Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  Giving up An Loc without a bullet fired would sit hard among South Vietnam’s armed forces. Especially among the ARVN rangers who in 1972 successfully defended the fortress city against a ninety-five-day siege and forced the badly battered NVA divisions to retreat into Cambodia to lick their wounds. The ARVN victory greatly bolstered self-confidence among all branches of the South Vietnamese armed forces. They had, after all, beaten the best efforts of the North Vietnamese, and had done it without American assistance.

  In this one instant, President Nguyen Van Thieu had literally reversed the Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s greatest victory, and General Nguyen Van Toan hardly raised an eyebrow, agreeing to the order with a mere shrug and nod.

  As Nguyen Van Thieu sat in the darkened conference room in Nha Trang, he thought of General Toan’s indifference and questionable loyalties. The worry of it gnawed at him as he listened to the operations officers from his general staff explain the details of his plan and its timelines to the regional commands and Joint General Staff, all seated at the table. Even above the drone of the air conditioners, the president could hear the heavy sighs at the announcement of his casting An Loc to the enemy without a fight.

  Then, when the briefing officer addressed the redeployment of the entire II Army Corps from Kontum and Pleiku to Nha Trang, the sighs grew to moans and loud coughs. Even to the lower ranking clerks and aides, the impending disaster appeared very clear.

  “I think that went as well as one could expect, General, don’t you?” Nguyen Van Thieu said to Pham Van Phu following the briefing.

  “You could say that, sir,” General Phu said, taking a seat in the sofa chair opposite the president, once again in the privacy of the office where the two men had talked prior to the formal conference.

  “Unfortunately,” President Thieu said, sipping a cup of tea, “I have further orders for your forces. While your forces will redeploy to the coastal lowlands and form defensive perimeters around the major cities, you must also do likewise for Ban Me Thuot.”

  “Sir?” Phu said, unsure of what he had just heard.

  “You will retake Ban Me Thuot,” President Thieu said. “We cannot allow Darlac Province nor its capital to remain in enemy hands.”

  Pham Van Phu lowered his eyes and looked at the age that showed itself on his hands. He thought of the horrible months he had spent in captivity, tortured and threatened with death by the Viet Minh when Dien Bien Phu had fallen and he had surrendered to the Communists along with his French leaders. Hundreds had died in their prison. He had survived by pure will.

  “As commander of the II Army Corps,” Phu said, “I must remain at a position where I can command all the forces. Correct, sir?”

  “Yes, that is correct, General Phu,” Nguyen Van Thieu said. “However, I regard the counterattack and reclamation of Ban Me Thuot as one of your highest priorities. Success of my overall plan for saving Saigon and our southern regions depends on your success there.”

  “Agreed, sir,” Pham Van Phu said. “Yet Ban Me Thuot means little if the coastal lowlands fall while I am preoccupied in Darlac.”

  “What do you propose?” President Thieu said.

  “The commander of our rangers, Colonel Pham Van Tat, has proven himself quite a capable leader,” Pham Van Phu began. “He can provide that forward-area command presence while I am able to manage all these operations from our new headquarters in Nha Trang. I propose that you promote Colonel Tat to brigadier general so that he can command the forward regiments directly.”

  Nguyen Van Thieu laughed, shaking his cup and spilling tea in the saucer.

  “Very well, General Phu,” the president said. “Consider Pham Van Tat promoted to brigadier general. I agree with you that he is a very capable and strong-willed commander and a good choice to take charge in the forward areas. However, the obligation of retaking Ban Me Thuot remains with you. I will look to you for answers. You cannot fail, or all is lost.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Pham Van Phu said, feeling great relief.

  In his heart he knew the entire plan held together like feathers in a torn pillow. One good shake and everything would fly to the four winds.

  Chapter 7

  WHIRLWINDS

  CAMP BUTLER, OKINAWA—MONDAY, MARCH 17, 1975

  “SKIPPER, WHAT ABOUT these front-page pictures,” Corporal Steve Tingley called to Captain Jerry Shelton as he stepped through the doorway at the Joint Public Affairs Office, shortly after 10 a.m. “Looks like some heavy shit breaking out in Vietnam, all these people jamming the roads to Hue.”

