Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  Shields said, “Do it!” and promised him a chartered plane to fly the JMT delegation’s Vietnamese to Guam.

  Madison gathered his Vietnamese employees and said, “You should consider this top secret, but I want to know which of you wants to leave because the Communists are going to come waltzing in here any day now.” Most asked to leave. They would be easy to evacuate because they had passes permitting them to enter Tan Son Nhut, but their families would have to be smuggled onto the base. Madison gave this job to Herrington and Sergeant Bill Herron. Herrington asked Andy Gembara if he could borrow his notorious freezer truck. Gembara said he could have it, but only for a few hours because it was in demand from competing underground railroads.

  Although Gembara had drilled airholes in its floor, Herrington was so nervous about suffocating his evacuees that he assembled them at a safe house three minutes from the airport. On his first run he packed everyone in so tightly that they had to stand. Before closing the door, he said that as he neared the gate, he would lean back from the cab and hit the side of the truck three times, “Bang! Bang! Bang!” After that, there could be no noise, and mothers must clap their hands over the mouths of their infants and children. His first two runs went smoothly. He banged on the truck and everyone quieted. The MPs saw a uniformed U.S. Army officer and waved him through. Because the JMT had its own dedicated plane, he drove straight to the flight line and delivered everyone to Madison and Colonel Harry Summers, the second-in-command of the U.S. delegation. But when he returned to the safe house for the third time, the evacuees warned him that neighbors had reported suspicious activities to the police, and they had summoned the owner of the house to the local station. Faced with imprisonment for assisting an illegal operation, the man jumped into the back of the truck and arrived in Guam with the clothes on his back.

  Herrington had some special cases that he was determined to evacuate regardless of the dangers or laws that he might be breaking. Major General Smith had forbidden anyone in his command to evacuate members of the South Vietnamese military, but Herrington was torn. Although assisting desertion in wartime was a serious offense, he also believed that the Communists were certain to execute or imprison South Vietnamese intelligence officers, and knew that not evacuating military personnel with their families meant depriving their wives and children of their sole wage earner, perhaps splitting up families for years if not forever. During his earlier tour he had become friends with Lieutenant Tuan, who had led an intelligence platoon. Tuan had written to him, saying, “Dear Captain, If you are able to help my family and me please come to Bien Hoa. You know the house. If you can’t help us, we are dead for certain.” Tuan was a Catholic who had fled the North, a marked man for sure. After considerable soul-searching, Herrington decided to evacuate him and other military friends. He assumed that the government had tapped the U.S. delegation’s phones, so he met his prospective evacuees in person to agree on a code. He told them that if he called to invite them to a party at his quarters, the time and date of the event would indicate when they should arrive at a prearranged safe house.

  Bill Bell also faced some agonizing decisions. He glanced out his office window one morning to see a Vietnamese lieutenant colonel standing outside the door, as if debating whether to come inside. Bell recalled seeing him at the DAO accompanied by a plainclothes U.S. intelligence operative who had identified him as Lieutenant Colonel Pham Xuan Huy, a legendary intelligence officer who had erected a memorial to a heroic American pilot. Bell thought that Huy was a candidate for a Communist death list and assumed he was too proud to ask someone at the JMT to help him but was hanging around hoping that someone might volunteer. Bell told himself that one of the Americans who knew and admired him would surely rescue him. Instead, everyone abandoned the man who would become Bell’s father-in-law.

  Madison recruited Bell and marine gunnery sergeant Ernest Pace to operate the JMT’s second underground railroad. Pace was also a Vietnamese linguist and, according to Bell, “a hard-drinking and fun-loving Marine.” They drove day and night, losing sleep and missing meals while collecting the relatives of JMT employees who had missed the first evacuation flights. Bell also evacuated his landlady and her neighbors, Special Branch policemen whom he knew from his earlier tour, and a friend’s daughter who worked for Stars and Stripes—an obvious “class enemy.” As Bell loaded her into the trunk of his car, he realized while closing it that his friend might be seeing his daughter for the last time.

