Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  At 7:30 a.m., Martin received a note from President Minh requesting that all DAO personnel leave South Vietnam within the next twenty-four hours “in order that the question of peace for Viet Nam can be settled early.” Martin promised to comply and cabled Kissinger, “In view of the above, I repeat my request to permit me and about 20 of my staff to remain behind, at least for a day or two, to at least give some dignity to our departure.”

  The National Security Council convened in the White House Situation Room at 7:32 a.m. Saigon time. Ford decided that this would be the last day for evacuating Vietnamese and that all the remaining Americans should depart except for a small group at the embassy. Kissinger recommended leaving a skeleton staff of 150, saying it would signal that the United States had not abandoned Minh and might lessen the chances of his turning on the United States. He continued pushing for the evacuation of Vietnamese and suggested filtering Americans out with them because, he said, “if the Americans get out on the first aircraft the situation will be out of control. We have to space them out. The people who should stay to the end are the team to handle the evacuation of Vietnamese. The others should go.”

  Kissinger cabled Martin that Ford had decided that if Tan Son Nhut remained open for fixed-wing planes, he should evacuate high-risk Vietnamese, all the DAO Americans, and all but the “bare minimum” from the embassy. He continued, “While you should not say so, this will be the last repeat last day of fixed-wing evacuation from Tan Son Nhut.” He added that should Tan Son Nhut become too hazardous for fixed-wing planes, “You are immediately to resort to helicopter evacuation of all repeat all Americans, both from the DAO compound and from the embassy….Suppressive fire will be used as necessary in the event of helicopter evacuation.”

  Kissinger’s cable reinforced Martin’s determination to continue the fixed-wing evacuation. He met in his office at 8:00 a.m. with Polgar, Jacobson, Alan Carter, Joe Bennett, and his military attachés. Smith called Jacobson to report that ordnance, vehicles, wing tanks, and armed soldiers were blocking the runways and that he had ordered the Special Planning Group buses and Air America helicopters to begin collecting Americans, third-country nationals, and Vietnamese and bring them to the DAO for a helicopter evacuation.

  After Jacobson repeated Smith’s report to the room, Polgar interjected that a CIA agent at Tan Son Nhut had just notified him that the runways were a mess.

  “How do you know for sure?” Martin demanded. After all, this was only one man’s opinion.

  Polgar replied that if Martin would not believe an eyewitness report, perhaps he should see for himself.

  “I can tell you this,” Martin said, “before I make any decision I’m going out to Tan Son Nhut to have a look. I refuse to run away from this thing.”

  Before leaving, Martin received another call from Kissinger. After hanging up, he announced to the room that Ford wanted to continue the fixed-wing evacuation and reduce the embassy to 150 people—“a small hard core.”

  To comply with Ford’s directive, many of the Americans who had already reported for duty would spend the next several hours inside the embassy, poring over staff rosters and debating who among the U.S. mission’s remaining 750 Americans should be included in this “hard core.”

  Alan Carter had told a hundred of his employees and their families to assemble for evacuation at the USIA office. A hundred and fifty Vietnamese with CIA connections had gathered at the Duc Hotel. Similar groups awaited evacuation in other U.S.-owned or U.S.-leased buildings across Saigon. Their American friends and bosses had steered them to these staging areas in the belief that buses would take them to Tan Son Nhut or the docks. But because of the attack on Tan Son Nhut and the increasingly chaotic streets, and because fewer trained escorts and drivers than anticipated had reported to the embassy and the DAO to drive the Special Planning Group’s buses—because they either could not reach the DAO, were obeying the government’s sudden twenty-four-hour curfew, or had already been evacuated—there were fewer buses than anticipated. Six never left the embassy motor pool, and the SPG’s bus routes had to be reduced from twenty-eight to fourteen. Meanwhile, some of the people who should have been directing buses to the embassy safe houses, finding drivers for the idle buses, or themselves driving evacuees to the docks or walking them to the embassy were themselves inside the embassy. By the time Ford ordered a total evacuation of Americans, the crowd surrounding the embassy wall had become much larger and more unruly, and Saigon’s streets more dangerous, making it more difficult for Americans to leave the embassy and assist their Vietnamese evacuees, although some did. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese gathered in the safe houses and staging areas continued to believe that the promised buses would arrive, and were reluctant to venture into the streets and get themselves to Tan Son Nhut or the river docks without an American escort. It was a textbook demonstration of the truth of Prussian field marshal von Moltke’s maxim that “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”

