Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  After a CIA agent in Pleiku noticed fewer planes than usual parked at the airfield, he went to Phu’s headquarters and found his staff packing. An officer admitted that they were retreating and that Thieu had told them not to alert the Americans. Phu also followed Thieu’s order not to alert Pleiku’s civil servants, local defense forces, or Montagnard irregulars. “Let them [the Montagnards] find out about it later,” he told his staff. “They’re Moi [savages]. Let them return to their mountains.” Instead, some stayed and joined the Communists.

  South Korean troops, who had been allied with U.S. forces in South Vietnam, had mined the shoulders of Route 7B. Logging trucks had carved deep crevices into its surface, and five of its seventeen bridges lay in ruins. On the morning of March 15, an advance convoy of military engineers under orders to repair the road rumbled through Pleiku as helicopters began ferrying General Phu’s staff to the local airfield. Panic ensued. Soldiers deserted to find their families, and businessmen abandoned stores and workshops, expecting that the Communists would confiscate them anyway. In its haste to retreat, the air force left behind sixty planes, and the army failed to destroy large stores of arms, ammunition, and fuel. When the main body of Phu’s troops left the following morning, thousands of panicky civilians followed. They knew that the Communists had executed several thousand South Vietnamese after capturing Hue in 1968 and that after the Communists took Pleiku, the South Vietnamese Air Force was certain to bomb it.

  U.S. provincial representative Earl Thieme and Nelson Kieff, the intelligence operative working under civilian cover who had been ordered to recruit Vietnamese stay-behind agents, threw together a convoy of jeeps and vans and sped through Pleiku collecting the Vietnamese employees of U.S. agencies. They drove them to the airport, bribed the MPs, and put them onto Air America planes and helicopters. Kieff also evacuated his stay-behind agent, Sergeant “Minh,” a member of an elite ARVN Special Operations unit. Kieff and Thieme returned on a helicopter the next day to pick up more Vietnamese employees, and several days later the indefatigable Thieme flew over the refugee columns in a helicopter, searching for vehicles belonging to U.S. agencies in Pleiku and zooming down to rescue their occupants.

  Cars, trucks, bikes, motorbikes, and oxcarts became entangled with military vehicles on Route 7B. By March 21, the retreat had become a death march. Thousands of soldiers and civilians drowned while fording rivers under Communist fire or succumbed to thirst and hunger. Communist mortars and artillery killed tens of thousands more. Those leaving the road risked triggering mines; those walking on it risked being flattened by armored cars and tanks. Corpses littered the shoulders, and rivulets of blood flowed into ditches. Horrific accounts appeared in Saigon’s newspapers. Reporter Nguyen Tu called the retreat “The Convoy of Tears” and wrote of shells hitting trucks packed with civilians and the “roaring artillery, crackling small arms, screams of the dying and crying of the children,” merging into “a single voice from hell.” Never before during this brutal war had so many people died in such a short period of time. Estimates of military and civilian casualties ranged from 50,000 to 100,000, a staggering number for a country of 20 million. General Phu would lose three-quarters of his 20,000 troops, and all but 900 of the 7,000 elite rangers who had left Pleiku. The debacle delivered six provinces into Communist hands and sixty thousand starving people to the coastal town of Tuy Hoa.

  While this tragedy was unfolding, Ambassador Graham Martin was recovering from dental surgery at his home in North Carolina. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and his logistics expert Erich von Marbod called to brief him on the retreat. “Why, I know all about that,” Martin drawled. “Phu has long been planning to withdraw part of his headquarters from the highlands. That’s all it is.” Schlesinger urged him to come to Washington, but Martin refused to interrupt his leave to address what he called “a minor problem.”

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  After the Communists captured U.S. provincial representative Paul Struharik in Ban Me Thuot (Struharik would spend months in captivity), the U.S. consul general in Nha Trang, Moncrieff Spear, strapped a large revolver to his waist and ordered Walter Martindale and other official Americans in the Central Highlands to report to Nha Trang. Unlike several days before, this time Martindale obeyed Spear. After he arrived, Spear said that he could not risk losing another American to the Communists and ordered him not to return to Gia Nghia.