  He and Pace also evacuated CIA sources who feared the agency would abandon them, anyone carrying a GE Slimline radio, because they knew that the CIA issued them to its Vietnamese agents, and the Vietnamese wives of American officers who had kept their marriages secret because they feared they would lose their security clearances for cohabiting with a woman who had not been vetted. They began by evacuating people they deemed to be endangered but were soon helping anyone who wanted to leave. If they could fit six people into whatever vehicle they were using and only four showed up, they offered places to anyone standing around. “It was fill it up, get in, who wants to go to the United States,” Bell recalled. “Bam! Bam! They’d jump in and we’d take off.” The more people he evacuated, the better he felt about leaving Andrea in California.

  As he and Pace drove farther into Saigon’s sketchier and more distant neighborhoods, they shifted from trucks to cars to navigate the narrow streets. Their favorite vehicle was a black Ford LTD with a large trunk that an American had abandoned in the DAO parking lot. Pace played the chauffeur, while Bell sat ramrod straight in the backseat, wearing his parachute wings and decorations and staring straight ahead. The MPs saw a bigwig and waved them through, and they drove their people to a hangar where they handed them over to a little African American air force enlisted man wearing a bandanna around his head. Every time Bell watched his evacuees following the airman to the plane, like baby ducks behind their mother, he felt a surge of pride.

  He tried to keep his operation on the down low, but the word spread. One man offered him diamonds; another promised to sell him a Ming dynasty vase for $20. Phones at the JMT rang with calls from Americans in Bangkok begging him to track down a girlfriend, wife, in-law, or ARVN comrade. He went to houses where several generations waited in a single room, sitting on their suitcases, scared to go but terrified to remain. He drove into dodgy neighborhoods filled with ARVN deserters to collect bar girls described as “close female friends.” During his last runs North Vietnamese rockets whistled overhead and exploded nearby, showering the streets he had just left with metal shards.

  After Madison had flown the U.S. JMT delegation’s Vietnamese and their families to Guam, Major General Smith asked him to help evacuate the families of South Vietnam’s 150-man JMT delegation. Madison informed Colonel Nghia, their commanding officer, that although for the moment his men could not accompany their families, he would try to evacuate them later. During the next four days Nghia arranged to have his men’s families brought to the Tan Son Nhut soccer stadium. Herrington scrounged up a bus with embassy license plates and drove them from the stadium to the flight line, where they boarded the planes that Madison and Summers had wrung out of the air force.

  Herrington had the painful job of standing by the door of the bus, counting people off, and enforcing Smith’s prohibition on evacuating military personnel, watching as Colonel Nghia’s men embraced their wives and children for what might be the last time. One parting between a colonel and his family was particularly excruciating. The wife was pregnant and one of the children seriously ill. The colonel and his wife hugged, wept, and hugged again. Unable to watch any longer, Herrington told him in Vietnamese, “Go, Colonel. Get on the bus with your family.”

  “My duty requires that I stay and fight,” he said. “I can’t desert my country at this desperate moment.”

  “That’s very noble of you, but President Thieu has left, and some generals left this morning. [In fact, Thieu would not leave
until the next day.] Your family needs you more than your country right now. I’m not going to say it again…but get on the bus. Get on the bus!”

  The colonel burst into tears and boarded with his family.

  Colonel Summers had been standing nearby and asked what had happened. When Herrington explained, he became furious and said, “You encouraged the desertion of an officer. You know what the rules are. Shame on you!”

  The incident haunted both men for years. Two decades later, Summers recounted it in a magazine article. He admitted that “nothing that officer [the Vietnamese colonel] could have done would have changed anything,” and concluded, “In hindsight, Captain Herrington did the right thing.” He also admitted that he had himself violated the prohibition against evacuating the military. One case involved a pregnant waitress at the DAO mess who was days from delivering her child. She refused to leave without her husband, a marine sergeant who had just turned up after being reported missing. “So we just bundled her husband up and put him on an airplane and shipped him out of [the] country,” Summers wrote. “We figured they could lose a Marine sergeant and it wouldn’t hurt too bad.”

