Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  “Turn it around right here, Ken,” Daly then said to his pilot. “We’ll just kick open the hatch and keep the engines turning. Once we get a load, hotfoot this baby back to the main and let’s get airborne.”

  A Golden Gloves boxer as a youngster, Ed Daly unplugged his headset and hustled to the aircraft rear ventral door, ready for the hand-to-hand combat that he knew awaited him when he popped the hatch and dropped the air stairs. He had hoped to ferry out women and children, but when the hatch opened, automatically releasing its internal stairs, a crowd of angry men, scores of them soldiers, clambered aboard as the steps slid down.

  Looking outside, Daly saw frantic men pop open the 727’s door to the cargo hold, and people began flooding inside that space too. In seconds, the aircraft jammed with passengers crushed shoulder to shoulder, pushing themselves into every corner and gap that they could find.

  “Forget the welcome-aboard speech,” Daly cracked to Ken Healy over the crew phone intercom. “Throttle this mother up and roll.”

  “Skipper, the runway is jammed with people,” Healy called back.

  “Then just build a fire in it here, and launch from this taxiway!” Daly shouted back, at the same time kicking a Vietnamese man in the chest, rolling him backwards off the air stairs as the plane began to move out.

  As Daly struck one man, two more running behind him took his place. He slugged and kicked one man after another off the stairs, trying to close the hatch so that the plane could take off. Finally, Ed Daly drew his pistol and began slapping the onrushing men with the gun’s butt. All the while, Ken Healy had pushed forward the throttles, and the big plane picked up speed down the five-thousand-foot-long taxiway.

  As the jet lumbered forward and gained speed, people ran from its path. One frustrated soldier hurled a hand grenade at the departing aircraft. It exploded on the wing, damaging the flaps.

  Under the plane, legs and bodies dangled from the three wheel wells. Other frantic souls clung to the landing gear struts and tried to stand between the spinning tires. Quickly, many of them fell. Body after body tumbled from beneath the airplane, broken and crushed, and littered the taxiway.

  As the jet developed lift, stretching out its gear, the unlatched cargo doors rattled in the hundred-mile-per-hour wind, and Ed Daly pulled with all his might on the air-stair and hatch cables. He finally managed to secure the ventral door when the last man trying to climb the retractable ladder fell off. At that same second, the 727 picked up its nose, its airspeed finally high enough to lift it off the ground, and began its rotation and climb.

  The normal 525-mile-per-hour, forty-minute flight covering the 350 miles from Da Nang to Saigon took Daly’s badly overloaded plane two hours to journey. An unknown number of people clung on spars and braces inside the wheel wells, so Ken Healy had to leave the gear down. Dozens more had jammed themselves in the cargo holds. With the outer doors ajar and therefore no pressurization, Healy had to keep the plane’s altitude low and airspeed at minimum, flying below ten thousand feet and averaging only 175 miles per hour.

  When Daly’s plane landed at Tan Son Nhut, he had counted 338 people inside the passenger cabin. He had no idea of the numbers who had ridden in the wheel wells and cargo hold.

  A day after the heroic flight, the World Airways boss expressed his disappointment about the mission. He had intended to carry out families, and mostly women and children. In the end, of the 338 accounted passengers, only eleven women and children had managed to get aboard the heroic flight.

  Photographs of a gun-wielding Ed Daly and news of Da Nang’s last flight flashed across the media wires throughout the free world and bannered most newspapers under headlines, “Da Nang Falls.”

  EASTERN BEACHES BELOW MONKEY MOUNTAIN

  “AHOY!” Al Francis shouted happily, keying the microphone on his handheld walkie-talkie. “Ahoy!”

  “Blink your light three times,” a voice on the radio responded.

  Al Francis took the small, pocket-sized penlight that one of the CIA agents had left with him, along with a handheld tactical radio, and flashed it three times at the green, red, and white position lights from the South Vietnamese Navy patrol boat that motored toward him and two British companions.

  “We cannot risk running aground,” the voice came back on the radio. “You’ll have to swim to us.”

