Escape from Saigon

by Michael Morris

  The passengers high-fived Matt all the way back to his seat.

  Tuesday, April 15

  PRESIDENT FORD READ THE MEMO HIS chief of staff had handed to him. Ever since he took office, the Congress—still fuming over the Watergate debacle—had stymied everything his administration tried to do. Now the Democrat-controlled Senate Armed Services Committee had rejected his emergency aid request for South Vietnam.

  He knew what it meant. Without the help they needed, the nationalist government could not hold on much longer. This spelled the end—the end of South Vietnam as a nation and the end to the war that they and the U.S. had poured so much money and so many lives into over the past decade.

  There was nothing he could do now. By taking revenge on him, the Democrats had sealed Vietnam’s doom.

  “Those bastards!” he yelled aloud to his empty office.

  * * *

  As the 747 crossed into South Vietnam airspace and proceeded to Tan Son Nhut, the captain announced, “We will be on the ground for two hours. Repeat two hours, not a second more. So I suggest you round up anyone who wants to ride with me and get back here on the double. We’re not waiting. Two hours. No more.”

  * * *

  As soon as the 747 landed, the captain taxied to a parking spot away from the terminal and runways. He was well aware that TSN currently held the top spot on the FAA’s “Hazardous Airports” advisory bulletins, and parking too close to those targets would put the plane at risk during a shelling or ground assault.

  The CIA was assigned responsibility for the safety of the 747 while it was in-country. Steve Carwood reassured the airline manager in Saigon with a hand-delivered message: “According to DOD and CIA intel, the North might bust up the runway or shell the military side of Tan Son Nhut. But risk damaging a U.S. Department of Defense-designated 747? Not a chance.”

  When the State Department later asked Carwood to assess the situation, he responded directly to the secretary with an uncoded message. It stated, “An attack on the plane would be extremely unlikely. If it does happen, the Seventh Fleet will strike the North with a fearsome vengeance and furious anger.”

  Five minutes later the CIA intercepted a one-word, uncoded message from Hanoi to its field commanders near Saigon.

  “Hiểu.”

  Translation: “Understood.”

  * * *

  As Matt climbed down the stairs of the 747 and walked to the terminal, he saw two of Pham’s sisters standing outside, anxiously waving to him.

  “The officials are questioning Kim!” said Phuoc, pointing to their youngest sister, who was surrounded by uniformed men. One of the officials kept pointing to the girl’s paperwork.

  “You do not have the exit tax stamp here and here,” the official said. “You need to go back and get it. You cannot leave the country until this matter is corrected.”

  Before Matt could react, the stewardess he met on the flight approached him.

  “I have an idea,” she said. She looked over at Kim and, with a slight wave, caught her attention, motioning toward the ladies room with a tilt of her head.

  Kim picked up the hint. “I have to use the bathroom,” she said to the official.

  “It’s on the other side of the gate,” he curtly replied. “Someone will have to escort you. You have to wait.”

  “But I need to go now! Please!”

  The official looked around. There were no female inspectors available to accompany her and the line was building up behind him. He shrugged and motioned her toward the gate.

  “Go!”

  Once inside the restroom, the stewardesses surrounded Kim.

  “Take off your clothes,” one of them said as she began unbuttoning her own uniform jacket, revealing an identical jacket underneath. “Here—put this on.”

  The other stewardess pulled down her uniform skirt revealing a second one underneath. Kim put it on as they tossed her clothes in the trash. Together, they left the room and walked her through the terminal—a phalanx of powder-blue uniforms with Matt and the sisters following a few yards behind.

  They made it to the top of the stairs. Across the threshold they would be safe. No one would challenge crew members of a commercial flight—especially a flight with a U.S. Department of Defense designation.

  Soon four busloads of Pan Am employees and their families arrived directly at planeside, skipping the terminal entirely. Matt and Pham’s sisters surveyed the sea of people getting off the buses and heading up the stairs. There was no sign of Pham’s parents.

  “Kim, what happened to your parents? Where are they?”