  As Herrington was escorting some evacuees to the flight line, he discovered that a wealthy Saigon surgeon had bribed an officer in the Vietnamese JMT delegation to put him and his family on the manifest. Herrington considered it the kind of corruption that had ruined South Vietnam. He was so angry that he flagged down a pickup truck and ordered the surgeon and his family dumped outside the gate. Minutes later he felt awful. To ease his conscience, he approached a forlorn-looking young couple who were sitting alone under a tree. She said that her boyfriend was a law student and they saw no future for themselves in a Communist country. Some friends who had promised to get them on a plane had failed to appear. Herrington handed them the flight manifest and told them to add their names to it. Pointing to a staging area where families of the Vietnamese JMT delegation were boarding a bus, he said, “Just get over there and join that line.” She blinked back tears and said in perfect English, “We will always think of you as our guardian angel and remember you in our prayers.”

  Herrington realized that he was playing God. He might have condemned the surgeon and his family to years of privation and imprisonment while giving the young couple the chance at a new life in the United States. He never forgot any of them. Twenty years later he received a phone call from a woman asking if he was the American captain who spoke Vietnamese. After he replied in Vietnamese that he was, she asked, “Do you remember that law student and his girlfriend? Well, I was that girl.” She reported that she and her boyfriend had married, had children, and now lived in Seattle, where he practiced law. “I just wanted to tell you that we took advantage of that opportunity you gave us,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Although Martin had fired Don Hays for participating in an unauthorized evacuation, Hays soon became involved in schemes that could have led Martin to expel him again. While having lunch with an American secretary in the recreation center restaurant, he overheard Wolfgang Lehmann saying, “Goddamn it! I’d like to find the defeatist who’s telling all these secretaries to leave,” and realized that Lehmann was talking about him. One of the embassy communication officers had recently handed him a cable from the State Department authorizing the immediate departure of the dependent families of U.S. government employees in South Vietnam. The officer told him that Martin had ordered him not to distribute it and to destroy the original. Hays ran off copies and put one in every in-box during the lunch break. Some secretaries showed the cable to their bosses and received permission to depart.

  Hays’s wife was security officer Marvin Garrett’s secretary. Garrett struck Hays as loud and brash, “the kind of guy who might get you in trouble if you went barhopping with him,” but he also admired him for being decisive and candid. Because Garrett’s last evacuation scheme had led to Hays’s expulsion, he was wary when Garrett summoned him to another late-night meeting in his office. Garrett had gathered an eclectic group from across the mission that included Ken Moorefield, two Seabees, a marine guard, and someone from Alan Carter’s USIA office. Garrett declared, “Since the ambassador has frozen me out of his thinking on any evacuation, refusing to even discuss it with me, we’re going to have to plan it ourselves.”

  He said he was not asking them to launch an evacuation without Martin’s approval, at least not yet, but to prepare for it discreetly. He gave Hays the assignment of transforming the embassy compound into a helicopter evacuation site in case the land route to Tan Son Nhut became impassable. Hays asked a contact at AID to send over a work crew of Seabees. They modified the embassy gates, reinforced the roof, moved utility poles farther from the walls to prevent them from being climbed, and strung concertina wire across the wall. While Hays was on the wall supervising the work, his boss Hank Boudreau saw him and shouted, “What the hell are you doing?” Boudreau was close to Martin, so Hays told him he was carrying out a work order. Who had signed it? Boudreau asked. “You did!” Hays shouted. “Or at least it looks like your handwriting.” Boudreau harrumphed and walked on.