  At just past midnight on the morning of March 30, the water washed cold on the consul general’s bare feet as he and two other stranded souls waded into the surf that washed along the beach at Monkey Mountain. As he swam the half mile to the waiting patrol boat, he thought of sharks and other frightening sea predators lurking in the black water. Hammerheads, tigers, white tips, and reefers—they all prowled this tropical sea, and sharks seemed to bite best at night. Although his joy of finally making contact with his rescuers eliminated the feelings of fatigue from his long day’s journey and desperate wait on Monkey Mountain, listening to a walkie-talkie that made no sounds until midnight, the idea of a man-eater careening from the depths and clamping him between its razor teeth helped Al Francis kick the distance with Olympic speed.

  One toss of a life ring tied to a line pulled the American diplomat the final few feet to the waiting boat, where several hands pulled him aboard.

  Walter Sparks learned of Al Francis’s rescue when he arrived at the American embassy in Saigon the next morning. He also learned that several other Americans had managed to drive motorboats from Da Nang to the rendezvous area and had gotten aboard the Pioneer Contender when it returned. Other Americans had also managed to escape aboard the tugboats that rode alongside the Pioneer Contender that night.

  For the next few days, Sparks and his Marines pitched in and lent a hand at the embassy. Soon, along with other nonessential Americans, they caught planes to the Philippines and then on to Okinawa.

  All that they had were the clothes on their backs. They had lost all their personal possessions, including their uniforms. Although Sparks issued protests, citing that their losses were due to their duties, Uncle Sam felt no sympathy for them and offered no form of reimbursement.

  During the two days following Sparks and his Marines’ escape from Da Nang, other Military Sealift Command ships returned to Da Nang, rescuing more than seventy thousand Vietnamese from the coastal waters. Even one day after Da Nang’s fall, on April 1, the Contender’ssister ship, the Pioneer Challenger, sat just beyond the city’s bay taking aboard more evacuees.

  An untold number of South Vietnamese people, ranging well into the thousands, also died trying to escape. Many were killed by their country’s own soldiers.

  When the MSC ship, Greenville Victory, arrived on station behind the Pioneer Contender, the renegade ARVN soldiers who had commandeered a tugboat seized control of the ship when they boarded. The ship’s hijackers forced the captain to sail the vessel to Vung Tao, well away from its ordered destination of Phu Quoc Island, the port that the Saigon government had designated to receive all refugees evacuated by sea from Military Region 1.

  Vice Admiral George P. Steele, commander of the Seventh Fleet, sent a United States Navy cruiser to ride alongside the Greenville Victory’s port side and a United States Navy destroyer to ride at the starboard side. Both warships trained their deck guns on the bridge of the captured ship.

  Near the coastline of Vung Tao, the Greenville Victory dropped its anchor, and the South Vietnamese deserters scampered down the chain and swam for shore.

  Chapter 13

  THE CRUCIBLE OF DA NANG

  DA NANG, RVN—SATURDAY, MARCH 29

  PLUMES OF SMOKE rose from Da Nang, merging into an overcast sky as Colonel Hoang Duc The sat on a stack of ammunition boxes, overlooking the Han River, perched atop the concrete building that had once housed the III Marine Amphibious Force headquarters. The former United States Marine Corps command post sat midway on the Tien Sha Peninsula, north of Marble Mountain, on the riverfront side of the long strand of sand and rock, directly across the water from the American consulate and be
hind the China Beach Sea Load Lines jetty and pier. The commander watched the ongoing destruction through powerful binoculars and listened as a team of his Thirty-eighth Regiment’s forward observers called targets for the Second NVA Division’s artillery and rocket batteries that now held the southern neighborhoods of South Vietnam’s second-largest city in an ever-tightening noose.