  “I know,” the captain said as he poured coffee and then began thumbing through a stack of messages. “Have you seen Gunny Thurman this morning?”

  “He called at about 7:30 from Camp Courtney,” Tingley responded.

  “Good,” Shelton said. “He must have gotten word about the operations briefing at III MAF.”

  “Yes, sir, he did,” Tingley said. “The gunny told me he would be here as soon as he got finished with it.”

  “Lance Corporal Carlson with him?” Shelton asked.

  “Yes, sir, I think so. Either that, or Eric is still at his office at Camp Hanson,” Tingley said and then walked to the captain’s office and shut the door.

  “These pictures on the front page of Stars and Stripes, sir, what do you think? Seriously.”

  Shelton looked at Tingley.

  “Don’t put more into them than meets the eye,” the captain said. “Granted, the NVA have increased their activity over the past year, and we have watched their buildup as an indicator that they will probably launch a major campaign this spring. However, every time fire breaks out, a gaggle of peasants seems to flood the highways into Hue and Da Nang, trying to get away from fighting at one place or another. Nothing new about it.”

  “Well, sir, the whole MAF mounting out,” Tingley said, “that’s new. At least that’s scuttlebutt in the barracks.”

  “Granted, we have additional units mobilizing to reinforce the Ninth Marine Amphibious Brigade, but that’s hardly the whole Marine Amphibious Force,” Shelton said. “What’s the point?”

  “All the shit that’s going down, sir,” Tingley said. “Gunny Thurman and Lance Corporal Carlson, for example. They are mounting out, aren’t they?”

  “Look,” Shelton said, “most of you guys will probably sit this one out. So loosen up your pack straps.

  “Right now, Russ Thurman and Eric Carlson occupy the only two boat spaces that we could squeeze out of General Poggemeyer, and we are lucky at that to get them launched. Carlson has worked hard as Fourth Marine Regiment’s correspondent, and as a result, Al Gray has adopted him as one of his boys. Gunny Thurman has combat experience, talent with a camera and a typewriter, and Colonel Gray likes him too. So we really had the choices of whom to send pretty much made for us.”

  Then the captain opened that morning’s edition of Stars and Stripes, spreading it across his desk, and pointed to a one-column story on page three.

  “Cambodia,” Shelton said. “With the activity in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge have decided to not be outdone. It looks like that situation, to no one’s surprise, is rapidly going south. If the Khmer Rouge shut down the airfield, as they have threatened, we will have a host of Americans then stranded in Phnom Penh with little to no way out, except on our bloody backs. All the hubbub this morning has more to do with that potential evacuation, Operation Eagle Pull, than with anything going on in South Vietnam. Although the goings-on in Vietnam still ride high on the radar scope.”

  “What if Gunny and Carlson get busy in Phnom Penh, and all kinds of shit breaks loose in Vietnam?” Tingley asked.

  “In that case, I am sure we will have no problems getting you boys over there,” Shelton said, smiling.

  THAT NIGHT IN OKINAWA CITY

  RED NEON AND Christmas lights reflected in the mirror behind the bar at Mama Wolf’s, an out-of-the-way nightclub on an alley-wide backstreet of Koza, Okinawa City’s bar and brothel district. The smoke from a dozen
burning cigarettes, inhaled by the usual crowd of older Marines and sailors who frequented the dark little den on the less traveled side of central Okinawa’s tenderloin, lay in a crimson haze and swirled behind Chief Warrant Officer Bob Neeley as he hurried back to his table, carrying a large bottle of Orion beer, Okinawa’s local brew, in each hand.

  “Toxon Orion, desu ne?” Neeley said in GI-slang Japanese, describing the size and brand of the two beers as he slid across the red vinyl seat in the booth where Jerry Shelton sat.

  “Hi dozo, and domo alligators,” Shelton said, humorously substituting the amphibian reptile for the Japanese word for thank you, arrigato.

  “Don’t touch my moustache,” Neeley said with a laugh, playing off the Japanese language response of you’re welcome, doi touchi musta.

  Although a Marine, Neeley worked at Kadina Air Force Base, managing the Far East Network radio and television station located there. He and Shelton had a long-standing friendship that began in Vietnam when they served as junior enlisted combat correspondents working in the Da Nang press center nearly ten years earlier.

