Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  After hearing that Phu had fled, Spear ordered the immediate evacuation of Americans, third-country nationals, and his Vietnamese staff and their families. By now convicts and deserters controlled the streets, and military police had sealed the airfield. Despite Al Francis’s warning to Spear that “the roof will fall in about twenty-four hours before you think it will,” Spear had not anticipated that Nha Trang might become too dangerous for his American and Vietnamese staff to drive to the airfield. It was the first of the month, so employees had come to the consulate for their pay and retired Americans were picking up their Social Security checks. There were about 150 Vietnamese inside the compound walls, including local employees and their families and strangers who had walked in off the street because no one had locked the main gate.

  Instead of leaving with his children in Kennerly’s plane, Martindale had stayed to make sure that his employees from Quang Duc made it to Saigon. He was still angry at Spear for bungling the evacuation of the U.S. government’s Vietnamese employees from the Central Highlands. As the evacuation from Nha Trang got under way, he turned to Spear and said, “We have a saying in the South: don’t ever mistake civility for forgiveness.”

  Fearing that Martindale would go rogue again, Spear shouted, “I don’t want you out of my sight.”

  “I have an obligation to the people I brought here,” Martindale said evenly.

  “We don’t need you to be John Wayne!”

  “I’m not being John Wayne. But I feel a responsibility to our allies. What if we had run out on our allies in World War II or Korea?”

  “Don’t give me history lessons. I’m older than you.”

  “Well, somebody here needs a history lesson,” Martindale said.

  Martindale helped the marine guards close the outer gate and volunteered to identify people in the crowd who had worked for the U.S. government. After making it through the gate, the French consul hugged him and said, “Cher Walter, can you believe this?”

  Military intelligence agent Nelson Kieff also wanted to make sure that the Vietnamese whom he had helped evacuate from Pleiku escaped to Saigon. Unlike Martindale, he had the advantage of not being in the State Department or DAO chain of command. His boss in the Five Hundredth Military Intelligence Group was in Bangkok, and his only responsibility since arriving from Pleiku the week before had been to train Sergeant Minh, his stay-behind agent. Otherwise, Kieff was, as he said later, “free to do what I thought was right.”

  By mid-afternoon Air America helicopters had flown several hundred people from the consulate to the airport. Jake Jacobson, Martin’s field operations officer, was monitoring the evacuation from the embassy. After receiving erroneous reports of heavy gunfire in the streets surrounding the consulate, he ordered Spear to end the helicopter airlift quickly by restricting it to Americans. The American staff rebelled, refusing to board the helicopters until the Vietnamese had departed. Spear raged against what he called their “last-man syndrome,” but unless he drew the pistol he had strapped to his waist, he could not force them to leave.

  Kieff and Martindale cut a hole in the back fence and roamed through Nha Trang searching for their people. Kieff came upon a group of local CIA employees standing outside the CIA billet. They complained that their American bosses had told them to gather here for evacuation but had apparently abandoned them. Kieff led them back to the consulate and slipped them through the fence.

  North Vietnamese troops bypassed Nha Trang for Cam Ranh Bay and would not enter the city for several days. Nevertheless, Jacobson became convinced that they were about to assault the consulate. He called Spear and said, “Get the hell out of the city now, you and the rest of the Americans.” Spear obeyed and jumped onto the next helicopter. Minutes later his deputy Phil Cook called Jacobson for instructions and was told that Spear had already left. “And you’d better get out too,” Jacobson shouted. “That’s an order!”

  Cook summoned two helicopters. He and half the Americans climbed aboard the first as the consulate’s marine guards fired warning shots over the heads of the remaining Vietnamese. Martindale and a mixed group of Americans and Vietnamese boarded the last helicopter. Among the passengers was a retired U.S. Army colonel who helped Martindale pull some of the Vietnamese evacuees into the chopper. As they were lifting off, an elderly Vietnamese man holding an infant in one arm dashed forward and grabbed the floor of the helicopter with his free hand. The colonel decided the aircraft was overloaded and stamped on his hand. Martindale would never forget the look on the man’s face as he and the child tumbled onto the ground. They were among about thirty Vietnamese who were left at the consulate. Spear was also abandoning seven hundred Vietnamese who had been employed by U.S. government agencies throughout Military Region II and were being quartered in bungalows on the beach prior to a promised seaborne evacuation.

