Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  McNamara felt guilty about deceiving Nam and considered returning and telling him the truth. He asked his driver Phuoc to stop and spent several minutes by the side of the road wrestling with his conscience. He rolled down his window and felt a gathering wind and watched it rustle the palm fronds as thunderheads rose in the sky. At that moment, he wrote later, he had “realized how much I had grown to love Vietnam.” Although he had found Africa fascinating, he thought that there was “something special about Vietnam,” something that had enabled it and its people to suck him “further into its spell.” He decided to place his evacuation ahead of his friendship with Nam and told Phuoc to drive on. Three days later Nam shot himself.

  CHAPTER 17

  Eighteen Optimistic Minutes

  At 10:00 p.m. on April 27, members of the National Assembly who had not yet fled South Vietnam (about two-thirds of them) ignored their constitution’s succession procedures and voted unanimously for a resolution stating that “the President of the Republic of Vietnam transfer all the powers of the president to General Duong Van Minh in order to carry out the task of seeking ways and means to restore peace in South Vietnam.” Minh had told an American television newsman earlier that day that he preferred to assume the presidency the following day because the stars were out of alignment for an April 27 inauguration. President Huong, the antique politician who had succeeded Thieu, postponed Minh’s inauguration until late on the morning of April 28 because more time was required to arrange a respectful ceremony and, he argued, “we cannot hand over the responsibilities of power like a handkerchief.” The inauguration was postponed until late afternoon because Minh was having difficulty assembling a government. Many experienced politicians had already departed, and the others were reluctant to accept a post promising to lengthen their incarceration in a Communist prison.

  Minh had maintained a back-channel dialogue with Hanoi, his younger brother was a senior officer in the NVA, and he was the acknowledged head of a neutralist “Third Force” supposedly capable of uniting Communists and anti-Communists in a government of national healing and reconciliation. Because of these factors he believed, as did Graham Martin and other optimists, that once he assumed the presidency, the Communists would agree to a cease-fire and negotiations. His supporters praised him for accepting the presidency at such a perilous moment; his detractors thought his Third Force was nonsense and that he was politically inept and quite stupid.

  His most distinguishing features were his purported honesty and his size. He was large for a Vietnamese man, six feet tall and two hundred pounds, leading to his nickname, Big Minh. He had served as president for several months after participating in the 1963 coup against President Diem, but his current power base consisted of a dwindling number of Vietnamese and Americans who believed he could pull a coalition government out of his hat. His supporters touted him as a serene Buddhist who would have preferred to raise orchids and play tennis at the Cercle Sportif, an image somewhat at odds with the fact that he had strangled a guard while escaping from a Communist prison and had been one of the principal plotters in the 1963 coup toppling President Ngo Dinh Diem, reputedly giving the signal (two raised fingers) that resulted in Diem and his brother-in-law being murdered while in army custody.

  At 5:00 p.m. on April 28 two hundred members of South Vietnam’s remaining political and military elite arrived at Independence Palace wearing uniforms and tailored dark suits covered with medals and ribbons. Liveried footmen opened limousine doors, and members of Minh’s cabinet lingered outside, whispering and intriguing as if preparing to launch a long and prosperous chapter in their nation’s history. After they took their seats under the Great Hall’s chandeliers, Minh addressed them in a heavy, halting voice—“as if delivering a hopeless prayer,” one observer said.

  He said, “The order to our soldiers is to stay where they are, to defend their positions, to defend with all their strength the territory remaining to us.” He declared, “Our soldiers fight hard,” although discarded boots and uniforms already littered streets near the palace.

  They did not sound like the words of a leader seeking negotiations, but then he added, almost as an afterthought, “I accept the responsibility for seeking to arrive at a cease-fire, at negotiations, at peace on the basis of the Paris Accords. I am ready to accept any proposals in that direction.” Claps of thunder and a howling wind from the first storm of the monsoon season almost drowned him out as he proclaimed, “Citizens, brothers, patriots! In this difficult hour I can only beg of you one thing: Be courageous, do not abandon the country, do not run away.”

