Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  NEAR THE ARVN TWENTY-FIFTH DIVISION AT CU CHI

  IN THE PITCH darkness of the forest, Le Van Reung stared at the radium dial of his Timex wristwatch. In the moonless night its face glowed so brightly that he had to squint to look at it. At one o’clock in the morning, he and his squad had made good time from the camp where his brigade commander awaited their return. His unit, with a regiment from the 320th Division, had traveled on foot for twelve hours a day during the past week, moving secretly from Ban Me Thuot southward along the Cambodian border. Now Reung and his twelve guerrillas slipped through the night to take reconnaissance positions outside Cu Chi at the ARVN Twenty-fifth Division’s Dong Zu Base.

  The remainder of the 320th NVA Division had joined with elements of the 316th and 10th NVA divisions and then moved openly down Highways 14 and 21 toward their next series of objectives that culminated at Nha Trang. Above them, Colonel Huang Duc The had led his Thirty-eighth NVA Regiment as the spearhead unit for the Second NVA Division and raced down Highway 1, consuming Binh Dinh, Phu Cat, and the port cities of Qui Nhon and Tuy Hoa. They had encountered the Twenty-second ARVN Division at Binh Dinh and had chased them to Qui Nhon, where the South Vietnamese soldiers had finally fled and evacuated by sea.

  Converging at Nha Trang, Colonel The and the Second NVA Division would join sixteen other North Vietnamese divisions along a line that extended westward from Cam Ranh Bay to Cambodia. Meanwhile, far to the south, six more NVA divisions converged along the southern flank. From these new lines of departure, they would ultimately close on Saigon from five fronts.

  As the northern units hastened to Nha Trang, tens of thousands of peasants streamed along both sides of the roadways where the North Vietnamese divisions traveled. Their trucks festooned with flags and victory banners, and honking their horns incessantly, the Communist units pushed past the crowds of refugees, rarely stopping to even question the people. Riding in the vehicles’ beds, North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong soldiers waved at the crowds and cheered. The peasants smiled politely and returned the gestures, but still plodded southward toward Saigon.

  “How many of the big guns do you see,” Reung whispered to a comrade who peered through a captured American starlight scope assessing several batteries of ARVN 175-millimeter artillery laid across the camp.

  “So many I cannot count them,” the guerrilla answered.

  “Count the tubes,” Reung said. “How many tubes do you see?”

  “Seven tubes, but it looks like much more than only seven,” the Viet Cong looking through the night-vision device said.

  “Here, let me see,” Reung told his comrade and took the starlight scope and put it to his eye.

  The green and black outlines looked distorted through the night-seeingoptic that gathered starlight and moonlight and amplified it in a luminescent monochrome green color. Silhouettes and glowing images confused his eyesight until his vision finally adjusted to the picture it saw.

  “From the left I count seven long tubes on stationary guns, the 175-millimeter pieces,” Reung said. “They cannot easily move those.”

  Then he shifted the scope to the right.

  “I count seven more long tubes, but these extend from tracked vehicles. They move easily,” Reung said. “Those guns on these mobile artillery pieces fire either 175-millimeter or 155-millimeter rounds. I cannot tell with this awful telescope. No matter, though. Whichever they shoot, I do not like them. They cause terrible damage. I also see many tanks, mostly the smaller M48 series, but they have a few of the larger M60 main battle tanks too. Those big ones are useless in these forests. The smaller ones can maneuver somewhat, but not very well.”

  “With all of this armor and artillery here, clearly they anticipate our attack from this point,” the guerrilla said.

  “Perhaps,” Reung said, counting tanks under his breath. “Then perhaps they anticipate our attack from the north, along the coastline, and have these units standing in reserve so that they can maneuver reinforcements where they may need them.”

  “Our people and the regiment from the 320th Division have only B- 40 rocket grenades and B-41 artillery. How can we attack such heavy armor as they have here?” the soldier asked his leader.

  “We can take them in the trees,” Reung said and smiled.

