Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  After the U.S. government chartered three of his World Airways 727s to evacuate American and Vietnamese refugees from Da Nang, he had come to oversee the operation. During the previous three days, his planes had flown out two thousand evacuees, mostly women and children. The day before, the embassy had suspended his airlift after refugees and undisciplined soldiers mobbed one of his planes at the Da Nang airport. Outraged at having his good works sidelined, he had blustered and cursed his way into Martin’s office. A marine guard had noticed a shoulder holster under his Hawaiian shirt and arrived close on his heels.

  When Martin became angry, his courtly southern gentleman manner became even courtlier, and he lowered his voice to make an adversary strain to hear him. “Give the gun to the Marine if you want to talk to me,” he said, his voice low and calm.

  Daly shouted that Saigon would fall within two weeks and accused him of concealing the truth and being “nothing but a used-car salesman,” whatever that meant.

  Martin politely informed him that he no longer had clearance to fly into Da Nang.

  “What are those bastards at Tan Son Nhut going to do if I take off without their goddamned clearance?” he demanded.

  “I imagine they’ll shoot you down.”

  “And then what will you do?”

  “Applaud,” Martin said. “And who the hell do you think you are?” he demanded. “I mean you don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground, you don’t know what this whole thing is about.”

  As Daly left Martin’s office, he told the World Airways executive accompanying him, “We’re going anyway.”

  Martin gave the job of managing Daly to George “Jake” Jacobson, a retired army colonel in his early sixties with the vague title of “Special Assistant for Field Operations.” Over the years he had become the embassy’s jack-of-all-trades, filling a range of military and civilian positions, becoming an expert in rural pacification, establishing friendships with many senior South Vietnamese government and military officials, and working under four ambassadors. His greatest moment had come during the Tet Offensive when a Vietcong squad fought its way onto the embassy grounds, trapping him in his office on the second floor of a small villa. An American MP noticed a Communist soldier entering the villa building and had tossed Jacobson a pistol through an open window. The soldier emptied his AK-47 up the stairway, and Jacobson leaned down and shot him dead. He had the AK-47 silver plated and mounted on his wall with an engraving that said, “The Viet Cong fired this and missed. The Colonel fired back and didn’t.” Jacobson had been a professional magician and remained something of a showman. Kissinger was lukewarm about him, but Martin had kept him on, guaranteeing his loyalty.

  Despite Martin’s and Jacobson’s admonitions, Daly flew to Da Nang the next morning. Jacobson would later condemn him as an “unhousebroken, miserable man” and “one of the most despicable human beings” he had ever met. Still, like Walter Martindale, Daly was one of the first Americans to risk his life to evacuate Vietnamese civilians. His plan was straightforward and noble. He would shuttle three World Airways 727s between Da Nang and Tan Son Nhut and rescue several thousand women and children, freeing their husbands and fathers to return to the battlefield. He joined the first flight and was in the cockpit when an air traffic controller at Tan Son Nhut ordered pilot Ken Healy to abort the flight and return to the terminal because he lacked clearance. Daly ordered Healy to “experience radio failure,” and the 727 lifted off as the controller was shouting, “Abort! Abort!”

  Da Nang’s airport appeared peaceful from the air, but the moment Daly’s plane touched down, crowds of civilians and soldiers burst from its hangars and terminal. They raced toward the jet in jeeps, cars, and armored vehicles, on bikes and motorbikes, and on foot. Healy tried to taxi to a distant corner of the runway but had to jam on the brakes when a military policeman drew his pistol and jumped in front of the plane.

  Daly and the crew lowered a narrow metal stairway from the tail and were immediately besieged. Soldiers and civilians punched, tripped, and kicked one another in a mad scramble to get aboard. Soldiers trampled children and elbowed women. One shot a family of five and leaped over their bodies to reach the stairs. As the cabin filled with soldiers, a flight attendant screamed, “Where are the women and children? Where are the women and children!” Daly stood on the stairway, grabbing at the women and children who had made it this far, punching soldiers (he was a former Golden Gloves boxer), and smashing them with the butt of his pistol. He staggered down the aisle covered in scratches and blood. His clothes were shredded, and his trousers had been yanked below his knees.

