Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  With the coming morning’s predawn attacks set at Hue, Tam Ky, and Chu Lai, the Forty-fourth Line Front also had the task of guarding and blocking any traffic attempting to depart Da Nang.

  Their noose now in place, ready to snap the enemy’s neck, Colonel Le Cong Than and his three thousand guerrillas waited for morning.

  Chapter 10

  THE LOST BRIGADE

  HUE, RVN—SATURDAY, MARCH 22, 1975

  EXPLOSIONS JOLTED AWAKE South Vietnamese Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Tran Ngoc Toan, who sat in a chair catnapping at his Fourth Battalion command post, and sent him tripping to his feet. The colonel rubbed his eyes and yawned, listening to the salvo’s thunder, and waited for the action’s first situation reports to come across the 147th Brigade’s radio network.

  Even at 4:00 a.m., Toan could not allow himself to relax into any deep slumber, despite the infantry commander’s not sleeping in his bed now for several days. For rest, the Marine sometimes caught an hour or two nap on the nearby duty watch’s cot, but mostly he got his shut-eye from dozing in a chair, among the hum and bustle of his battalion’s operations and communications center. Command decisions these days required immediate action because combat respected no clock, especially now that the NVA’s shelling of South Vietnam’s imperial city had begun to intensify.

  The sun not yet risen, the volume and frequency of the bursting artillery rounds, walking closer to his unit’s position, told him that perhapsthis finally represented that ill-awaited, fateful knock that proclaimed the tiger now clawed at their door. This morning, the Communists attacked Hue in earnest. From here on, they would launch no more probes, no more harassment fire, no more withdrawals. Their great engine of doom had begun to roll.

  A few days earlier, Toan’s 147th Brigade had retreated from the northern reaches of I Corps, along with the 258th and the 369th brigades which, with the newly formed 468th Brigade, represented the entirety of infantry of the South Vietnamese Marine Corps (an armed force comprised of a single infantry division with associated supporting arms and elements, originally designed, outfitted, organized, and trained by the United States Marine Corps). Since 1973 the three Viet Marine brigades had operated from outposts spread along Highway 9, which extended across the northern badlands from Dong Ha at the coast to Khe Sanh in the far western mountains, overlooking the Laos border. From the old American firebases with haunting names like Con Thien, Camp J. J. Carroll, and the Rockpile, they patrolled the southern flank of the DMZ. Simultaneously, the Viet Marines had manned the defense garrisons at Quang Tri City and the key coastal enclaves of Quang Tri Province. When President Thieu transferred the ARVN Airborne Division from Da Nang and Hue to bolster the defenses of Saigon, Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong, the MR 1 commander, ordered the Vietnamese Marine Corps redeployed from Quang Tri to the regions around Hue and Da Nang to fill the defense voids left by the departed airborne units.

  With the departure of the Marines from Quang Tri, the ARVN soldiers who had remained behind, manning the outposts and garrisons, on March 19 threw down their arms, discarded thousands of tons of weaponry, equipment, munitions, and stores, shed their uniforms, and fled their posts. Without receiving a shot of enemy fire, they abandoned the entire province and its capital, along with a war chest of arms and supplies, to the advancing Vietnamese Communists.

  Three days later, Lieutenant Colonel Toan sat on a metal folding chair, catnapping in the sleepy morning hours before dawn outside Hue. From here his Fourth Battalion and three others of the 147th Marine Brigade, the Third (on loan from the 258th Brigade), the Fifth and the Seventh, along with an artillery battalion and a handful of support detachments, stood as the primary defenders of the ancient Vietnamese capital and its heralded Imperial Palace and Citadel.