  As Martindale disembarked at the airport, Spear shouted, “Get your ass over here. You’re coming with me.” Spear then turned to Kieff and threatened him with “a piece of my tongue” if he made any more forays into town.

  Spear followed Jacobson’s orders and restricted the last Air America fixed-wing evacuation flight from Nha Trang’s airfield to Americans only, leaving behind the consulate’s Vietnamese employees who had not yet boarded a flight for Saigon. As the Americans ran for the plane, the consulate’s marine guards fired over the heads of Vietnamese. Spear would say that leaving them and their families behind had been “a bitter blow” and “very disheartening.” One consulate employee told a reporter, “I’m so ashamed of the United States government that I’ll never be able to work for it again.”

  Air America had placed pilot Marius Burke in charge of its Nha Trang evacuation. He arrived at the airport minutes after Spear had left to find himself responsible for the consulate’s abandoned Vietnamese. The pilot of a Bird Air DC-8 who was flying to Saigon empty radioed Burke that he could divert to Nha Trang and take hundreds of passengers. The airport had calmed down following Spear’s departure, so Burke told him to land. Spear had been silently monitoring their conversation from the radio on his plane. He broke in and ordered the DC-8 to return to Saigon empty. Burke protested, but Spear, who believed the airport was still in a state of anarchy, was adamant. “So much for quality leadership from the upper echelons,” Burke thought. Before leaving Nha Trang, he and the other Air America pilots shuttled three hundred Vietnamese from the airport to a Korean LST (landing ship, tank) anchored offshore, stopping only after they ran low on fuel. The seven hundred people the consulate had abandoned on the beach hired boats to take them out to the Korean ship. Back at the airport, one of the consulate’s Vietnamese employees persuaded the South Vietnamese Air Force commander to fly some of the remaining evacuees to Saigon, earning his sympathy by describing how their American employers had betrayed them. After reaching Saigon, the employee sent Spear a note accusing him of using the consulate’s Vietnamese workers “like a sponge,” wringing them out and discarding them when he no longer needed them.

  * * *

  —

  There were four U.S. consular districts in South Vietnam. After the fall of Nha Trang, only the consulates in Saigon and Can Tho, the largest city in the Mekong delta and its administrative capital, remained open. The U.S. consul general in Can Tho was Francis Terry McNamara, a short middle-aged man with bushy eyebrows, a fondness for Italian boots with three-inch heels, a rolling tough-guy walk, and the testy manner of Spencer Tracy in one of his ornery roles. But underneath the feisty Irish American veneer lay a kind heart and a fierce moral courage.

  McNamara had been planning to send his American and Vietnamese employees and their families to Saigon so they could join the evacuation from the Tan Son Nhut airport that he assumed the embassy would be organizing. But after learning about the sudden defeat of South Vietnam’s armed forces at Ban Me Thuot and the horrors of the Convoy of Tears, he told his American staff that he was thinking of loading eve
ryone onto boats and taking them down the Bassac River to the South China Sea, where they could board U.S. Navy ships. He admitted that there were dangers. In places, Communist troops were dug in along the banks, and the river sometimes narrowed to a hundred yards or less. He would need a crew familiar with its channels, and vessels large enough to carry several hundred people each and sturdy enough to brave the open sea. Still, he argued, they would have the element of surprise because the Communists would expect them to fly. Furthermore, blockading a river was more difficult than cutting a road or bombing an airfield, and once they left Can Tho, there would be no danger of being overwhelmed by mobs of civilians and deserters. But the strongest argument for going down the Bassac, he said, was that it would enable them to evacuate more people, fulfilling their responsibility to the South Vietnamese who had been working alongside them.

