Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  The SPG prepared the DAO compound at Tan Son Nhut, its “Alamo,” so it could shelter ten thousand people for ten days during a protracted battle. It stockpiled chemicals to make the swimming pool water potable, pre-positioned fuel tankers, generators, and material for constructing latrines, appointed civilians to oversee billeting and sanitary and medical services, converted the DAO auditorium into an evacuation processing center, and recruited seventy American expatriates to serve in a self-defense force and trained them in the evenings. It accomplished much of this during the first two weeks of April, largely under the cover of darkness and without the knowledge of Ambassador Martin. Smith knew that Martin had no objections to revising a theoretical evacuation plan, provided it remained theoretical, but training bus drivers and putting helipads on roofs went beyond that.

  Smith did not openly defy Martin, but neither did he keep him abreast of the SPG’s activities. As the senior U.S. official in South Vietnam, Martin was technically his commander. But Smith also reported to Lieutenant General John Burns, who commanded the Seventh Air Force in Thailand, and to Commander in Chief Pacific Command (CINCPAC) Admiral Noel Gayler, a decorated World War II pilot who disliked Martin so intensely that he scheduled his visits to Saigon when Martin was away. (Martin, in turn, had been heard to remark that he did not want “that polo-playing admiral” in his country.) Brigadier General Baughn, with Smith’s tacit approval, encouraged Americans working at the DAO to slip some of their Vietnamese employees and their dependents aboard the U.S. Air Force transports that would otherwise be returning empty to the Philippines. This contravened the immigration laws of South Vietnam, the Philippines, and the United States, but Smith tolerated what he termed Baughn’s “covert smuggling” because, as he explained later, “my own employees had a great deal of empathy with their local national co-workers and were determined to get out as many of them as wanted to get out of the country.”

  Baughn believed that Americans “had an obligation to save our loyal Vietnamese” and that Martin’s “head-in-the-sand policy” was putting American and Vietnamese lives at risk. When he arrived in Saigon in June 1974 to serve as deputy defense attaché, he was already disillusioned by how the architects of the Vietnam War had waged it. In his lexicon, former president Lyndon Johnson was “the Grade School Teacher,” a reference to his first profession, and former secretary of defense Robert McNamara was “the Edsel Genius,” a reference to the spectacular failure of that car during his leadership of the Ford Motor Company.

  Baughn and Martin had been a bad fit from the start. Baughn was a decorated World War II fighter pilot, while Martin had been a U.S. Army Air Forces intelligence officer who had been, according to Baughn, “safely behind the scenes in intelligence analysis” and never facing a “do or die situation.” They had served in Thailand at the same time—Martin as ambassador and Baughn as commander of a fighter squadron. Between 1965 and 1966, Baughn had flown a hundred combat missions over North Vietnam. The loss rate among his pilots matched that of some of the deadliest World War II missions, and he and his men joked that a “supreme optimist” was an F-105 pilot worrying about dying from lung cancer. He urged his airmen not to take needless risks, telling them it did not make “a damned bit of sense” to lose their lives when the Pentagon ordered them out on a mission while at the same time forbidding them to hit a nearby airfield full of parked North Vietnamese warplanes. During one four-month period he lost a third of his squadron. He blamed the empty chairs at the squadron dinner table and the agonizing letters he had to write to families on what he called his country’s “asinine military policy.”

  As soon as Baughn arrived in Saigon in 1974, Smith’s predecessor at the DAO, Major General John Murray, warned him that Martin was “a great dramatic actor,” capable of being charming one moment and fixing you with his famous icy stare the next. He was a man, Murray said, who “could stand in the shadow of a corkscrew.” Baughn witnessed Martin’s deviousness when he substituted for Murray at a meeting of the heads of the U.S. agencies in South Vietnam. Martin opened it by saying, “I’d like to introduce you to my good friend General Richard Baughn, who I know from our days together in Thailand.” Baughn had never before laid eyes on Martin, and Murray told him afterward, “You have just had some distance placed between you and the other agency heads and everyone else. They’ll figure you’re too close to the ambassador and will be very careful what they say to you.”

  General Smith hinted to Baughn that he agreed with Murray’s reservations about Martin. Others were less circumspect. After Lieutenant General Louis Wilson, who headed the air force’s Pacific Command, had conferred with Martin, he told Baughn, “I have now met my first egomaniac.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Palpable Fear

  Former Da Nang U.S. consul general Al Francis arrived in Saigon soon after being rescued from an MSC ship off Cam Ranh Bay. One morning, he and diplomat Ken Moorefield, who had warned the embassy of an imminent attack on Ban Me Thuot, had coffee in the embassy canteen. Moorefield had previously reported to Francis from Nha Trang and considered him a bright and decent man who was destined for a brilliant career. Francis had an unblemished record and a powerful mentor in Graham Martin, and with his rugged good looks he even looked the part of a dashing diplomat. He told Moorefield that he had just briefed Martin about his escape from Da Nang, “the chaos, the total breakdown in law and order,” and how he and the other Americans “damned near didn’t get out.” He had urged Martin to plan for a similar catastrophe in Saigon. After Martin tried to put an optimistic spin on his account, he had raised his voice and said, “Sir, Da Nang is lost! General Truong’s army is no more!” Martin smiled, shook his head, and said in a voice so faint that Francis had strained to hear him, “No. Military Region I is not lost. I have information to the contrary.” He added that his sources in Thieu’s palace had assured him that the government was planning to mount a counterattack to recapture Da Nang. He gave Francis a penetrating stare, inquired after his health, and suggested that he leave South Vietnam as soon as possible.

