Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  The sergeant major trudged onward and looked out the corner of his eye, watching more of the trucks roll past him.

  “I too fear for our home.”

  ALGIERS, DEMOCRATIC AND POPULAR REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN of the international press, please listen,” Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, spokeswoman and foreign minister for the Provisional Revolutionary Government, said in an Algiers hotel conference suite. “We understand that General Duong Van Minh has offered to negotiate peace on behalf of the Saigon regime. We are anxious to talk with him. He speaks a voice of reason within the corrupt government of Nguyen Van Thieu, who leads our people daily to more needless suffering. We hope very much that peace can be achieved with Big Minh representing Saigon.”

  Her news conference ended without questions. It cast another empty peace overture toward the West and set Capitol Hill strategists scrambling. Perhaps a negotiated settlement with North Vietnam had not lost all hope. They readily bought the ploy that Nguyen Van Thieu, from the Communists’ perspective, presented the only stumbling block to finally saving Saigon.

  Chapter 17

  THE NOOSE CLOSES

  SAIGON, RVN—FRIDAY, APRIL 4

  “STORK TWO-ONE-eight, climb to and maintain flight level three-two-zero, report passing two-eight-zero, cleared to vector heading one-three-six, information India, squawk six-two-five-niner and ident, contact Clark center on guard frequency two-eight-niner-point-five,” the Tan Son Nhut departure flight controller said in a rapid-fire litany of aviation shorthand, radioing the monotone drone of instructions in the outbound Air Force C-5A Galaxy flight deck crew’s headsets as the gigantic cargo aircraft banked southeastward and ascended through twenty thousand feet at its best-rate-of-climb attitude and airspeed.

  “Two-one-eight with the information, roger, and good day, sir,” the aircraft’s pilot in command, Captain Dennis “Bud” Traynor, responded as his copilot, Captain Tilford Harp, switched the aircraft’s radios to the next flight center frequency.

  Picking up its southeast heading of 136 degrees and climbing through twenty-three thousand feet, the strategic transport’s four immense General Electric TF-39 turbo-fan engines, their eight-and-one-half-foot diameter intakes agape like the mouths of a quartet of bowhead whales, sucking air, compressing it, supercharging it with fuel, and combusting the volatile mix through each of their twenty-seven-foot-long bodies, exploded forty-three thousand pounds of constant thrust out the exhaust end of each jet and sent the three-quarters of a million pounds of aircraft loaded with 332,500 pounds of JP-5 kerosene, 328 passengers, their personal possessions, and a flight crew of sixteen, droning skyward at more than three hundred miles per hour, above a bed of growing cumulus clouds. The aircraft’s wings stretched nearly 223 feet and easily lifted its 247-foot-long, 65-foot-high body as it pushed higher into the cold blue of a late afternoon sky.

  Built by Lockheed-Georgia, and already having circled the planet for nearly six years as a proud representative of the Sixtieth Military Airlift Wing from its home station at Travis Air Force Base, California, the awesome craft, serial number 68-218, still turned heads. C-5 Galaxies, like great trains, ships, and skyscrapers, possess a titanic beauty unique in the world.

  The big plane had shuddered slightly as it began pressurizing the crew stations, passenger cabin, and cargo bay, passing above eight thousand feet mean sea level, racing for its thirty-two-thousand-foot cruise altitude. As it climbed higher and higher above the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam, the flight engineer monitored the four sets of engine gauges and saw the cabin pressurization indicator moving slowly but holding a positive volume well in the green.

  “Thelma, sweetheart, I need a favor,” Twila Donelson called to her colleague Thelma Thompson just before takeoff. Twila was an American attached to the Defense Attaché’s Office in Saigon, and Thelma Thompson was another DAO member who had drawn orphan escort duty for a one-way ride home. “Would you mind terribly if you moved upstairs into the rear passenger area, in the tail section? They have 145 children up there with just six attendants. You’ll make it lucky number seven for them. As shorthanded as they are up there with those children, I think they would really appreciate some help.”

