At the airport, roving bands of ARVN deserters soon began attacking the aircraft that landed and forced their passage aboard several flights. By midafternoon, as the NVA now landed artillery shells in the city itself, no safe place existed in Nha Trang.
Admiral Noel A. M. Gayler, United States Navy, commander in chief, Pacific, and operational commander of the United States Support Activities Group, read an intelligence report from Tom Polger, the CIA station chief in Saigon, issued with a message date-time group of 1 April 75, that said that with the NVA pressure now exerted against the ARVN defensive forces in MR 2, Nha Trang would fall in the next two to seven days. The admiral immediately sent a message to Rear Admiral Donald E. Whitmire, commander of Navy Task Force 76, directing him to send helicopter landing ships to lie one mile off Nha Trang’s coast, should the Americans at the consulate there need evacuation.
No one at the American consulate in Nha Trang ever saw either message. Phil Cook, the consulate deputy, had by early afternoon put the Marines to work shredding and burning everything classified and destroying all encrypting equipment. They did, however, maintain their communications center radios and telephones.
As he did the first thing each day, Cook had gone to Major General Pham Van Phu’s headquarters for his regular morning briefing. There he encountered not the swaggering peacock general, but a man on the brink of nervous breakdown. Phu stood before the American diplomat broken and disheveled. In the city, the mayor had already dismantled the police force and government, in his own mental collapse, and now on the telephone begged and sobbed for the general to send soldiers to save him. At the same time Phu’s army had just lost its last skirmishes with the 10th and 320th NVA divisions, which now bore down upon Nha Trang like an avalanche. With Phil Cook now presenting a new thorn in his side, the general could not rid himself of the consulate deputy fast enough.
With the artillery closing fast, and the army headquarters already looking like a ghost town, no one had to tell Phil Cook what he needed to do next.
As the American drove away, Pham Van Phu exploded from his office in a rage. “Get out!” he shouted to the few loyal soldiers who had remained near him. “Get out now!”
Without even taking his hat, the mad general ran from his office and out of the headquarters building to where his helicopter sat.
“Get out!” he screamed again in the courtyard and then ran for the chopper.
Major General Phu would later claim that he had simply relocated his headquarters to Phan Thiet. One other passenger had managed to board the general’s Huey just as it lifted off, an NCO academy instructor. If Phu had truly moved his headquarters as he claimed, then the single soldier represented the army that he now led.
By the time Phil Cook had reached the American consulate, his suspicions drove him straight to the telephone where he tried to reach the MR 2 commander. No one answered. Wanting to make certain of what his gut shouted to his mind, the consular deputy drove back to the ARVN II Corps headquarters and now found it deserted.
He immediately called Moncrieff Spear by radio and urged him to consider without delay breaking and burning, and getting the hell out of town. The ARVN had already fled, and no one now stood between the NVA and Nha Trang.
With so much poor planning and little thought toward evacuation, the departure from the American consulate quickly degenerated to chaos.
Hardly any of the Vietnamese who had worked as valued field agents for the CIA had even received contact. All of these people would certainly meet with an executioner’s bullet if they fell into the Communists’ hands. While the intelligence agency’s senior field supervisor grabbed his staff and choppered to the Nha Trang airfield, a handful of his younger, more conscience-prone subordinates backed off boarding their Saigon-bound plane and returned to the consulate, driven by strong feelings of collective guilt from seeing the agency now abandoning these people.
Riding a helicopter back to the consulate, the young CIA agents teamed with an agent from the DAO and through the day made repeated forays into the city, seeking out their endangered Vietnamese colleagues. One by one the American agents encountered these trusted friends and employees, often finding them waiting at designated rally points as instructed by their handlers’ standing operating procedures and emergency contingency plans. Without the young, conscience-driven Americans seeking out and evacuating their Vietnamese partners, these people would have very likely suffered summary executions much like those currently happening to so many like them in Da Nang.
