Someone picked up the phone on the other end and said nothing.
“Hello, anybody there?” Sam asked.
“Don’t say anything. I want you to meet me,” said the voice.
“Who are you?”
“A friend of our mutual friend. You have to meet me. We can’t talk over the phone.”
“Okay. Where?”
“Where you said good-bye to an old friend. Do you know the place?”
“Yeah.” Sam was catching on.
The last place he saw Trung was at the cyclodrome, where teenagers raced two-cycle motorcycles around a track to entertain people with nothing better to do on Sunday afternoons.
“Be there,” the voice said. “Ten tomorrow morning.”
Click.
As Sam replaced the handset in its cradle, a voice behind him said, “Buy a girl a drink, sailor?” It was Lisette. “What are you hiding, Sam? You look guilty,” she said.
Sam crumpled the phone message, trying to appear nonchalant.
But it was too late. Lisette spotted the note in his hand. After ordering a drink, she shifted to a more seductive voice. “You’ve got something, Sam. Come on, give. You’ve got a real scoop. I know you do.” she begged, trying to unfold his hand. He held the note like a child hiding a prize marble.
“It’s a source. He wants to talk to me. Alone.”
“How long have we known each other, Sam.” It wasn’t a question.
“I don’t know. When was TV invented?”
“Very funny.”
“You trying to tell me something?”
“No, just thinking. The devil is at the door and I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. See this face? Even though I’m as American as you are, my eyes make me a target for the North. Okay, Sam, for the first time, well maybe fourth time, I’m scared. Really scared. I don’t know what there is for me in the States. What are you going to do?”
Sam shifted on his bar stool. “I figure the Legend will be there for me. They’ll throw a big welcome home party for me in the newsroom with cake—the kind the publisher’s assistant sends his secretary out to buy five minutes before the event. Then a couple of speeches, ‘Blah, blah blah … we’re keeping you here, nice and safe in D.C…. no more war zones for you … thanks for your contribution to the Legend, above and beyond …’ That sort of thing. Then they pay me for the rest of my life. I file a couple of stories a week. A column would be nice. It would be enough dough to support myself while I write my memoirs.”
“Christ, Sam, you make it sound so exciting. I can hardly wait,” Lisette replied.
Sam didn’t miss a beat. “Maybe I’ll even get married. Find a senator’s daughter. Or I could always go into PR.”
Lisette nearly choked on her drink. “Yeah, and maybe I’ll do the weather in Boise.”
* * *
For Sam, covering Vietnam became just a job. He was there four years before the embassy was completed in late 1967, three months before the Tet Offensive. This gave the U.S. a big building, so what to do with it? Fill it with CIA agents, Vietnamese office workers, and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s staff of Ivy League graduates who fancied themselves professional diplomats. The embassy staff expanded so quickly that within a year, the State Department began renting additional office space all over Saigon, including the Armed Forces Radio station at 9 Hong Thap Tu Street, several blocks from the embassy. The CIA used the broadcasts as an overt means of sending covert messages to the dwindling number of American soldiers, Marines, and diplomats left in the country.
With no real strategy to defeat the enemy, by the 1970s the U.S. government needed something to show that America was still winning. So the Pentagon came up with a scorecard—body counts. Every day the Pentagon released data that exaggerated the number of North Vietnamese killed while downplaying the number of American and South Vietnamese deaths. The war was stuck in the muck like stalks of rice planted in the Mekong Delta paddies.
As the war devolved into a vague, amorphous guessing game, correspondents found ways to break their boredom. Every reporter had a girlfriend. “We ate, we drank, we fucked, and when we could we wrote,” was how one of them described it.
Some correspondents created a uniform of their own—the Saigon suit. It was probably the first leisure suit. Local tailors made them in seersucker, gabardine, and baby blue pinstripes. A few of the big names—the AP’s Esper and Arnett, the Times’ Halberstam and the Legend’s Sam Esposito—would have none of it. They developed their own style. Esper looked like he belonged with MAC-V—he wore olive-drab mostly and rolled up his shirtsleeves to the elbow in the MAC-V Headquarters style. He blended in, spoke barely above a whisper, and made friends of the brass and everyone else.