  Headlines in The Saigon Post the next morning (its last day of publication) proclaimed, “Ceasefire Likely” and “Saigon Residents Feel Sense of Relief, Hope.” But Radio Liberation called his inauguration a trap “set up by the lackeys of the United States” and “a scheme of the Americans” and attacked Minh for being “no longer a member of the Third Force but an American lackey.” New York Times reporter Malcolm Browne telephoned Polgar to report that a Communist spokesman had told him that Minh was an unacceptable negotiating partner. Polgar’s other intermediary, his fellow Hungarian Colonel Toth, stopped taking his calls.

  At 6:08 p.m., eighteen minutes after Minh had finished speaking, five captured American A-37 fighter-bombers attacked Tan Son Nhut. Lieutenant Trung, the turncoat who had bombed Thieu’s palace on April 8, had trained a group of VNAF defectors and North Vietnamese pilots and flew the lead warplane. His squadron attacked the South Vietnamese Air Force flight line, dropping 250-pound bombs, firing cannons, and narrowly missing Major General Smith’s office. The attack commenced minutes after Richard Armitage had landed at Tan Son Nhut following his narrow escape from the airfield at Bien Hoa. As Trung’s squadron approached at five hundred feet, von Marbod turned to Armitage and said, “I thought South Vietnamese pilots knocked off at 6:00 p.m.” When the raid ended, von Marbod said, “It’s over. We’re getting out tomorrow.”

  Tom Glenn had been walking to the men’s room down a corridor in the sprawling DAO headquarters. He passed some workmen on stepladders who were threading wires through the ceiling. One said they were connected to explosive charges and joked, “Last man out lights the fuse and runs like hell.” As a bomb exploded nearby, the urinal lurched from the wall toward Glenn. He staggered outside as Lieutenant Trung’s planes were diving for a second attack.

  Twenty-eight hundred people were inside the DAO awaiting evacuation. A bomb fell on open ground near the Evacuation Processing Center, rattling the gymnasium and sending overhead fluorescent lights crashing to the floor. One slammed into Joe McBride’s shoulder. He wrapped the consular stamp around his wrist with duct tape and jumped up from his desk. Holding the stamp high in the air, he shouted, “I’m still working! Look, the stamp’s still here!”

  Ken Moorefield grabbed his revolver and dashed from his side office into the gym. Another explosion shook the room and McBride shouted, “Let’s get out of here.” They hustled everyone into a sturdier building across the street and told them to lie down in the hallways. Moorefield doubled back to the processing center for his consular stamp. While he was outside, two planes dove toward him. He remembered calling in air strikes on Communist positions and thought, “Well, now I know how scared and utterly defenseless the Vietcong must have felt.”

  Bill Bell had been erecting a sign over the entrance to the combined mess identifying it as the new headquarters for the U.S. delegation to the Joint Military Team. The delegation’s commander, Colonel Jack Madison, assumed they would be staying after a Communist victory and wanted to consolidate their offices and living quarters in the mess hall. Bell watched as the A-37s attacked the VNAF flight line, releasing their bombs and circling for a second attack. One peeled off and seemed to be tracking him. He moved right and it did the same; he moved left and it did too. It finally released a bomb that fell into a patch of open ground, throwing up a shower of rocks and dirt. He had witnessed nume
rous sorties against Communist positions, but this was his first time as a target. Nothing had prepared him for the terror of having a plane dive at him, guns blazing, and he wondered, “How in the world did they put up with this during all the years when we had air superiority?”

  When Ross Meador left the Friends of the Children of Vietnam orphanage that morning, babies in cardboard boxes had been wailing and toddlers stumbling down hallways. After helping to put them on an evacuation flight, he returned to a building that was suddenly so empty and quiet it gave him the willies. As the A-37s hit Tan Son Nhut, a group of Vietnamese nuns had been loading the villa’s incubators and refrigerators into their truck. They sped away, leaving Meador alone with the FCVN’s senior Vietnamese nurse. The power failed after sunset. Fearing that the Communists were about to seize the airport, he and the nurse spent the night huddled together and made love.