While the DAO and CIA agents made their humanitarian excursions back and forth into Nha Trang through a hole in the consulate fence, hidden by shrubs and overlooked for repairs, Staff Sergeant Painter and his five Marines found themselves almost overwhelmed trying to stem the flow of Vietnamese slipping through the consulate gates and over its high, chain-link fence. When the first helicopter had landed in the consulate parking lot, a surge of more than a hundred people blew through the front gate. Someone had forgotten to lock it.
It took all five Marines and several of the CIA and DAO staff to shove it shut again. Then, as one person turned his back from one breach to stop another, a new group of Vietnamese filtered through.
As the Air America helicopters ferried load after load of passengers from the consulate parking lot to the Nha Trang airport terminal, the number of Vietnamese passengers who remained for transport there seemed to grow rather than shrink. Phil Cook began to lose his patience and told the Marines to crack down and keep the people from slipping through or over the fence.
As Staff Sergeant Painter and his Marines turned from diplomatic nice guys to club-wielding aggressors, now accompanying stern orders with smashing billy club shots to shoulders, heads, and faces, the crowds outside the consulate, now numbering in the thousands, turned vicious. They began tearing angrily at the gates and fences.
Mild-mannered Consul General Moncrieff Spear had sat in his office, agitated at seeing the CIA and DAO staff repeatedly slipping back to the helicopter assembly area with new faces in tow each time. The Marines also agitated him, seeing the sentries now slapping people back with blood-marred police batons and threatening them with shot-guns.
Everything had fallen into disarray. With the sun lying low above the mountains, it seemed to him that the entire day had failed itself. It had begun badly and had gotten worse.
Then when the telephone rang, and George Jacobson, the Saigon embassy’s field operations special assistant to Ambassador Martin, told him to get out now, he did just that. The tall, often soft-spoken diplomat slipped on a hogleg pistol nosed into a black leather shoulder holster and bounded down the stairs. Without a word to anyone, he left on the next helicopter bound to the Nha Trang air terminal, leaving all his woes and chaos behind in the unruly consulate parking lot.
A half hour later, Phil Cook came knocking on the consul general’s door and found the boss gone. He called George Jacobson in Saigon, who then told him that Spear had followed orders and that he should too.
“Get your staff, and get those Marines, and get the hell out of there now,” Jacobson growled. “That’s an order.”
By six o’clock, Phil Cook had loaded out the last passengers and began gathering his American cohorts who had helped him supervise the impromptu evacuation from the consulate parking lot while Roger Painter and his Marines held their fingers in the dike. The last flight out would be hairy since the men holding back the angry human tide would no longer stand in that breach. Thus every moment counted.
With bags in hand, Staff Sergeant Painter, Sergeant Michael A. McCormick, and Corporals Robert L. Anderson, John G. Moya, Levorn L. Brown, and Jimmie D. Sneed bounded up the back ramp of the Air America CH-47 Chinook helicopter, and bid farewell to the consulate.
“Go ahead and get your men on that plane,” Phil Cook told Roger Painter when the helicopter ramp came down on the tarmac at Nha Trang airport. The Marine looked down the concrete apron where a silver with blue trim Air America Volpar Turbo Beech
18 executive twin aircraft sat with its left engine softly whistling at idle while it waited for passengers.
“Grab a seat anywhere,” Painter shouted as he led the five men to the plane.
The aircraft’s copilot climbed down the steps on the side hatch and waved to the Marines, each with a satchel of their clothing in one hand and a rifle or shotgun in the other. He stood by the fuselage beneath the aircraft’s twin tail and shouted at the staff sergeant, “Drop your bags here by the cargo door, and get your men inside.”
Staff Sergeant Painter looked back at his Marines and began running them aboard, and then stopped.
“Sergeant McCormick,” he said. “I need you to jump back on that chopper before it leaves and get back to the consulate. We left our service record books and pay records on the front desk. We’re screwed without those! Especially the pay records. We’ll sit tight until you get back!”
