Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  “Didn’t they clean up roadkill with this truck?” Sergeant Bill Spruce groaned. “I know some of it is still sticking to the sides.”

  “I think that’s hog guts you’re smelling,” Sergeant Lazaro Arriola responded sarcastically. “I saw this truck parked at the slaughterhouse yesterday, hauling off their shit.”

  At 4:30 a.m., the two ARVN soldiers seated in the front of the truck pulled it to a stop at the docks across the street from the consulate. Walter Sparks and the others hiding in the back could hear the people outside, talking and slapping the door of the truck. The Vietnamese sentry who rode on the passenger side got out and said something harsh to whoever had banged on the truck and then walked to the back and put his head under the canvas.

  “No ships yet,” he said.

  “They were supposed to be here at 3:30 this morning,” Sparks whispered.

  The soldier just shook his head, “No ships yet. I will tell you when I see them.”

  Dawn’s gray light began to leak through the gaps in the corners of the canvas, and Walter Sparks peeked out when he heard the deep rumble of a tugboat’s twin diesels as it pushed a three-hundred-foot-long barge tied ahead of a second barge half its length. Then a crewman disengaged the lines that coupled the larger barge to the smaller one and the tug.

  Just as the big barge uncoupled, the tug heaved its engines hard forward and sent the hulking open ore hauler sliding toward the shore where thousands of Vietnamese and renegade soldiers gathered. Quickly, the ARVN soldiers bivouacked there, just as Al Francis had predicted, opened fire, and established a barrier that kept the people at that end of the street at bay. This was their barge, and they would board it first.

  Sparks immediately bailed from under the canvas when he heard the tugboat’s diesels roar in reverse, slowing the smaller barge as it skidded along the small docks across the street from the consulate.

  “Everybody jump aboard now!” Sparks commanded.

  In a matter of seconds, the Americans had all scrambled aboard the bouncing nose of the great vessel. Then to their shock came a tidal wave of people running at the ship. The ARVN soldiers had turned automatic weapons on the crowd, but still they came. The slaughter became intense.

  “Get it out of here!” Sparks shouted, pumping his fist up and down for the tugboat’s skipper to see.

  Despite the boat grinding into reverse, pulling back, hundreds of Vietnamese began leaping and diving aboard the vessel. Walter Sparks and the Americans could only hurry to the stern of the barge, wait in a point of safety, and watch the horror unfold.

  Hundreds of boats now crowded the river, and thousands of people scurried aboard the three-hundred-foot-long barge set adrift. They futilely waved their arms at the tugboat captain to hook on and pull them too. However, the load now crammed aboard the 150-foot barge that the tug struggled to push strained the boat’s full worth as it shuddered to get underway.

  As the tug pushed and pulled the barge to get it to turn against the river’s current, its great steel nose crashed and ground into the rocks and concrete of the seawall. While the operator tried to maneuver the barge out and push it down the river, people tried to leap aboard and fell into the water. Others, desperate to at least save their children, threw toddling and infant babies at the barge. Their small bodies crashed against the steel sides of the great hauling vessel. Most of them dropped into the water too. Before the babies disappeared beneath the surface, their screams echoed above the drone of the tugboat’s engines.

  Each time the tug surged the barge forward, in its attempts to turn and get underway, it rode into the seawall and rocks, crushing the old people who had fallen into the water, trying to board, and the fallen children.

  Walter Sparks watched the carnage, horrified at what he saw and heard. Each surge brought death screams from men and women and small children, smashed between the stone and steel.

  Despite the river of death flowing red at the consulate docks, parents kept throwing their babies at the departing barge. Insanely they hoped that people who now overflowed the space on the vessel might reach over the side and save the child. The few who did rescue a baby only brought a shower of more children.

  As the overcast dawn shone its first light across the water, the tug pushed the badly overloaded barge toward the sea and its rendezvous with the Pioneer Contender. Walter Sparks looked back at the tragic scene, watching it shrink in the growing distance as fog began to shroud the river. Even in combat he had never seen such carnage.