  “He either will not or cannot accept the reality of what happened up there,” Francis told Moorefield. “He doesn’t want to hear about it. He thinks I’m sick or something. Making it up. I don’t know. Jesus.”

  Francis had chosen to unburden himself to a man who understood Graham Martin and the Vietnam War as well as if not better than anyone serving in the embassy. Moorefield’s father had been a career army officer and decorated World War II battalion commander. Moorefield had entered West Point in 1961 hoping to emulate him by commanding infantry troops in battle. At the end of his first year, President Kennedy had delivered a graduation address praising the cadets’ “moral motivation” and predicting that they would experience “the greatest opportunity for the defense of freedom that this Academy’s graduates have ever had.” He named third world countries like Vietnam as their proving grounds and predicted that they might risk their lives, “not as combatants, but as instructors or advisors,” and might “need to give orders in different tongues and read maps by different systems.” He echoed the “ask not” line from his inaugural address, telling the cadets, “When you are asked by a President of the United States or by any other American what you are doing for your country, no man’s answer will be clearer than your own.” Years later, Moorefield could recall the timbre of Kennedy’s voice, and he left the field house elated to be a member of the Kennedy generation and to be living in such “an exciting, progressive time.” After Kennedy’s assassination, but before President Johnson sent combat troops to Vietnam, the noted Indochina expert Bernard Fall spoke to Moorefield’s political science class. He began by unveiling a wall map of South Vietnam covered with so many red pins that it reminded Moorefield of the measles. He explained that each pin represented a place where the Communists had assassinated a hamlet or village chief during the previous twelve months. Moorefield realized at that moment that Vietnam would be his war—
his chance to lead men into battle.

  The army sent him to South Vietnam in 1967 as an adviser to a South Vietnamese Army mobile battalion fighting in the Mekong delta. The government controlled the towns, and the Communists held the countryside. His battalion went wherever combat was heaviest. He carried a rifle and was an infantryman first and an adviser second. For nine months he seldom saw another American. Whether or not he summoned U.S. air support or a medevac team might mean life or death for his Vietnamese soldiers; whether or not they fought bravely could mean life or death for him. He decided that to advise them, he needed to understand them, so he slept, ate, fought, celebrated, and mourned with them. They became, he said, “blood brothers in the truest sense,” and he experienced an intimacy with them that he had expected to find while commanding American troops.

  In the spring of 1968 the Communists attacked the provincial capital that his battalion was defending. While leading a counterattack alongside the ARVN commander, he stood up to communicate with gunships, and a bullet entered his arm and blew out his elbow. He collapsed facedown into a canal. Some of his men dashed forward under heavy fire, risking their lives to keep him from drowning. They pulled him into a paddy, stabilized him, and summoned a helicopter. He left on a helicopter with his wounded comrades. Some died during the flight, their blood mingling with his on the floor of the helicopter.

  He returned a year later to command a U.S. infantry company platoon in a province northeast of Saigon. He knew the enemy, the South Vietnamese forces, and the battlefield environment. He believed himself to be superbly prepared to lead men in battle. But the war that American troops were fighting in Vietnam in 1969 bore little resemblance to his father’s war. His men recognized that the goal of their political and military leaders was to avoid losing, and to hang on until a settlement could be negotiated, so not unreasonably their goal was also to hang on and not lose their lives in a war their country’s leaders did not seem to care about winning. This meant that they had little tolerance for junior officers putting them in harm’s way, and shortly before Moorefield arrived, a company commander had been “fragged” by a grenade—murdered by his own men.

  Moorefield understood that keeping his troops at their base camp for extended periods of time gave them access to drugs and liquor but that if he ordered them to do something they viewed as unnecessarily hazardous, he might be risking his life. He steered a middle course: making decisions that demonstrated he would not needlessly endanger them while trying to convince them that remaining in a defensive posture encouraged the Vietcong to attack. His company had fewer discipline problems than others in their brigade, and his men began to resemble the band of brothers he had imagined his father leading into battle. Four months later the army transferred him to division headquarters to serve as a general’s aide. He was appalled to see high-ranking officers making decisions while flying above a battlefield in helicopters and planes, zooming overhead in starched fatigues while soldiers like those in his former company fought for their lives below. He asked to be transferred back to his unit but was told he had too much experience and that there were too many newly minted captains needing command experience.

  He decided that if the Vietnam War was all about career advancement, then he was finished fighting it. He left the army and backpacked through Europe before entering Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. After completing his first year, he was taking a lifesaving course at a Washington pool when he met an eccentric young man wearing black socks with his bathing suit. When they bumped into each other again a few days later, the young man invited him to meet his father, explaining that he had just been appointed ambassador to South Vietnam and might like to discuss the war with someone who had fought it.