  Earlier that day, Jim Devine, the embassy’s political-military officer, had called Walter Martindale to join the embassy’s “skeleton team” after Saigon fell. “You have to tell us now if you’re willing to stay,” Devine said. “Yes or no.” Martindale said yes. He had already evacuated his children and most of his friends and believed he could help others escape. He was at Tan Son Nhut when the A-37s attacked. He hurried back to his apartment building and strode through the hallways, shouting to the Vietnamese whom he had encouraged to move into the empty apartments, “Don’t worry! Don’t worry! I’ll get you out….I’ll get you out!”

  After Jacobson refused to give Marius Burke a letter guaranteeing visas for Air America’s Vietnamese employees and their families, Burke continued searching for ways to evacuate them. He saw a solution when retired Foreign Service officer Jim Collins returned to Saigon on a mission to rescue orphans being housed at the military academy in Vung Tau. Rear Admiral Benton had promised Collins a barge so he could transfer the children to an MSC freighter. Burke agreed to fly Collins to Vung Tau on condition that he evacuate some of the Air America Vietnamese personnel and their families on his barge. When the A-37s hit Tan Son Nhut, Burke had just dropped Collins at Vung Tau and was heading back to Saigon. He landed on one of the U.S. Navy ships and decided to return to Vung Tau in the morning.

  The ARVN troops guarding Independence Palace fired off rounds at the departing A-37s. Some hit the U.S. embassy. Diplomats and CIA agents grabbed weapons and dove to the floor. Someone screamed, “They’re in the halls! They’re in the halls!” and marines in flak jackets dashed up stairways.

  Don Hays was in the embassy recreation center, surrounded by anxious Vietnamese. The evacuees he had been managing at the DAO evacuation center had become so dehydrated and famished while waiting to board planes that he had driven to the embassy and persuaded the manager of the recreation center’s restaurant to have the cooks make five hundred sandwiches. When the attack commenced, he led the Vietnamese in the recreation center into the restaurant. He put the children in a windowless bathroom and told the adults to turn over the tables and take cover. After the raid ended, two of his supervisors, Hank Boudreau and Al Jazynka, happened to be walking past as he was loading his sandwiches and jugs of juice and water into a station wagon. Jazynka asked, “Why the hell do you have to bring them all that?”

  “Because they’re dehydrated and I’m afraid they’re going to become sick and we don’t have any doctors or running water there,” Hays replied.

  “Stop being so serious, Don,” he said. “Come with us, we’re going to a cocktail party.”

  Hays slugged him. After Jazynka struggled to his feet, Hays turned to Boudreau and asked, “Why didn’t you stop me from doing that?”

  “Because I thought you wouldn’t do it.”

  Hays assumed it was the end of his career, but neither man reported him.

  * * *

  —

  Dr. Lem Hoang Truong’s position as acting head of the Ministry of Administrative Reform and Civil Service made her the government’s highest-ranking female member. Like many Vietnamese her age, she was acquainted with political violence and realized what might happen to her following a Communist victory. During World War II she had seen Japanese soldiers cut off the hands of militants; after the war French police had shot and killed her father. Yet unlike other civil servants of her rank, she had not hired a boat or bought plane tickets. Because she was South Vietnam’s top civil service reformer, she believed she had to lead by example.

  Like many families, hers was split over whether to become exiles. Her mother was desperate to leave, but her husband leaned toward staying. Like her, he was a devout Catholic, and because the church hierarchy had decided to remain after a Communist victory, he believed that he should stay. The couple had been living in different homes because her government job provided her with a house near Independence Palace where she lived with her mother, two young daughters, and a four-month-old baby girl. Her thirteen- and fifteen-year-old boys lived with her husband in the family home.