  Seeing the tugboat depart, the ARVN soldiers guarding the docks opened fire on the barge. Bullets ricocheted off the ship’s steel sides and dinged into the tug’s woodwork. Boats crowded with panicked passengers sped after the barge, some also opening fire on the vessel since they could not catch it.

  Later, these same soldiers commandeered a smaller tugboat, threw its passengers off, and used it to push the bigger barge out to sea.

  At eight o’clock on the morning of March 29, the Alaska Barge and Transport Company tugboat, with Walter Sparks now riding in the wheelhouse, entered the open sea outside Da Nang Bay. There, in the distance, came the Pioneer Contender, exactly on time.

  Once the MSC cargo vessel had stopped on station, it sent a whale-boat to the barge and took aboard Staff Sergeant Sparks and his Marines, along with the other Americans from the consulate. The Pioneer Contender’s master stood at the top of the gangway as the Americans climbed aboard.

  “What’s all this?” the captain said, pointing at the barge swarmed with its Vietnamese passengers. As the ship sat waiting for instructions, more and more small boats began gathering at its sides, unloading their passengers on the already overcrowded vessel.

  “What’s all what?” Sparks said, caught off guard.

  “My instructions are to put into Da Nang and pick up vehicles, American cars and trucks,” the captain said. “What’s all this? All these people?”

  Walter Sparks laughed and said, “You got some bad scoop, skipper. There’s about a million people wanting out of Da Nang right now. We brought a good bunch of them with us.”

  “Judging from the boats in the distance,” the captain added, “it looks as if the rest are coming close behind you.”

  “We better get things underway then,” Sparks said.

  “We will pull the barge alongside and load the people straight up on the cargo nets,” the captain said. “Sergeant, you and your men must disarm all evacuees before they get off that barge. I will have no gunfire aboard my ship.”

  “We’ll just have to do that as they come up the side,” Sparks said. “If it’s alright with you, we can just toss the guns into the ocean.”

  “Fine,” the captain said.

  For the next ten hours, Walter Sparks and his five Marines unloaded the barge, taking every weapon from the passengers in the process.

  The horror that they saw on the docks played again as the barge rode along the side of the big ship. The two vessels’ hulls slammed and ground as the waves and currents washed them back and forth.

  Men pushed women and children out of their way, trying to scramble aboard the cargo ship. They could not wait their turns to board. Children and old people fell into the water, and the ships crushed them.

  Panic soon overtook the passengers still aboard the barge as more and more heavily laden small boats pulled alongside and unloaded people onto it. Sporadic gunshots echoed among the chaotic throng, randomly killing and driving the people into a maddened crush trying to board the ship.

  At sunset, Walter Sparks helped the final old woman onto the deck of the Pioneer Contender. He then gathered his five Marines for the grizzly duty of searching the barge for anyone still living among the deck strewn with corpses.

  A dozen dead bodies lay pushed in a heap, and among them Sparks heard a groan. There he found an old man lying, exhausted, suffering from shock and a broken leg.

  Near him, an old woman lay in a heap. At first the Marine thought that she was dead. Then she moved.


  In the last light of March 29, Sparks, Sergeant Arriola, Sergeant Rogers, and Corporal Anderson finished their search for the living and carried the two survivors aboard the waiting ship.

  Pushing slowly underway for Nha Trang, the Pioneer Contender’s crew cut the lines from the barge and set it adrift. With the ship free from its drag, the skipper then rang the engine room for flank speed.

  Throughout the long day, Walter Sparks kept asking members of the consulate staff, now communicating with the ship’s radios to Saigon, to let him know if they heard any word regarding the fate of Al Francis and the other Americans with him. Late that afternoon they made contact with the CIA team by radio. They needed extraction.

  Sparks had already informed the ship’s captain that when they had off-loaded the evacuees, he intended to return to Da Nang with him to rescue Al Francis and the American crew that remained with him.

  “Let me have that phone a minute, sir,” Sparks told the shipmaster, standing in the vessel’s wheelhouse, watching the lights of Nha Trang grow larger in the distance ahead of them.

  The shipmaster had already tried to plead the Marine’s case, yet the party on the other end of the call flatly said no dice to him.