  His staff was an unconventional bunch. His deputy Hank Cushing was a gaunt, sharp-witted former English professor fond of quoting Dante and Shakespeare. Cary Kassebaum was a slight and thoughtful former Peace Corps volunteer with a sandy beard and Coke-bottle glasses who had come of age during the Kennedy years and still held to its ideals. Sergeant Boyette Hasty, who commanded the consulate’s unit of marine guards, was a gung ho string bean who looked fifteen. David Whitten was a Vietnamese-speaking navy veteran who had spent two years in the delta advising the South Vietnamese Navy. But as unconventional as they might be, traveling for more than six hours down seventy-five miles of river through territory controlled by the Communists and doing it in open boats carrying hundreds of Vietnamese civilians struck them as harebrained, and when McNamara first proposed it, they opposed it.

  They changed their minds after the botched evacuations of the Da Nang and Nha Trang consulates. On April 2, the day after Moncrieff Spear had abandoned some of his Vietnamese employees at the Nha Trang airport, McNamara told Cushing he feared that the Saigon embassy and the U.S. military would not allocate enough resources to the delta for the airborne evacuation of the hundreds of Vietnamese employed by U.S. agencies and their families. Cushing agreed that the consulate had a duty to evacuate Vietnamese tainted by their association with the United States and that going down the Bassac was the most surefire way of fulfilling it. Others on McNamara’s staff also came around to supporting a riverine evacuation. They all knew that although McNamara had a reputation for being a maverick, he had proven himself to be a courageous and lucky maverick.

  McNamara had grown up in blue-collar Troy, New York, as the youngest of seven children in a multigenerational household that included his immigrant grandparents and had been drawn to ships and rivers at an early age, often walking a few blocks to the Hudson River and setting out alone in a rowboat. As a teenager he had crewed on the last coal-burning tugboat on the river and on a barge plying the Erie Canal. He had left school at sixteen and lied about his age to join the navy during World War II. He entered Syracuse University after the war but after running afoul of the local sheriff transferred to Troy’s Russell Sage College, a formerly all-female institution that was accepting male veterans. He rejoined the navy during the Korean War and after passing the Foreign Service examination in 1956 joined a training class of upper-middle-class Ivy Leaguers.

  He began earning his maverick reputation during the early 1960s while serving at the U.S. consulate in Elizabethville in the Congo’s Katanga province during a secessionist rebellion against the newly independent central government. Belgium, the former colonial power, and European mining interests supported the rebels. The United States and the United Nations backed the government. At various points during the conflict, European mercenary pilots bombed McNamara’s car, and Katangan rebels mistook his jeep for a UN vehicle, opening fire on it. The colonel commanding the UN’s Gurkha troops laid the blade of his curved knife against the throat of the leader of a band of squatters who were menacing McNamara’s home, promising to kill him if anyone harmed the American. McNamara repaid him by standing alongside him in the middle of a road while he distributed mail to his troops as rebel mortars exploded around them. McNamara also organized the evacuation of Americans and Europeans, bringing them to the airport in armed personnel carriers manned by Swedish UN troops. As rebel bullets bounced off the sides of his armored car, the Swedes fired back, and their shell casings flipped into the back of the carrier, landing on McNamara’s children.

  Two senior State Department officials flew in from Washington and ordered him to encourage the locals to support the Congolese army. He told them that the Congolese army was an undisciplined armed rabble specializing in rape and pillage and that the United States should be urging the Congo’s leaders to disband it. After Katanga, he refused to serve as South Africa desk officer because he could not support a U.S. policy that acquiesced in apartheid. He volunteered for South Vietnam, and in 1968 he was posted to the Mekong delta as a rural development specialist with CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) and led a team of American civilians and soldiers in Vinh Long province. The Communists had assassinated his predecessor, and the helicopter bringing in McNamara removed the man’s corpse. Soon after arriving, McNamara hosted CIA official William Colby. During a boozy bull session Colby asked for his frank assessment of the war. McNamara told him that it was the height of immorality for the United States to encourage the South Vietnamese to continue resisting the Communists if it was going to abandon them. We should quit now, he said, so there would be no more unnecessary bloodshed, or plan on staying for decades, as we had in Korea.

