Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Martindale persuaded Jake Jacobson, Martin’s special assistant for field operations, to make him a special field operations officer, a vague title allowing him to do more or less as he pleased. After learning that the government had interned some of his people on Phu Quoc, he marched into Jacobson’s office and announced that he was going there “even if I have to go in a rowboat.” Jacobson knew him well enough to know that he was not joking. He put him in charge of a hastily manufactured mission to study the feasibility of identifying former U.S. government employees interned on Phu Quoc and relocating them to Saigon. On April 13, Martindale flew to the island on a commercial flight along with what he called his “identification team,” a contingent of Montagnard bodyguards, friends from the national police, and Vietnamese from Quang Duc and other captured provinces who could identify their comrades and co-workers.

  After arriving, he performed a delicate dance with the island’s senior military official, South Vietnamese Navy captain Nguyen Van Thien. Thien said that while “in principle” Martindale could remove his people, he was afraid that doing so might incite the other refugees to riot. To prevent that from happening, Martindale proposed moving them gradually and in small groups from the larger camps to a staging area near the airport. Thien agreed, and Martindale visited six of the fourteen camps and located 52 U.S. government employees and 235 of their dependents. Consul General Moncrieff Spear’s former assistant was still so furious over his treatment that he refused to speak with Martindale. Others described a hellish journey from Cam Ranh Bay. They had spent two days at sea with little food or water before anchoring off Phu Quoc and then waiting days to disembark while the sun scorched them and renegade soldiers robbed them.

  Martindale gave them cash from the embassy’s emergency fund and promised to fly them to Saigon. He asked four members of his identification team to remain, visit the other camps, compile a list of U.S. government employees and their dependents, and begin transferring them to a holding camp he had set up near the airport. He wrote in a report to Jacobson that most of the employees he had met were “sick, emotional, and scared.” Some had wept with relief upon seeing him. Others had cried “bitter tears” and “expressed disbelief that we, the Americans, had abandoned them.”

  He persuaded a pilot with the charter company Bird Air to fly him back to Phu Quoc on a rattletrap World War II–vintage DC-4. He jammed so many people onto his first evacuation flight that the pilot taxied back and off-loaded some. He returned three more times on successive days, stopping only after Bird Air ordered its planes out of Vietnamese airspace. He pulled strings at the DAO so he could transfer the evacuees with intact families directly onto U.S. Air Force transports leaving Tan Son Nhut for the Philippines. The other evacuees fanned out across Saigon to search for their relatives. When they were ready to depart, he manufactured bogus visas and passes to get them back into Tan Son Nhut. He purloined Ambassador Martin’s personal stamp and another belonging to a high-ranking Vietnamese police official under what he admits being “questionable circumstances” and used them to emboss his fake visas and passes. He provided similar documents to friends in Saigon, friends of friends, and anyone he thought might face retaliation from the Communists. He turned his apartment building into a safe house, filling its empty apartments with evacuees and throwing down mattresses in its hallways and on the roof. He slipped some of his people onto the embassy buses that were shuttling Ambassador Martin’s “special cases” to Tan Son Nhut. Others he smuggled into the airport himself, stuffing them into the trunk of the new Peugeot he had bought as a wedding present for his Franco-Vietnamese fiancée, who had decided to remain on her family’s coffee plantation.

  He made mistakes. He refused to evacuate the eighteen-year-old brother of a friend because the boy was old enough to fight for his country. He soon regretted his decision and tried to compensate for it when two Vietnamese MPs boarded an embassy bus to search for draft-age males. After an American diplomat fingered one of Martindale’s evacuees, a fourteen-year-old boy traveling with his mother, Martindale lost his Irish Cherokee temper. “You’re not letting them take that kid!” he shouted. “Do you want to die in Vietnam? Well, you’re not getting off this bus alive if they take that kid.” The boy remained on the bus.