  “Sir,” Sparks began, “I am the staff NCO in charge, and my duty is the safety of the consul general, and he is sitting on a barge, as we speak, waiting to be picked up.”

  Again, the answer came a hard negative.

  “Consulate communications people have made contact with those Americans,” Sparks argued. “They got back to the docks and managed to get on a barge and need to get picked up. Right now renegade ARVN have commandeered most of the barges and tugs and have opened fire on anyone who approaches them. The consul general is in danger!”

  Again, without explanation, the voice on the telephone told Walter Sparks that he and his Marines had finished their jobs, the consul general currently sought other evacuation options, and that the Marines returning with the ship would present far greater risks.

  AL FRANCIS SPENT much of the morning struggling his way to Marble Mountain, where the ad hoc airlift of deep-cover intelligence operators had finally wrapped up.

  Because returning to Da Nang presented significant risk for the American diplomat, Francis remained at Marble Mountain while his American cohorts hiked back to the consulate and found it ablaze. They also found that the ARVN who had once guarded the docks there had gone on a rampage. They had begun shooting indiscriminately, killing anyone they pleased, had raped scores of women, and were looting homes and shops, stealing gold, jewels, and other valuable barter goods. The Americans had used a handheld radio to make contact with one of the Alaska B & T tugboats, Oseola, whose New Zealander skipper braved the ARVN gunfire and rescued most of the remaining Americans, except for Al Francis.

  While several of his cohorts had sailed a boat back across the river to Da Nang, looking for other Americans, the consul general remained at the Marble Mountain landing zone, helping to get the unauthorized airlift finished. Then as advancing NVA forces closed on the airfield, he and two British social workers fled to the swift boat basin and navy pier at Monkey Mountain, where he had hoped to find more evacuation barges, but found himself stranded instead.

  As he hiked to Monkey Mountain, Al Francis looked at the sky and to his surprise saw a World Airways 727 climbing steeply, black exhaust smoke pouring from its three screaming engines, running full thrust from a hail of tracers, followed by the arcing white contrails of several futilely shot, surface-to-air rockets. He watched, amazed, as the passenger jet banked steeply away and roared toward the sea. Then, to his astonishment, he heard the thundering rumble of a second set of engines, echoing from the ground at Da Nang Air Base.

  ALMOST FROM THE war’s beginning, World Airways, with its flamboyant gunslinger boss, Ed Daly, had ferried thousands of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines, along with a host of government civilian employees, officials, and contractors in and out of South Vietnam. He hired the toughest, bravest pilots and crews and paid them well for their hazardous work. Daly also led his company by example, not putting an aircrew in a situation where he would not willingly stick his own neck.

  In 1950, Daly had to borrow the fifty thousand dollars that it took him to buy World Airways, founded in 1948 by Benjamin Pepper with a fleet of three Boeing 314 Clippers. At the time Daly purchased the struggling firm, the Beroviche Steamship Company held title to the airline, acquiring it from Pepper a year earlier, and had added a pair of war-surplus Curtiss C-46 Commandos to the fleet, operating one to and from San Juan and using the second C-46 as a source for spare parts. With five well-worn airplanes representing the sum of the airline’s principal assets when Daly bought the ailing firm, he also assumed the company’s debt of more than a quarter of a million dollars. A year after Daly closed the deal that gave him World Airways, he leased a more modern Douglas DC-4 from Braniff Air Lines and began flying passengers under government contract.

  After Ed Daly struggled for nearly five years, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 finally dealt him a meaningful hand. He leased a second DC-4 and contracted World Airways to fly Hungarian refugees to America. During the refugee airlifts, his two aircraft made fourteen trans-Atlantic crossings, and Daly found his way to the news pages and picture magazines by personally flying on several of the missions and visiting many of the refugee camps.

  The good PR paid off, and Daly landed World Airways its bread-and-butter contract with the Military Air Transport Service, ferrying American soldiers on daily routes between Tokyo, Okinawa, Taiwan, and Manila. In 1959 the Civil Aeronautics Board upgraded World Airways’s certification, broadening its operations to carrying military personnel and equipment on transcontinental flights, and then beyond. The move enabled Daly to equip his company with the big iron, the Lockheed Super Constellation and Starliner flagships.

