Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  One American who found the events of those days especially harrowing was Jim Livingston, winner of a Medal of Honor at Daido seven years before, and now operations officer of the Marine amphibious brigade aboard the command ship Blue Ridge offshore. He went briefly ashore at Danang and ‘felt sick’ at what he saw. A colonel from the South Vietnamese Black Cat Division who attempted to board the warship off Camranh Bay was repulsed by Livingston, disgusted at his abandonment of his men: ‘I’ll go back with you and fight, you sonofabitch!’ said the Marine, a histrionic offer the Vietnamese rejected. Others adopted a different course: the first of many suicides took place. At Qui Nhon the 42nd Regiment’s CO waved farewell to his men boarding vessels, then disappeared into a house where he shot himself.

  Giap initially hoped that the leading Northern formations might capture Saigon ‘on the run’, sustaining the momentum of the previous weeks, without waiting for the ‘Coastal Column’ to arrive from the north. He ordered Gen. Tra’s troops to isolate the capital from the Mekong delta, but their attacks met stronger resistance than the NVA had experienced in the Central Highlands. There were violent exchanges with South Vietnamese riverine gunboats; a mid-April attack on Can Tho was repulsed; Long An RF and PF militia held off the Northern 5th Division for four days.

  The most significant battle the communists were obliged to fight took place thirty-seven miles north-east of Saigon. The town of Xuan Loc, capital of Long Khanh province, occupied a key road junction on Route 1, surrounded by rubber and banana plantations. The action that began there on 9 April enabled the army of South Vietnam, for the last time in its history, to display courage and determination in the face of odds, though it could not deflect the irresistible course of events.

  The 18th Division’s commander Brig. Le Minh Dao, his features seldom visible save beneath enormous and somewhat sinister sunglasses, had a playboy reputation more conspicuous than his military one – he was celebrated as a singalong guitarist. He and his officers nonetheless prepared skilfully to meet the looming communist assault. They removed most soldiers’ families to Long Binh, and pre-registered guns on the approach routes the communists had used in their Tet 1968 attacks, correctly anticipating that they would come the same ways again. Dao sent troops to occupy high ground the enemy might use for artillery observation, emplaced his own thirty-six guns in bunkers, stockpiled ammunition, monitored NVA wireless channels.

  Almost the first shell of the bombardment that began at 0540 on 9 April wrecked Dao’s own quarters near the Catholic church. In the days that followed, communist artillery would reduce much of Xuan Loc to rubble without doing much harm to the defenders, dug in on the outskirts. At 0640 two red flares signalled the advance of armour and infantry. On the eastern flank, the invaders’ 7th Division was quickly checked by wire, mines and VNAF air strikes. The 341st, attacking from the north-east, penetrated the town, but Southern fire drove back its green teenage infantry. The 6th Division achieved the only important communist success, advancing from the south to cut Route 1 between Xuan Loc and Saigon. Thereafter, the town was isolated.

  During the next two days, Dao’s men staged some successful counter-attacks, and repulsed renewed enemy assaults. In the last mass helicopter operation of the war, a hundred Hueys lifted an Airborne brigade to reinforce the garrison. Communist shelling made wretched the lives of the civilian inhabitants, but Hanoi’s commanders understood that they had made a succession of mistakes. First, Gen. Tra had failed to fulfil orders to interdict take-offs from Bien Hoa, to deny Xuan Loc air support; only on 15 April did Northern shell and rocket fire begin to accomplish this. Meanwhile, after weeks of fighting, the attacking 7th Division was weary. The South Vietnamese seem to have done almost everything right, and the communists were punished for their hubris in rushing a frontal assault on strongly-fortified positions. They also suffered considerably from the effects of 15,000lb BLU-82 ‘daisy-cutter’ bombs, used here by the VNAF for the first time, along with a deadly CBU-55 air-denying cluster bomb.