  He accelerated the pace of his evacuations after noticing that the Israeli and West German ambassadors had left their Mercedes limousines in front of the American embassy, keys in their ignitions and flags on their bumpers, and after hearing that the French ambassador had evacuated his mistress but not his wife. He became even more concerned when his friend Nay Luette, a Montagnard who had formerly served as minister of tribal affairs, gripped his hand and begged him to evacuate a hundred Montagnard boys and girls, saying that he expected a bloodbath and wanted to save “the seed” of his people. Martindale reported his request to Jacobson, who like many former U.S. military officers was devoted to the Montagnards. Jacobson shook his head and said, “Walt, I’m afraid that we’re the only people in this embassy who give a damn for the Montagnards.” He urged Martindale not to lose hope and claimed to have “inside information” that a negotiated settlement was imminent.

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  Between April 6 and April 18, the U.S. Air Force evacuated 2,776 South Vietnamese and third-country nationals from Tan Son Nhut on transport planes that had arrived from the Philippines with supplies and would have otherwise returned empty. Hundreds more Vietnamese left during this period on “black flights” involving U.S. planes that had flown into Tan Son Nhut empty for the specific purpose of evacuating Vietnamese employed by the CIA, the DAO, and other U.S. agencies.

  The DAO’s underground railroad smuggled many of these evacuees into Tan Son Nhut. It owed some of its success to Andy Gembara, the burly Ukrainian American army intelligence agent who had become so alarmed by the embassy’s slipshod evacuation planning in March that he and Colonel Bill LeGro had started evacuating Vietnamese employed at the DAO. After serving two earlier tours as an airborne infantry officer, being wounded, learning Vietnamese, marrying a Vietnamese woman, and coming to admire her people for “their toughness, love of family, and stoicism,” Gembara was determined to rescue deserving South Vietnamese. He hired a Vietnamese forger to make a copy of the U.S. consular stamp that he believed “looked even better than the real thing.” He scrounged up a refrigerator truck and drilled airholes in its floor, transformed a van into an ambulance, painting red crosses on its sides and putting a flashing blue light onto its roof, and modified a pair of jeeps to resemble those used by the ICCS delegations, painting them gray and adding the ICCS logo to their doors. He gave priority to his former comrades in the Military Security Service (MSS). Some were so high on blacklists that the Communists had infiltrated hit squads into Saigon to kidnap or execute them. One squad had grabbed General Le Van Hoc, a former head of the MSS counterintelligence unit, snatching him off a downtown street and spiriting him to Hanoi, where he died under torture. Military intelligence operative Mike Gill’s driver also disappeared. His body surfaced several days later, and Gill and Gembara suspected the Communists or a band of ARVN deserters had killed him. His death and Hoc’s disappearance convinced Gembara that evacuating his people before Saigon fell was not enough; he had to do it before the Communists got them first.

  He lent his refrigerator truck to other underground railroads and struck a deal with CIA agent John Limbeck, a fellow Ukrainian who worked in the agency’s logistical department. Limbeck feared that CIA chief of station Polgar would rescue his friends and high-ranking government officials while abandoning many of the agency’s Vietnamese, including the men working in his warehouse. He offered Gembara supplies from the warehouse in exchange for evacuating his workers. Gembara told him that he and the others running the DAO’s evacuation were taking amphetamines to stay awake and were perpetually thirsty. What they needed was water and more pills. Limbeck gave him the only liquids left—bottles of whiskey an
d cognac and crates of San Miguel beer—and threw in several boxes of opera glasses. Gembara could not imagine how the CIA had planned to use them, perhaps explaining why so many remained. He handed them out as bribes to bemused roadblock MPs.

  Gembara became an accomplished briber. He bribed the colonel commanding the military police detachment at Tan Son Nhut by evacuating the man’s family and then bribed him again by evacuating his second family. He bribed down the chain of command because there was no guarantee that a senior officer would be on duty when he needed him. By the third week in April, several back-to-back twenty-four-hour days and a sudden proliferation of roadblocks manned by unbribed officers had left Gembara stressed and emotional. He drove sixty evacuees to a C-130 transport, only to find a CIA agent was loading it with President Thieu’s furniture. The plane’s ramp was down and its engines were running. The CIA truck was on one side; Gembara’s bus was on the other. He and the CIA agent were armed, exhausted, and angry. Had they been adversaries in a Western, they would have been reaching for their six-shooters. The air force loadmaster said that the embassy had ordered Thieu’s furniture evacuated. Gembara complained to LeGro, who checked with the embassy and radioed back to say that Thieu’s furniture had priority. Gembara stood down but was furious that the CIA, which was moving slowly to evacuate its Vietnamese agents and members of South Vietnam’s Central Intelligence Organization, was saving Thieu’s furniture.