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  —

  Jacobson wanted Martin to helicopter to Tan Son Nhut, but the Air America controller did not have a spare aircraft. Two helicopters were in Can Tho, VNAF pilots had hijacked four more, and many pilots had not yet arrived on base.

  When Martin heard this, he said, “Goddamnit, I’ll drive. That way I can get the feel of the atmosphere in town.”

  Jacobson warned him that Vietcong units had been sighted near the airport and urged him to wait for a helicopter.

  “Well, we all make mistakes, don’t we, Jake?” he said. “Someone call my car. I’m going.”

  He drove to Tan Son Nhut in his armor-plated Chevrolet sedan. His marine escorts retracted its fender flag stanchions to avoid announcing his presence. An advance jeep of two marines probed the streets and roadblocks, radioing back instructions in code. More sedans filled with marines, fingers on triggers, preceded and followed him.

  The South Vietnamese police and MPs manning the Tan Son Nhut gate refused to admit Martin. He sat alone in the backseat for twenty minutes while authorities were contacted and pressure applied. As columns of black smoke spiraled into the air from damaged VNAF planes, he told himself that no matter what happened, he was sure to receive “sledgehammer blows from the idiot leftist press” and “the perfumed ice pick to the kidneys from State Department enemies.”

  Promises were made and threats delivered, and he was finally admitted to Tan Son Nhut. Major General Smith had assembled a group of American and Vietnamese officers in his operations bunker. They told Martin that a fixed-wing evacuation would be madness under present conditions. Martin turned to Colonel Le Van Long, the head of intelligence for the ARVN Joint General Staff, and told him to call his office and demand that his troops restore order. Long said that no one was answering the phones and that even his switchboard operators had fled.

  Smith broke in and said, “Either we go with Option Four [the helicopter evacuation] or we’re going to look pretty stupid, or pretty dead.”

  Martin asked to confer with him privately. Once alone in Smith’s office, he said that he was determined to evacuate ten thousand Vietnamese that day and that only the C-130s could accomplish this. He called the White House on Smith’s scrambler phone and asked Scowcroft to confirm to Smith that President Ford had agreed that the fixed-wing airlift should continue. Scowcroft replied that Ford wanted the planes to continue flying “as long as feasible.”

  As he and Smith were walking back to the operations room, he repeated his conversation with Scowcroft. When Smith protested that the runways were blocked, he said, “If we can’t, okay, but let’s try.” Then, speaking with more passion and force than Smith had ever witnessed from him, and even though he was speaking in a whisper, he said, “Everybody—the Pentagon, Schlesinger, the Joint Chiefs, and CINCPAC—is going to ask us to get the Americans out fast and leave the Vietnamese. We have thousands of high-risk Vietnamese here; we have to pull out as many as pos
sible.” He repeated himself several times, warning that Schlesinger, CINCPAC, and the Joint Chiefs were going to exert enormous pressure on them all day—pressure they must resist. Leaving the high-risk Vietnamese behind would be “unconscionable,” he said, one more ghastly mistake capping the thousands of others that the United States had made in Vietnam.

  Erich von Marbod had been sitting at a desk in the corner of the operations room. After walking past without acknowledging him, Martin suddenly turned, smiled, and putting an arm around his shoulder asked if they might have a word outside. They stood talking next to Smith’s bunker for several minutes. As a shell slammed into the Air America hangar, sending fireballs shooting into the sky, Martin said, “You have friends at Seventh Air Force headquarters. Can you ask them to send for a plane to pick up Dottie?”