  The Communist forces, now advancing behind a full artillery assault, had augmented their firepower with a multitude of 155- and 105-millimeter howitzers that they had captured with massive caches of ammunition and other arms, abandoned by the fleeing First, Second, and Third ARVN divisions and the South Vietnamese Marine brigades. The Americans had brought the great stockpiles of weaponry and munitions and then discarded them to the ARVN when the last United States Army and Marine Corps units exited South Vietnam in 1973. Rather than hauling the war supplies home with them, the departing American forces had cleverly labeled nearly all their still serviceable arms and materiel as “junk” and left it behind. According to the provisions established by the Paris Accords, with the arms stockpile regarded as scrap, the weaponry, munitions, equipment, and vehicles technically did not count as military supply or support.

  As cold mist and fog swirled around Da Nang, that same so-called junk today turned its shock and horror full force against its former owners. Its firepower greatly augmented its new owners, the North Vietnamese forces encircling the city; an army of more than thirty thousand uniformed infantry troops plus their supporting elements, comprised of the Third NVA Division, moving from the north, the 304th NVA Division, closing from the west, and the Second NVA Division and Fifty-second NVA Brigade, advancing from the south. Meanwhile another ten thousand Viet Cong from the Forty-seventh and Ninty-sixth regiments, and the Forty-fourth Line Front brigade had infiltrated Da Nang and now moved through the streets from the eastern water-fronts toward its heart.

  Directly across the river from the United States Consulate, the NVA colonel watched flames and smoke boiling from the American compound. Despite the blaze, that morning a lieutenant had reported to him that a company of Viet Cong from the Forty-fourth Line Front had entered the consulate and had found one of the radios intact and still operating. They had used the system to signal Saigon.

  An unsuspecting voice asked, “How are things going in Da Nang?”

  The gleeful Viet Cong then passed to him a message for Nguyen Van Thieu: “Tell your president that Da Nang now resides securely in the hands of liberation soldiers.”

  All along the river, Colonel The could see hundreds of thousands of people crowded on the street above the seawall and along the Han River’s edge. Barges, tugs, fishing launches, sailboats, and even outboard motor skiffs maneuvered under a hail of gunfire. Dead bodies littered the water and floated in reefs like drifting trash among the ten thousand large and small vessels crammed with standing passengers.

  The commander of the Thirty-eighth NVA Regiment did not like looking at the human tragedy unfolding on the river and turned his field glasses away from that scene and panned his view across the bay. He brought the binocular lenses in focus on the deepwater docks at the peninsula’s end, below Mong Ky Mountain, which the Americans had come to term Monkey Mountain.

  South Vietnamese Navy swift boats and patrol cutters still ran in and out of the long concrete docks at Monkey Mountain’s Thong Nhat Allied Piers and Market Time Swift Boat Base. As Colonel The looked more closely, he could see dozens of tiny silhouettes of men darting among the buildings and along the roadway that serviced the various docks.

  “ARVN soldiers,” he told himself, watching the men scurry from place to place. “They have retreated to this bitter end and have no place else to run.”

  The NVA colonel told his forward observers to instruct the artillery batteries to immediately engage the docks as primary targets. In a moment, a shower of American-made 105-millimeter artillery rounds, descending through a chilly drizzle that had now begun to fall, rained on the new impact area. Spotter rounds found the distance, and hastily the observers called their gunners to fire for effect. Quickly, the salvos began turning the naval facility to rubble.

  THONG NHAT ALLIED PIERS AT MONKEY MOUNTAIN

  “GENERAL TRUONG!” the major cried to his commander. “We cannot stay here any longer. Their artillery has found its range and has us bracketed. They will soon fire for effect.”

  Lieutenant General Ngo Quang Truong rose from the deck chair where he had sat, watching the smoke rising from Da Nang. His heart had sunk as he saw the explosions of direct hits on what he estimated was his former headquarters compound, beyond Da Nang Bay, across the city, near the airport. He had heard far too many reports about how his command had run amuck and how hundreds of his soldiers roved in armed bands, raping and murdering Da Nang’s own citizens and callously looting anything of value. The shame of it burned deeply in his heart.