  ON HIGHWAY 1 AT NHA TRANG

  DAVID KENNERLY HAD arrived in Nha Trang at midday on Monday greeted by turmoil. The highway reminded him of the parking lot at the Super Bowl, except the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd extended for as far as the photographer could see. Then today, thunder had awakened him before dawn. He saw no clouds and quickly realized that the North Vietnamese had begun shelling the city. The pushing and jostling of the hundreds of thousands of refugees on the roadway and in the city square suddenly turned to a panic-driven stampede.

  Two days earlier, the ARVN’s Third Airborne Brigade had tried to make a stand where their units straddled Highway 21 below An Khe Pass, serving as a blocking force for the ARVN garrison defending Nha Trang. For the last two weeks of March, the North Vietnamese had shown them no activity. Then the day that Da Nang fell, battalions from the 320th, 316th, and 10th NVA divisions came roaring down their throats.

  Lieutenant Colonel Truong Quang Thi had led his light infantry battalion back to the top of An Khe Pass after its victory at Cheo Reo. While other battalions of the 320th NVA Division mopped up at Ban Me Thuot, Cheo Reo, Pleiku, and Kontum, his unit marched back to their post atop the highest point on Highway 21, ready to react should the remaining ARVN in the coastal regions attempt any counteroffensives.

  When the day came to finally strike the ARVN Third Airborne Brigade, positioned down the slope from Truong’s battalion, his soldiers led the charge.

  With mortar volleys into the ARVN bunkers and followed by superficial probes by small units of his infantry, Truong Quang Thi succeeded in drawing several companies of the enemy forces into a counterattack up the pass where the bulk of his NVA battalion waited. His ambush worked perfectly, and his warriors decimated the pursuing units who had given his soldiers chase.

  “When I was still a boy,” Truong told his officers that evening as they quietly celebrated that first day’s victory, “many of our fathers who fought beside Chairman Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap achieved one of their greatest victories at this very place. They held this same ground where our battalion now stands and annihilated an entire division of French Union soldiers using the same ploy as we did today.”

  The Communist soldiers smiled proudly, hearing this history that several of them already knew from their school days in Hanoi.

  “The French Union Army had several regiments also garrisoned at Kontum,” the lieutenant colonel continued. “The embattled division called them for help, believing that they could attack our fathers from two sides. This narrow highway and steep terrain proved their undoing, and our Viet Minh army decimated those regiments too.”

  The following day, Truong Quang Thi mobilized his battalion before dawn and struck the heart of the Third Airborne Brigade with the full force of his battalion. Just as David smote Goliath with a stone, Truong’s light infantry sent the much larger ARVN unit reeling.

  When the Third Airborne Brigade’s leaders saw that not only did they face a very determined NVA battalion, but behind it came nearly three enemy divisions, the ARVN folded their tents and ran toward the sea. Upon reaching Nha Trang, without word to anyone, the brigade’s command group boarded helicopters and fled south. The remaining units, in disarray, splintered and fled on foot and by boat.

  As David Hume Kennerly hurried to the airport that same Tuesday morning to also flee from Nha Trang, Lieutenant Colonel Truong Quang Thi and his battalion already stood on the hilltops outside the city. The NVA commander could see the airfield from where he sat and watched the busy aircraft traffic amidst the incoming shells of his division’s artillery.

  With a bag full of exposed film hanging off his shoulder and three cameras dangling from his neck, the White House photograph
er boarded his outbound Air America chopper flight to Saigon.

  “I think this is it,” he shouted to the pilot as he sat in the jump seat behind the Huey helicopter’s center console.

  “It what?” the pilot said, easing upward with the collective handle, turning the power full throttle, and easing the cyclic control forward for takeoff.

  “The war,” Kennerly said. “The handwriting’s on the wall. The North Vietnamese will be in Saigon in a matter of weeks.”

  CAM NE HAMLET, SOUTH OF DA NANG

  WITH HIS FORCE of 450 poorly armed Viet Marines hiding in the trees just beyond the checkerboard of rice paddies north of the Cam Ne hamlet complex, Lieutenant Colonel Tran Ngoc Toan slipped quietly to the darkened farmhouse. He heard a man try to muffle a cough inside, so he approached in the shadows and peered in the window.

