by Max Hastings
Nguyen Hai Dinh, a defector from the NVA who had spent the previous four years in a Saigon seminary, professing to train as a Catholic priest, knew that his future would be brief indeed if he awaited the victors. On 30 April he fought his way through a bewildered, surging mass of people to join fifteen Airborne soldiers aboard a tiny fishing boat leaving a Saigon quay, from which they transferred offshore to a bulk carrier carrying four thousand other fugitives. Amidst the terrors and hardships that ensued when its engines broke down, Dinh tossed away his South Vietnamese identity card and his certificate as a chieu hoi. They finally disembarked at Hong Kong, where he spent nine months. His lifelong ambition for a new life in the US perished with the departure from Saigon: like many fellow-countrymen, he now viewed the Americans as betrayers, and chose instead to make a home in Britain.
Out on the South China Sea, as the state of South Vietnam became history, a multitude of emotionally exhausted people gazed in wonderment upon a vast armada of warships large and small, transports, tankers and small craft crowding the billow, a scene that reflected the bitterest humiliation ever to befall the United States, though its deepest pain fell upon the people of South Vietnam.
As communist forces approached Vung Tau, many Saigon soldiers suddenly donned red armbands, proclaiming their new allegiance to the victors. Lt. Nguyen Quoc Si had declined opportunities to flee, ‘because I loved Vietnam and had no wish at all to live in the United States’. He witnessed terrible scenes during the last hours before the port was overrun: ‘There were paratroopers who made last-ditch stands. Some people killed themselves and their families.’ A boatload of fugitives offshore suffered a direct hit from communist artillery. Then Si and other Southern officers watched troops of the North’s 3rd ‘Yellow Star’ Division march into the town. Their first impression was of the enemy’s embarrassing juvenility: ‘many were maybe thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. We said to each other, “How could we have lost the war to boys like this? Surely we should have been able to beat these people.” We were very, very sad. The communists had no idea what to do with us. I handed my Colt .45 to a boy who started playing with it like a toy. I had to take it back and remove the bullets before he shot himself.’ The surrendered officers were first detailed by their captors to bury the stinking bodies that littered the countryside from the war’s final battles, including detritus from the carnage around Xuan Loc.
Cmdr. Tri’s navy flotilla had lain in Vung Tau harbour since 6 April, while its officers and men argued fiercely over whether or not to flee. About half chose instead to disembark. Tri said dryly: ‘If they had known how the communists would behave, everyone would have left.’ Those who chose exile set a course for Subic Bay aboard a landing ship which carried fifteen hundred people on a voyage tranquil and almost comfortable by comparison with the ordeals that faced hundreds of thousands of others. By contrast, two old landing craft from Can Tho, crammed with Vietnamese and a handful of US consular staff, endured an ordeal amid rain, hunger, thirst and seasickness before being picked up by the old Liberty ship Pioneer Contender. The exhausted and embittered American passengers had felt abandoned; their spirits were not now improved by seeing a nonchalant figure gazing down on them from the stern rail of the big ship – a CIA officer who had made a comfortable exit by helicopter. ‘Hey,’ he shouted, ‘too bad you had to get wet.’
In Tay Ninh, no one had more reason to fear the communists’ arrival than Special Branch Lt. Col. Phan Tan Nguu, whose wife Nguyet also worked in his department. His CIA adviser had offered them seats on a Huey, but they declined because their two children were away, staying with grandparents. On 30 April, after burning his files Nguu set out on a Honda with his wife to try to reach the family, only to find the road blocked by NVA. They briefly took refuge in a temple, but that evening were taken prisoner. Major Nguyen Thuy of the Saigon police, thirty-two years old, knew her own fate if she fell into communist hands, yet likewise felt unable to flee because her youngest son – ‘the one I loved most’ – was with her parents in My Tho. She spent the ensuing thirteen years in a re-education camp, while her ARVN officer husband served six. All the couple’s property, including their house and that of their parents, was sequestered.