  Moorefield and Graham Martin spoke about Vietnam throughout dinner and continued their conversation while watching the Watergate hearings on television. As Moorefield was preparing to leave, Martin asked him if finishing Georgetown was really so important and proposed that he accompany him to Saigon in ten days as his special assistant. Moorefield could think of several reasons to reject this surprising offer, not least that he had known Martin for only a couple of hours, his last tour in Vietnam remained a painful memory, and he doubted that the Paris Peace Accords would succeed. He had recently represented the voice from the battlefield on a Public Broadcasting Service program about the treaty. He had argued that allowing North Vietnamese units to remain in the South was a poison pill and had asked why, if the United States could not guarantee South Vietnam’s survival with 500,000 troops, it believed it could accomplish the same thing with none?

  Despite his reservations he agreed to go. It would mean entering the Foreign Service without taking the examinations, and he told himself that while serving as Martin’s assistant, he might have an opportunity to influence policy. Still, he wondered why Martin had offered the position to someone with no diplomatic training, and was so determined to have him come to Saigon that after a hurried security check revealed that he had once smoked marijuana, Martin threatened not to take up the post unless Moorefield accompanied him, telling the State Department security officer investigating Moorefield, “I’d rather have an aide who told the truth than one who lied.” Later, Moorefield decided that Martin might have wanted an assistant from outside the normal Foreign Service career path because such a person was more likely to be loyal, and because that was how Martin had entered the State Department, without taking the examinations and under the patronage of a powerful mentor, in his case Secretary of State George Marshall. Moorefield also wondered if Martin considered him a replacement for his two dead sons—his adopted son, Glenn Mann, who had been killed in action in 1965, and the son who had died in the car accident.

  He and Martin flew to Saigon on a White House jet. After turning twenty-eight during a layover in Honolulu, Moorefield disembarked at Tan Son Nhut for the third time in five years, this time descending a metal staircase while holding the arm of the new American ambassador. Two years later, he would find himself holding Martin’s arm again while walking him to a helicopter whose pilot had permission to force Martin aboard if necessary.

  Moorefield spent a month living with Martin at the ambassadorial residence before Dorothy Martin arrived from the States, sharing a series of what he recalls being “pretty quiet dinners.” He was a friendly and talkative extrovert; Martin was secretive and silent. If Moorefield had imagined Martin taking him into his confidence and giving him important assignments, he would be disappointed; if Martin had once imagined Moorefield replacing one of his dead sons, he had apparently changed his mind. Moorefield respected Martin for being fearless and tenacious in defending his beliefs and for being a superb writer and analyst. Most of what he learned from him he learned by reading the papers crossing his desk, particularly the cables from the State Department and his tart replies. Because Martin had once been an intelligence officer, he focused on the weekly intelligence reports from his consulates and provincial representatives, but when Moorefield compared these reports with what was happening in the field, he became skeptical of their value and suspected that much of their information came from double agents and con men.

  Moorefield’s two tours in Vietnam had taught him the value of going into the field, but Martin seldom left Saigon, and because he rarely traveled on official business, neither did Moorefield. It was a frustrating situation for a West Point graduate who believed that “Duty, Honor, Country” meant moving the ball toward the goalposts and that doing something and making mistakes trumped doing nothing. After a year as Martin’s assistant he decided that if he wanted to prove himself as a political officer and make a career of the Foreign Service, he would need to meet the soldiers fighting the war and write his own reports. He requested reassignment and was posted to the Nha Trang consulate as a military reports officer. He evaluated and consolidated reports from U.S. provincial representatives like Walter Martindale and traveled extensively through t
he consular region, collecting eyewitness accounts of battles and interviewing wounded South Vietnamese soldiers and captured Communists. He returned to Saigon in December 1974 to assume the frustrating job of embassy liaison officer to the Iranian delegation to the International Commission of Control and Supervision, the organization created by the Paris Peace Accords and charged with overseeing elections that never occurred and investigating violations of a cease-fire that no one respected. A week before Da Nang fell, he had urged the Iranians to evacuate their inspectors. They resisted, saying that the U.S. embassy had assured them that ARVN had tightened its defensive perimeter around the city. He warned them Da Nang was doomed and that neither the United States nor South Vietnam was planning to rescue the Iranian inspectors. The head of the Iranian delegation withdrew his people just in time.

  Moorefield’s dispiriting conversation with Al Francis about Da Nang had left him concerned for the safety of the Iranian ICCS delegation in Saigon. Now that the Communists had seized half of South Vietnam and were threatening the capital, there was no longer the pretense of a peace for the Iranians to control and supervise. As their liaison officer, he felt responsible for their safety and feared that it would be on his conscience if something happened to them. He told one of the young Iranian diplomats who had become a friend, “Listen, I don’t have the authority to tell you this, but you’ve got to get out. The South is not going to hold the line. Things are going to collapse, and when that happens, it’s going to happen dramatically and it’s going to be ugly. You don’t have a deal with the U.S. military. They’re not going to whisk you away.” To his relief the Iranians left.