Halberstam, on the other hand, berated the generals any chance he got, along with the senators and congressmen who flew in for a quick look. He was especially rancorous toward Nixon, to the point where the president wanted to know, “Who the hell does this guy think he is?” and looked for ways to, as he once said, “bang Halberstam’s and Esposito’s heads together on TV.”
Sam simply went about his business. His mode of operation was simply to make sure no one really noticed him until he scooped them all with his reporting on the Tet Offensive. After Sam’s story was published he slipped back into his own world.
“Sam! Snap out of it!” Lisette said, jolting him out of his trip down memory lane. Sitting next to him at Le P’tit, she added, “You know, Sam, maybe the least of my worries is getting a job in the States with the network. Maybe I should make sure I stay alive.”
Sam came out of his reverie and looked at Lisette as though for the first time. He wanted her alive, too.
* * *
The roar of the two-cycle engines was deafening and the cloud of burned oil and gasoline that rose above the cyclodrome stung Sam’s eyes. It was only the first motorcycle race of the day, and although the track was outdoors, the air was already filled with blue fumes.
Sam watched the racers go around and around the track until he got bored. He found a park bench and lit a cigarette with his Zippo lighter. He waited for over two hours for his contact to show up. Then as he was about to leave, he heard a voice from behind.
“Do you know how to get to the Statue of Liberty?” a voice said. “Don’t turn around. Look toward the motorcycles. Don’t look at me.”
“Chao ong,” Sam greeted the voice.
“Captain Trung has a surprise for you. It is a story you will want for your newspaper. You will be contacted again. I promise, April 28 will be a very special day.”
“That’s it?” Sam replied, puzzled. When he turned around, whoever had given him the message had already melted into the crowd.
Thursday, April 10
From the Congressional Record
April 10, 1975, President Gerald R. Ford addresses a joint session of Congress:
I have received a full report from General Weyand, whom I sent to Vietnam to assess the situation. He advises that the current military situation is very critical, but that South Vietnam is continuing to defend itself with the resources available. However, he feels that if there is to be any chance of success for their defense plan, South Vietnam urgently needs an additional $722 million in very specific military supplies from the United States.
In my judgment, a stabilization of the military situation offers the best opportunity for a political solution.
I must, of course, as I think each of you would, consider the safety of nearly six thousand Americans who remain in South Vietnam and tens of thousands of South Vietnamese employees of the United States Government, of news agencies, of contractors, and businesses whose lives, with their dependents, are in grave peril.
There are tens of thousands of other South Vietnamese intellectuals, professors, teachers, editors, and opinion leaders who have supported the South Vietnamese cause and the alliance with the United States to whom we have a profound moral obligation.
And I also ask prompt revision
of the law to cover those Vietnamese to whom we have a very, very special obligation and whose lives may be endangered should the worst come to pass.
I hope that this authority will never have to be used, but if it is needed, there will be no time for Congressional debate. Because of the gravity of the situation, I ask the Congress to complete action on all of these measures not later than April 19.
Saturday, April 12
IT OFTEN SEEMED TO PHAM THI Quanh—or “Pam” now, to her new neighbors and friends in San Diego—that the peaceful, sun-warmed, laid-back routine that had become her life in Southern California was everything she had ever wanted. The small suburban Craftsman-style home she and Matt had moved into after they married was quiet, calm, and spotlessly clean. People washed their cars in the driveway here. The streets were clean. Everything looked bright and new. She felt safe.
Pham also loved her life before California. After graduating from secondary school in Saigon, she had found a job at World Travel Services. Smart and ambitious, she quickly worked her way up to manager. At the height of the war, World Travel helped organize the commercial airline flights that brought American soldiers into the country. On one of the flights that she happened to be aboard, she met Matt. By chance they met again while he was on in-country R&R in Vung Tao, the seaside resort south of Saigon. Despite his return to the boonies and a nearly yearlong separation, they managed to stay in touch. At the end of his tour, they married in the Notre Dame Catholic Basilica in Saigon among her family and childhood friends.
