Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  By 1975 he and his maintenance manager were the only Pan Am Americans left in Saigon. He was younger than most of his Vietnamese mechanics, ticket clerks, and office and sales managers, but they called him “Uncle Al,” as if he were a beloved family member. He was smitten by what he called “these very special people” and found it painful to ask them to sell tickets on Pan Am planes and service them but not escape on them. He knew that the Communists would view them as traitorous as Vietnamese working at the embassy, and raised the subject of an evacuation with executives at the New York headquarters. They asked how many he wanted to evacuate. All sixty-two of them, he said, and their families. They replied, “Yes. Let’s get them all out,” and said they would trust him to figure out how to do it and when—trusting him with the lives of sixty-two people about whom he cared deeply.

  He gathered them at Pan Am’s downtown office at the end of March and said that the company had decided to evacuate them and their families. “I can’t tell you when it’s going to happen or how,” he said, “but believe me it’s going to happen.”

  New York promised him a dedicated plane if he could not fit everyone on a scheduled flight, but he still needed to get his people into Tan Son Nhut. He hit upon the idea of “adopting” them before General Smith and Admiral Gayler proposed it to Martin. Pan Am had flown two chartered 747s with more than six hundred orphans and escorts to the United States during the Babylift, and he reasoned that if adopted orphans, some long out of diapers, could leave without exit visas, then why not his employees and their families? It was the kind of harebrained scheme you might expect from a corporate manager who doubled as a disc jockey. He sent his human resources manager, Xuan Nguyen, to the Ministry of the Interior to ask his contacts there how Topping could adopt his employees. Nguyen returned with a stack of adoption forms and told Topping to sign one for each employee and their dependents. Topping gave Nguyen the job of compiling a roster of the employees’ family members. After he came up with 700 names, Topping insisted that he cut it in half. Pan Am in New York had said immediate family members only, and he needed to fit everyone onto a single 747. The next day Nguyen handed him a list of 360 names. Topping tried not to imagine the painful negotiations that had produced it.

  Topping signed the forms and Nguyen brought them to the ministry with cash for the fees and bribes. After the forms came back signed and stamped, Topping sent his family home to the States and moved into a trailer at the airport. He spent restless nights sleeping in a flak jacket and listening to distant explosions. He assumed Hanoi would want to take Saigon before the Communists’ May Day celebration and scheduled his evacuation for the April 24 flight. The day before, the Federal Aviation Administration prohibited U.S. commercial flights from landing in Saigon. Pan Am executives persuaded the State Department to designate flight 842 a government charter on the pretext that some embassy employees had purchased tickets. Topping had accepted a thousand reservations for the flight but assumed that few Vietnamese would get exit visas and arrive to claim them. The April 22 flight had left largely empty despite being overbooked, and he assumed the same thing would happen again. To be safe, he asked Pan Am to put a second 747 on standby in Bangkok.

  He alerted his employees on April 23 and suggested they sleep at the downtown office or the airport. He decided not to notify Ambassador Martin, even though the flight was technically a State Department charter. Instead, he called a friend at the embassy who agreed to provide four buses to carry his people to Tan Son Nhut. News of the evacuation spread through the Pan Am grapevine, and he received calls all night from former employees begging to be included. He had to say no. He had already promised to evacuate 360 of his employees and dependents on a plane seating 375 people, and he might have to accommodate hundreds more depending on how many people claimed their reservations.

  The next morning an envious crowd watched as the Pan Am employees boarded the buses. Telex machines chattered away on empty desks, and a sign on the front door said, “Temporarily Closed.” Topping met the buses at the airport gate. He handed an MP a stack of forms showing that he had adopted all the passengers. Soldiers boarded the first bus and walked slowly along the aisle, glancing down at the adoption papers and up at the passengers. The bus was stifling, over a hundred degrees. Everyone stared straight ahead. No one said a word. They were the most terrifying minutes of Topping’s life. He had “adopted” several military-aged men, and the MPs would have been justified in arresting them, and him. Instead, they disembarked and waved them through.

  The buses drove straight to the plane. The landscape was flat, and the four-story-high 747, painted in Pan Am’s blue-and-white livery with an American flag on its tail, was visible for miles. It was such an inviting target that during the Babylift flights Topping had ordered that only one 747 could be on the ground at once.

  The flight attendants from the April 22 flight, including Pam Taylor, Gudren Meisner, and Tra Dong, had returned from Manila. Taylor searched the terminal in vain for the teenage boy she had promised to evacuate. The security was tighter, and the crowds outside the fence were larger and more menacing. Meisner replaced the Vietnamese ticket agents at the counter so they could slip aboard the plane and hide. Topping did a masterful job of choreographing the departure. Pan Am employees working as liaison officers in the control tower left at the last minute to board one of the buses heading to the plane. Vans raced across the tarmac, bringing Pan Am mechanics, baggage handlers, ticket agents, and caterers from the cargo hangar. Tra Dong’s sisters arrived in one. The colonel whom Dong had met on the previous flight had kept his word and smuggled her sisters into the airport. She had borrowed flight attendant uniforms from Pan Am crews who were on layover in Manila. Her sisters threw them on and made a show of helping passengers up the stairs. The skirts were too long for them, and they stumbled in the oversized high heels. When no one was looking, they pulled them off and bounded up the stairs two at a time.