  With the onslaught of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces pouring at them from three sides, Brigadier General Bui The Lan, Commandant of the South Vietnamese Marine Corps, responding to General Truong’s directives, sent the 369th Marine Brigade, comprised of the Second, Sixth, and Ninth battalions, to fill the vacated airborne defense positions north and west of Da Nang and deployed the 258th Marine Brigade, with its two remaining battalions, the First and Eighth, to assume defenses at the abandoned airborne positions south of Da Nang. The 468th Brigade, comprised of the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Eighteenth battalions, took up positions north of Da Nang along Highway 1, extending a defense line from the Hai Van Pass northward to the coastal enclave of Phuoc Tuong and its heliport thirty-seven kilometers southeast of Hue. Commandant General Bui The Lan simultaneously relocated his South Vietnamese Marine Corps headquarters from Huong Dien, located in Thua Thien Province, twenty kilometers northwest of Hue, to the airfield compound at Marble Mountain, located on the China Beach peninsula, stretching seaward along Da Nang’s southeast side, just a stone’s throw from General Truong’s MR 1 headquarters, located across the Han River at Da Nang Air Base.

  Colonel Toan listened to the anxiety-punctuated radio chatter from excited operators transmitting messages from the front-line positions engaged under heavy attack. Words, such as fire mission, danger close, snake eyes, and echo-zulu, crackled among the choppy Vietnamese slurry. At a long table stacked with receivers, radiomen hurriedly wrote notes on flimsy pages from yellow pads and quickly handed them to runners who took the slips to operations specialists standing over a map spread on a another table in the center of the sandbag-reinforced command bunker. Above them a string of forty-watt incandescent lightbulbs blinked off and on as a 120-millimeter mortar round burst outside.

  While the Vietnamese Marine lieutenant colonel waited to see a first appraisal of the morning attack, he thought of the old woman who no doubt sat at her bedchamber window in the Imperial Palace, looking at the fireworks’ reflections rippling across the water of the Perfume River. At 86 years old, Tu Cuong, the mother of Vietnam’s last Nguyen emperor, Bao Dai, stubbornly clung to her dynasty as well as her lifelong home. Conversely, her son, the emperor, stubbornly clung to his wealth and luxurious countryside villa in France, where he had lived in exile since 1954.

  General Truong had fumed that he would send armed soldiers and a helicopter to wrestle the old woman from the palace, if push came to shove. The Marine lieutenant colonel smiled, considering the idea. He would like to see a gang of young soldiers try to wrestle the old queen mother from her lair. He seriously doubted that even a full platoon could succeed in removing her from Hue. She would surely die there. He hoped that the Communists would show the old woman mercy, if nothing else, simply from respect for her age.

  Yesterday afternoon, he had watched and smiled as the American consul general from Da Nang had flown an entourage of reporters and photographers to the various Viet Marine positions, including his own Fourth Battalion headquarters. Albert Francis had told the journalists that Hue stood secure. Less than twelve hours later, Lieutenant Colonel Toan crouched inside the command bunker while impacting 130-millimeter, NVA artillery shells exploded overhead, sending cascades of dirt from the stronghold roof onto the line of chattering radios, onto the operations map and table, and onto the duty cot.

  He considered that Hue might stand one or two more days, at the current state of conditions, but without higher headquarters executing some sort of reinforcing strike that would push the enemy off balance, the city would soon surely fall. Toan’s final orders called for the brigade to defend Hue to the last man. He considered the grim possibilities that the prospect held in store and then tried hard not to think again about such realities. For now, he lived for the moment.

  “The Communists have cut Highway 1 at Phu Loc!” a radioman shouted to anyone who might hear the news.

  While a place called Phu Loc enclave, a cluster of three tiny villages, lay to the south near Chu Lai, this Phu Loc was a district capital located forty kilometers south of Hue, straddling Highway 1 on the northern approach to Hai Van Pass. The 468th Viet Marine Brigade held responsibility for those defenses, Lieutenant Colonel Toan thought to himself.
>
  “Any word from Fourteenth Battalion or from the 468th Brigade CP?” Toan asked the operator, now standing over the young Marine’s shoulder and listening as the radio chattered. His operations officer, a major, and two captains, the S-3 alpha (assistant operations officer) and the S-2 (intelligence officer) also stepped closer to hear. Worried looks crept across every man’s face who had heard this disturbing news.

  “No word, sir,” the operator said.

  “I think the Fourteenth Battalion had that area of responsibility,” Toan said to the operations officer.