  Thelma smiled and nodded happily at Twila and left the lower cargo bay where the remaining 102 of the total 247 South Vietnamese orphans sat, along with forty-seven other passengers on this first flight of Operation Babylift. Because most of the children averaged no more than one year of age and suffered from malnutrition and other health problems, they required close attendance.

  Satisfying two goals, helping the children and evacuating an importantand deeply appreciated portion of his staff, Major General Homer Smith, the defense attaché in Saigon, had assigned as orphan escorts forty-four women from his American staff, many of whom were qualified nurses. Along with them he wrangled aboard the flight a handful of other evacuees like Helen Drye, an American DAO employee, and her young daughter Theresa; Laurie Stark, an American school teacher; and Sharon Wesley, who had worked for the American Red Cross and Army Special Services for several years in South Vietnam and had remained in Saigon after her job and the United States military had pulled out in 1973.

  Tending to the crowd of crying babies in the main cargo bay, Clara Bayot, Barbara Stout, and Mary Ann Crouch busily changed diapers and tried their best to ease the infants’ tears. Beyond them, Ruthanne Gasper, Dorothy Howard, and Joan Pray worked with groups of five children each. Juanita Creel, Elizabeth Fugino, Vera Hollibaugh, and Beverly Herbert did likewise with their charges of orphaned Vietnamese infants.

  Most of the babies had wound up in the New Haven Nursery in Saigon after spending hungry months at poor foundling homes scattered across the country. Pronounced ribs, potbellies, and gaunt faces seemed the common denominator among the children, such as Bach Thi-Kim Cuong.

  The newborn infant’s family had abandoned her only days after her birth, sometime in late April at Soc Trang hamlet, and thus she came to live at the Khanh Hung Orphanage on May 6, 1974. No one knew the baby’s identity, family, or birth date, so the nuns gave the little girl a name, Bach Thi-Kim Cuong, and decided that she could recognize the day that they found her lying on the orphanage doorstep as her birthday. What difference would that few days make over the years, anyway?

  The Sisters of Providence, who operated the orphanage, had very little and baby Bach already had badly suffered starvation, so the nuns persuaded an American colleague, Sister Susan McDonald, a missionary nurse at the New Haven Nursery in Saigon, to take the severely underweight and malnourished infant.

  Bach Thi-Kim Cuong learned to sit up and crawl at her new home, under Sister Susan’s gentle hand, along with a hundred other children just like this baby girl from the Mekong rice lands. Her first memories of life formed there.

  After she lived in the Saigon orphanage nearly a year, an English couple, Colin and Diane Felce, at long last finalized arrangements to adopt little Bach. They had finally overcome the mountains of paperwork and had passed all the grueling tests and screening. The arduous process seemed ironic in the face of the devastating conditions from which these children came and their current meager existence. Why should these children languish while bureaucrats slowly processed stacks of papers, spinning mountains of red tape, when families on the other end wanted them so badly?

  With the war rapidly closing the noose around Saigon, and because baby Bach Thi-Kim Cuong had a place to go, she received priority to board this first flight of angels.

  Unfortunately, the bustle of loading the children so quickly had not allowed time to process much paperwork to accompany the babies. So workers attached hospital bracelets to the children’s tiny wrists containing only sketchy information, such as “Baby Cuong, destination London.”

  Besides the 247 orphans and their forty-four American babysitters, along with an additional United States Air Force medical crew of ten, brought aboard to look after the sick and very fragile among the children, a mix of twenty-
seven other homebound Americans, mostly civilian government employees, also rode in the aircraft. The Thirteenth Air Force, based at Clark Air Base, Philippines, held operational authority over the airlift and had coordinated the flight of this C-5A Galaxy, along with a C-9 Nightingale, as the inaugural sorties of President Ford’s Operation Babylift.

  The C-5A’s afternoon mission from Saigon to Clark Air Base had originated with the big cargo jet delivering one of the first loads of expedited military supplies summoned by General Fred Weyand during his telephone conference with President Ford. Once the ground crews had rolled off the war goods, they quickly prepared the main bay and upstairs passenger areas to receive the orphans and American evacuees.