  “Goddamn it, Graham! Don’t you realize what’s happening?” von Marbod asked. “Look at the runway. We’re catching a ration of shit.” The time when a plane could land and pick up Martin’s wife had obviously passed.

  “I’ve just told the president we’ll go fixed wing,” Martin replied coldly. As he spoke, more shells hit the VNAF flight line.

  Smith, Martin, and the White House had agreed that even if Martin and his “hard core” of diplomats departed, the U.S. delegation to the Joint Military Team should move to the embassy and continue to pursue MIA issues and mediate negotiations between General Minh and the Communists. Colonel Madison thought that staying in Saigon under the auspices of a peace agreement that the Communists had blatantly violated was lunacy. When Smith asked him to move his men to the embassy, he imagined himself standing alone at the gate when the Communist tanks arrived, holding up his Paris Peace Accords documents and demanding that they honor his “privileges and immunities.”

  The American JMT delegation had shrunk to Madison, Colonel Summers, Captain Herrington, Bill Bell, and two enlisted men, Ernest Pace and Bill Herron. After a breakfast of bacon and eggs and champagne liberated from the DAO snack bar, they loaded a Land Rover, sedan, and jeep with typewriters, medical supplies, and rations, put on helmets and slipped on their Four-Part Joint Military Team armbands—bright orange with a “4” in the middle—and attached flags carrying that same symbol to their vehicles. Herrington doubted that the flags and armbands would protect them. He feared disgruntled ARVN troops more than Hanoi’s soldiers and was secretly rooting for the Communists to take Saigon quickly and impose some order.

  Sporadic Communist artillery shells and rockets continued hitting the VNAF flight line as the JMT’s three-vehicle convoy drove through the main gate and past the sign proclaiming, “The noble sacrifices of allied soldiers will never be forgotten.” The day was overcast and windless, with a low, leaden sky that trapped the heat and humidity. Herrington swerved into a ditch to avoid some looters who were dismembering a stalled car. Past the airport, the traffic thinned and police remained on duty at some intersections. Uniforms, helmets, and boots abandoned by deserters littered sidewalks. Loudspeakers broadcast Minh’s acceptance speech and the national anthem on a continuous loop.

  Martin returned to the embassy around 10:00 a.m. He called Smith to report having just received a cable from Scowcroft confirming that the C-130s should resume landing, then called Smith back minutes later to remind him that he wanted large numbers of Vietnamese included in the evacuation.

  Smith called Admiral Gayler in Honolulu and described the conditions at Tan Son Nhut. “The helicopters should begin now,” he said. “Period. Or I don’t know what, exclamation point!”

  Gayler said that he would recommend that the Joint Chiefs activate Option IV, or “Frequent Wind,” the helicopter evacuation from Saigon. Smith reported this to Martin, giving him a chance to save face by making the same recommendation to Kissinger.

  “It’s not their decision,” Martin snapped, meaning that it was his.

  Smith replied that landing planes at Tan Son Nhut had become impossible.

  “Well, you’re probably right—for the wrong reasons,” Martin said, wanting to have the last word. “We could get them in but we couldn’t control the boarding.”

  Martin called Kissinger at 10:48 a.m. and requested Option IV, making the decision his own.

  Kissinger asked that he complete the evacuation within daylight hours.

  When Martin said this might not be possible, Kissinger resorted to flattery, saying, “Graham, you did your best and it was excellent.”

  Martin shot back, “I don’t like much A for effort.” He followed up with a cable saying, “I repeat my request to permit me and about twenty of my staff to remain behind, at least for a day or two to at least give some dignity to our departure and to facilitate an orderly disposition of our extensive properties here.”

  Ford had become increasingly concerned about the safety of U.S. citizens. He vetoed the idea, and Kissinger called Martin back and said, “The President insists on total evacuation.”

  Martin argued that he should remain in Saigon with a small team to help Minh and keep the evacuation going.

  “Now, Graham,” Kissinger said, “we want all our heroes at home.”