  “Might have been the Eighteenth Battalion, sir,” the intelligence officer said.

  “If the enemy has blocked Highway 1 at Phu Loc, then whichever battalion, be it the Fourteenth, Sixteenth, or Eighteenth, has likely perished, or hopefully fallen back to secondary positions southward,” the operations officer said absentmindedly.

  He had said what they all had thought, but Lieutenant Colonel Toan wished that he had kept the words to himself. They only underscored what he already felt gnawing at his gut. His Fourth Battalion, along with the 147th Brigade and their supporting arms from the First ARVN Division, had no place to retreat. Surrendering, much less dying, did not sit well with the Marine.

  “Sir,” the radio operator said, “the 468th Brigade reports heavy casualties, and all battalions have fallen back to Hai Van. They also report that tens of thousands of civilians are running from the fight both toward them and to the north, toward us.”

  Toan knew that this panic would only grow worse as the artillery intensified into Hue. Trying to escape the slaughter, the people would run the only direction available to them, toward the sea.

  “BRIGADIER GENERAL BUI,” Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong said on the telephone to the Commandant of the Vietnamese Marine Corps, “how many of your men remain in Hue?”

  “Sir,” the Marine commandant responded, “slightly more than three thousand troops, the 147th Brigade reinforced with the 3rd Battalion, 258th Brigade. I do not have the exact numbers of First ARVN Division soldiers who still remain there in support elements.”

  “Get these men out of Hue,” Truong said with quick words to emphasize the urgency of his order.

  “Sir,” Brigadier General Bui The Lan said, “the President ordered us to defend Hue to our deaths. The four battalions holding that ground will stand to the man if needed.”

  “We need them here. Without those forces, Da Nang will surely fall,” General Truong said. “Tam Ky and Quang Ngai City are only hours from demise. Chu Lai will then fall soon afterward. With the enemy now threatening the northern slopes of the Hai Van Pass, Hue is cut off and will surely fall too. Therefore, you must redeploy those units to Da Nang. Since Highway 1 north now belongs to the enemy, your only egress from Hue is by sea.”

  “Yes, I know that,” the Marine general said firmly. “We have a number of navy vessels augmented with landing craft just returned from there. Already today, when several of these ships tried to evacuate some elements of the First ARVN Division at the docks at Tan My, panicked civilians overran the ships, and they had to pull out. I am told that these same vessels, using their LCM landing crafts, can rendezvous with the 147th Brigade on the beaches away from the piers and the crowds and can evacuate our men and equipment.”

  “Then by all means, General, see to it immediately. We need those forces here as soon as possible,” Truong snapped and hung up the telephone without another word.

  The Viet Marine commandant looked at a colonel who stood wide eyed at the office door. “Send a flash message to the 147th Brigade,” the general began. “They should prepare to move from their positions no later than dawn and maneuver to Tan My, where navy ships will await their arrival offshore. Upon contact, the ships will deploy landing crafts that will move inland and extract the brigade from the beaches. They must signal their positions to the vessels with red smoke grenades and green star clusters.”

  BY THE TIME the 147th Marine Brigade received its bug-out orders, the sun had already begun to set in Hue. The unit’s three thousand Marines spent nearly the entire night packing their gear, loading their munitions, and hitching their mobile artillery to trucks for movement. They began their rearguard maneuver, southeastward to Tan My and the strand of beaches east of the city, shortly before dawn on Sunday, March 23.

  Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Toan stood on the hood of his jeep, straining his eyes through forty-power binoculars, searching for ships along the horizon or the sign of an LCM dancing among the eight-foot waves beyond where the surf crashed across submerged sandbars lurking like whales in the low-tide shallows several hundred yards from shore. Toan shook his head at the major, his operations officer, who stood by the jeep, and then looked up the beach at the brigade commander, who also stood on the hood of his jeep, binoculars held to his eyes, searching the skyline for ships.

  Finally, the radio operator seated in the back of Toan’s jeep shouted over the loud roar of the crashing surf. “Sir,” the Marine said, “ships will close on our position in three hours.”

