Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  As for South Vietnam’s leader, figurehead, president: what did Nguyen Van Thieu think, sitting almost alone in the great echoing Independence Palace as his government collapsed about his head? ‘Thieu would have made a great Las Vegas poker player,’ said Frank Scotton. ‘He was completely opaque.’ Frank Snepp said: ‘As soon as we didn’t control a Vietnamese leader, we disowned him. Thieu was a tragic figure.’ A senior air force officer suggested that the president had always been haunted by the memory of Diem, fearing that if he defied the will of Washington, he would meet the same fate. ‘And so, when Americans looked at Thieu, they saw simply a little guy.’ PRG minister-in-waiting Truong Nhu Tang argued that Thieu naïvely supposed that the Americans cherished almost a blood loyalty towards him. He ‘simply could not bring himself to believe that in this extremity they would abandon him’.

  The latter speculation seems plausible, though unprovable, since in exile Thieu sustained an unbroken silence. He displayed through his last weeks of power – or, more appropriately, of impotence – the political insensitivity that had characterised his eight-year rule. In mid-March he rejected calls for resignation from oppositionists Father Tran Huu Thanh and former vice-president Ky – the latter had sulked on a farm since quitting the 1971 presidential race. Ten people were jailed for allegedly plotting the government’s overthrow. Thieu dismissed a Saigon Senate vote calling for his eviction. On 4 April he belatedly reshuffled the cabinet, though his survival in office depended now, as always, upon the loyalty of generals. The CIA’s ‘Tay Ninh source’, agent ‘Hackle’, reported Hanoi completely uninterested in a deal with any Southern faction. Why should the North bargain, when it stood on the brink of military triumph? Only ambassador Martin and a handful of Vietnamese power-brokers clung to delusions that an outcome might be contrived which deflected a communist takeover.

  To posterity Thieu seems an unsympathetic figure, who failed to relate to the mass of his own countrymen, and governed through a handful of more or less corrupt warlords. No anecdotage exists to endow this preternaturally cool man with a human face. The best that may be said is that he was not among the most cruel of the world’s autocrats. He belatedly resigned the presidency on 21 April and left his country for the last time four nights later, accompanied by former prime minister Tran Thien Khiem. Frank Snepp was Thieu’s driver on the short ride through darkness from his private residence inside the Tan Son Nhut base to a waiting USAF C-118. The president shook the hand of the CIA officer and said a terse ‘Thank you’ as he blinked back tears. A knot of American spooks, diplomats and guards, all in civilian clothes, joked a trifle nervously among themselves about the gunfire audible in the distance.

  The ambassador exchanged a few words with Thieu at the foot of the aircraft steps. ‘I just told him goodbye,’ said Martin afterwards. ‘Nothing historic. Just goodbye.’ As the plane’s engines whined, there was a preposterous moment as the envoy, chest heaving, himself set about dragging away the steps. Snepp shouted, ‘Mr Ambassador! Can I do that for you?’ For years afterwards, rumour held that Thieu bore away in his baggage South Vietnam’s gold reserves, yet in exile neither he nor his family displayed evidence of massive portable wealth: in 2016 in Orange County his widow relied on the generosity of friends to purchase a burial plot. Thieu’s epitaph must be that he became a puppet collapsed, when the Americans chose to drop his strings.

  Seventy-one-year-old ex-schoolteacher Tran Van Huong assumed the presidency for a few wretched days, while Lt. Gen Nguyen Van Toan prepared to direct the defence of Saigon. He disposed sixty thousand regular troops, and about the same number of RF and PF militia. These could not suffice to ring the city, and thus its southern approaches lay almost naked. No one on either side supposed that the South Vietnamese could long resist the North’s masses, but some officers and politicians clung to hopes that they might fight long enough to secure negotiated terms, rather than make an abject surrender. The NSA intercepted an enemy wireless message ordering artillery to fire if the Americans were not gone before Dung’s columns reached the city centre. It is still uncertain whether this was bluff, but senior US personnel planned their departures accordingly, ahead of the communist spearheads.

