto sanctuaries. The accords mandated a cease-fire, the repatriation of prisoners of war, an accounting of soldiers missing in action, the National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, and “free and democratic elections” to determine South Vietnam’s future. The United States promised to contribute economic aid to North Vietnam to heal “the wounds of war” and promote “postwar reconstruction.”

  Most of the 100,000 North Vietnamese Army troops remaining in South Vietnam occupied a swath of territory running from the 17th parallel south along the Laotian and Cambodian borders through South Vietnam’s mountainous and lightly populated highlands. Communist troops also held territories scattered across the South known as “leopard spots” because of their appearance on military maps. North Vietnam resupplied its troops in the South via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, no longer a network of narrow jungle paths but now a wide all-weather highway, asphalted for miles, running alongside oil pipelines, and reaching to within sixty miles of Saigon. The trail enabled North Vietnam to mass its army and attack where it chose, while South Vietnam had to disperse its armed forces to defend each of its forty-four provinces. Phuoc Long had been the result of this strategic imbalance.

  The accords gave Americans the peace they wanted, with their troops home and their POWs freed, but failed to settle the question of who would rule South Vietnam. Veteran war correspondent Keyes Beech thought the treaty proved that “all the U.S. cared about was getting its prisoners back” and did not “give a damn about anything else.” He found it telling that even the young antiwar correspondents condemned the treaty as a sellout. When Kissinger and his North Vietnamese negotiating counterpart, Le Duc Tho, won the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, two members of the Nobel committee resigned in protest and Tho refused the honor. Kissinger later considered returning it, telling Ford on April 3, 1975, after South Vietnam had suffered a string of calamitous defeats, “I am returning the Nobel Peace Prize, but the money is in a trust so I will have to borrow to return the money.” Later, he changed his mind.

  Marshal Ferdinand Foch, the commander of Allied forces during World War I, said of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” The same could be said of the Paris Peace Accords, although they lasted two years instead of twenty and did not provide the semblance of an armistice. They called for a “cease-fire in place” to begin at midnight on January 27, 1973, but failed to stipulate what “place” opposing troops were supposed to be occupying. During the next two years, South Vietnam lost fifty-one thousand soldiers, almost as many as America lost during its entire participation in the war. There would be no Council of National Reconciliation, free and democratic elections, U.S. funds for reconstructing North Vietnam, accounting of the missing, or end to the mortar barrages and civilian casualties. Instead, the accords created the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS), a multinational organization charged with overseeing elections that never occurred and investigating violations of a cease-fire that neither side respected. Throughout the decent interval, the ICCS remained deadlocked between its two Communist members, Hungary and Poland, and its pro-Western members, Iran and Indonesia. (Former member Canada had resigned in frustration and
been replaced by Indonesia.) Because the ICCS could act only if it was unanimous, it seldom acted. Its 1,160 inspectors flew across South Vietnam investigating cease-fire violations and otherwise passed the time at swimming pools and nightclubs, arguing over their rights and privileges while trying to recruit one another into the intelligence services of their respective nations. Had the ICCS been impartial, it would have ruled that North and South Vietnam had been more or less equally responsible for cease-fire violations during the initial months of the truce but that by the time Phuoc Long fell, the North had become the principal offender. By then, Saigon wags were calling the ICCS “I Can’t Control Shit,” and one of its inspectors compared the accords to “a dictionary for a language that nobody speaks.”

  The signatories of the accords also pledged to exchange information about military personnel missing in action and to repatriate remains. To accomplish this, they created the Four-Party Joint Military Team (JMT), an organization that comprised delegations from the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the PRG. Most of the ten officers and five enlisted men on the U.S. delegation had served in Vietnam during the war and had volunteered because they believed that a flawed peace was better than the war they had fought, and considered recovering the remains of fallen comrades a noble enterprise.