  Topping had also agreed to evacuate some of the Adventist Hospital’s Vietnamese staff. They pretended to be patients and arrived in ambulances, lights flashing and sirens wailing. Some limped up the stairs; others came aboard on stretchers. About 50 passengers walked from the terminal holding boarding passes. The other 950 people with reservations had not appeared. Because the flight was a charter, commercial rules were suspended, and Topping loaded some passengers two to a seat and put others in the aisles and galleys. He noticed that several of his employees had brought extra family members and that two soldiers from the airport detachment had changed into civvies and boarded. He let everyone stay.

  An immigration officer walked down the aisle and announced that anyone without an exit visa would have to disembark. Passengers threw their remaining piastres into a pillowcase and bought him off. A soldier stationed at the foot of the stairs began checking papers, and the crew placed a garbage can at his feet so evacuees could fill it with their soon-to-be-worthless currency. After removing the wheel blocks, three maintenance workers crawled into the plane through its electrical box. The ground traffic controller jumped onto the landing gear after using his wands to direct pilot Bob Berg toward the runway. Berg came to a full stop so the controller could climb into the wheel well. From there the man pushed aside a panel and slithered into the cabin. After Berg had reached the runway, the air traffic controllers claimed that there was enemy activity nearby and put him on a ground hold. They were furious that the same Pan Am employees who had been sitting next to them in the tower minutes before were escaping.

  After the plane had been on the runway for forty-five minutes, Jim Eckes, the Continental Air Services manager, handed an ARVN officer holding a walkie-talkie $200 and said, “Ask the tower to let that plane take off. Offer them this money. Let ’em drink to our health. Let ’em do what they want with it.” The officer spoke to the controllers, and Pan Am’s last flight from Saigon finally took off. Eckes had been close to Topping and the Pan Am employees. He thoug
ht, “Now all my pals are gone, all my friends,” and began crying.

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  Ross Meador, the long-haired West Coast youth who had become a co-director of the Friends of the Children of Vietnam, evacuated his Vietnamese employees. He had accompanied a group of FCVN orphans to California on the April 5 Babylift flight. His parents had urged him to stay, but like Bill Bell he insisted on returning and moved into the FCVN orphanage at Truong Minh Ky Street, the last one remaining open following the departure of many of the organization’s orphans and staff on the Babylift flights.

  He discovered that because of the backlash against the orphan flights, formerly sympathetic government officials were refusing to provide adoption certificates and exit visas for the FCVN’s remaining orphans. As the military situation deteriorated and reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities spread, he began caring for more and more children. Women arrived at the FCVN compound in the final hours of their pregnancies and left their babies. Physicians at the city’s hospitals implored him to collect babies being left in their maternity wards. Nuns from rural orphanages arrived penniless and abandoned their malnourished charges. Packs of homeless children camped in the lane outside the FCVN villa. Mothers held their babies up against the windows of Meador’s van whenever he left the compound, screaming and begging him to take them. Some hurled their infants over the compound’s wall at night. The next morning the staff found them lying in the courtyard and wailing, or dead if they had hit a patch of concrete.

  By April 21, Meador and his staff were caring for 180 orphans. The Ministry of the Interior was refusing to approve their adoption, and the crowd outside the compound had become so menacing that the DAO offered him a handgun. Vietnamese staff members reported that their relatives were begging them to stay home, complaining that they were putting themselves and their families at risk by continuing to associate with Americans. Meador promised to evacuate them and stopped at the AID office daily to ask when they would begin evacuating nongovernmental organization (NGO) staff. He was always told not yet. He concluded that the NGO Vietnamese would always be at the bottom of any AID or embassy list and decided to evacuate them himself. He put five staff members on the floor of his van, threw blankets and suitcases over them, and headed for the airport. When they were several hundred yards from the barrier, he heard gunfire and a bullet whizzed through the car, missing him by inches. A middle-aged man on a motorcycle in army fatigues pulled alongside, pointed a revolver at him, and shouted, “Pull over, I go too!” Meador swerved, hitting the motorbike and sending it careening off the road. He was so unnerved that when he saw soldiers manning a machine gun nest near the Tan Son Nhut gate, he slammed on the brakes and reversed back onto the highway.

  The next day he hid his staff members underneath a group of orphans whom he encouraged to be noisy and unruly. The soldiers let them pass, and he used the same ruse several times, sometimes bringing along Americans who had volunteered to “marry” or “adopt” his Vietnamese employees and sign their affidavits. He married some staff members and adopted others. Sister Therese, a nun in her forties, married a nervous Vietnamese man in his early twenties. Moorefield, McBride, or whoever signed their papers gently suggested that perhaps she should make him her adopted son.