  Martindale said he had to go back because he had promised to evacuate his Vietnamese employees. Spear accused him of having “a John Wayne complex”—of wanting to play the hero and be last man out.

  “Mr. Spear,” Martindale replied in an icy voice. “The United States made certain commitments to these people, and we must try to fulfill them.” He was furious at Spear, furious that the United States was abandoning “his country,” furious at Kissinger for writing off South Vietnam, furious at Congress for refusing to increase military aid, and furious at cowardly and corrupt Vietnamese generals. He defied Spear and persuaded an Air America pilot to return him to Gia Nghia.

  He had put roots down in Gia Nghia. In February, he had adopted two Amerasian children, five-year-old Luc and his three-year-old sister, Van. Their mother was a Franco-Vietnamese Catholic from the North, and their father had been an American contractor who had returned to California and broken his promise to send for her and the children. She spoke of a church wedding, but Martindale could find no evidence of it, and while on home leave he had failed to track down her husband. He returned to find that in his absence her two-year-old daughter had died of neglect. He adopted her siblings, and this thirty-two-year-old bachelor who had lived in South Vietnam for five of his last seven years, and who was engaged to marry a Franco-Vietnamese woman whose family owned a nearby coffee plantation, suddenly had two more reasons to care about what happened to “his” country.

  He had chosen this country sight unseen, joining the U.S. Navy Reserve in college and volunteering for South Vietnam after graduation. His father was a career naval officer and had pulled strings at the Pentagon to stop the posting, writing to him afterward, “Your brother is a Marine, your sister is an Air Force nurse and I’ve served my country throughout my life, but we’re not going to win this war because they [the politicians] won’t let us.” Martindale belonged to a proud southern military family whose members had served in every branch of the armed services and in every American war. He persisted, and in 1968 the navy finally sent him to South Vietnam. He joined a civic action team, advised a South Vietnamese regiment, counseled ARVN widows and orphans, raced around the highlands in a vintage jeep, and joined Chinese mercenaries on cloak-and-dagger missions. He returned as an AID development officer in 1971 and never left. He entered the Foreign Service, served as a consular representative and a province senior adviser, advised the national police and the People’s Self-Defense Force, and took on more jobs and responsibilities as the embassy withdrew other official Americans from Quang Duc after the fall of Phuoc Long.

  His pleasant demeanor concealed a steely interior. According to a Vietnamese woman who admired him, he was “brave, but sometimes too adventurous.” He was also, at least by the standards of the Central Highlands, a bon vivant. He lived in a French villa with a commanding view of a curving river and jungly mountains, employed a renowned cook and a faithful housekeeper, Mr. Tua and Ba Duc, served meals on fine china, handed out printed calling cards, and had instructed his gardeners to cut “Welcome” into his hedge. His friends gave him a sign for his villa that said “Chez Walt.”

  Soon after he arrived back in Gia Nghia to evacuate his employees, Spear called him and said, “Get your ass out of there and come to Nha Trang.”

  Martindale ignored Spear and evacuated his friends and employees down unpaved back roads to Bao Lac, the border town in Lam Dong province. He evacuated everyone who had worked for him, even the two boys who cleaned his compound and had carved “Welcome” in his hedge. After sendin
g out five hundred people, he joined them, bringing along his two devoted Montagnard bodyguards, Kulie Kasor and Nay Ri. Before leading his evacuees overland to Dalat, Lam Dong’s provincial capital, he returned to Chez Walt to collect his Burmese cat, Ralph. He had outfitted Ralph with a collar announcing in English and Vietnamese, “Ralph. Property of U.S. Senior Advisor. Do Not Eat,” but feared this might not protect him from the Communists. He was also returning to rescue his friend Ly Quyen, a slight man with thick glasses who headed Quang Duc’s Provincial Reconnaissance Unit, a military group that tracked and identified Communist infiltrators and agents. Martindale considered Quyen the bravest soldier he had ever met. An Air America helicopter pilot who also admired Quyen agreed to fly Martindale back to Gia Nghia to rescue him.