Just before the communists occupied Saigon, Major Nguyen Cong Luan drank half a bottle of bourbon, more than ever before in his sober life, without getting drunk. He put a pistol to his head, but his driver said, ‘Don’t do that please, I beg you. If you decide to end your life to go down there in the netherworld, let me go with you and I will keep being your driver.’ This made Luan laugh, and abandon thoughts of suicide. Others, however, decided differently. A few doors down lived another army major who ate a lavish lunch with his wife and seven children before giving the family sleeping pills, then shooting them one by one before killing himself. He left a note: ‘Dear neighbours, my family can’t live under the communist regime. Please forgive us and help my relatives bury us. In our safe there is a little money. Please use it for our burial expenses. Thank you and farewell!’
At 5 p.m. on 30 April, the people of North Vietnam heard echoing through myriad street loudspeakers the familiar theme tune ‘Kill the Fascists’, that preceded news from the Voice of Vietnam. Then an announcer said: ‘Fellow-countrymen, you are invited to listen to a special victory proclamation.’ A song was played: ‘If only Uncle Ho could be with us, to share this happy day.’
In Saigon, Northern soldiers were awed by the wealth of goods in the shops. A young lieutenant hastened into the Khai Tri ‘Enlightenment’ bookstore, where he used his tiny stock of money to buy two Vietnamese–English dictionaries, one for himself and one for his sister: ‘I wanted to return to college, and we could not get such things in Hanoi.’ Bao Ninh gained the impression that many Southerners were simply glad the war was over; he was assuredly correct that the first reaction of millions of Thieu’s former people was a surge of relief, which for a time overcame their fears for the future.
Communist histories provide only fragmentary statistics for the final campaign of the war. These indicate over twelve thousand casualties during the fighting at Xuan Loc, Phan Rang and Saigon’s western approaches, together with the final assault on the capital. A senior NVA officer observed dryly: ‘The march to victory was not conducted along a red carpet laid for us by the enemy, as many people suppose.’ The 1975 battles probably cost North Vietnam around ten thousand dead – few enough when heaped atop the mountain of his people’s corpses that Le Duan had already climbed to secure Vietnam’s reunification.
Henry Kissinger was stunned by the vast human tragedy that unfolded during the days that preceded and followed the communist triumph. Yet when Graham Martin at last reported to him in Washington following his ordeal, the secretary of state contrived for the ex-ambassador a characteristic gallows jest: ‘Well, you’d better get back out, because in the devil theory of history we have to have someone to blame.’
28
Afterwards
1 VENGEANCE
When the guns fell silent, the homecomings of victorious communist veterans proved as dispiriting as those of their former American foes. A Southerner, Chau Phat, said sardonically, ‘The Northerners found winning much less meaningful than they had expected.’ Bao Ninh describes in his autobiographical novel The Sorrow of War a return to Hanoi after the 1975 campaign, aboard the so-called ‘Unification Train’, packed with wounded and demobilised soldiers: ‘Knapsacks were jammed together on the luggage racks and in every corner. Hammocks were strung vertically and horizontally, making the compartments look a little like resting stations in the jungle. There had been no trumpets for the victorious soldiers, no drums, no music. The general population didn’t care about them. Nor did their own leaders.’ He likened the noisy stations through which they passed to afternoon markets, and wearied of the repeated searches for loot to which soldiers were subjected: ‘loudspeakers blared, blasting the ears of the wounded, sick, blind, white-eyed, grey-lipped malarial soldiers. Into their ears poured an endless str
eam of the most ironic messages, urging them to ignore the spirit of reconciliation, to dismiss the warmth and humanity in the ruins of the defeated, sybaritic society of the South. And especially to guard against the idea of its people having fought valiantly or been in any way deserving of respect.’ Ninh and most of his comrades despised ‘this barrage of nonsense’.