Now Pham wanted her life to be like this always. The world she left behind, a world she once loved, was fraught with chaos and fear. The fond memories she had of growing up in her parents’ green-shuttered stucco home off Rue de Pasteur slipped further away as each day passed.
But not today. Today the news in the papers and on the television was all about her homeland, Vietnam, and about the war that grew increasingly grim as the armies of the North and South clashed and the people trapped between them died. People she knew. Her entire family was there, her mother and father, her sisters and aunts and cousins and second, third, and fourth cousins. While Pham had managed to get away and make a life in a new world, they had stayed behind, out of inertia but also as a matter of choice and a desire to cling to the old order and traditions, and to the land that had belonged to them for a thousand years.
If what the television news was saying was true, all of that was about to be ripped away.
“Matt, please come in here, you need to see this!” Pham called to the other room as she focused on the television. The TV, an extravagantly large Sony Trinitron, along with all their furniture, his Nikon cameras, their western clothing, and two oversize decorative ceramic elephants standing by the front door which Matt bought them at the PX in Saigon when he was discharged from the Marines five years ago. Now the memories of that life, and of her ancestral home in Vietnam, came back in a rush as scenes of war and destruction swept across the TV screen.
Matt Moran emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel. “Honey, I’m shaving, what’s up.”
“You shaved last year, babysan, get in here,” It was their little joke. Despite his two tours on the DMZ, one of which had earned him a Purple Heart, Matt still looked like a high school sophomore. Pham liked the way he looked, especially now. He had gained back most of the weight he lost as a grunt living and fighting in the jungle, and he was fit and muscular and tan as a surfer—his favorite pastime when he wasn’t studying for his economics degree or working part time at Wax My Mama, a surf shop south of the San Diego State campus.
Matt pulled on a cutoff sweatshirt and stood beside Pham, as the two of them stared wordlessly at the television. He wrapped his arms around her to feel her warmth. Pham welcomed the embrace and used the remote control to turn up the volume.
The newsman in the broadcast was reporting from a helicopter landing zone somewhere in Vietnam, describing events as they were happening around him.
“… Flush with victory, the North Vietnamese Army with their Soviet-made tanks has now captured both Hue and Da Nang, two major population centers American soldiers and Marines defended for more than a decade and key defensive strongholds that South Vietnam’s President Thieu had vowed to hold …
“… The South’s remaining divisions still control positions in the Central Highlands and along the South-Central coast, but observers now wonder if they have the resolve to stop the NVA advance and keep them from barreling straight to Saigon, which would strike a fatal blow to the heart of this beleaguered nation …”
Matt gave a low groan. “This isn’t good,” he muttered. “Not good at all.”
“… In other action, North Vietnam infiltrators have reportedly begun attacking Tan Son Nhut, the huge airfield near Saigon that now serves as this country’s main commercial air hub as well as its military air force base …
“… Although sources tell me the airfield and city are not in danger of being overrun any time soon, this entire turn of events could be the precursor to the end many people inside and outside the government have feared. This is Lisette Vo, NBS News, reporting from a firebase outside Phan Rang, South Vietnam …”
“We have to do something,” Pham said, turning to face Matt. She repeated it with emphasis. “We have to do something now.”
“Jesus, Pham. All those chances we could have had to bring your family to the States … what can we do now? If they’re shelling Tan Son Nhut we may not get them out at all. We were stupid not to do it when we could.”
After the American military pulled out of Vietnam two years earlier, Pham and Matt had discussed getting visas for her parents and sisters and relocating them to the States. But her parents resisted, unwilling to leave their home and life in Saigon. It didn’t seem like a burning issue at the time. Like most people in South Vietnam and in the U.S., they believed the fighting would eventually reach a standoff and Vietnam would remain a divided nation, like North and South Korea. The U.S. government still supported South Vietnam, so the communists in the North were unlikely to press their luck and attempt a total takeover. Or so they had thought.