  Dung disposed more than a quarter of a million troops in five corps, fourteen divisions, ten independent brigades and regiments, together with a battalion of SAM-2 air defence missiles shipped down from the North. A few pilots had been rushed through conversion training from MiG-17s to A-37s, so that they could fly captured aircraft; Hanoi declined to use its own Russian-built fighters, for fear of provoking an American response. Dung’s multiple-axis assault focused on key headquarters and symbols of military and political power, including Tan Son Nhut and Independence Palace. Fourteen bridges lay between communist start lines and the city centre, which sappers were tasked to secure ahead of the armoured columns. The overarching intent was to pin and destroy South Vietnamese forces at the periphery, averting a destructive struggle in the city centre.

  On 25 April Le Duc Tho dispatched a long cable to his politburo colleagues in Hanoi, seeking to calm their fears that the endgame was being dangerously delayed; that even after losing the capital, Saigon’s forces might retire to make a final stand in the delta. ‘You may be at ease,’ messaged Tho: everything would be fine. Saigon was poised to fall; the regime would perish with it.

  In the last phase out at Tan Son Nhut, the men of a VNAF security detail said to their commander: ‘Okay L.T., now what?’ Lt. Nghien Khiem remained mute for several minutes, because he had no constructive answer. Eventually he said: ‘Go home. The best thing you can do is take care of yourselves.’ In those days this exchange was repeated ten thousand times among South Vietnamese both in uniforms and out of them. Khiem himself mounted a moped and set off for his family home. Just outside the base, in the middle of the road he saw a pathetic sight: two small, lonely figures, a boy of around ten and a girl perhaps six years old, sitting atop a mountain of baggage and possessions. Khiem swung the bike and approached them, asking, ‘What are you doing?’ The boy answered: ‘Our parents told us to stay here and wait for them.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Early morning.’

  It was now mid-afternoon. Khiem made the only gesture he could think of: crossing to a nearby stall, he bought some fruit juice and handed it to the children. He said: ‘You’d better leave the luggage, go on home and wait there.’ They nodded uncertainly as he continued on his way, leaving the forlorn pair where they sat.

  The North Vietnamese scheduled their six-pronged final attack on Saigon for 27 April, but the Coastal Column was authorised to move a day earlier, because it had two rivers to cross. Early on the 26th, twenty battalions of artillery opened fire from the east: tanks and infantry rolled soon after. On the following day the ARVN 18th Division, heroes of Xuan Loc, was brutally handled by the North’s 4th Corps, and forced into retreat, while An’s 2nd Corps attacked Southern forces defending the only road link between Saigon and the sea. An wrote: ‘The fighting grew more intense with each passing minute, surging back and forth as the troops fought for control of every shattered wall, bunker, rubber tree, tank against tank, howitzer against howitzer.’ Regional Forces for a time clung to the town of Long Thanh; the remains of the Airborne held their positions until outflanked, then retired towards the port of Vung Tau.

  On the evening of the 28th, five captured A-37s flown by communist pilots bombed Tan Son Nhut, destroying several aircraft and traumatising defenders. Ten hours later a rocket and artillery bombardment scoured the airbase, killing two US Marine guards. Communist sappers seized and for some hours held the Newport bridge, close to the heart of the city, prompting a firefight watched with grim fascination by scores of Western media reporters and cameramen. Vietnamese Marines are said to have made an impressive stand further north, but this availed the defenders nothing when their lines were soon breached in twenty places by communist troops surging towards the capital.

  The North’s 10th Division, which had
done more fighting than any other since the start of the campaign, advanced along the last miles of Route 1 led by tanks with infantrymen cramming their hulls. The columns that raced past Cu Chi, once a base with a symbolically intricate Vietcong tunnel complex beneath the Americans’ feet, were composed of a mixture of their own T-54 and K-63 tanks, most at the limits of engine life, together with captured American M-41s and M-48s. Chivvied relentlessly by commanders, drivers were told to smash headlong past opposition, rather than waste the hours necessary for infantry to deploy off-road for set-piece attacks. By 0600 on the 29th, sappers and infantry had secured the Sang bridge. This promptly collapsed under the weight of two tanks, and attackers found themselves addressing ‘stubborn resistance’ at Dong Du. More tanks bogged in a stream from which they had to be rescued by engineers, then clashed with Southern armour and found the way ahead – Route 4 – blocked by trucks. In heavy rain, the South Vietnamese sustained resistance through most of the morning at the Vinatexco textile mill and Tham Luong bridge. There was a spectacular explosion in a bomb dump at Tan Son Nhut before, late in the afternoon, Northern tanks began firing on aircraft parked inside the base. At last light they halted, awaiting dawn to renew their assault.