Former secret cadre and PRG justice minister Truong Nhu Tang was among those embittered, indeed alienated, by the manner in which the ‘liberation’ of South Vietnam was implemented: ‘The Hanoi Communist Party concentrated power in the hands of corrupt and incompetent bureaucrats and brutal security organisations. They fought among themselves to sequester the best houses, the richest plantations and black market luxuries.’ Tang never forgot the Party assembly at which the Northerners asserted their intention to rule, dismissing the claims of NLF veterans – including Tang himself: ‘No photograph has yet been published of the Rex dance hall [meeting], scene of the Southern revolution’s final humiliation on 18 July 1975.’ He found friends fiercely reproaching him: ‘At least under Diem and Thieu there was honour among thieves. But these Party people are wolfing down everything in sight. Was it really such a good idea to throw out the Americans?’ Northern cadres and army officers, ‘after being subjected for years to the rigours of military life were suddenly confronted [in Saigon] with what seemed to them fairytale riches, theirs for the taking. It was as if the city had been invaded by a swarm of locusts.’
Meanwhile the last Americans returned home ashamed that amid the shambles of the evacuation, so many of their allies had been abandoned to face communist retribution. Frank Snepp told an August 1975 audience at Washington’s Foreign Service Institute: ‘We left behind on the tarmac or outside the embassy walls four to five hundred of the Saigon special police force whom we’d trained … about twelve hundred members of Saigon’s central intelligence organization … and thirty thousand cadres of our Phoenix counter-terror program.’ He highlighted the comprehensive failure to destroy files containing tens of thousands of names of Vietnamese who had served the Americans or the regime, and estimated that only about one-third of the most vulnerable had escaped. Snepp’s audience, drawn from the political establishment, listened in stunned silence. They deplored not what Americans had done, or failed to do, but instead Snepp’s exposure of it. His angry 1977 book Decent Interval prompted a prosecution by the US government and sequestration of his earnings, together with imposition of pariah status upon the author by the intelligence community.
As for the fugitives who fled Vietnam in such terrible circumstances, their numbers overwhelmed accessible American shipping. When Lt. Nghien Khiem’s overcrowded refugee boat encountered a warship in the South China Sea, the American crew emphasised insistence that they should sheer off by spattering the waves with warning bursts of automatic-weapons fire, which some voyagers deemed a symbolic gesture. Setting a course by the stars, they eventually reached Singapore after extraordinary adventures and privations. In Saigon, Khiem’s father was stripped of his business and indeed of all his possessions. His mother opened a coffee stall to support the family until they were permitted to leave seven years later, destitute as they had been on quitting Hanoi back in 1954. In Khiem’s rueful phrase, ‘And so, twice in a lifetime, we washed our hands clean.’
Nguyen Thi Chinh flew out of Saigon carrying the diplomatic passport that she was privileged to hold as South Vietnam’s foremost screen star. However, when she reached Singapore, where she had recently been filming, she was detained: with the collapse of the Thieu regime, her credentials became a mere losers’ visiting card. After two days she was deported, bearing a round-the-world air ticket bought by friends. This launched her upon a lonely odyssey: in Paris she briefly glimpsed her sister through the glass wall of the immigration hall before being shuffled onwards to London, where she was again barred. Back across the Atlantic, she was turned away at New York’s JFK. On 2 May, she was at last admitted to Toronto: ‘I became Canada’s first Vietnamese refugee.’ A few days earlier she had been a relatively wealthy woman, but everything she owned was back in Saigon, forever beyond reach. Canadian social services gave her a coat and $75; as a condition of entry, she was required to seek immediate employment. In a scenario that would seem incredible in a fictional movie, she became a cleaner on a chicken farm, paid $2 an hour to wield a pressure hose.
In desperation she took up her only asset, an address book, and made painfully expensive calls to Hollywood stars whom she had met or worked with. First she tried William Holden, who proved to be away in Europe. Glenn Ford’s butler regretted that the great man did not remember her. Burt Reynolds’s office repeatedly insisted that Mr Reynolds was unavailable. Finally, almost at the end of her little pool of cash, she telephoned a woman she had met just once – Tippi Hedren. ‘I was a drowning person. I cried down the phone – and she cried, too.’ Then Hedren said, ‘Slow down,’ and took Chinh’s details. Within three days the former Hitchcock star enabled the Vietnamese actress to escape from the nightmare chicken farm, equipped with an air ticket and a visa for the US, where Hedren invited Chinh to her home, opening her own wardrobe to her destitute guest. When Bill Holden returned from his hunting trip, he sent her the biggest box of roses she had ever seen, accompanied by a note saying ‘Welcome to America. Make this land your home.’ Chinh was one among three-quarters of a million South Vietnamese who did just that in 1975 and the years that followed: she appeared in almost a hundred more movies, known to the world as Kieu Chinh.