  One of her American friends, Dr. John Evans, had formerly served as a technical adviser to her ministry. He had returned to assist in the evacuation and had come to her office several hours before the raid on Tan Son Nhut to inform her that Ambassador Martin had just received an urgent telex from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger directing the embassy to evacuate her and her family and tell her that a position awaited her on the faculty of the Federal Executive Institute in Virginia, where she had previously studied. Evans was emaciated, fidgety, and under great stress. She asked him to inquire if the embassy would also evacuate her senior staff. Many were former military officers whom the Communists were certain to treat harshly. He promised to speak with Jacobson and call her the next morning. Moments after she returned home from her office, Tan Son Nhut came under attack. She and her daughters and mother spent a sleepless night in their shelter.

  All across Saigon families like hers huddled behind shuttered doors and windows, debating whether to leave or stay, trying to calculate how tainted they might be in the Communists’ eyes, how far down the purges might reach, and who among their American friends and contacts might help them. They wondered if everyone in the family should leave, if some should stay, if some of the elderly should be left on their own, and if they should evacuate their younger children with friends or relatives or entrust them to strangers. Which was worse, they wondered, never to see your children again or to have them indoctrinated and raised by the Communists?

  * * *

  —

  An hour after the attack ended, Martin convened a meeting of his senior staff in the sixth-floor communications room. He spoke by radio to Major General Smith at Tan Son Nhut, using a microphone and loudspeaker so that Polgar, Lehmann, and the others could listen. Smith reported light damage to the runways and said the transports could resume landing.

  Polgar, who believed that the attack had been Hanoi’s response to Minh’s inauguration, said, “You can bet that some cadre in the palace got a copy of his speech in advance.” (In fact, Hanoi had started planning the attack on April 19, and its timing, coming just minutes after Minh’s inauguration, had been coincidental.) Martin disagreed. The Communists claimed to favor a political solution, he said, and were “not the kind of people to change their minds.” He telephoned Kissinger and predicted that despite the bombing he expected the Communists to answer Minh’s speech with a “political initiative.”

  Minutes later he cabled Kissinger and complained that the DAO was jumping to the conclusion that the A-37s were captured VNAF planes. Instead, he said that “when all the evidence is in,” he believed it would be revealed that they were piloted by disaffected South Vietnamese pilots showing “bitter resentment” at the way the war had been conducted. He told Kissinger that “we do not expect any interference” with the C-130s that were scheduled to commence their evening runs to the Philippines and that during the next twenty-four hours he hoped to evacuate “at least 10,000 or more of our Vietnamese employees
and high risk Vietnamese.”

  He went on to describe what he thought would happen in the days and weeks ahead. He forecast that Minh would recognize the PRG as a legitimate government leading to three Vietnams—North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and areas in the South controlled by the PRG—and that a negotiated cease-fire and the formation of a national council of reconciliation would follow. He predicted that the new coalition government would have a “60-40 lineup,” with the 40 percent or less being Communist because, he insisted, the Communists “are simply not in that much of a hurry.” After “a year or more” they might “begin to tighten the screws on the administration of Saigon.” Nevertheless, he thought that “they will wish to show a gentle face for a while.” He argued that the new 60-40 administration would be counting on the United States “to help them buy a little more time” and that closing the embassy and making “an immediate or precipitate” departure would “pull out the rug” from under this coalition government. He declared that given that “we still have a functioning Republic of Vietnam, and will for quite a while,” there was no U.S. policy interest “in either leaving in pique or trying to create conditions that would force our departure.” Instead, the embassy should remain open, and the United States should provide “a modicum of relief and rehabilitation” to the people of South Vietnam. He reported that 825 Americans assigned to the U.S. mission remained in Saigon, adding, “We cannot do with any less.” He concluded by telling Kissinger that he could take either his advice or that of those on the Washington Special Actions Group, “who have not, it seems to me, crystal balls of the first quality.” As an exercise in wishful thinking, Martin’s April 28 cable may be unequaled in State Department history. Not only would nothing that he predicted happen, but during the next forty-eight hours the exact opposite would occur.