McCormick dropped his valise by the others and glanced up at the plane’s tail section where he took a mental picture of the white letters Air America painted on the fuselage above the aircraft’s registry, N3674G. Then with his rifle in hand he ran for the helicopter that had now begun to rev its twin rotors for takeoff.
“Can you get one last trip to the consulate for me?” he shouted to the pilot.
“I can get you there, but I have no fuel to wait,” the pilot said. “I am heading for Cam Ranh after that.”
“Fine,” McCormick said and climbed aboard.
In a matter of minutes, the big chopper set down on the consulate parking lot and lifted away just as the Marine’s feet hit the ground. Already, in only a matter of ten minutes, Vietnamese had begun to tear down the fence, hoping to get aboard any other helicopters that might happen to land.
Grabbing the stack of manila folders on the security office’s front desk, the Marine ducked out the consulate’s side door, away from the people who had already managed to break through the fence. They ran into the vacated building and began trashing several stacks of files that had not made it to the burn barrel before the consulate staff’s hasty departure.
Mike McCormick didn’t look back, but found the hole in the fence, behind the shrubs, where the CIA and DAO agents had made their forays and ducked out into the darkening city. With six sets of Marine Corps service record books and pay records under his arm, the young sergeant began jogging a straight shot back to Nha Trang airport.
“Where’s a cyclo when you need one?” he said to himself, looking for one of the normally hundreds of bicycle-driven carriages that had until this evening crowded Nha Trang’s streets. He looked at his wristwatchas he jogged and saw that his few-minutes journey back to the consulate had already taken nearly half an hour.
“They had better wait,” he told himself as he now began to sprint, clutching the records tight and pumping the rifle with his other hand as he ran.
NHA TRANG AIRPORT TERMINAL
MONCRIEFF SPEAR PACED the now blockaded Nha Trang terminal nervously, at one point tripping over the feet of the DAO officer who had made several of the forays after Vietnamese friends earlier that day. He snapped at the man, who then burst into laughter. The sight and now growling of the gangly, otherwise soft-spoken diplomat, with the loosely strung shoulder-holstered hogleg pistol slapping his ribs as he paced had sent the young defense attaché assistant over the edge. The tension simply broke.
“Just us left,” Spear said, taking a quick appraisal of the terminal. “Good. Our helicopter should be here any second.”
Outside, hordes of Vietnamese civilians with suitcases and boxes stacked beyond belief huddled all along the terminal boarding areas. Beyond them bands of armed ARVN soldiers, now desperate for escape, roamed the tarmac, ready to take on any challengers.
With immediate security falling quickly apart, the consul general had ordered that when the next aircraft landed, it should taxi discretely to the opposite end of the airfield, far from any roving bands. He had then ordered a helicopter to set down at the side of the terminal where he and the remaining handful of Americans could scramble aboard. The chopper would then ferry the last of his staff to the waiting Air America Volpar.
Just as the Air America Chinook’s wheels touched the concrete outside the terminal, Spear, Phil Cook, and a handful of other Americans scrambled inside its open side hatch. It lifted off the ground just as a thousand Vietnamese rushed for a departing ride.
Marine Corporal Jimmie Sneed stood guard outside the door of the Air America plane and snapped to attention when he saw Consul General Spear and the others dash toward him. Appropriately, he crisply saluted his boss by presenting arms with the Remington 870 riot-model 12-gauge shotgun with which he stood his sentry watch while waiting on Sergeant McCormick to return.
Moncrieff Spear dashed aboard ahead of everyone else and strapped himself into the forward seat.
“Give us just a couple more minutes, sir,” Staff Sergeant Painter said to Phil Cook as the last American climbed aboard. “I have a man inbound and should be here any minute. We cannot leave a Marine behind.”
“Right,” Cook said, saddling himself into one of the empty seats and finally relaxing after running nonstop for the past fourteen hours.