  While they were in the air, a friend of Martindale’s in the Gia Nghia police force radioed to say, “The tiger has left the cage,” a prearranged code meaning that the province chief had departed. As Martindale’s helicopter was about to land, South Vietnamese troops guarding the Gia Nghia airport began shelling Chez Walt. The province chief had ordered the barrage to prevent Martindale from landing. He feared that if he allowed the American provincial representative to set foot in Gia Nghia after he had left, he would also have to return or lose face. The shells unnerved the policeman who had collected Ralph, and he dropped the cage and the cat escaped. The Air America pilot landed several hundred yards from Chez Walt, and Martindale disembarked to collect Quyen and other members of his Provincial Reconnaissance Unit. As they were boarding the helicopter, a deserter with pinwheeling eyes leveled his rifle at Martindale and demanded to be included. Quyen jumped between them and disarmed the soldier.

  After returning to Bao Lac, Martindale scrounged up a convoy of vans, pickup trucks, and dump trucks so he could transport his evacuees sixty miles east to Dalat. Some of his people had already made it there, but three hundred remained, too many for his vehicles. He made decisions that still haunt him, and one woman was so grateful to be included that she renamed her baby Walter.

  He led his convoy in an International Harvester Scout pickup truck. A dozen of his armed Montagnards brought up the rear in a vehicle he grandiloquently dubbed his “gun truck.” They left early on a red laterite highway winding through tree farms and coffee plantations. Lines of dispirited South Vietnamese soldiers, deserters, and stragglers trudged along its shoulders. As Martindale’s convoy slowed for a turn, several jumped into the road and stopped one of the vans. They yanked open its rear door and began pulling people out.

  Martindale ran back and grabbed one of the soldiers. Another deserter pointed his rifle at Martindale and yelled for his comrade to duck. Martindale unholstered his .38 and fired off several rounds. The soldiers shot back, missing Martindale but wounding an elderly man in one of the trucks. Martindale emptied his revolver, and the deserters scattered into the bush. As they were regrouping to mount another attack, the Montagnards in the gun truck arrived like the cavalry, firing their weapons and sending the hijackers fleeing. Martindale believed that if they had been farther away, the deserters would have massacred everyone.

  Soon after he arrived in Dalat, the young deputy chief of his Montagnard guard units approached him and said, “My men respectfully ask the permission of the American senior adviser [Martindale] to allow them to keep two of the trucks and weapons and fade into the mountains with their families.” He reminded Martindale that the Communists had been known to massacre Montagnards allied with Americans, adding, “We are mountain people, and if we have our backs to the sea, the Communists will kill us for sure.” Martindale’s throat tightened, and tears welled in his eyes. Turning away to conceal his emotions, he asked himself, “What in the hell have we done to these wonderful, loyal, brave people?” He composed himself and said that he understood that the mountains were the Montagnards’ home and urged them to take whatever they needed. The guards lined up and saluted. Martindale shook their hands and thought, “These people have risked their lives to protect me and other Americans. I have a moral responsibility to protect them. Instead, I’m abandoning them.” He would call this moment the most “gut wrenching” of his life and speak of his heart “breaking into a million pieces.”

  As his convoy entered the coastal town of Phan Rang, groups of soldiers cheered him and clapped. They claimed to be happy that he had escaped Quang Duc and the Communists. But he noticed that they belonged to the same unit that had attacked him earlier. He told his bodyguards to ready their weapons and shouted that anyone approaching his vehicle would be shot.