  At 4:03 p.m., the twenty-eight wheels on the Galaxy’s landing gear quickly sucked inside the belly of the mammoth aircraft as it lifted from the runway at Tan Son Nhut. It passed over Saigon like a football stadium on wings, its engines humming their telltale drone, and climbed through the building afternoon clouds as it followed the Mekong River southward. Sparkling like mirrors in the sun, the thousands of rice paddies that spread throughout the broad river delta shrank smaller and smaller as the great aircraft lifted itself higher and higher aloft.

  “Good afternoon, Clark center, stork two-one-eight with you passing flight level two-eight-zero for three-two-zero, heading one-three-six degrees,” Captain Traynor radioed the en route air traffic control center.

  “Roger, two-one-eight, squawk ident,” the traffic center controller responded.

  At 4:15 p.m., twelve minutes into the flight, Captain Harp pressed the ident button on the aircraft’s radar transponder. This sent a momentarily strong signal of the aircraft’s identifying code to the air traffic control radar, causing the numbers to show brightly on the flight center’s cathodal sweep screen. Suddenly, a deafening boom shook the gigantic aircraft. The cockpit lurched up, then slammed down violently. As the transport plunged into a deadly dive, it immediately ran up three hundred knots on the injured plane’s airspeed indicator.

  “What was that?” Captain Traynor shouted as he immediately pulled down his oxygen mask and hauled back on the control column, trying to raise the big plane’s nose. Instead of blue sky, he now saw the watery green Mekong Delta filling the Galaxy’s front windows.

  “Oh, dear God!” the aircraft’s crew chief cried out as he looked through the window of the door that opened onto the lower deck and cargo bay. The 13.5-foot-high, 19-foot-wide, and 148-foot-long hold had filled with a massive tornado of fog, spinning aircraft debris, personal belongings, and human beings in its wind. At the aft end of the aircraft, where the twister generated its force, a huge, gaping hole shown.

  “Sir,” the crew chief shouted on the intercom to his commander, “the aft cargo doors and ramp have blown off the aircraft. It looks like a large part of the rear, lower airframe has torn off too.”

  “No pressurization, sir,” the flight engineer followed.

  “The explosion must have severed the control cables to the rudder and elevator,” Captain Traynor said to his copilot. “I get no response out of the tail, and I’ve got reaction from only one set of wing spoilers and aileron.”

  “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” Captain Harp called on the radio and switched on the emergency locator radio beacon, broadcasting a Mayday signal on the international distress frequencies. The incessant sirenlike radio chirp of the emergency signal filled the cockpit.

  “Two-one-eight declaring emergency, attempting return to Tan Son Nhut,” the copilot continued.

  “Two-one-eight, Tan Son Nhut tower,” a voice responded on the radio, “cleared for emergency landing, runway two-five left. If able, come about to heading three-one-zero.”

  As the C-5A gained airspeed in its dive, the increased lift on the wings caused the aircraft to shallow its dive and its nose to rise. Soon the big plane slowed to a stall and rolled to the right, again diving hard. With the increase in airspeed on the wing surfaces, the lift again brought the plane’s nose up.

  “I have no pitch control and very little attitude with just one wing spoiler and aileron working,” Traynor told his copilot. “By adding power in the dives, we shallow out sooner, and we roll to the right. Using the throttles to control pitch and letting it roll to the right, I think we can bring it back around to the northwest heading. Harp, you take care of the roll with that one wing control while I bring us about and try to control our descent by manipulating these power settings.”

  The sudden decompression of the aircraft dislodged everything and everyone inside the cargo area. The violent storm of debris and tornadic winds, with the sudden lack of oxygen, instantly killed many of the passengers in the lower bay. Several of those people seated toward the rear were sucked out the massive hole in the tail of the plane.

  “Almost there, Harp,” Captain Traynor told his copilot as both men watched their heading indicator slowing ticking its way to the final approach heading for runway 25L at Tan Son Nhut. Airspeed soared with each dive and fell as the nose came up, bringing the rate of descent from four thousand feet per minute to a little more than fifteen hundred feet per minute. The pronounced time lag from power adjustment to aircraft response taxed the full energy and fiber of both pilots to their outer limits.