  The JMT enjoyed the privileges and immunities of a diplomatic mission, including its own flags, vehicles, and armbands marked with a “4” inside an orange circle. The two hundred members of the Communist delegations were quartered at Camp Davis, a group of Quonset huts adjoining the U.S. embassy’s Defense Attaché Office’s compound at Tan Son Nhut airport. The huts had formerly housed U.S. Army code breakers and had been named in honor of James T. Davis, the first American serviceman killed in action in South Vietnam. The JMT sponsored weekly liaison flights between Saigon and Hanoi so that the U.S. and South Vietnamese delegations could confer with senior North Vietnamese officials, and the Communist delegations could resupply their headquarters at Fort Davis and rotate their staffs. During biweekly meetings at Camp Davis, the American delegation handed the Communist delegations MIA dossiers, and the Communists promised to investigate each case but never did so. The Communists encircled Camp Davis with barbed wire and security personnel; the South Vietnamese encircled the Communists with lip-readers, telescopes, and their own security agents. The Communists flew in their food from Hanoi to prevent the Thieu regime from poisoning them; South Vietnamese military police ran their hands through the food, spilling it on the tarmac. Every Saturday morning the Communist spokesman gave a press conference during which he called for the overthrow of the Thieu government. The sound of South Vietnamese jets taking off to bomb Communist positions sometimes drowned him out.

  The United States had pledged in the accords to “contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam,” and President Nixon had promised a sum of $3.25 billion. The North considered the money a quid pro quo for providing information on American MIAs. Having recently exchanged six hundred American POWs for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops in South Vietnam, Hanoi was in no hurry to hand over MIA remains for free. During a coffee break at one of the JMT’s fruitless meetings, Captain To, a senior member of North Vietnam’s delegation, told Captain Stuart Herrington of the American delegation, “Of course we have information on many of your MIA personnel and in some cases even the remains of your pilots….But why should we give them to you for nothing? Your government has done so much damage to our people and our land that it must pay.”

  Herrington was one of several Vietnamese speakers on the U.S. JMT delegation. Like many in his generation, he had been, he said, “swept along on a wave of idealism” by President Kennedy and, like many, had become skeptical that Vietnam had been the right war to fight, or a winnable one. Soon after Phuoc Long fell, he began hearing from South Vietnamese Army officers who knew him from his earlier tour as an intelligence officer. Their pretexts for contacting him were flimsy, and he recognized that they were looking for an American to help them escape.

  He noticed other omens. An American contractor working at the South Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) base at Bien Hoa reported that morale was so low that pilots schemed to avoid missions. An intelligence analyst based at the Defense Attaché Office reported filing a pessimistic memorandum, only to have the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, Wolfgang Lehmann, return it with “CRAP!” and “Where did you get this?” scrawled across the top in red ink. One evening a posse of inebriated South Vietnamese soldiers pulled an American contractor from his car a block from Herrington’s building and pummeled him. They told the policeman who intervened that he deserved it because he was an American. Herrington told his brother in the United States that the South Vietnamese Army was “a demoralized force,” “completely convinced that we’ve…betrayed them,” “irate and increasingly ill-disciplined,” and a greater danger to Americans than the North Vietnamese. He began shipping his possessions home and told his parents to expect him by August.

  Army specialist 7 Bill Bell was the best Vietnamese linguist on the U.S. JMT delegation. His superior officer had been on home leave when Phuoc Long fell and had remained in the United States, leaving Bell to assume his position as head liaison officer to the other three JMT delegations. After Phuoc Long fell, Bell decided that the crucial question was not when the Communists would strike next but where. He received an answer while lunching in Saigon on February 25 with members of the Santilli family, who owned a coffee plantation outside Ban Me Thuot, a provincial capital in the Central Highlands. The family patriarch was an Italian who had fought with the French Foreign Legion and had married a Rhade, one of the tribal peoples native to the region. Bell had met Santilli several years earlier while serving with the Twenty-Fifth U.S. Infantry Division and providing security for his plantation. He was stunned when Santilli revealed over lunch that his family was selling its plantation and moving to Italy. Santilli explained that his Rhade friends had warned him that North Vietnamese troops were massing on the Cambodian border west of Ban Me Thuot and had been observed logging near his plantation. On closer inspection, the Rhade had discovered that the Communists had sawed the trees only halfway through, making it easier for the lead tanks in an armored unit to push them over as they headed for Ban Me Thuot.