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  If President Thieu was going to accept advice from any of his generals after the Ban Me Thuot debacle, he should have listened to General Ngo Quang Truong, who commanded Military Region I, the northernmost of South Vietnam’s four military districts. Truong was an unprepossessing man in his mid-forties, so quiet and emaciated that out of uniform he could be mistaken for a peasant or day laborer. His soldiers revered him for his honesty and courage, and he often joined them on the front lines. American generals had praised him as a “tough, seasoned, fighting leader” and “probably the best field commander in South Vietnam.” Norman Schwarzkopf, who would command U.S. troops during the Persian Gulf War and had fought alongside him in Vietnam, thought he was “the most brilliant tactical commander” he had ever met.

  Truong commanded the First Division, the finest of the regular ARVN divisions, and the Airborne Division, the best trained and led military formation in South Vietnam. After deciding on his “light at the top” strategy, Thieu had ordered him to transfer the Airborne Division to Saigon. It can be said in Thieu’s defense that because he was planning to surrender most of Military Region I to the North, the other units under Truong’s command should have proven sufficient to hold enclaves around Hue and Da Nang and that bolstering Saigon’s defenses with the Airborne Division was prudent. Cynics have suggested that Thieu feared a coup and trusted his airborne troops to thwart it. Truong flew to Saigon and begged Thieu to change his mind. Thieu agreed to postpone the transfer until the end of March but reversed himself after Truong left.

  Truong had forged a close friendship with Theresa “Terry” Tull, a handsome, large-boned, thirty-nine-year-old Foreign Service officer who was second-in-command of the U.S. consulate in Da Nang, South Vietnam’s second-largest city. She had grown up in New Jersey as the youngest of seven children and had been working as a secretary to help support her mother and earning night school credits when she read an article in Good Housekeeping that made the life of a female diplomat sound daring and glamorous. She arrived in Saigon in January 1968 as a newly minted political officer, witnessed the Tet attack, saw Vietcong bodies in the embassy’s front yard, learned Vietnamese, and befriended the president of the National Assembly, giving him English lessons while he volunteered confidential information that she included in her reports. Back in Washington she served on the State Department’s Vietnam Working Group and was studying for a graduate degree in Southeast Asian studies when she returned to South Vietnam in 1973 as deputy principal officer in Da Nang.

  As a female Foreign Service officer, she was accustomed to being marginalized, and Secretary of State William Rogers had mistaken her for a secretary when she arrived at his office to brief him about South Vietnamese politics. After Consul General Paul Popple asked her to represent the Da Nang consulate at General Truong’s daily staff briefing, she approached the assignment cautiously, wearing a long skirt and taking care not to appear too pushy or aggressive. Truong sat her on his right, a signal to his staff to treat her with respect. Both were gentle yet capable people, and they established an immediate rapport. He invited her to join his inspection tours, another signal that he held her in high esteem, and she invited him and his generals to dinner, always including their wives. Because of their friendship, she probably understood the military situation in Military Region I better than any American in South Vietnam.

>   In January 1974, Popple asked her to write a tour d’horizon of their consular district. She synthesized reports from American advisers in outlying districts into a gloomy memorandum that concluded “all the parameters are negative.” She had spent the last six years in South Vietnam or focused on Vietnamese affairs at the State Department. She knew more about the country and had closer relationships with its people than Martin or Polgar, and her pessimistic report should have rung alarm bells in Saigon and Washington. Popple praised it as a “fine job” but said that he doubted Martin would send it to Washington because he wanted to avoid providing the administration or Congress with any excuse for reducing military assistance to Thieu.

  Popple’s term ended later that year, and Martin replaced him with Al Francis, one of Martin’s most loyal subordinates. In February 1975, the State Department evacuated Francis to the United States for treatment of a thyroid condition, leaving Tull acting consul general. After General Truong reported that Thieu was withdrawing the Airborne Division from Military Region I, she began planning for the evacuation of her consular district’s American and Vietnamese employees. She was appalled when she read the emergency evacuation plan for the first time. It called for the U.S. military to execute a countrywide evacuation restricted to Americans and made no provision for the kind of incremental collapse occurring in the Central Highlands, or for evacuating South Vietnamese working for the U.S. government, no matter how loyal and endangered. After finishing it, she thought, “We can’t do this to the people who have worked for us.”