  “They kept trying to get here, but they were stopped and ordered to return home. They told us to wait until dark and go without them, so the three of us got on my Honda and made it. We slept in the terminal hoping they could follow us here today on one of the Pan Am buses.”

  “I’ll get them here. I need your motorbike,” Matt said. Kim handed him the keys and told him where he could find it.

  By this time the 747 was overloaded by a dozen passengers. The captain couldn’t wait any longer and began the preflight checklist. Pham’s sisters and Matt boarded and, as the girls took their seats, he grabbed his backpack. As he passed the cockpit door on his way back out, he looked in at the captain and said, “I guess I’m staying in Saigon, so now you have room for one more.”

  “Your call, son. Good luck.”

  As Matt walked from the plane, he realized that it was probably the last U.S. commercial flight out. After that, the only option for Pham’s relatives would be the C-130 refugee flights that the Air Force was running from the military side of TSN.

  He headed off to the Quanhs’ house, hoping he could get them out as well.

  * * *

  It was after dark when Matt finally found the house, which appeared to be abandoned. He pushed open the door. It was unlatched. The house was dark. All the shutters were closed. He heard a sound, and two people cautiously emerged to greet him. Then two more. Then another. Children come out from under a bed. Before long the house was swarming with children, teenagers, elderly people, and two familiar faces; Pham’s parents. In all there were twenty-three people.

  Matt breathed a sigh of relief. He had found them. Now, all he had to do was persuade them to come with him so he could put them on a refugee flight out of Vietnam.

  Wednesday, April 16

  Article published in the Washington Legend, 16 April 1975

  England has its pubs, the U.S. its corner tavern, but in Saigon, piano bars rule.

  by Sam Esposito

  When Vietnam was partitioned in 1954, the Viet Minh took over the North while the governing body of the South was known as the State of Vietnam. French expatriates living in Hanoi were given a choice. If going back to France was not possible, they could stay behind with the hope that Hanoi would remain the quietly genteel city it had always been, though under communist rule. Or they could head to South Vietnam and hope to recreate the life to which they had grown accustomed in Hanoi.

  Those who moved to South Vietnam got jobs at oil companies, managed hotels, or ran private clubs like the snooty Cercle Sportif.

  And a number of them opened piano bars—Vietnam’s version of the British pub or the American corner tavern. At last count there were some 260 piano bars in Saigon. One of them, Le P’tit Bistrot, is run by Jean Paul Pellerin. “I arrived in Saigon with my family, took the gold sewn into the hems of our clothes, and used it to rent a street-level space at the Caravelle Hotel building and open Le P’tit Bistrot.”

  Then he added, “With the money I had left after stocking the bar, I went over to the Rex. They were buying a new piano for the ballroom so I bought their old Steinway baby grand. What a bargain, and what stories that piano could tell if it could talk.”

  Pellerin then painted one wall white, and left markers on the tables so patrons could express themselves with thoughts about Vietnam and anyplace else that was not Vietnam, the place American GIs referred to as “The World.” />
  When Jean Paul opened the doors to his new café, he banned “the rock and roll and bar girls. This is a place for cool jazz and great conversation,” he told everyone who came in. Fortunately, when he left Hanoi, the one thing of value he brought with him, besides the gold, was his father’s jazz collection, some of which were on 78-rpm records. “They weighed a ton,” Jean Paul recalled. But it was worth the trouble. Le P’tit was always filled with the sounds of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Nina Simone, Billie Holliday, and Sarah Vaughn.

  “You won’t hear any renditions of ‘Proud Mary’ by Filipino vocalists. Not in my place. Never.”

  Fortunately a DJ from AFRTs, Armed Forces Radio and Television, affectionately known as A-FARTS, transferred all of Jean Paul’s old records onto reel-to-reel recording tape that could be played continuously from the TEAC tape deck that enjoyed a place of honor on the back shelves of the bar—next to the Hennessy, Jim Beam, Glenfiddich and, when he could get hold of it, Pernod and sake.