In the heady days after Saigon’s fall, an NVA general offered his new comrades of the South a nod towards reconciliation, saying: ‘Only the Americans are the vanquished.’ Yet twenty-year-old history student Kim Thanh’s family, who lived near Tan Son Nhut, remained for days in hiding in the cellar of her great-uncle’s house. The old man, like her own parents, had migrated from the North in 1954: ‘They knew the communists, and what they would do.’ When the family finally emerged, they saw the first manifestations of Northern victory: bodies lying in the street, victims of spontaneous executions. In justice to Hanoi, most of the unquantified number of killings that took place in the summer of 1975 – probably in the low thousands – were local initiatives by vengeful cadres and Vietcong, not mandated by the politburo. Such spasms of hatred explode at the end of all such struggles: in 1944–45 France, for instance, during ‘l’épuration’ – ‘the cleansing’ – former Resisters murdered or summarily executed fellow-countrymen thought to have collaborated with the Nazis. Some Vietnamese committed suicide to pre-empt an inevitable fate, such as Tay Ninh Special Branch officer Phan Tan Nguu’s key Vietcong informant, Vo Van Ba. He told Nguu before the end: ‘Because I know the communists so well, I know what life under them will be like.’
As the new rulers tightened their grip, South Vietnam’s people progressively learned the meaning of ‘communism’, hitherto a mere weapon-word, brandished or parried by the rival combatants. Le Duc Tho had assured foreigners during the Paris negotiations: ‘We have no wish to impose communism on the South.’ Yet now, in the words of Michael Howard, ‘a grey totalitarian pall’ descended upon the country. A Hanoi doctor inspected the equipment of Saigon’s main hospital and said, ‘You have too much. We cure many diseases without all these things.’ Truckloads of medical equipment were removed and shipped north, along with much else. Cadres evicted wholesale from Cong Hoa military hospital a thousand ARVN wounded. They vandalised South Vietnam’s principal military cemetery, erecting a sign outside its gate: ‘Here lie the Americans’ puppet soldiers who have paid the price for their crimes.’
For months after fighting ended, Northerners in the South were warned to remain armed and vigilant for fear of attacks by embittered supporters of the vanquished regime, though scarcely any took place. A former Southern sergeant watched with grim amusement the reaction of NVA soldiers to the riches of the former capital, renamed Ho Chi Minh City: ‘Their eyes were opened: they saw what we had and they did not.’ Lifelong communist Nam Ly,
who had ‘regrouped’ to Hanoi in 1955 while the rest of her family remained, now travelled south bringing gifts for the mother with whom she had not communicated for twenty years: a dozen rice bowls, two kilos of sugar, two cans of condensed milk. Ly had unquestioningly swallowed the Party’s assurances that the South’s people were victims of privations far greater than their own.
After two months Kim Thanh was allowed to resume her studies at Saigon University, where she found the history syllabus drastically amended: ‘Some of the emperors whom we had been told were bad now turned out to be good, and the other way around.’ Her father, a retired army master-sergeant, owned a little farmland, which was sequestrated for distribution to peasant collectives. Uncompensated issues of new currency destroyed the savings of tens of thousands of families. By the end of 1975, many people in the South were struggling for subsistence, and severe hunger struck a few months later. ‘There was no rice to be had. We ate sweet corn, sweet potatoes, manioc – all sort of things we had scarcely seen before.’ The sufferings of the South Vietnamese in the years thereafter, with the failure of Hanoi’s economic policies and the pillaging of the vanquished to serve the victors, were cruel indeed. Communists of all ranks wandered into homes, removing anything that took their fancy. Northerners treated Southerners – especially those who could be branded lackeys of the fallen regime – as milch cows, providers of spoils. The Soviets took their own modest share in kind – ten thousand M-16 rifles and ten million rounds of ammunition, which KGB boss Yuri Andropov assured Giap ‘will be used in the fight against imperialism and to meet the needs of national liberation movements’.