  An American physician at the Adventist Hospital contacted Meador on April 22 and proposed a collaboration. The hospital had requested a U.S. Air Force medical-evacuation plane from the Philippines and planned to put some of its Vietnamese staff aboard. The physician offered to include Meador’s sickest children. Meador arrived at the hospital with his children to see members of its medical staff wrapping bloodstained bandages around each other, setting splints, and attaching IVs to arms. They rode to Tan Son Nhut in ambulances with Meador’s orphans, sirens wailing and bringing traffic to a halt. Meador followed in his van, laughing and cheering. The MPs saluted as they sped through the gate.

  Meador still had 184 orphans. Mr. Thanh, an FCVN guard and translator, came to his rescue. After Thieu resigned and Huong assumed the presidency, Thanh found that he had friends among the new ministers. He persuaded one to write a letter on official stationery stating that the new government would not interfere with the evacuation of the FCVN orphans. AID agreed to provide seats on a plane, supply four buses for an airport run on April 26, and permit them and their seventeen American and Vietnamese escorts to land in Guam without documentation.

  Meador stayed up all night, making up names for the children that he put on armbands and writing notes on their medical conditions. The AID buses had sealed windows to prevent mothers from slipping their infants inside and armed guards to prevent anyone from forcing their way aboard. Meador followed in a van filled with food and medical supplies for the flight. The MPs expected the convoy and raised the barrier as it approached the gate. When Vietnamese attempted to run into the airport after the buses, the police turned fire hoses on them.

  The airport had become grimmer and the crowds more unruly. Soldiers had shot several people attempting to scale the perimeter fence, and their bodies lay draped across the barbed wire. Meador and the orphans waited hours for a plane, long enough for a baby girl with an IV in her arm to die in Cherie Clark’s arms. She and the other American staff flew out with the orphans. Meador wrestled with his conscience. He was a military-age American male, and there was a risk that the Communists would identify him as a CIA agent and execute him. On the other hand, the FCVN villa was filled with equipment and supplies that should be distributed to the other orphanages and hospitals before looters got them. He decided to stay.

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  There were dozens of other American civilians who, like Meador and Al Topping, operated freelance underground railroads. Some had the support of their bosses; others, like Rosenblatt and Johnstone, and the five Americans working for Alaska Barge & Transport (ABT), defied their superiors.

  The ABT Americans operated the barges that had been chartered by the U.S. Military Sealift Command to transport ammunition and supplies up the Mekong River to Cambodia. They met for lunch on April 24 at the United Seamen’s Service Club in Newport with Bill Ryder, the MSC’s South Vietnam operations officer. Before leaving the club, which would close for good that afternoon, they would cast a vote that would determine the future of more than twenty-five thousand South Vietnamese. When asked later to reflect on the role that Bill Ryder played in rescuing these people, U.S. Navy attaché Carmody said that had Ryder been in the military, he would have recommended him for the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  Ryder was an unlikely-looking hero: a slight, wiry man in his late forties with a receding hairline and a deceptively mild disposition who had spent a quarter century at sea on U.S. merchantmen or at MSC headquarters in Washington. He had volunteered to serve in South Vietnam because the pay was good and he was sick of his desk job, not because he supported a war that he thought every American president since Kennedy had lied about to the American people. The MSC was a civilian branch of the U.S. Navy responsible for chartering merchant ships from American maritime companies to transport cargo and military supplies for the U.S. military and government agencies. Most of its vessels in South Vietnam operated from the port of Vung Tau or from Newport, a large military terminal of piers and warehouses north of downtown on the Saigon River that was also headquarters for South Vietnam’s navy.

  By March, Ryder and Dan Berney, who headed the MSC in South Vietnam, had concluded that the most pressing question for them was not when Saigon would fall but how they could evacuate their Vietnamese employees before it did. In early April they moved their offices from the downtown riverfront to Newport to put them closer to their ships and make it easier to cultivate Vietnamese naval officers and the commander of the terminal. Several days before the April 24 Seamen’s Club luncheon, ABT had canceled the contracts of its American and expatriate employees, stopped their pay, given them airline tickets, and ordered them to leave Sout
h Vietnam. By April 24, the Americans and expatriates operating the tugboats and barges had already evacuated most of their Vietnamese friends and family members. Now they were deciding whether to remain and risk their lives to evacuate Vietnamese strangers.

  Five of the expatriates who captained the tugs that pulled the ABT barges had already chosen to remain and continue working without pay so they could evacuate South Vietnamese. During their April 24 lunch Ryder told the American barge workers that although the MSC had ordered him to leave, Rear Admiral Hugh Benton, whom the navy had sent to the embassy to coordinate an evacuation with the Seventh Fleet, had asked him to remain so that the MSC’s freighters, tugs, and barges could participate in an evacuation. Ryder promised them that if they voted to stay, he would too, but they should realize that attempting to escape down the Saigon River on tugs and barges filled with thousands of anti-Communist refugees could be a dangerous enterprise. Their safest choice would be to obey the company and leave. All five voted to stay if he did. They said they needed him to coordinate with Admiral Benton and trusted him to tell the embassy to go to hell. He needed them because he had been in South Vietnam less than two years while they had years in the country and had good relations with the port commander and his staff.