  Meanwhile in central Saigon, the city’s inhabitants were belatedly obliged to acknowledge the imminence of the volcanic eruption that was to bury their society. ARVN chief of staff Cao Van Vien had resigned his post and flown to sanctuary aboard a US carrier on the 28th, followed next day by Gen. Toan and other officers. Former vice-president Ky made a flatulent speech, calling on his fellow-countrymen to turn Saigon into a second Stalingrad, before piloting a Huey onto the carrier Midway. To escape the humiliation of being disarmed by American sailors, he and his companions tossed into the sea their own side arms, including a pistol presented to Ky himself by John Wayne. The ship’s captain, greeting him, pointed to a Vietnamese medal ribbon on his own breast and said, ‘You gave this to me.’ Ky wrote: ‘My eyes filled. Great sobs racked my body. The captain withdrew, quietly shutting the cabin door, and left me with my tears.’ Despite a reputation for venality, Ky proved almost penniless when he began a new life in California.

  Helicopters clattered ceaselessly across the sky, first lifting evacuees from Tan Son Nhut, then on 29 April from the US embassy compound and a handful of mission buildings that became the last American enclaves. That afternoon, Lt. Khiem reached his parents’ Saigon house to find his elderly grandfather and other family members in tears, which flowed in rivers that day. By the custom of the country Khiem asked the formal consent of his father-in-law to take his wife Lien to the embassy, to escape to the Seventh Fleet offshore. He then bore her on his moped the few blocks to the compound, protected by US Marines from an increasingly frantic crowd outside the walls. Her father came too, carrying two of her sisters on a Lambretta. They rendezvoused with Khiem’s brother before the lieutenant forced a path to the gates.

  Privileged connections caused a sight of his ID to persuade the US Marines to admit the entire group. However, his younger brother, a twenty-three-year-old law student, was missing. Khiem returned to the family house, where the young man appeared soon afterwards. Once again Khiem fought through the crowd to the embassy gates, and after pressing $100 into his brother’s hand, by brute strength pushed him over the gates, then himself returned home.

  Tran Tan was twenty-five, and like Khiem had close contact with the Americans – he worked as USAID’s night switchboard operator. His bosses asked him to remain as ‘essential personnel’, which conferred a right of passage on an evacuation flight. He phoned his parents – an American home phone was another perk of the job – and asked that his fifteen-year-old brother Hung should bring him food and clothes at the USAID office. When the boy arrived, Tan told him to stick around. He asked the Americans if his other two brothers, whose details he had already given them, could come too. No, they said sternly – both were soldiers, and President Thieu had decreed that no military personnel should quit the country. Tan said later: ‘I was stupid – when we got to Guam and saw all the ARVN men there, I learned that if we had just found a few dollars to give someone, my brothers could have come too.’ His father refused to leave, shrugging, ‘I am too old to care whether I live or die.’ When Tan and Hung boarded a helicopter out of the US embassy at 6 p.m. on 29 April, their departure opened a chasm in their family, as in countless others, that would persist for years. Tan learned to be grateful that his brothers were mere enlisted men: their lowly status spared them from the horrors of the communist camps that awaited ex-officers.

  On that final day of the evacuation, shamefaced CIA staff listened to the bleats and whistles of unanswered radios in the operations room, static-crackling pleas for help on every channel, coming from all over Vietnam: ‘I’m Mr Han, the translator …’ Frank Snepp called these ‘soundmares’. It was never plausible that the Americans could conduct an ordered extraction of all those Vietnamese linked to the US, even had the ambassador displayed greater foresight. Instead, vast numbers of panic-stricken people embarked on escapes in ships and small craft of every shape and size that dotted the seas off South Vietnam through the weeks that followed; a few fortunate folk flew away.