  Since the Caravelle was also the unofficial headquarters and lodging for the foreign press corps, Jean Paul’s Le P’tit soon became the daily hangout for foreign reporters, Army and Air Force PR types, and their Vietnamese girlfriends. Whenever young American GIs showed up, they usually took one look, did an about-face, and headed for the bars and massage parlors on Tu Do Street. Those who stayed got to rub shoulders with famous journalists. NBS’s new on-air sensation Lisette Vo was a favorite everyone wanted to get to know.

  Though Jean Paul opened Le P’tit in 1954, “The idea really started in 1927. That was when my parents left France and headed for Vietnam on a steamer. My father had been promised a job managing the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, which he did all through the ’30s and then during World War II when Japan occupied the country,” Jean Paul recalled.

  He added, “I remember the occupation. It was hard. But the Japanese needed lodging, and my father kept the Metropole functioning throughout the occupation. My father was also able to hide some gold in what he referred to as ‘my shoebox,’ which I used to start this new place in Saigon.”

  After the war in the Pacific ended and the Japanese where kicked out, the French retook their old positions as if nothing at all had happened.

  It was then that Jean Paul’s father opened a small piano bar overlooking Hoan Kiem Lake in central Hanoi. “As a kid I hung out there after school, and eventually took over running the place. My father still came in most nights to play piano.” Though Jean Paul had never been to France he knew of Paris and the jazz scene there from stories his father told. “I became as much a fan of the American Jazz as my father. So, when Dien Bien Phu fell, I realized it was time to leave Hanoi for the last time—the music was about to stop.”

  Growing up as he did, Jean Paul acquired three things from his father: how to run a bar, how to play jazz piano, and how to disarm people with grace and charm. “I can read people instantly and figure out what they want or what they need even if they do not know it themselves. I keep a mental scorecard of favors granted and favors received.”

  He recounted, “I kept track of the Viet Minh elite who scorned their French overlords during the day, but did not mind skimming profits from their rubber plantations and opium trade and could banter easily with them over drinks at the hotel bar at night.” Jean Paul knew which Viet Minh party leader had a French mistress and which French lieutenant was keeping a Vietnamese mistress in town, while living with his family in a villa on the outskirts of the city. “Information like that always paid off.”

  Along with starting a new life in the South, Jean Paul stayed in contact with the Vietnamese who remained in the North—especially the ones who populated the Metropole.

  He eventually developed a reputation as a fixer. If you needed an export license, Jean Paul knew the civil servant you had to pay off to get it. Toward the end, when nothing was moving in or out of Hanoi, he even got a crate of Clicquot Club Champagne loaded onto a freighter in Marseille and delivered in time to celebrate New Year’s Eve. That was December 31, l953, and it was getting close to the time to go.

  And in April 1954, Jean Paul did not wait for the grace period when ex-patriates could move freely between the North and South, nor did he put much stock in the fact that the partition of Vietnam was only temporary. Elections were to have been held in 1956 in a bid to unify the country.

  He told his parents and his two younger brothers and sister that their journey had been prearranged. “We are all set,” he assured them as they made their way to the harbor. “I’ll go ahead and signal when it is time to come aboard.”

  Jean Paul did have the freighter all picked out and he knew the schedule. But he never bothered to make any arrangements. He’d watched the docks for weeks and knew the freighter would be fully loaded by now and ready to push off. That night, he waited near the gangway, knowing the harbor pilot would be boarding at any minute, ready to ease the freighter through the narrow mined channel and out into the open ocean. As the pilot got to the gangway, Jean Paul fell in behind him. “I still remember his look when I pulled back the hammer of my revolver and held it about a millimeter behind his ear. The message was clear. But just in case I said, ‘Do what I say or you are dead. Now walk.’”

  Jean Paul directed the pilot to a shed on the dock. “Give me your hat and shirt. Take them off right now,” Jean Paul demanded. When the harbor pilot hesitated he dug the end of the barrel into his head. Within an instant the pilot was in his underwear and shivering.