  The stocky, round-faced warrant officer had just begun pouring his beer into a water-spotted glass when a wide smile broke across Shelton’s face. Neeley then looked over his shoulder and saw Pacific Stars and Stripes correspondent Jim Lee sauntering past the bar with a pair of likely suspects in tow. Following closely behind the reporter, like novice monks in trace of their kung fu master, Steve Tingley and another Marine from the public affairs office, Sergeant Carl Ebert, apprehensively searched the darkly lit room for comrades and beamed happily when they finally saw the familiar faces of Neeley and Shelton.

  “Oh shit,” Neeley said, laughing wryly, “he’s corrupting the troops again. We’re going to be here all night.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Shelton said, waving at the trio.

  Short, heavyset, his black hair combed slick in an oily ducktail, and wearing black plastic sunglasses, black slacks, and a predominately black silk Hawaiian shirt with pink, purple, and green flowers printed on it, Jim Lee, a native son of Monroe, Louisiana, had lived in Okinawa for years, kept intimate acquaintances at all the local watering holes, and spoke fluent gutter Japanese. He immediately found Mama Wolf, bear-hugged the burly woman, who stood nearly two inches taller than Lee, and began laughing and yammering in colloquial Okinawan dialect with the club’s female proprietor.

  Shelton and Neeley smiled knowingly as they watched Lee then lead Mama Wolf to the two young Marines that the reporter had brought to the club and introduce them to her as “Okinawa cherry boys.”

  Carl Ebert put out his hand for the woman to shake, but instead, the hefty Mama-san immediately embraced the Marine in a suffocating squeeze with her massive arms and buried his face deep in the perfume-rich, jiggling-fat cleavage between her watermelon-sized breasts. Then she lowered her hug, reached behind the sergeant, and clamped both cheeks of his buttocks in her palms, squeezing hard.

  Ebert immediately rose to his tiptoes and cried out.

  Everyone in the bar erupted, laughing.

  Showing her large, gold teeth in a wide smile, Mama Wolf then turned toward Tingley, who took a long step backward and offered the woman his hand at a stretched-out distance, cautiously avoiding her clasp. However, rather than grasping his dangling paw, Mama Wolf shot her arm past it and straight into Tingley’s groin, where she clamped her ironlike grip onto his testicles, jolting the Marine to virtual levitation.

  Patrons of the bar laughed even louder while Tingley screamed and danced, and Mama Wolf paraded him in a circle as he wailed on his tiptoes.

  “I see you boys have now joined the Wolf pack,” Shelton said after Tingley and Ebert had bid Mama Wolf adieu and now slid to a happy landing in the captain’s booth.

  “You got the classic Wolf kiss, Sergeant Ebert,” Neeley said. “Tingley,however, found out the hard way what one gets when one tries to avoid the Wolf kiss.”

  “What kiss?” Tingley said loudly, still laughing. “It seemed to me more like groped ass and scrambled balls. Gunner Neeley, her lips never even puckered. She just smiled that mouth full of Hong Kong gold and filled her hands.”

  “Consider yourselves now members of the club,” Shelton said, raising his beer toward the two sergeants.

  A young woman dressed in a long, clingy, green silk gown, embroidered with yellow dragons and peacocks, followed Jim Lee to the table, carrying four large bottles of Orion beer that she set in front of Tingley and Ebert.

  “You two guys’ drinks are on the house, courtesy of Mama Wolf,” Lee said, pulling a chair to the end of the booth and setting down his glass of Johnny Walker Scotch and ice.

  “What brings you to the ville on a Monday night?” Shelton said to the newsman.

  “Don’t ask me,” Lee said. “Talk to your two knuckleheads here. They showed up on my doorstep before sunset, begging me to go have a drink with them.”

  “So, what’s in the funny papers tomorrow?” Shelton asked the reporter, making small talk.

  “Cambodia,” Lee responded. “Place has steadily gone down the shitter for the past year. Your guys had a briefing about it today. I think General Lon Nol and his gang are history. Just a matter of weeks now.”

  Shelton nodded and said nothing.

  “Why do you say that?” Tingley asked.