  Xuan Loc lingered as a bastion amid the crumbling front. Brig. Dao’s stand caused Hanoi to postpone its assault on Saigon, originally planned for 15 April, and wait for the rest of its army to catch up. Western media were flown into Xuan Loc to applaud the defence, though the effect was marred by a rush of townspeople, desperate to flee, mobbing the helicopters that lifted reporters out. The weary defenders lapsed into passivity, and could do nothing to check the Northern build-up in their rear, west of the town. On 20 April, Xuan Loc was evacuated: the garrison withdrew on foot southwards through rubber plantations, with the 1st Airborne Brigade acting as rearguard. Dao, ‘wearing the haggard face of a man who had not slept much’, in the words of a soldier, honourably marched out among them, rather than escape by Huey. Xuan Loc was the final multi-formation clash of the war. Hanoi has never published credible figures for its own casualties, but three or four thousand seems a fair guess. It was foolish for the NVA to have fought there at all: its commanders could easily have masked the town, and continued their advance leaving Dao and his men to stew. Surviving South Vietnamese soldiers anyway cherish Xuan Loc as a shining memory, in the midst of a grand narrative of humiliation.

  Even as that battle was being fought, there were clashes at Phan Rang, a coastal city on Route 1 south of Camranh Bay and more than two hundred miles north-east of Saigon, where Southern troops for a few days clung to the airbase. On 3 April US Navy ships offshore began to provide humanitarian assistance to refugees, but their commanders rejected pleas for gunfire support. VNAF aircraft strafed the advancing communists, and in a dramatic helicopter operation recovered eight hundred survivors of the Airborne brigade which had defended the M’Drak pass: they were flown to reinforce the defenders of Saigon.

  On 16 April, lead elements of the Northern Coastal Column took over the assault on Phan Rang. The port and city fell quickly, though the airbase held out a little longer. Gen. An’s gunners found themselves exchanging fire with South Vietnamese warships. The plethora of captured transport in communist ownership prompted mishaps, often caused by Vietcong who for decades had taken for granted that anyone occupying a vehicle must be a foe. The commander of a Northern air defence division was fatally wounded by a B-40 rocket that hit his truck; communist tanks came under friendly fire. Gen. An was thrilled with a brand-new jeep he appropriated from an abandoned South Vietnamese corps headquarters, but on the night of 16 April became less so when he was shot up by guerrillas, being fortunate to escape on flattened tyres.

  Among the prisoners taken in the coastal fighting were corps commander Lt. Gen. Nguyen Vinh Nghi and James Lewis of the CIA, both of whom were flown to Hanoi. A Northern propaganda officer demanded of the captured general: ‘How should we phrase appeals to puppet soldiers, to lay down their arms?’ Nghi responded despairingly: ‘What’s the need for appeals? The army has already fallen apart.’ South Vietnamese in Washington sought to exploit the evidence of Xuan Loc to convince American legislators that their army still had the will to fight, if the US would provide support. Senators remained immovable. An overpowering sense of doom overhung South Vietnam, intensified by the collapse of neighbouring Cambodia, from which President Lon Nol had fled on 1 April. The victorious Khmer Rouge, a creation of the North Vietnamese albeit later disowned by them, entered Phnom Penh on the 17th, and soon afterwards commenced their genocide against Cambodia’s people.

  2 ‘AH, MY COUNTRY, MY POOR COUNTRY’

  Around the country through much of April, clashes of arms and stampedes of terrified people persisted, beyond the view of the world’s media and thus little known to posterity. Thousands of cadres were dispatched from North Vietnam to assume control of what were described – pejoratively so, Southerners came to believe – as ‘liberated territories’. On 2 April Le Duc Tho accompanied Gen. Dung – now tasked to command the assault on Saigon – to set up their headquarters beside COSVN’s base at Loc Ninh. Dung’s insistence on completing the destruction of II Corps before redirecting his forces south fro
m the Central Highlands proved well-judged. The coastal panics and troop collapses confirmed to the world, and especially to the American and South Vietnamese peoples, the terminal predicament of the Saigon regime and its armed forces. What is remarkable is not that many ARVN formations crumbled, but that some mounted last-ditch stands in the face of an irresistible enemy tide.

  In the capital a strange unreality persisted. However powerful the logic of looming communist triumph, many people, both Vietnamese and American, found it impossible to acknowledge that everything familiar in their lives, for good and ill, was about to be swept away. Foremost among the deniers was Graham Martin. In February a visiting congressional delegation was accompanied by Frank Scotton, who was furious to discover that Frank Snepp – the man most likely to tell the truth about how bad things were – had been barred from the briefing team by the ambassador. Scotton ensured that the CIA analyst spoke privately with the congressional group.