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  Like Walter Martindale, Bill Bell was determined to see the war through to the end. Several days after the Babylift crash that had killed his wife and son, he had flown his daughter, Andrea, to a hospital in California for treatment. His superiors on the Joint Military Team urged him to stay with her. Instead, he left her in the care of her maternal grandparents and returned to Saigon. He wanted to help the forensic experts at Tan Son Nhut identify Nova and Michael and wanted “to save as many people as possible to justify my being over there and getting my family killed.” He believed that his fluency in Vietnamese and contacts with the military on both sides of the conflict obligated him to help Americans and South Vietnamese survive “the fire that was coming.” After the forensic experts identified his family’s remains, the Communist delegations at Camp Davis invited him to a traditional chia buon, a sharing of the grief ceremony. Their sympathy and humility struck him as sincere, reminding him of their shared humanity and “the futility of war.”

  While he had been in California, his colleague Captain Stuart Herrington had represented the U.S. JMT delegation on the April 11 liaison flight to Hanoi. The opportunity to visit Hanoi on these flights had been one of the things attracting Herrington to the JMT. Despite spending several years immersing himself in Vietnam’s language and culture, he felt that he knew only half the country, and the liaison flights promised a window on the rest. He had joined the army in 1967 as an intelligence officer, serving in Berlin and then transferring to the reserves to escape Vietnam. Procter & Gamble hired him, but he soon regretted becoming a soap salesman and returned to active duty. After months of intensive language training, he went to South Vietnam as a district intelligence officer, advising South Vietnamese militia forces, immersing himself in village life, and fighting with South Vietnamese troops. He wanted the South to win but respected the enemy for its “tenacity, aggressiveness, and bravery.” On the way home from his first tour in 1970, he had landed at Travis Air Force Base in California and entered a restroom crowded with soldiers exchanging their uniforms for civvies. He overheard one soldier say, “ ’Nam was a bummer, a bad trip”; another said he would tell people that he had served in Korea. None of them expressed pride in having fought in Vietnam. He left Travis scared for his Vietnamese friends and wondering how much longer Congress would underwrite this unpopular war.

  When he had landed in Hanoi in 1974 on his first liaison flight, Gia Lam airport had been deserted except for a few Soviet helicopters and colorless except for red flags fluttering over its faded stucco terminal. The city had struck him as dingy and cheerless, and the contrast with Saigon reminded him of that between East and West Berlin. Major Huyen, his escort on this and later visits, led him through an art museum filled with exhibitions extolling Ho Chi Minh before treating him to lunch at the drab Hoa Binh Hotel.

  He arrived in Hanoi on the April 11 liaison flight expecting the usual sightseeing and knickknack purchasing followed by lunch at the Hoa Binh, a routine rendered still more surrealistic by the fact that North Vietnamese troops were flagrantly violating the very treaty responsible for these flights. He found Hanoi transformed, with smiling soldiers and civilians strolling under streets hung with red-and-gold banners proclaiming, “Giant Victories.” He and Major Huyen had developed a cordial relationship based on an unspoken mutual respect, but as they drove from the airport, Huyen suddenly said, “Our Foreign Ministry has denounced the American scheme of a refugee-orphan airlift as a crime similar to those committed during the Hitler era.” Herrington shot back that he had always considered Huyen “an educated and intelligent person” and did not think he believed such nonsense. Huyen glared at him and fell silent.

  Lunch was acrimonious. The North Vietnamese gloated, telling the South Vietnamese delegation, “We scared the hell out of your soldiers so that all they did was run, run, and run.” As Herrington parted from Huyen at the airport, he suggested that instead of vilifying Americans for evacuating anti-Communist South Vietnamese, North Vietnam should be thanking them for removing so many potential opponents, and said, “You should let us take out our Vietnamese friends and depart in peace.” Huyen flashed a thin smile and said, “We have been trying to get you to leave our country for twenty years. You may therefore rest assured that when you are finally ready to go, we will not stand in your way.”