  Regulations prohibited members of JMT delegations from collecting human intelligence, so Bell shared Santilli’s warning with Andy Gembara, a burly Ukrainian American plainclothes military intelligence operative with a no-bullshit swagger acquired while growing up on New York’s Lower East Side. Gembara served under Colonel William LeGro, who headed the military intelligence unit at the DAO. After hearing Gembara’s report, LeGro warned the embassy and the Pentagon that Ban Me Thuot might be North Vietnam’s next target. When they ignored LeGro’s warning, Bill Bell invited officials of South Vietnam’s Central Intelligence Organization and a delegation of U.S. intelligence operatives to meet at his home. The Vietnamese officials said that they were shocked that the Santillis were leaving but insisted that Ban Me Thuot was an unlikely target. Their intelligence indicated a Communist offensive in the Mekong delta. Bell saw some of them next on April 29, while helping them board a helicopter leaving from the roof of the U.S. embassy.

  Soon after Phuoc Long fell, Colonel LeGro ordered his files microfilmed and a copy flown to Guam. In February, he asked Gembara to represent their office at a meeting at the embassy called to discuss an evacuation. Gembara was surprised that the only people attending it were a lone CIA agent and the three military attachés. None of them knew how many Americans lived in South Vietnam or how many Vietnamese worked for the various agencies of the U.S. mission in South Vietnam—people who Gembara believed had a “moral right” to evacuation. The only plan under discussion involved loading Vietnamese onto landing craft and taking them down the Saigon River. He reported this to LeGro, adding, “I think they’re smoking something.”

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bsp; “Let’s ignore the embassy and organize our own evacuation,” LeGro said, launching what would become the first American underground railroad.

  The army had taught Gembara Vietnamese, made him an officer, and assigned him to a Special Forces psychological operations unit that he considered “worse than useless” because it was alienating the same people he was fighting to protect. He was wounded in 1968, and at a time when most officers were running the other way, he volunteered to return as an intelligence officer because he had “fallen for these people.” The Paris Peace Accords limited the United States to fifty uniformed military personnel in South Vietnam, so he traded his uniform for civvies and a Department of Defense civilian identification card. After receiving the go-ahead from LeGro, he began compiling lists of potential evacuees among the Vietnamese working for the DAO, giving priority to anyone who might rank high on Communist execution lists. He added to his list former members of ARVN military intelligence, interpreters, and his counterparts in South Vietnam’s Military Security Service. U.S. military intelligence was based in the DAO compound inside the Tan Son Nhut airport, giving it easy access to the U.S. Air Force transport planes that were arriving daily with military supplies before returning empty to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Thanks to Gembara and others, during the second half of March, the transports began landing at Clark with small groups of Vietnamese passengers.

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  The faded red banners flapping over Saigon’s boulevards proclaimed President Thieu’s threadbare political philosophy, his “Four No’s”—“No Coalition Government!” “No Negotiating with the Enemy!” “No Communist Activity in the South!” “No Square Inch of the National Territory Is to Be Abandoned to the Communists!” The first three contradicted the spirit and provisions of the Paris Peace Accords, and Thieu had now violated the fourth by failing to retake Phuoc Long. After he struggled to explain this during a rambling three-hour televised speech, it fell to Joe McBride, one of the more cynical of the embassy’s junior diplomats, to draft a cable to Washington summarizing it. (McBride: “As if anyone cared what Thieu said.”) After sending his cable, McBride walked past the embassy recreation center, where a raucous Hawaiian-themed party was under way. Americans wore leis, and the Vietnamese waitresses had wrapped themselves in sarongs. Tiki torch flames reflected in the swimming pool. “There’s something wrong here,” he thought. “South Vietnam has just lost its first province, Thieu has delivered a three-hour speech, and it’s Luau Night at the embassy. This can’t last.”