  On 8 April the CIA forwarded to Washington a cable detailing information from the tried and trusted ‘Tay Ninh source’ about Hanoi’s decision to dash for all-embracing victory: ‘regardless of what happens … There will be no question of negotiations or a tripartite government. Communist forces will strike at Saigon.’ Yet until the last, with almost deranged obstinacy ambassador Martin defied his advisers to insist that some deal would be cut with Hanoi to preserve the rump of South Vietnam. The most important consequence was that he resisted demands for an evacuation of tens of thousands of the Vietnamese most vulnerable to communist vengeance, an operation which thus began too little and too late. The ambassador’s attitude, like his earlier bullish dispatches to Washington, enraged staffers desperately concerned for South Vietnamese friends and colleagues. Only in the week of 21 April did USAF transport aircraft belatedly commence sorties out of Tan Son Nhut, 304 in all, which evacuated almost forty-three thousand Americans and Vietnamese.

  During Saigon’s last weeks as Thieu’s capital, many Vietnamese who lacked magic-carpet connections struggled to secure passages out of the country, despite the emotional cost that exile imposed upon people wedded to the culture of family, of belonging. Meanwhile members of the French community, their ambassador prominent among them, taunted the unhappy Americans with a cruelty rooted in confidence – later pleasingly shown to be unfounded – that a special relationship with Hanoi would secure France’s position in a communist Vietnam.

  The value of the piaster collapsed, so that foreigners with dollars found themselves partying almost free: an AA pilot calculated that the real price of the most beautiful bar girl in Saigon was sixty-six cents for a short time, $1.11 for the night. Some Bacchic orgies, their frenzy rooted in the fear gripping participants, took place in bars and hotels. Americans vainly urged the Thieu government to avow to its people at least some portion of reality. Instead, amid the vacuities and deceits of official spokesmen, rumour held sway and there were many sleepwalkers: the South Vietnamese command and staff school at Long Binh continued its courses until 28 April. Senior officer students spent hours debating battlefield scenarios, and agreed that the Americans would scarcely abandon the nation for which they had sacrificed fifty-eight thousand dead.

  While many prominent Vietnamese were selling everything to raise cash to escape, some came home. Nguyen Thi Chinh, the 1954 teenage fugitive from Hanoi who had since become the South’s biggest TV and screen star, was shooting a movie in Singapore, but felt that she must return to Saigon: ‘It was wrong for my reason, but right for my heart.’ On 1 April Maj. Nguyen Cong Luan, a twenty-year Southern veteran who had just completed a Fort Benning course, boarded a plane at San Francisco with three comrades. At Tan Son Nhut, a girl checking the arrivals manifest asked them in bewilderment, ‘Why did you come back? Dalat fell last night.’

  Though Australians had played a notable role in South Vietnam’s defence, now their country’s Labor government ordered that RAAF aircraft evacuating their residual personnel should not carry refugees. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam insisted on acceptance of Hanoi’s public assurances that South Vietnamese had nothing to fear from the incoming communist government. Of 3,667 people who sought Australian visas in those days, only 342 applications were successful, and just seventy-six eventually travelled: the embassy’s Vietnamese staff were abandoned. Meanwhile flights were organised by crassly sentimental foreign philanthropists to evacuate Saigon orphanages. No sane person could suppose that the victorious communists would murder pretty children. Instead, pot-bellied ARVN officers, unlovely bureaucrats and policemen faced mortal peril; they, however, were bereft of foreign friends.

  Lt. Nghien Khiem said: ‘We understood that we were losing, but we couldn’t think what to do. We didn’t even dare talk much to each other, in case we started a panic. We lied to our men, to reassure them.’ As the son of a prosperous businessman, Khiem had relations in Europe who kept telephoning home, urging insistently, ‘Get out, get out!’ He said: ‘They knew more than we did. But how to escape?’ Ngo Thi Bong, a matriarch who had survived Hue’s horrors during Tet 1968, wrote from Saigon to her English friend Gavin Young: ‘Everything is lost now. My very dear, my only son, Minh, was in Danang … Can he still be alive? Or is he dead already? It is so, so sad, unimaginable for a poor mother. I cannot express my feelings because we live from minute to minute … I have no more tears left to weep for my little Minh and at the same time for my grandchildren. Ah, my country, my poor country.’