  “What?” Toan responded, the sudden sense of panic coloring his voice. “It takes no more time than that to cruise by sea from Da Nang to Hue. They must just now be leaving port in Da Nang!”

  While the Commandant of the Vietnamese Marine Corps had issued clear orders, in the fractious confusion of the ongoing battles not only at Hue, but overwhelming his other three brigades surrounding Da Nang, the general’s staff had neglected to inform the Vietnamese navy of the planned extraction of the 147th Brigade from the beaches at Tan My until the brigade had already mounted out for their rendezvous. By the time the ships left Da Nang, the Marines already had arrived at the beachhead. Furthermore, the order for ships and landing crafts had failed to explain that the heavily reinforced 147th Brigade contained double the numbers of men and equipment common to a typical Marine brigade. Therefore, the navy sent too few vessels as well.

  “Major,” Lieutenant Colonel Toan said, now in a voice driven by command resolve, “prepare the battalion to establish a hasty defense. The enemy has already mobilized its forces toward our positions as we speak. In three hours, we will be under heavy fire.”

  Already, the other three battalions had also begun deploying their forces in hasty defenses. They laid in their field artillery, mortars, and TOW missile batteries in a rear-facing arch behind the brigade, that now sat like a duck in the wrong end of a shooting gallery, stranded on the bare beaches at Tan My with their backs to the sea.

  Slightly less than two hours later, the first NVA rounds from 130-millimeter field guns exploded into the center of the brigade’s line. The Marines pounded back with their string of 105-millimeter howitzers and rapidly spent the brigade’s supply of TOW missiles, trying to take out the advancing NVA armor that now rained direct fire on the Marines from their main weapons and heavy machine guns.

  “Ships!” cried a young Marine keeping watch, crouched in front of Lieutenant Colonel Toan’s jeep. “I see two ships, and I see six LCMs circling in the water.”

  “Pop the smoke and the star clusters,” the operations officer shouted to a handful of Marines crouched near him.

  All along the beach, amid the explosions of incoming enemy fire, red smoke poured from grenades tossed along the shore to signal the landing positions, while an array of green flares popped in the air above them. Aboard the ships, green star clusters rocketed skyward, signaling back to the Marines that the Navy had a fix on their positions.

  “They cannot land here,” Toan quickly surmised, taking note of the shallow water and surf crashing over the submerged sandbars far from shore. “We will have to swim to the boats.”

  The words had no more than cleared his lips when he saw the brigade commander and a score of Marines dash into the surf and start wading and swimming toward the sandbars.

  Seeing their senior commander’s sudden departure, hundreds of other Marines now dashed toward the surf, hoping to also swim to freedom. Tran Ngoc Toan, however, f
ought the urge to panic and held his ground. With bullets snapping through the air, he climbed to the hood of his jeep where he stood for his men to see.

  By now, the North Vietnamese Army had closed on the beach and sent infantry running and shooting at the stranded and panicked Marine brigade.

  “Destroy all the crew-served weapons, and gather what firepower you can carry,” the lieutenant colonel shouted to his men while still standing on the jeep. Bullets from the rifles of the closing enemy infantry thudded into the sand, pinged off the jeep, and zipped past Toan’s ears. Yet he kept his perch, holding his Marines’ faith with his courage.

  From his high mount, the Fourth Battalion commander could see the slaughter already taking place on the beaches near the advancing enemy soldiers. Dead bodies quickly began to litter the ground and bobbed and washed in the surf. Out at the breakers, he could see the brigade commander and the smattering of men that remained from the crowd of Marines who had fled with him scrambling up the sides of the few landing crafts that had even bothered to brave running aground on the sandbars to rescue the men.

  Artillery shells from the North Vietnamese 130-millimeter field-pieces exploded in the water, turning back the majority of other LCMs that had faintly attempted the rescue, and now targeted the three boats that sat grounded on the sandbars as Marines scurried up their sides. With each explosion in the crashing surf, bodies and body parts of fleeing Marines tumbled in the air and disappeared into the surging foam.

  “Sir,” shouted a young captain, standing by the jeep, “what shall we do?”