“I’ll go,” said Matt. “Even if the NVA head for Saigon, we may still have time to get them out.”
“You’re crazy! Dinky dao, GI!” Pham said, tapping his forehead with a slender finger. “You can’t just fly in there now if the fighting is so close! We should go to the State Department office in L.A. first and see what they can do.”
“They won’t do anything—there must be a million nationals who want to dee-dee the hell out of Saigon now, along with all their relations here in the States who’ll be trying to get them out. It’s too late for that. If I can get in, I’ll find a way to take them out with me. You still have contacts there who might be able to help—you know people at the airline and I’ve stayed in touch with a couple of Marine buddies at the Defense Attaché Office. Let’s just hope we’re not too late.”
“Okay, okay. Let me see if I can get through to my friends in the Saigon office,” said Pham. “Pan Am is a military contractor—my guess is they’ll still be flying into Saigon right up until the day the city falls. Maybe I can find out what’s going on, and see if they can get word to my parents and sisters and get them on a flight out. It’s worth a try.”
“And what if your parents still won’t budge?” Matt countered. “One of us has to go to convince them to leave. You’re South Vietnamese, even if you’re married to me and an American citizen now. If the NVA do invade, you’ll be in danger. I’m the one to go. You get on the phone and see if you can wrangle me onto a flight. I’ll pack.”
“Okay, cowboy,” Pham said. She thought for a moment and added, “We’ll wrangle you an airplane.”
COLONEL LAWRENCE J. HICKS
ARMY OF THE UNITED STATES
April 13, 1975,
My Beloved Margaret,
I know I should have written before, but this is the first time I have had a spare ten minutes.
I spen
t my last two weeks in Vietnam in a trailer on the flight line at TSN. I sleep in my fatigues and, yes I am wearing my flak jacket.
We hear the daily shelling but it is off in the distance, so not to worry. It goes around the clock, as do the American C-141 jet transports. We’re flying in and literally dumping military supplies on the tarmac for the South Vietnamese troops. Unfortunately, most of the supplies end up in the hands of the invading North Vietnamese Army.
Then we board the refugees, probably twice the maximum passenger load——but the passengers are mostly children——children of GIs, abandoned girlfriends and wives and U.S. government and NGO workers.
Two weeks nonstop. And you know what? For some reason I’m not tired. Just incredibly sad.
Give my love to Peg, Bill, and Harry, Jr. Kiss them for me.
With my love and devotion,
Lawrence
Monday, April 14
WEARING THE BLACK PAJAMAS OF PEASANT workers and a conical bamboo hat pulled down far over his eyes, the elderly-looking man quickly flashed his ID as he shuffled through the main gate and past the guard shack at Pleiku Air Base. He was among the local workers who swept the sidewalks, cooked the meals, washed the fine china from the officers’ mess, and otherwise kept Pleiku Air Base clean, tidy, and running smoothly for the VNAF—the South Vietnamese Air Force, which had taken over from the Americans with the Vietnamization of the war.
Even without coloring his teeth with boot black to look like he was addicted to chewing betel nut—a habit among Vietnam’s villagers that produced a mild high and turned one’s teeth black as coal—no one could have imagined it was Trung. Trung, the darling of the United States Air Force, South Vietnam’s dashing hero aviator, the shoo-in to become the Supreme High Commander of South Vietnam’s Air Force, had shuffled past the main gate sentries in a pair of mud-caked sandals cut from an old jeep tire.
Once inside the fence, Nguyen Thanh Trung busied himself by sweeping the pathway to the HQ building, keeping his head down, affecting a limp so as not betray the presence of a twelve-inch bayonet stuck in his pants leg. By nightfall, when all the other local workers shuffled out, Trung, who had staked out the sentry post long enough to know the guards would not do a head count, remained behind. He waited for the darkness he needed to put his plan into action.
Escape from Saigon Page 7