  Two weeks later, the Vietcong sprayed his compound with bullets. Six months after that, he became the first American to head a rural development team in Vinh Long to leave the province alive. He volunteered for a second tour and was appointed U.S. consul general in Da Nang. After he released a report condemning the brutality of South Korean troops fighting alongside U.S. marines, the marines’ commander, General Herman Nickerson, demanded that the State Department recall him. After he had a South Vietnamese general cashiered for smuggling and pedophilia, Nickerson berated him for interfering in military affairs and said, “I bet you’d like to get rid of General Lam, too.” McNamara shot back that he would, because Lam was a drug dealer who was poisoning Nickerson’s marines. Nickerson leaped up from behind his desk and almost decked him.

  McNamara became consul general in Can Tho in August 1974. His district encompassed the entire delta, sixteen U.S. provincial offices, and over a thousand American and South Vietnamese employees. In Can Tho he gave full rein to his eccentricities. He sheared off the tops of champagne bottles with the curved knife that Gurkha UN troops in Katanga had presented him as a tribute to his bravery and soon after arriving made a tour of the city’s brothels, giving his card to the madams and urging them to contact him if their American clientele misbehaved.

  After his staff agreed to support his river evacuation, he calculated that if he included all of the Vietnamese working for the U.S. government in the delta, as well as their families, it would amount to around five thousand people, an impossibly large number. He decided to put everyone into three categories. Category A would be anyone in mortal danger following a Communist victory. Category B would be those who were less threatened but whose skills, education, and facility in English would enable them to thrive in the United States. Category C would consist mostly of cleaners, guards, drivers, household staff, and manual laborers who were less likely to succeed in America and whom the Communists were less likely to punish. He asked the heads of departments at the consulate and of U.S. agencies in Can Tho to break their employees down into these categories and discreetly ask the A and B people if they wanted to leave. Once he had a master list of prospective evacuees, he planned sending some to Saigon for an early evacuation in order to reduce the number of those going down the Bassac. He recognized that there was no magic formula for determining whom the Communists might punish and who might flourish in the United States, and that he was asking Americans who had bee
n working alongside these Vietnamese to serve as judge and jury. He faced some agonizing choices himself. He put his driver on the A list because he had served a succession of senior U.S. officials, making him a larger target than someone driving more junior Americans, but reluctantly included his maids in the C category. They were widows with children to support, but neither spoke English.

  Whereas McNamara’s staff saw in him courage and experience, CIA base chief Jim Delaney and his agents saw recklessness and what one termed “uncalled-for heroics.” What McNamara and his staff considered a noble plan to rescue hundreds of Vietnamese, the CIA contingent considered a risky endeavor that might lead to CIA agents being shot, drowned, or left to rot in a Communist jail. They argued that the South Vietnamese Navy was certain to intercept them, that McNamara had no knowledge of the Bassac’s tricky channels, and that Communists would open fire on boats filled with Americans and their Vietnamese allies, and because none of the agents had credible cover stories, they would be treated harshly if the Communists captured them.

  McNamara and his staff believed that Delaney and his agents exaggerated the risk of being captured. He and Delaney were very different kinds of Irishmen. McNamara was loud and ornery; Delaney was smooth, soft-spoken, and competitive. McNamara was short and pale; Delaney was a tall and handsome redhead with chiseled features who had attended Boston College and Georgetown Law School, two of the country’s most prestigious Catholic schools. Also contributing to their animosity was the fact that each relied on intelligence sources predicting different scenarios. McNamara believed Major General Nguyen Khoa Nam, a quiet and resolute officer who commanded South Vietnamese military forces in the delta and was known for his honesty and for his pledge to remain a bachelor until the war ended because he believed that the wives of highly placed officers encouraged corruption. Nam had assured McNamara that even if Saigon fell, he could hold the delta and that recent attacks on his installations had been diversionary moves. Delaney received his intelligence from a network of paid informants who had convinced him that Can Tho was in imminent danger of being overrun. Because he believed them, he understandably preferred a quick helicopter evacuation.