  The crew could pull the stairway up only halfway. Some refugees clung to it, while others climbed into the cargo hold and wheel compartment. As Healy began taxiing, a soldier lobbed a grenade and others opened fire. Abandoned vehicles, angry soldiers, and the bodies of people killed in the stampede blocked the main runway. Healy took off from the middle of the taxiway as North Vietnamese rockets slammed into the airfield. He detoured onto the grass verge to avoid an abandoned vehicle and ran off the pavement, smashing through some flimsy buildings before becoming airborne. Stowaways plummeted to their deaths from the stairs and wheel compartment. Blood covered the aisle and 268 passengers, twice the plane’s capacity, sat two to a seat. Only five women and two children had made it aboard. Instead of rescuing the soldiers’ families, Daly had rescued the soldiers, leaving the corpses of women and children behind on the runway. After watching news film of the fiasco, President Ford turned to a friend and said, “That’s it. It’s time to pull the plug. Vietnam is gone.”

  While Daly was barely escaping from Da Nang with his life, General Truong, who had entrusted his children to Theresa Tull, returned to his headquarters and found it abandoned. He drove to the beach at Hoi An, where small boats were ferrying his marines out to Vietnamese Navy vessels. He waded into the surf and swam toward one of these boats. On March 10, he had been the most respected general in South Vietnam; nineteen days later, he was swimming for his life. Some marines jumped into the water and grabbed him. As they were hoisting him aboard, he began sobbing.

  His principal contribution to the catastrophe had been to obey conflicting and constantly changing orders from Thieu and the chiefs of staff. When he and Thieu had met in Saigon on March 13, Thieu had ordered him to prepare to abandon all of Military Region I except for Da Nang. He had complied and started withdrawing from the northernmost provinces. During a meeting on March 19, Thieu had ordered him to stop withdrawing from Hue and defend it “at all costs.” That same afternoon, he had received a message from South Vietnam’s chiefs of staff warning that his forces were insufficient to hold both Hue and Da Nang and ordering him to leave Hue. He obeyed and his marines began retreating toward Da Nang. North Vietnamese artillery pounded highways already jammed with refugees, and their retreat turned into a rout. The navy attempted to evacuate troops from the beaches, but artillery fire hit some ships and waves swamped others. When Hue fell on March 26, five marine battalion commanders shot themselves.

  By March 29, half a million panicky civilians and angry soldiers had doubled Da Nang’s population. Military officers and government officials fled, policemen shed their uniforms, and leaderless soldiers filled the streets, halting traffic and robbing pedestrians. Refugees searched for family members, wounded soldiers died before reaching hospitals, and bodies lay sprawled on sidewalks. Famished children begged; stores were looted and women raped. Instead of defending Da Nang, its garrison mutinied and shot their officers. The marines were the most terrifying. They had long hair and tiger-striped fatigues and had emulated the U.S. soldiers who had trained them, decorating their bodies with homemade “Love” and “Peace” tattoos. UPI reporter Paul Vogle wrote that “their skin seemed taut, like there was something high-powered behind their eyes.”

  A mob screaming anti-American curses besieged the U.S. consulate. Inside, phones rang unanswered and
papers blew through empty corridors. A rear guard of diplomats leaped over the back fence as the mob pushed down the gate. Two nights before, consulate officials had attempted to evacuate three hundred Vietnamese toward whom, according to a CIA report, they “felt a specific obligation.” The Osceola, an Australian tugboat under charter to the U.S. Military Sealift Command (MSC), a civilian branch of the navy, towed a barge to the dock opposite the consulate. The plan had been to load evacuees onto the barge at night and ferry them across the harbor to MSC freighters anchored offshore. Instead, thousands mobbed the barge. People tumbled into the water and drowned or were crushed against the dock. One of the consulate’s marine guards, despite having extensive combat experience, recalled the scene being “one of the most tragic things” he had seen while serving in South Vietnam.