  Almost three million American veterans watched with a special fascination the drama unfolding across the Pacific. Former US Marine captain Hays Parks suggested sadly: ‘If the South Vietnamese had known what the future was, they would have fought harder.’ Lt. Gen. Bruce Palmer fumed: ‘The hard truth lingers on, that when South Vietnam in its dying hours turned to us in despair, the US looked the other way … Our South Vietnamese friends can never forget the tragic nightmare of those last scenes.’ Army nurse Phyllis Breen agreed: ‘I just felt so bad for all the Vietnamese who had trusted us.’

  British journalist Richard West, who knew Indochina intimately and had once been passionately anti-American, now wrote remorsefully from Saigon: ‘It is not true to portray South Vietnam as a fascist regime overthrown by a revolutionary movement. Even at this eleventh hour opposition movements have some right of protest, while Saigon’s press is less timid than London’s in its exposure of rascals in office. The Vietcong, or indigenous Southern Communists, now play only a tiny part in the war; the Saigon proletariat, which ignored two calls for an uprising in 1968, seems apathetic … What began as a revolutionary war has turned into an old-fashioned conventional invasion of the South by the North … It is distasteful, here in Saigon, to read the gloating tone of some foreign newspapers over the fate of anti-communists.’ This last remark reflected the triumph of Hanoi’s propaganda: hundreds of millions of people around the world, including more than a few Americans, believed that the impending North Vietnamese victory represented a just outcome.

  Out in the US processing area at Tan Son Nhut, thousands of terrified Vietnamese queued outside the base bowling alley, mustered on its tennis courts, as they awaited refugee flights. On the afternoon of 23 April, forty-five-year-old Le Thi Thu Van, widow of murdered South Vietnamese politician Nguyen Van Bong, met a friend, an elderly French literature teacher who suddenly exclaimed in dismay. A briefcase containing $2,000, his entire disposable wealth, had vanished from his side, obviously stolen. The old man announced that he refused to enter the US as a beggar – he would return to his home in the city. His cousin, the government’s deputy education minister, accompanied him, an impulsive decision that condemned both to years in communist re-education camps.

  Once aboard a C-130, Van and her children secured four canvas seats. A tall young American civilian pushed his way through the crowded hold with a Vietnamese woman and gestured to the widow and her brood to remove themselves. When she refused, in his anger the man dropped a lead-heavy bag on her toes. ‘Hey girl,’ he said, as he and his companion squat
ted on the floor, ‘do you know what you’re going to do in my country? You’ll be washing laundry.’ Thu Van wrote: ‘So I left my country with a heavy heart and crushed feet.’

  Former VNAF fighter pilot Tran Hoi’s family escaped aboard a World Airways flight arranged by friends who owed him. When his mother-in-law declined to accompany them, he solemnly handed her the deeds to his house and ownership documents for two cars, saying reassuringly, ‘Don’t worry, Mom, this is only temporary. As soon as the situation calms down, your grandchildren will come back.’ Then Hoi flew to Guam aboard a USAF Starlifter; the prized possessions that he left behind would become victors’ spoils. Eva Kim, secretary to Graham Martin, said to Merle Pribbenow: ‘You’ve got a Vietnamese family – I can get you a few places on a “black” flight.’ So she did, providing the address of a safe house from which his mother-in-law and niece escaped to safety – his wife and son had already left. Kim, an exemplarily kind woman, provided a similar service for many others.

  Some children, such as nine-year-old Bong, viewed the whole evacuation as ‘kind of a neat adventure, going to new and exciting places’. The boy could not understand why the adults around him spent so much time crying. His mother, like almost all the fugitives, had said nothing to neighbours about plans to leave, but in the Tan Son Nhut bowling alley they met friends, colleagues, classmates, sharing an embarrassment as well as a misery which they recoiled from articulating. Through two long days and nights they lingered there, until at last they boarded a C-130, to suffer a few moments of terror as they rose into the air lest the communists, now so close, should fire on the aircraft. Once safely over the sea, they settled to endure the weary discomfort of the flight to the Philippines. A deplorable aspect of the evacuation was that some Americans and Vietnamese with authority to include names on manifests sold space: hundreds of bar girls with ‘green money’ – US dollars – became beneficiaries. Meanwhile, over $50,000 in bribes was paid by the Americans to Vietnamese military and police personnel at Tan Son Nhut, to permit their compatriots’ evacuation to proceed unhindered.