With the evening light fading quickly to darkness, Jimmie Sneed did not see the gaggle of desperate ARVN stragglers running at the plane until they had already reached him and their leader had put the cold, steel end of his rifle to the Marine’s head. Not hesitating to think, the corporal shoved his shotgun’s barrel straight up and caught the ARVN lieutenant under the chin with its muzzle.
“Back off,” Sneed said to him. “That plane’s full of armed United States Marines who will slaughter your men once I blow off your head.”
The lieutenant suddenly smiled and raised his hands, holding his rifle above his head. He stepped back from the aircraft, and then he and his men ran back toward the terminal’s floodlights.
“Gentlemen,” Moncrieff Spear shouted from his seat, where he had sat by the window and had watched the frightening exchange. “We’re leaving! Now!”
“Sir, Sergeant McCormick!” Staff Sergeant Painter shouted. “We cannot leave a Marine behind. We never.”
“You will tonight, or you and your Marines can get off and find other accommodations,” Spear snapped without looking back.
“Get in the plane, Corporal Sneed,” the staff sergeant then said, leaning out the door. “First, make sure you clear your weapon outside.”
The corporal smiled and began jacking the shotgun’s pump action back, expecting to see a shower of aught-four buckshot cartridges spit out of it. His heart had nearly stopped when he looked into the wide eyes of his staff sergeant.
“Don’t tell me that damned gun was empty!” Painter growled at the corporal.
“I guess I forgot to load it this morning,” Sneed said with a sick smile as he handed the empty weapon to the staff sergeant and climbed inside the plane.
SWEAT STREAMED DOWN Mike McCormick’s face as he ran down the airport apron, past the active runway and to the far taxiway and fence line where he had left his fellow Marines waiting. He still had all their pay records and SRBs tightly in his clutch.
He jogged across the spot three times, his head turning 360 degrees as he ran, and found nothing but bare concrete and asphalt. His bag was gone. The plane was gone.
“I knew it!” he cried out. “I damned well knew it. They left me here to die!”
He looked at the floodlights of the terminal and watched the crowd that had again settled in to wait. The sky had fallen silent, and the artillery had stopped. One silhouette of a man taller than the other people stood off the corner of the building, marking his position by the glow of the cigarette that he smoked. He didn’t look Vietnamese.
“Leave me like this,” McCormick said under his breath as he began to jog, heading toward the light and the tall man standing in the shadows a few yards from the side of the building. “If I die, they will go home poor. Without pay records, they’re screwed.”
The idea of even that low level of revenge at leaving him behind made the Marine feel better about his situation. Only very slightly better.
“Ah, another friendly,” the man said, seeing McCormick jog toward him. “I thought that I had the honor of the last man out.”
“Not much honor in that,” the sergeant said, smiling through his sweat-dripping face. “I ran from the consulate, and they were supposed to wait for me.”
“I saw the plane take off nearly half an hour ago,” the stranger said. “I tried to catch it too. Luckily, I have my trusty little handheld and managed to raise Air America at Cam Ranh. They’ve diverted an inbound flight to drop in and swoop us out. I’m afraid you’ll have to put in a little more PT before we sit down. We’ve got to get out to the far runway when we hear his engine. He won’t wait.”
“Let’s go now,” McCormick said anxiously.
“Give it a few minutes more,” the stranger said calmly. “We don’t want to draw a crowd, or gunfire, do we? I think we can run the distance between the time we hear his engine and he sets down out there.”
The tall man had hardly finished his words when the distant beat of a Huey caught McCormick’s attention. “Like now,” he said.
Both Americans quietly walked into the darkness and then ran for all their worth. When the UH-1N twin-turbine utility helicopter flashed on its landing light, it caught the two men waving happily at it from the runway’s center stripe.
Like diving out of a hot LZ, the two new friends bellied aboard the chopper as it tilted its nose and raced skyward. Beating the air as it climbed, the Huey streaked past a suddenly stirred crowd that charged after the aircraft.
Goodnight Saigon Page 31