  During the National Security Council meeting that morning, Ford had asked Joint Chiefs chairman Brown, “Are you ready to go to a helicopter lift?” Brown had said, “Yes, if you or Ambassador Martin say so, we can have them there within the hour.” Instead, more than three hours would elapse between when Martin agreed to go to Option IV and when two helicopters landed at Tan Son Nhut bringing Lieutenant General Richard Carey, commander of the Ninth Marine Amphibious Brigade (MAB), and Colonel Al Gray, who was commanding the MAB’s five-hundred-man ground security force. And it would not be until an hour later, at 3:12 p.m., that Gray’s troops began arriving in the larger CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters and the first groups of seventy evacuees began boarding these helicopters. After learning about the delay, Kissinger said, “We’ve screwed up everything else in this war—why not that?” An investigation revealed that the delay had occurred because the marines and their helicopters were positioned on different vessels and had to be “cross-decked”—brought together on the same ship—and because of a misunderstanding between the navy and the air force over whether the L in “L-Hour” meant when the helicopters were launched or landed in Saigon.

  The JMT was unpacking its equipment in the embassy’s fifth-floor military affairs office when Wolfgang Lehmann burst in and said, “New orders from Washington. We’re all leaving.” He suggested that because they were already at the embassy and many of them spoke Vietnamese, they could help manage the evacuation.

  Herrington looked out a window to see streamers of shredded documents falling like ticker tape and black smoke spiraling into the air as diplomats destroyed their files. In the recreation area over a thousand evacuees sat on suitcases and cardboard boxes filled with photographs, memorabilia, diplomas, jewelry, and cash—the kinds of valuables people grab when homes burst into flames. A gate connected the recreation area, with its pool and restaurant, to the parking lot and chancery. Herrington could see that the larger helicopters would have to land in the parking lot and that the JMT would need to control the people in the recreation center, breaking them into helicopter loads and feeding them into the parking lot through the gate or over the low roof of the embassy fire station. He turned to Lehmann and said, “The only way we’re going to get control of the crowd is to promise that everyone inside the compound will be evacuated.”

  Lehmann checked with Martin and reported back that he had promised that everyone inside the embassy compound would be flown to the fleet.

  Herrington, Bell, Madison, and Summers went downstairs and circulated through the crowd in the recreation center. The evacuees were nervous and fearful. Herrington thought it would not take much to start a riot. He and the others confiscated weapons and large suitcases and threw them into the swimming pool. They removed a large antenna that risked snagging one o
f the helicopters. They promised the twenty embassy firemen that they would put their families on the first helicopters if the firemen agreed to leave on the last ones so they could extinguish any fires if one of them crashed. They barged in on a group of American contractors who had pulled meat from the lockers in the recreation area restaurant and were grilling it over burners while swilling liquor stolen from the bar. They locked up the liquor and shooed the contractors outside. They walked through the crowd repeating the same message: hand over your weapons, calm down so we can organize you into helicopter loads, everyone will get out.

  Summers climbed onto the roof of the soft drink stall and shouted through a bullhorn, “Every one of you folks is going to get out of here. Let me repeat that: all you people here with us today are going to be flown to safety and freedom. Not one of you will be left behind. I will only go after the last of you has left. And the United States ambassador has assured me he will leave right at the end, after you and me. On that we give you our solemn word.” He climbed down and walked through the crowd saying, “Don’t you worry,” and “Sure, you’ll get a job in the States.”

  Herrington had written to his parents in April that he was “doubtful about my ability to walk out with my personal honor” and was “extremely worried” that he was “going to be made to abandon our people, our employees, their families, my friends,” and be told, “Save the Americans and the hell with everyone else.” Now, relying on Martin’s promise, he shouted through a megaphone in Vietnamese that within twenty-four hours everyone who could hear him would be safely aboard U.S. Navy ships. “There is plenty of time! Don’t worry about it! No one will be left behind!” he yelled. “We will remain with you! We will be the last to leave!”