  Jean Paul then called to his brothers and sister, who were dumbfounded. “Tie him up. Gag him. We only need a few hours,” he ordered, as he put on the pilot’s uniform.

  Then Jean Paul, cap down over his eyes, made his way to the bridge. As the captain turned to greet whom he thought was the Vietnamese ship’s pilot, he realized that he was looking into a pair of blue eyes. “His brain tried to compute what was going on. But the pistol I shoved in his gut gave him the answer. ‘You are the harbor pilot now, we’re going to Saigon.’”

  Jean Paul waved to his parents to come aboard and told the captain to order the crew to shove off. “Now, radio the pickup boat. Tell them the pilot didn’t show up and you are taking the vessel through the channel. Tell them they are not needed.” As they slid past, Jean Paul said, “Now, wave like everything is okay. Don’t worry, you can have your ship back when we get to Saigon.”

  Eventually his family returned to France. South Vietnam, his father often said, “Does not have the quiet of the North. There is too much hustle and it is too noisy and harsh.”

  -30-

  * * *

  “Jean Paul, how long are you going to keep that framed copy of your life history on the wall?” asked Sam. “Everyone has to walk by it on their way to the toilet. Everyone has seen it a thousand times. Besides, I think I wrote it when Johnson was president. It’s embarrassing.”

  Jean Paul often repeated the story of his escape from Hanoi, telling Sam or anyone who would listen about every detail over and over again. Now, with the North Vietnamese closing in on Saigon, Sam discovered that he had a newfound interest in stories of old lives rejected and new lives embraced.

  “I keep it there to cover up something … something on the wall, that is.”

  * * *

  Before she graduated from Georgetown University, Lisette Vo studied English literature and French history. Due in large part to her father’s influence and the many stories he told her of French misdeeds in Cochin China, the nineteenth century French term for Southeast Asia, her indignation over big European countries dictating to small, weak countries was heightened. “The Chinese, the French, the Japanese, and now the Americans, what the hell are they all doing in Vietnam?” she asked anyone who would listen, challenging her classmates and professors alike.

  As the war intensified, she watched reporters on TV reporting from Saigon every night. It didn’t take long before Lisette convinced herself that she should be reporting from a country she felt was at least partly
her home. So she took the money she got for graduation, bought a ticket to Saigon, and two days later landed at Tan Son Nhut. She had some cash and the address of an aunt she had never met.

  She also brought with her a quality that made people want to get to know her. She came across as sophisticated but not snobby, which made her approachable. Her unconventional good looks made her even more attractive—darker than most Vietnamese but definitely not a Montagnard, the aboriginal people of Vietnam’s remote highland provinces.

  That was 1963. The networks, newspapers, and magazines were all scrambling for people, and journalism school graduates from America and Europe were swarming the press bureaus, willing to cover the war of their generation—even if they were put on as stringers, the industry term for freelancers. They would be paid eighty dollars for a story and an extra fifteen dollars if a bureau chief moved one of their pictures on the wire.

  Unless someone wanted to be a reporter in Idaho and hope to work his or her way into the New York Times or the Washington Post, or get onto one of the networks after slogging around Des Moines covering snowstorms, Vietnam was the career track. No matter what it took or how dangerous it was or how poorly it paid, dozens of young would-be reporters streamed into South Vietnam looking for their big break.

  Lisette also knew that if she wanted to meet journalists and get herself hired, the first order of business would be to find out where they drank. It did not take long for her to discover Le P’tit. The first time she walked in, every eye turned toward her and sized her up. She didn’t look like a bar girl, but there was enough of a murmur to let her know that every guy in the place wanted her—all they needed was enough courage to strike up a conversation.

  That was also her first encounter with hotshot reporter Sam Esposito, who was fresh out Yale and on a mission to expose the truth about the war in Vietnam. Sam soon became a big thorn in Lyndon Johnson’s side. Johnson talked about “escalation,” Sam put a human face on it with stories about boys from Albuquerque, or the Bronx, who were dying to protect hamlets that were no more than a few grass huts, a buffalo, and a water well.