  Hays’s wife was eight months pregnant. The embassy doctor had told her, “I don’t want to end up delivering a baby on a helicopter,” so Hays bought tickets out on Pan Am for her and their daughter. The airport was chaotic. Vietnamese shouldered their way into the check-in line and threw bribes at ticket agents. Police and immigration officers were so distracted that Hays boarded the plane with his wife and daughter. He considered leaving with them, but had he done so, several hundred more Vietnamese might have ended up in Communist reeducation camps, including the husband of his daughter’s kindergarten teacher.

  The teacher was a New Zealander, like Hays’s wife. She had finagled visas and passports for herself and their two children and had flown with them to New Zealand on the assumption that her Vietnamese husband, who worked for Esso as an engineer, would soon follow. But Esso refused to help him, and the New Zealand embassy would not issue him a passport or visa. He appealed to Hays because their wives were friends. Hays told him that the Royal Australian Air Force was operating daily flights to Bangkok. Their plane was parked on the far edge of Tan Son Nhut, and they were boarding anyone who showed up. To get past the MPs, a South Vietnamese citizen needed a ticket, passport, and exit visa, but Hays had noticed the MPs waving through the Japanese ambassador and suggested that the engineer borrow a black Mercedes, affix a Japanese flag to its bumper, hire a driver, and wear a dark suit and a homburg. “Go racing through the checkpoint,” he said. “Have the driver wave but don’t stop until you reach the Australian plane.” After Hays joined his wife in New Zealand a month later, she told him that the teacher and her husband had invited them to dinner. As soon as they arrived, the engineer handed Hays the homburg and said, “You saved my life.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “Godspeed”

  As General Dao’s troops retreated from Xuan Loc, the price of a seaworthy boat rose. CIA station chief Polgar strapped on a revolver and shipped his household goods home, and a police major suffered a breakdown in front of the American consulate, yanking people out of the visa line and shouting, “You can’t leave this country! I’ll arrest you all!”

  The Washington Post described Martin as “dazed and confused” and in “deep personal anguish” over the fate of the U.S. mission’s Vietnamese. Still, he insisted that work continue on a new bathhouse for the recreation center pool and that the embassy keep normal hours and close on weekends. He strong-armed USIA head Alan Carter into appearing on South Vietnamese television on April 19—the same day that embassy buses began taking Brian Ellis’s evacuees to Tan Son Nhut—to declare that rumors the embassy was organizing an evacuation were false. Carter insisted that there was “absolutely and equivocally no truth” to the claim that Americans would leave if Congress failed to appropriate additional military aid for South Vietnam and that the departure of U.S.
citizens was “routine,” adding, “If you were to visit Ambassador and Mrs. Martin’s house you would see that nothing has been packed,” and that “the same is true of my house.”

  The relationship between Martin and the commander in chief of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, Admiral Noel Gayler, had been strained ever since Gayler kept Martin waiting before their initial meeting in Honolulu. Gayler was a decorated naval fighter pilot who had shot down five Japanese Zeros, winning the Navy Cross. His contemporaries considered him a maverick, and he has described himself as “a loose cannon.” Like Martin, Madison, and Baughn, he blamed President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara for their “disastrously bad strategy” in Vietnam. He found Martin “not an easy man to communicate with,” and during their telephone conversations in early April he was unable to shake Martin from what he called his “curious idea that somehow or other there was a political fix coming, and [that] an armistice had been arranged.” Because Gayler commanded all the military forces from the West Coast of North and South America to the Indian Ocean, including those assigned to the Defense Attaché Office in Saigon, he considered himself the final authority on any evacuation from South Vietnam involving the U.S. military. Martin, however, insisted that as senior U.S. official in South Vietnam he should have the last word on anything involving U.S. civilian and military personnel there, including an evacuation. When Gayler pressed him to estimate how many people the military might have to evacuate from South Vietnam, Martin’s answers were so vague and evasive that Gayler finally flew to Saigon to resolve what he called “a very considerable conflict between the ambassador and me on making preparations [for an evacuation].”