  On March 29, the remaining American consulate employees left on the Osceola, taking as many Vietnamese as they could fit aboard. The tug crossed the harbor, passing corpses and capsized boats. Sampans, rowboats, and fishing boats were so overloaded and low in the water that passengers tumbled overboard whenever they hit a wave or crossed a wake. The Osceola delivered its evacuees to the Pioneer Contender, an American-flagged freighter chartered by the MSC. Its American crewmen had barricaded themselves on the bridge, while deserters terrorized the civilians jammed onto its decks, executing anyone who resisted or whom they suspected of being a Communist.

  On March 30, Easter Sunday, a lightly armed advance guard of Communist troops rolled into Da Nang and restored order. The most heavily defended city in South Vietnam, its warehouses filled with food and ammunition sufficient for a sixty-day siege, had capitulated without a fight. In nineteen days Thieu had lost five of his eleven divisions and over a billion dollars’ worth of military equipment, and Communist forces had eviscerated an army that the United States had spent a decade training, financing, supplying, and advising.

  The news reports, photographs, and films of Da Nang, the Convoy of Tears, and Ed Daly’s flight received wide coverage in the United States. Instead of unleashing Americans’ charitable impulses, the news convinced them that the United States should avoid becoming re-involved in the war, even on a humanitarian basis, and opinion polls showed a majority of Americans opposed to accepting Vietnamese refugees. After years of being misled and lied to, of mistakes and horrors, and billions spent and fifty-eight thousand U.S. servicemen killed, many American hearts had become so hardened toward South Vietnam and its people that even the Da Nang and Convoy of Tears horrors could not soften them.

  Vietnamese in Saigon feared a similar debacle would occur in their city and that the Thieu government and its American allies would be unable to protect or evacuate them. Americans in Saigon heard about Consul General Francis’s narrow escape from Da Nang, the sudden collapse of civil authority, and refugees and deserters running amok, and they feared a repetition in Saigon. Da Nang convinced some in Congress and the Ford administration that the time had come to evacuate U.S. citizens from South Vietnam, even if that meant abandoning America’s South Vietnamese allies. Ambassador Martin believed that the anarchy in Da Nang proved the importance of avoiding anything that might panic Saigon’s civilians and military. But neither he nor anyone else in senior positions at the embassy, the White House, or the State Department seemed to understand why Da Nang’s final days would not be replicated in Saigon: namely that in Da Nang, refugees had fought to the death for places on planes and ships because there was still a South Vietnam for them to escape to. In Saigon, however, people would face a different decision: whether to live in a Communist Vietnam or become exiles in the United States.

  During a State Department staff meeting on March 31, Kissinger asked Deputy Secretary of State Philip Habib, “Why don’t they [the South Vietnamese military] fight any place?”

  Habib explained that a phased withdrawal had “turned into a rout, psychologically and militarily.”

  Kissinger criticized General Truong for being “on a goddam barge in the harbor” and pressed Habib to explain why the Communists had routed Truong’s forces, even though they were “not being attacked very much.”

  “Because they were told to withdraw,” Habib said, repeating that their retreat had “turned into a rout.”

  Kissinger blamed the Communists for violating the Paris Peace Accords and the U.S. Congress for demoralizing South Vietnam’s government and military by slashing aid. He asked Habib, “But do you have any question in your mind that we triggered them into this rout?”

  Habib did not “buy that line,” he said. But neither he nor anyone else at the staff meeting told Kissinger the truth: that the fundamental reason that Generals Truong and Phu’s armies “would not fight anywhere” was that the Nixon-Kissinger policy of Vietnamization had been a failure and that once the United States withdrew its firepower, warplanes, and advice, the South Vietnamese Army had been revealed to be a rickety structure, and so weakened by corruption, nepotism, and feckless leadership that it had collapsed in the first strong wind.

  * * *

  —

  Dottie Martin had not yet returned from North Carolina and Ken Quinn was visiting his in-laws, so David Kennerly and Martin dined together alone at the embassy residence on the evening of March 28. They talked late into the night. Martin delivered a series of soliloquies about his career, Vietnam, and his sons that impressed Kennerly as anguished and sincere. Perhaps fatigue, jet lag, and the dispiriting reports from Da Nang had left Martin more open and vulnerable, or he might have felt more comfortable unburdening himself to Kennerly because the photographer was no longer a working journalist. He described the automobile accident that had killed his eldest son, and the battle that had claimed the life of his adopted son. He admitted being doubtful that South Vietnam could survive but said he had a duty to feign optimism and “keep the flag flying,” because if the word got out that the embassy was planning an evacuation “the wheels are going to come off here even faster than you can believe.” He called himself “the designated fall guy,” adding bitterly, “They’re going to blame me for this.”