  A week later, on April 18, it was Bill Bell’s turn to travel to Hanoi on the liaison flight. While perusing the manifest, he noticed that three senior Communist officials, including the influential Colonel Tu, were flying one way. He alerted Colonel Jack Madison, who commanded the U.S. JMT delegation, that the Communists were using the flights to evacuate their senior cadre and that Tu’s inclusion indicated an imminent attack on Saigon. It had been his experience, he said, that North Vietnam’s leaders were willing to suffer huge battlefield losses when the dead were poor rural teenagers but would be reluctant to risk the lives of senior cadre. He suggested keeping the senior Communist officials at Camp Davis as human shields, arguing that the longer they delayed their departure, the more time they would have to evacuate the U.S. delegation’s South Vietnamese personnel.

  Madison passed Bell’s recommendation up the chain of command and received approval for the plane to develop mechanical difficulties. After circling Saigon, it returned to Tan Son Nhut, where mechanics made a show of examining it. When Madison declared the flight canceled the Communists stood on the runway fuming and accusing him of bad faith and deception.

  Since returning from California, Bell had assisted Herrington in evacuating the Vietnamese wives of former or current U.S. servicemen. Some of the women had been living temporarily with their parents until their husbands completed an overseas posting; others had been visiting relatives and were unable to get exit visas. Herrington and Bell dressed the wife of an air force sergeant in a nun’s habit and slipped her onto a bus that was bringing nuns and orphans to a Babylift flight. As the nuns carried the orphans aboard in cardboard boxes, Herrington distracted the police while the sergeant’s wife climbed a metal stairway to the flight deck and hid until takeoff. Sometimes Herrington and Bell rode the buses bringing orphans to the flight line and persuaded their drivers to make a short detour to collect the wives of U.S. servicemen whom they had hidden behind the terminal. If an immigration official boarded a bus to make a head count, the wives hid under the skirts of the American women who were escorting the orphans.

  Colonel Madison asked Herrington and Bell to expand their operation and evacuate the U.S.
JMT delegation’s Vietnamese employees and their families. Madison was a tall, gangly West Point graduate with a sweet smile and a kind heart who had advised South Vietnamese troops in 1963, returning four years later to command a battalion in the Central Highlands. Behind the “Duty, Honor, Country” motto of West Point is an assumption that the three are a harmonious triad, but sometimes its graduates must choose. This had happened to Madison during his second tour in Vietnam when he concluded that instead of trying to win the war, the Johnson administration simply wanted to avoid losing it until negotiations ended it. Because his battalion’s area of operations included a major infiltration zone, his men had the dangerous assignment of engaging enemy soldiers and pushing them back across the border. Instead of sacrificing his teenage draftees in a war their leaders had no strategy for winning, Madison placed his personal honor and his duty to his men first. He discouraged what he called “bayonet stuff,” and targeted infiltrators with artillery and air strikes, “anything to avoid casualties among my guys.”

  Several years later, Madison had been on track to make general when an assignment officer at the Pentagon offered him command of the U.S. JMT delegation. He protested that he had been to Vietnam twice while some at his level had yet to go. After the officer promised him a pick of assignments when he returned, he reluctantly accepted the assignment. He reported to Dr. Roger Shields, the deputy secretary of defense for POW and MIA affairs, but was also under the command of Ambassador Martin and Major General Smith, a situation enabling him to play them off against each other. His previous two tours in the country had left him with what he called “a deep emotional connection” with the South Vietnamese, and he was upset when Martin refused to evacuate the U.S. delegation’s Vietnamese interpreters, drivers, secretaries, and MIA experts. He considered Martin’s excuse that their departure could lead to the collapse of the Thieu government ridiculous because, he thought, “everything was collapsing anyway!” In 1967 he had engaged in some low-level shenanigans to keep his teenage draftees out of harm’s way; eight years later he was ready to do it again to evacuate his Vietnamese employees. He called Deputy Secretary of Defense Shields, explained the situation, and proposed evacuating his people aboard the transports returning to the Philippines. If anyone questioned the operation, he would point out that if the Communists won, the United States would need their expertise to continue negotiating on MIA issues.