  They watched as the altimeter wound backwards, now showing less than six thousand feet. The parallel runways at Tan Son Nhut lay far in the distance.

  On the last shallow turn to final, from their heading of 310 degrees, pushing left to 250 degrees, lining up with the runway, the plane suddenly dropped.

  “Too slow!” Traynor said, pushing the throttles as the altitude rapidly disappeared, cursing the lag in response. “We can’t make the runway now! We’ve got to belly into the marsh. Level the wings as best you can, Harp. I’ve got full power to keep the nose up as high as I can get it.”

  Its wheels still locked inside its vast underbelly, the great Galaxy splashed into the watery flats of the Mekong Delta, sending a spray of water and mud over its massive body. Moving at more than 250 knots, the gigantic plane began to plow a deep trench through the muck and then skidded into a patchwork of flooded rice fields.

  Still traveling at high speed, the C-5A slammed through a paddy dike, and the impact sent the plane bounding back into the air. It rode airborne for nearly a half mile and then crashed back into the rice paddies, spraying more mud and water over its back as it now dug itself deeply into the ground. The impact as it struck the rice paddy dike fractured the wings and tail from the aircraft, causing the Galaxy to separate into four parts as it finally came to rest.

  Thelma Thompson had sat in her tail section seat terrified from the first moment that the explosion from beneath the deck under her feet had put a spinning fog all around her. She had almost passed out from the horror and the sudden lack of air. Then as oxygen at last began to again fill her space, clearing out the fog and giving her the feeling that perhaps the worst had passed, suddenly she found herself seeing daylight through the roof as her chair ripped from the floor, and a cascade of mud and water enveloped her.

  The careening and banging seemed to last an eternity during those few seconds of touchdown and crash landing. It stressed every part of her body. Then the final slamming, with the aircraft breaking apart and her seat crashing into debris that used to be part of the plane, had made her think she would surely die.

  As suddenly as it had all begun, it ended.

  Able-bodied and injured women and the few men aboard who had survived immediately grabbed children from the upper deck and rushed them out the massive holes in the aircraft’s broken body, tromping through the knee-deep rice fields, carrying the babies to a paddy dike. Back and forth they hurried, hauling the mud-covered infants.

  When Thelma Thompson managed to push herself out of the wreckage, her body throbbed with severe pain. As she stepped from the gash across the roof and side of the aircraft where she had ridden, she noticed that the ground was nearly even with the top of the plane. Recalling how the galaxy
had sat on its trucks and wheels at the airport before takeoff, she realized that now this same ground-level spot on the aircraft had earlier towered sixty-five-feet above the tarmac.

  Helicopters descended on the crash site almost immediately with emergency rescue and medical professionals racing to the great aircraft’s remains. They climbed down into the hellish chamber that had once served as the Galaxy’s cargo bay. It had filled with water, mud, and muck and reeked of kerosene from the aircraft’s ruptured fuel cells.

  As more and more rescue workers arrived, a stream of mud-covered babies began to fill the outbound medevac choppers. They piled the black-caked, limp children into the rapidly moving brigade of choppers, letting the medical workers at Third Field, the former army hospital at Tan Son Nhut, sort the living from the dead.

  At the hospital, nurses and doctors began their triage by washing a shower spray of water over the babies, clearing away the thick mud so that they could determine if the child still lived.

  At the end of the day, 141 of the 149 orphans and attendants who sat in the airplane’s massive cargo bay had died. The violent churn of debris in that chamber, chopping through everything inside like blades in a great blender, had killed most of the victims during the first seconds of the disaster. Some of the people survived the mayhem but succumbed from drowning after the crash. A handful died from having the massive vacuum pull them out of the plane at high altitude amidst a stream of whirling, knifelike debris very likely as well, killing them instantly.

  While many in the upper passenger compartment suffered serious injuries, such as Thelma Thompson, whose later compensation barely covered her medical expenses, only three of the people seated there died in the crash. Five of the sixteen-person flight crew also perished, as did three members of the ten-person medical team and three other passengers not connected with the babylift operation.