  On the last night in the embassy an aide to Martin, Ken Moorefield, chatted to CIA station chief Tom Polgar, a short, stocky, bald Hungarian, ‘obviously in great pain and despair’. Polgar had shared to the end the ambassador’s false hopes of a political deal. Now he lamented despairingly, ‘If only we hadn’t cut off their supplies.’ Moorefield wrote of the scene in the compound before he himself flew out: ‘An almost eerie calm had descended. There was almost no noise at all. No sound of gunfire. No sense of what was about to take place.’ In that final lift from Saigon, Marine helicopters flew 682 sorties to lift 1,373 Americans and 5,595 people of other nationalities – overwhelmingly Vietnamese – to warships of the Seventh Fleet. Ambassador Martin departed at 0458 on 30 April, when agreed code words ‘Tiger, Tiger, Tiger’ were passed to the command ship. Several hundred Vietnamese were abandoned in the compound after Washington insisted upon foreclosing the evacuation, so that the last Marines could fly out at 0753.

  Even as vestigial Americans were airborne, the Southerners were making another stand at the training base of Quang Trung, knocking out four Northern tanks, then holding on through the night. Communist attacks resumed at 0530 on the 30th, and still met resistance: one tank was hit by both an M-72 rocket and a shell from an ARVN tank, which a communist T-54 then rammed, causing its crew to bail out and flee. A Northern unit that got lost persuaded a young bystander to board a tank and show the way. When the column came under fire, however, the guide jumped off the hull and fled, causing the tanks promptly to take another wrong turning. Communist narratives speak of ‘increasingly dogged resistance’. The first NVA tank to approach Tan Son Nhut’s main gate was set ablaze: ‘Our infantry were pinned down, the lead element … became so weakened it could not continue the attack.’ Officers dashed up to view the situation, then committed reinforcements.

  An attack by VNAF aircraft – one of the last of the war – knocked out two more tanks. By 1015, as Northern armoured losses mounted, ‘the situation was becoming extremely complicated’. Then attacking infantry broke through, overrunning bunkers west of the main gate. A column of tanks and carriers surged forward, fanning out inside the perimeter, firing as they went. Clusters of defenders began to emerge, making gestures of surrender. By early afternoon, the last resistance at the base had been mopped up.

  Veteran Vietcong leader Huynh Cong Than led a division-sized force into Saigon from the south. He observed that, while the big picture was of Southern collapse, his units faced a succession of fierce little battles which cost a stream of casualties. One attack on a district military HQ was repulsed; the VC finally bypassed the compound, then crossed the Can Giuoc River with vivid memories of following the same route at Tet 1968, with much less favourable consequences. Than’s war concluded with his occupation of the national poli
ce HQ and navy HQ in the heart of the city. ‘Our soldiers’ faces were lit bright by smiles of victory,’ he wrote. The symbolic climax of the 30th came when one of the tanks that led Maj. Gen. An’s 304th Division smashed through the gates of Thieu’s abandoned Independence Palace.

  Former president Duong Van ‘Big’ Minh, whose younger brother was a senior NVA officer, had reassumed the nominal state leadership three days earlier. He retained vain hopes of orchestrating a ceasefire, but the communists would no more recognise Minh’s mandate than that of any other Southerner. On that morning of 30 April, the general performed his only serviceable deed by issuing a declaration of surrender, repeatedly broadcast thereafter, which saved many lives by persuading ARVN soldiers to lay down their arms. All significant fighting ended by nightfall.

  Tens of thousands of Vietnamese continued to escape from Saigon that day, and indeed through the weeks that followed. Lt. Khiem returned exhausted from the embassy to join his parents and grandfather at their home: ‘There was no time to cry: I was just wondering how to survive.’ On the morning of the 30th the family learned that – at a price – there was a chance for them to board a boat at the riverside. Khiem begged his mother to accompany them, but she insisted that she must stay to look after his grandfather. His father drove him down to the dock in one of the family business’s trucks, bidding his son an emotional but hasty farewell. The young officer sprang aboard a boat already laden with some two thousand people, landing atop a throng of bodies even as communist rockets exploded nearby. He urged some sailors: ‘Cut the cable!’ and so they did. That morning a convoy of navy ships ran the gauntlet of communist fire down the Saigon River to the sea. They were already offshore when they heard on portable radios that South Vietnam had formally surrendered, precipitating a new orgy of tears … and prayers.