  Kennerly’s Vietnamese and American friends echoed Martin’s pessimism. One acquaintance begged him to smuggle his children onto Weyand’s plane. A veteran war correspondent said, “This fucker is unraveling,” and none of the other journalists at the Caravelle Hotel bar disagreed. NBC bureau chief Art Lord asked him to arrange a meeting with Martin so he could plead for the evacuation of his Vietnamese employees. Martin agreed to see Lord as a favor to Kennerly but warned that Lord would be wasting his time. If he evacuated Lord’s Vietnamese, he said, “everyone will assume I’m pulling the plug.”

  Even meeting Lord represented a concession for Martin, who blamed the press for turning Congress and the American people against Thieu. After New York Times correspondent David Shipler had written an article cataloging U.S. and South Vietnamese violations of the Paris Peace Accords, Martin had fired off a cable to the State Department calling him “a tool of Hanoi” and charging that the Times had “a deep emotional involvement in the success of North Vietnam’s attempts to take over South Vietnam by force of arms.” He condemned a negative article about the Thieu government in the Times as part of a “massive deception campaign” and slammed the newspaper for being a “witting vehicle in this carefully coordinated effort.” Leaks to the press triggered in Martin a Nixonian paranoia. A series of articles by George McArthur challenging his rosy assessment of the war contained information that he believed came from within his embassy. He suspected his secretary, Eva Kim, who was dating McArthur, and asked U.S. military intelligence operatives at the DAO to tap her phone, break into her house, and rifle her purse to check for classified documents. When they came up empty, he arranged for an intelligence agent to join a golf foursome that included McArthur and diplomat Dick Peters. The agent carried a microphone in his golf bag and recorded a casual exchange during which Peters provided McArthur with information contradicting Martin�
��s optimistic line. Martin exiled Peters to the consulate at Bien Hoa.

  Martin’s meeting with Art Lord was brief. He refused Lord’s request to evacuate his Vietnamese employees and accused him of hypocrisy for even making it. “You guys [the press] have been saying all along that there isn’t going to be a bloodbath, so what are you concerned about all of a sudden?” he asked sarcastically. “Why do you want to evacuate your Vietnamese when all of your news reports are saying that nothing will happen to the population [of South Vietnam] in the event of a North Vietnamese takeover?” Martin’s charge that “all” of the news reports dismissed the likelihood of the Communists meting out a harsh justice to their former enemies was an exaggeration, but there was a general skepticism among some reporters of claims that Communist victories in Cambodia and Vietnam would be followed by a bloodbath.

  Lord left the embassy empty-handed, but Kennerly was encouraged that Martin had hinted he would not interfere with any private and clandestine evacuation that Lord might care to organize.

  Martin was more guarded with Ken Quinn when they dined alone several days later. The atmosphere in the residence struck Quinn as tense, and members of the household staff sidled up to him and asked, “What will become of us?” and “Who will protect us?” Some were trembling and had tears in their eyes. They had posed the same questions to Dorothy Martin after she returned from the States. She told Quinn, “I don’t know what to tell the servants.”

  Quinn had visited his in-laws before dining with Martin. Their news was grim. His wife’s eldest brother was an army pharmacist who had been on the Convoy of Tears, and he and his family had vanished. Her next-oldest brother, an officer in an elite ranger unit, had been seen lying in a ditch and bleeding profusely. Everyone assumed he was dead. Her youngest brother was seventeen, but the government had lowered the draft age and he would soon be conscripted. Quinn considered packing the boy into a crate, drilling airholes, and smuggling him onto Weyand’s plane. One of Quinn’s in-laws, a foreign policy adviser to Thieu, said, “Look, I’ll only say this to you because you’re a relative, but Thieu is frozen. He doesn’t know what to do, and he can’t make decisions. All is lost!”