  Squatting by the doorway, an old friend sat with an American M14 rifle pointed into the night. He had heard the Marine approaching, but had not yet seen the intruder.

  “Nguyen!” the colonel called in a loud whisper to the older man. “Chu hoi! Chu hoi! I surrender! Don’t shoot.”

  The man with the rifle relaxed and smiled.

  “Toan, I thought you died at Hue!” Nguyen said and immediately hugged his friend when he walked around the corner of the farmhouse.

  The old farmer had once led Viet Marines when their corps first began, training under the caring and proud hands of the United States Marines based at Da Nang. He had risen to the rank of brigade sergeant major and then retired to what he had hoped would be a quiet life of growing rice in the shadow of Hill 55, southwest of Da Nang.

  “I knew you would not run,” the lieutenant colonel said to the sergeant major. “I am saddened that you did not, but I am glad for the sake of my 450 men who wait among the trees that you have held your ground.”

  “I am sure the dirty bastards will eventually seek me out and kill me, as they have murdered so many of our brothers around here,” Nguyen said. “I intend to take as many with me as I have rounds for this rifle. Then I will detonate two cases of hand grenades that I have hidden under the floor. I will trip the wire once I get my house full of the scum. I will blow them all to hell with me.”

  “You should come with us,” Toan told his friend. “We could use your grenades, and your leadership.”

  “Do you intend to start your own guerrilla war with these imbeciles?” the sergeant major said and laughed.

  “I intend to lead these Marines to Saigon, if necessary, where we can regroup with our brigades and send these monsters back to Hanoi, wrapped in sheets,” Toan said.

  “As ignorant peasants, we fools who toil in the rice fields have great freedom to move about while our North Vietnamese lords ride along the roadways,” Nguyen said. “My neighbors, who are also my trusted friends, tell me the latest news that the soldiers tell them as they invite them in their homes to dine. Sadly, my brother, we have no more Marine Corps. All but a few who fled to Saigon and joined what is left of the 468th Brigade there have either died fighting these curs, or have gone to Khe Sanh or right here to Hill 327 as prisoners.”

  “What of the great line of defense from Nha Trang, cordoning off Saigon?” Toan asked.

  “I know nothing of any defense,” the sergeant major said. “All that I hear told describes the panic that jams all highways southward.”

  “We will not surrender,” the lieutenant colonel said, sighing in the darkness, sitting cross-legged on the floor by his old friend.

  “Everyone speaks of the American evacuation,” the sergeant major said. “They have many great cargo ships off the coastline, and thousands of people have gotten on boats to escape to the United States. Perhaps you may pursue that option if you can manage to sneak more than three hundred miles on foot without being arrested or shot. That is how far I estimate you must travel to reach friendly lines, if they still exist when you get there. At any rate, I am staying here. I cannot walk three hundred miles, but I can damned sure fight!”

  The lieutenant colonel took his friend by the shoulder and squeezed it with his hand. He knew the old man was right and would rather die fighting than to succumb to exhaustion while running away.

  “We cannot sneak very far down Highway 1 wearing these tiger-stripe uniforms,” Toan said.

  “Have your men strip and bury those clothes and their helmets tonight,” the sergeant major said, “and I will bring you as much peasant clothing as my trusted friends and I can gather from our closets or steal from our not so trustworthy neighbors. Most of them have abandoned their homes anyway, so they will never miss the articles. For now, I will go with you back to your hiding place with what clothes I have here. Perhaps those men who will wear them can then come with me to visit my friends and raid a few vacated houses.”

  By dawn, Tran Ngoc Toan and his 450 Marines had buried their uniforms and had dressed themselves as peasants, hiding their faces under wide-brimmed conical straw hats. They filled their pockets with grenades from the two cases hoarded by the old sergeant major, leaving him six for his planned self-destruction and final attack on the Vietnamese Communists. Marines who carried sidearms threw away their gun belts and holsters along with their helmets and other gear, filled their pockets with ammunition, and tucked the pistols in their trousers’ waistbands. Those men who had carried rifles buried them and everything else they discarded.