  American Consul General Al Francis had seen the general a few minutes earlier, just as the first artillery rounds began to strike near the fences and in the water, sending the South Vietnamese Navy swift boats and patrol cutters hastily to sea. Two British social workers had accompanied him here from Marble Mountain.

  The pair of Brits and a German missionary had come to Francis’s aid when a group of South Vietnamese soldiers had attacked him. The angry and exhausted American told General Truong how the soldiers appeared from nowhere, attempting to commandeer an airplane he had just loaded with evacuees. He had single-handedly fought the renegade band away from the aircraft, allowing it to taxi beyond their reach and then take off. The soldiers then retaliated on Francis, beating the consul general and leaving him lying limp on the Marble Mountain air facility taxiway.

  His face now badly swollen and bruised, Francis and his two British companions asked the general if he had any barges or boats they could use. The American pled his case, explaining that many more people, among them several American and British citizens, desperately needed to escape.

  A CIA logistician whom some of the Marines had jokingly come to call Oppie at last report sat trapped in the office at the American commissary supply warehouse compound with a mob of more than three thousand angry Vietnamese outside his window. He had radio contact with other agents, but had no way out except by his own wit.

  In another incident, rioting Chinese Nung guards whom the CIA had employed to provide security for their residential compound, at the corner of Gia Dinh and Le Loi streets, had opened fire on two American agents who had sneaked over the facility’s back wall in an attempt to retrieve some of their personal belongings. The two men managed to dodge the hail of automatic-rifle fire and escaped in a mad, broken-field dash through the front gates with only their lives. Their whereabouts in the city also remained unknown.

  Then, at last count, Francis said that he knew of approximately one dozen USAID employees, along with some British and German social workers and several South Korean diplomatic visitors, stranded near the ferry landing on the Han River across the street from the blazing consulate. Now with the intensive NVA shelling that had commenced, they faced great peril in their location.

  Dejectedly, General Truong expressed his regrets to Al Francis. He had nothing to offer, not a barge nor even a small boat. He no longer even had an army.

  The American diplomat had seemed surprised when he first saw General Truong. He had thought that the MR 1 commander had fled to Saigon with his staff a day ago. Truong had then told Francis that he had only gone to the Monkey Mountain seaport to try and regroup his forces. He had not given up after all, at least not until he finally realized that he no longer had any forces.

  “This handful of soldiers, my loyal friends, this is all that now remains of my command,” Truong said sadly, pointing to a haggard partial company of ARVN troops armed only with a few rifles and hardly any ammunition.

  Francis and his companions bid farewell to the general and his command and then jogged up the concrete roadway that fronted the piers and crossed through the fence at a small
pedestrian gate that opened to the beach. The trio ran along the outwardly curving sand and then disappeared around a rocky point.

  Through the cold rain, while artillery rounds fired from his own guns began to focus on their target and increase in intensity, General Truong and his aide, followed by his loyal troop of fewer than a hundred soldiers, ran along the beach, northward from the concrete piers. The men followed the tracks left by Al Francis and his British friends, around the rocky point, and soon put the extended fingers of Monkey Mountain between them and the artillery that now fired for effect into the heart of the Tien Sha Ramp, the Market Time Swift Boat Base, and the Thong Nhat Allied Piers.

  “I cannot swim,” General Truong said, embarrassment sweeping over him as he watched his aide stripping off his boots.

  “I will help you, sir,” the aide said. “Hold to my back, and I will swim for both of us.”

  A small South Vietnamese Navy patrol boat bobbed in the waves just beyond the surf line, waiting on the two officers and a randomly chosen dozen of his loyal men to swim to it. The skipper of the vessel had recognized the general jogging on the beach and knew well that he could not allow the man to fall prisoner to the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong. He had his crewmen wave their hats and T-shirts at the string of men on the beach and beckoned them to swim to the boat.

  General Truong at first tried to order as many of his men as he estimated that the boat could carry to leave ahead of him. They could then send for other boats to rescue those who remained on the beach with him. None of the soldiers would hear of it, however, and they urged the general to forget his compassion for them and to get aboard first. They would wait for him to send another boat for them.