  “Let’s see,” Lee said. “For starters, the Communists have now controlled the Mekong River for the past month or so, cutting off that supply route, in addition to all the highways. The Khmer Republic has a navy base at Neak Loung, on the river near Banam, about halfway between Phnom Penh and the South Vietnam border. However, those guys have no way out. Totally cut off, and no way to get supplies. So check them off the list.

  “Until now, the Mekong River was the principal supply line for what was left of Lon Nol’s government. With the highways long since owned by the Khmer Rouge, Pochentong Airfield, the air base outside the capital, is now the only way in or out. Bird Airways, Cambodia’s version of Air America, has a bunch of what the CIA calls surplus American C-130s and three DC-8s making fifteen to twenty supply flights per day into Pochentong. However, it is just a matter of time before the Khmer Rouge move back and start shelling the runway and aircraft operations again.”

  “Kind of like the Berlin airlift,” Tingley said.

  “Except under rocket, small arms, and antiaircraft attack going in and out,” Shelton said.

  “Actually, they have not had any rocket attacks for quite a few days because the Khmer Rouge got kicked out of their firebases at Toul Leap, northwest of the air base,” Lee said. “But like I mentioned before, that won’t last long. Like mold, they’ll creep back in the cracks.”

  “So we have basically chalked off Cambodia too,” Sergeant Ebert said quietly.

  “They don’t have a prayer,” Neeley said.

  “What’s the Marine Corps going to do about it?” Lee asked.

  “Can’t say,” Shelton said and looked straight at Tingley, who started to open his mouth, but closed it on seeing the captain’s eyes.

  “People say that you guys are going in there to roll up the rugs, shred the secrets, and get the hell out of Dodge,” Lee said. “At least that’s according to the guy on the third shitter from the right and pretty much common skinny on the streets.”

  “Like I said, I can’t say,” Shelton said and sipped his beer.

  “Well, I will tell you this,” Lee said. “We wouldn’t be sitting here dribbling in our suds, talking about doom had Nixon told the truth.”

  “Watergate?” Tingley said. “What does that have to do with anything here?”

  “Fuck Watergate,” Lee said. “Nixon has lied since the day he took office. I’m talking about the crock-of-crap Nixon Doctrine and his bullshit denials about our combat operations in Cambodia and Laos.”

  “True,” Shelton said, sipping his beer.

  “Damned right, true,” Lee said. “I will never forget the day Nixon went on national television. Lon Nol
had just overthrown Prince Sihanouk and sent him packing to Paris. Of course, the CIA set up the operation. Sihanouk got on television in Paris and cried foul, and Nixon said, ‘Who, me?’

  “Anyway, Senator Frank Church and a bunch more head-hunting Democrats from both the House and Senate flat out asked Nixon if there was any truth to what Sihanouk said. Nixon very cooly denied any involvement. Then like the guilty dog that he is, Nixon goes on nationaltelevision and says that the United States has no ground forces in Cambodia, no military advisors, nor has the United States any air assets supporting any actions in Cambodia. He says, and I quote, ‘Cambodia is the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.’ ”

  “Bullshit, I remember that boot full of paddy scum,” Neeley said. “I remember thinking, what a lie.”

  “Every junk monkey in any of the armed forces who ever cranked a bolt and saw past the smoking shitters knew it was a lie,” Lee said. “Hell, half of Congress knew it at the time, until the truth raised its ugly head in the newspapers, which it finally did, and set off Senator Church, all the Democrats, and a number of survival-oriented Republicans, on the political warpath.”

  “So we wound up with the infamous Case-Church Amendment, shutting off air and ground combat support in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia and South Vietnam?” Ebert said.

  “Give the man a cigar,” Lee said.

  THROUGHOUT MOST OF the years of United States involvement in South Vietnam, although Cambodia proclaimed a nonbelligerent, neutral status, it actually supported the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces by providing them refuge, primarily in the Parrot’s Beak region along the Mekong River, hardly more than fifty kilometers west of Saigon. In this so-called neutral territory, Communist forces successfully escaped American and South Vietnamese pursuit and rested and recuperated between commitments to combat operations. In this Cambodian haven, they also stashed large caches of weapons and supplies ferried over the notorious Ho Chi Minh Trail, which crossed through Cambodia at several points, exiting into the Mekong region and the Central Highlands.