  Cautiously the Viet Marines slipped through the forest and across the rice paddies following their colonel and, in groups of two, three, and four, melded into the massive sea of peasants still streaming southward.

  Chapter 16

  RACE FROM NHA TRANG

  NHA TRANG, RVN—TUESDAY, APRIL 1

  “THE BOOGERMAN’S A coming,” Staff Sergeant Roger Painter called into the room where two of his five American Consulate Marines had just rolled from their cots, suddenly awakened not only by their boss’s shout, but by the rumbles of the distant artillery crunching in the hills northwest of Nha Trang. “It’s no April Fools’ joke, sports fans. This is the real deal. Hustle down to the conference room ASAP. The skipper wants us there five minutes ago.”

  When the corporal on watch had heard the first rounds impact, he had immediately notified Painter, the Nha Trang consulate security force’s Marine NCO in charge. The staff sergeant, in turn, had called Consul General Moncrieff Spear.

  After a telephone call to the American embassy in Saigon, Spear faced the reality of the moment. Nha Trang today stood in immediate peril. Based on the intensity and nearness of the gunfire, the North Vietnamese Army could move on the city by sunset.

  The soft-spoken diplomat had stubbornly held faith in Major General Pham Van Phu’s albeit badly decimated II Army Corps, which now amounted to hardly more than remnants of the defeated Twenty-second ARVN Division, who had fled to the sea at Qui Nhon, and the Third Airborne Brigade, now beaten on Highway 21 and themselves running. While the northern provinces and Central Highlands collapsed, Spear had gone out of his way to avoid raising sensitivities among Nha Trang’s population by not sending a massive exodus of staff to Saigon. As provinces fell, he quietly allowed the workers from those outlying offices to proceed to Saigon. However, he did not send their corresponding workers at Nha Trang south as well. Thus, as more and more satellites closed, more and more of his consular staff found themselves searching for matters to keep themselves busy. He also had not bothered to have the emergency evacuation plan dusted off, or even updated.

  Meanwhile, the small, cliquish American community in Nha Trang began to rumble with concern despite Spear’s efforts to quell public discontent by preaching to them Ambassador Graham A. Martin’s party line of reassuring rhetoric. Each day, more and more of the concerned citizens came knocking on the consulate door, begging for Air America seats to safer climes. Then with the sudden fall of Da Nang came the flood of demands for outbound seats. By then the opportunity to establish a sound or even reasonable evacuation process had literally overnight been overtaken by events.

&nbs
p; In a matter of days the Nha Trang consulate swelled with transient CIA and USAID workers en route from Da Nang, who stopped there for a respite and had now gotten themselves stranded. Other similar recent arrivals used the consulate as a base of operations in their support functions at nearby Cam Ranh Bay, where the South Vietnamese government had established a refugee center.

  When April dawned in Nha Trang, the consulate found itself in a pickle. With the NVA’s artillery thundering in the nearby hills, the massive exodus from the beautiful seafront city became overwhelming. Air America, Bird Airways, and World Airways could not cram enough planes into the pattern fast enough to accommodate the rush.

  Pham Van Phu and his staff had several days earlier laid their plan of giving up Nha Trang, but had kept it tightly under wraps. The diminutive general had told his subordinate commanders to hold the front only long enough for him and his staff to depart, and then he could not care less what happened, especially to the Americans.

  When General Fred Weyand had visited Phu at his headquarters on the first stop of his fact-finding mission, the MR 2 and II ARVN Corps commander had assured the American army’s chief of staff that Nha Trang would stand. With their backs to the sea, Phu said his army would hold off the NVA on a line north of the city. He had told the American a wonderful and most gracious straight-faced lie. The American then conveyed that lie to the public, saying to reporters who trailed him, “The South Vietnamese forces are not demoralized in any sense of the word.”

  When April 1 dawned in Nha Trang, the only ARVN forces anyone could see had deserted their posts when their leaders had boarded planes for Saigon. The desperate soldiers ran amok as their fellow ARVN had done in Da Nang. They held people at gunpoint, robbing them of any gold they carried, raped the women, and murdered the men. These former saviors of the South Vietnamese people commandeered any form of transport they saw and fled south or out to sea.