  As America pumped more and more of its military forces into the Vietnam War, Daly’s World Airways became known as the Freedom Bird, flying military replacements and outbound veterans on daily hops between Okinawa and the conflict’s entry and departure points at Saigon and Da Nang. In those days, World Airways flew a grand fleet of stretched Boeing 727 and 707 aircraft, with Daly frequently riding in and out of the combat zone. Always looking to do a good turn for his best customer, at Christmas time he personally delivered tons of holiday treats and decorations, including planeloads of trees, hams, and turkeys to the GIs on the front lines.

  While NVA forces positioned themselves for the kill in Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge closed on Cambodia’s capital, blockading it except from the air. From February 15 to 26, Daly unflinchingly had two of his World Airways DC-8 jets making six runs a day from Tan Son Nhut to Phnom Penh, flying relief supplies to the beleaguered city.

  Thus, when the call for evacuation aircraft for Da Nang ran up its red flag, Ed Daly patriotically grabbed it and ran. Refugee flights had, after all, opened the door to success for his airline.

  Almost from the onset of his involvement with the Vietnam War effort, Daly had developed a deep sense of concern for the people of Vietnam. He felt a genuine duty to keep a promise made by America to not abandon the South Vietnamese people. Therefore he felt that flying Da Nang’s refugees from the onslaught of the enemy was the least he could do for them. He was a man of his word.

  Before chaos had shut down Da Nang Air Base, flight mission controllers in Saigon had contracted Daly to fly two of his stretched Boeing 727 passenger jets into Da Nang to ferry out more people on March 29. Despite Saigon’s repeated messages to him, advising that Da Nang no longer provided any form of security or safety for his aircraft and that they had cancelled all further evacuation flights there, Ed Daly, nonetheless, launched the two 727s from Tan Son Nhut bound for Da Nang with the pistol-toting World Airways president riding shotgun in the lead aircraft.

  “Bring her down steep,” Ed Daly reminded his pilot, Ken Healy, from the 727’s jump seat. “Keep her at four thousand feet, and then dump it like a rock on
to the runway.”

  The two crews and the World Airways boss had finalized their strategy before leaving the tarmac at Tan Son Nhut for the forty-minute hop to Da Nang. Coming in high and steep was nothing new to the veteran pilots, nor to Daly. That’s the way he ran his life. Run hard, come in hot, high, and steep, drop like a rock, and then flare for all you’re worth. Otherwise you crash and burn. Not only a tactic practiced by combat pilots, but a philosophy for living.

  “Da Nang tower, World Airways oh-one, lifeguard,” Ken Healy called to the unmanned control tower. No answer.

  “We’re on our own, boss,” he then called to Daly who sat on the jump seat, wearing a headset with boom microphone suspended below his lip.

  “Steep angle, and stay hot down the off-ramp and on the taxiway,” Daly replied to him. “Oh-two is right on our six, so get off the runway fast.”

  “Roger that,” the pilot responded, taking the 727 into a dirty dive, flaps and wheels dragging all the air they could grab.

  The first plane hit the runway hard, had its speed brakes deployed, reverse thrusters kicked full, and wheels smoking as Healy leaned the aircraft hard on its struts, taking the first high-speed ramp off the main landing strip.

  “Keep her hot, right up to the terminal,” Daly growled on the intercom. “Don’t slow down. If people get in front of you, just run them down.”

  As the first plane touched down, thousands of deserting Vietnamese soldiers, along with cowboys, other civilians, and their families ran toward the Freedom Bird. Seeing that many had rifles, Daly made a quick decision.

  The second 727 had just begun its flare, nose high and reaching for earth with its main struts, when Daly barked at its pilot on the radio, “Slim, don’t stop. Touch and go! Touch and go! If you splatter a few on the runway, so be it, but get back in the air.”

  Just as the wheels smoked onto the runway, the 727’s engines roared full thrust. In a few hundred feet, the aircraft lifted and banked hard right, retracting its landing gear and pulling up its flaps. Climbing hard and fast, it turned toward the sea and made its way with empty seats to Saigon.