Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  Seeing his two comrades depart their planned route to go bomb an uninhabited jungle made Nguyen Thanh Trung feel better about what he now had to do. Again, today, they would hurt no one.

  “I have a warning light,” Trung called to his companions. “Looks like hydraulic failure. Returning to base.”

  The sound of two clicks of a microphone button told the lieutenant that his fellows had received his message and acknowledged. Gently he turned his wrist easing the stick to the right while adding power, dropping a wing but continuing to climb, and made a shallow bank toward Saigon.

  This morning, when he had said good-bye to his wife and three daughters, he held the manila envelope that the civilian architect and Viet Cong spy at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Dang Quang Phung, had given to him three months ago. He had tucked it behind the seat of his plane when he first saddled up, along with a few toiletries wrapped in a bath towel hidden in his helmet bag. Inside the sleeve of his flight suit, he had squirreled away several small photographs of his wife and their three little girls.

  Kissing them farewell today had put his abilities to conceal his emotions to the ultimate test. While the mother and daughters had hugged his neck and wished him well and had said they would see him this afternoon when he finished at work, the lieutenant knew that he would not see them again until the war had ended. Even worse, he feared that the antiaircraft batteries surrounding Saigon, and the fighters that would surely come after him, might well shoot him down and kill him.

  Standing in the front doorway, putting on a happy mask, he fought back his tears and overwhelming grief as he held his wife a bit longer than usual and kissed her for what he knew could be the last time.

  When the control tower at Tan Son Nhut called him on his radio, Trung did not respond. He pointed his plane at the Presidential Palace in the heart of Saigon, and sent the F-5 into a high speed dive toward the massive, monolithic structure that symbolized South Vietnam’s leadership.

  Marine Corporal David Norman had stood watch at the American embassy all night, so he stripped down to his white skivvy shorts and T-shirt and had now gone to enjoy the outdoor breeze while relaxing on a chaise longue set beneath the green-and-white awning on the rooftop patio of the Marine House. From his vantage point atop the nine-story, French-hotel-style building, he could see the Presidential Palace over the treetops on the next block.

  He had just closed his eyes, imagining himself back home, when the coursing sound of Nguyen Thanh Trung’s diving fighter sent him to his feet. With the increasing unrest in Saigon, the Marines had begun keeping loaded weapons with them at all times, even when relaxing in their skivvies on the Marine House rooftop. Dave Norman immediately grabbed his M14 rifle and charged its chamber with a fresh 7.62-millimeter round from the loaded magazine locked in its well.

  With the rifle on his hip, he searched the sky and caught a glimpse of the plane just as the fighter stood on its tail, in a hard right turn back skyward, and sent a snake eye exploding on the palace lawn.

  “You Commie motherfucker,” Norman snarled, slamming the .30-caliber rifle into his shoulder and unloading his magazine at the climbing and turning aircraft.

  Neil Davis happened to have his motion picture news camera on his shoulder as he walked from the Presidential Palace when the bomb exploded and the plane climbed away. He watched the F-5 climb skyward, turn, and start a second, more shallow run at its target.

  The NBC News contract motion picture photojournalist brought the jet into focus in his camera lens and let the film roll. He followed Trung’s plane as it made its second run and put another Mark 82 squarely on the Presidential Palace lawn. The Australian kept his camera humming as the aircraft made another steep turn and then climbed to the north and disappeared.

  Dave Norman had grabbed a second loaded magazine, jammed it into the rifle, and managed a few distant shots at the fleeing airplane. He wondered if he had managed to even hit the fast-moving fighter.

  After the second bomb had gone astray, like the first, Trung pointed his plane’s nose to the ground and firewalled the throttles. He kept the aircraft just above the treetops, racing northward to Song Be Airfield. Not only did he want to make himself a difficult target for the AFRVN jet fighters that no doubt had now scrambled to pursue him, but he also did not want to risk getting shot from the sky by an overly zealous NVA rocketeer directing an SA-2 missile battery on the arch above Saigon who may not have gotten the word that Lieutenant Trung’s F- 5A Skoshi Tiger now flew friendly to their cause.

  The few minutes that it took him to fly from Saigon to Song Be seemed to last forever. Already, the events of this morning’s sortie, all of which had transpired in less than half an hour, seemed to have lasted a whole day. Nguyen Thanh Trung’s heart pounded. His stomach hurt. He worried that he might even throw up the tea and toast that he had eaten for breakfast.

  At least he would no longer have to live the lie of each day with cloak-and-dagger subterfuge, fearing that someone would discover his treason. That liberated honesty in his spirit felt good.

  However, he had not dared to tell his wife about his turncoat decision six months ago, nor of his planned mission that he had executed today. She would learn his secret soon enough, when Saigon’s television and radio news reports would break the story of his act of defiance against Nguyen Van Thieu’s regime. The American media would call him a disgruntled South Vietnamese pilot acting in protest to the president because Thieu had lost such great credibility with his armed forces.

  Although Trung had surely felt a loss of trust with President Thieu, it did not come from the recent failures in the northern provinces or Central Highlands. Nguyen Thanh Trung’s bitter discontent emerged from the murder of his father and the wrongful imprisonment of his brother by the very government he had, until last fall, sworn to defend with his life.

  Not an act of revenge, not an extraction of a tooth for a tooth— Nguyen did what he did to help end the fighting, to protest the violence. He wanted the killing to stop. He hoped that his act today would somehow motivate the warring sides to end the bloodshed. The lieutenant simply wanted peace.

  Tears streamed from the young lieutenant’s eyes as he skidded onto the runway at Song Be. Ahead of him crowds of cheering North Vietnamese soldiers ran across the tarmac to greet their comrade, today a hero of the people.

  As Trung smiled and waved to the men, with tears on his cheeks, his sobs came not from joy, but from profound heartache. Paramount in his mind, as he clutched the sleeve of his flight suit, holding to the photographs of his beloved family tucked there in the zipped-shut pocket, he thought of what possible misfortunes now confronted his devoted wife and three darling daughters.

  LIEUTENANT TRUNG’S HOME IN SAIGON

  WHILE SMOKE STILL boiled from the grounds in front of the Presidential Palace, two jeeps with four military policemen wearing green-and-white-striped helmets slammed to a stop at Nguyen Thanh Trung’s former home. Behind them a white van with two other policemen stopped.

  They surrounded the house, as though they had cornered a bank robber, as the two policemen from the van kicked in the front door. The troops clapped handcuffs on Trung’s terrified wife and dragged her screaming to the van. Behind the distraught mother, as a gathering crowd of neighbors watched in shock from the fringe, two other officers led and carried the three bewildered and frightened little girls.

  Following a day of intense interrogation, Saigon police concluded that the wife had known nothing of her husband’s treason. Nonetheless, they locked her and the three small children in jail.

  As his wife and daughters endured humiliation and abuse in Saigon’s prison, Nguyen Thanh Trung flew his absconded F-5A Skoshi Tiger to Da Nang. Now, as a captain in the Vietnamese Communist air force, he had a mission to oversee the preparations and planning for the air attack on Saigon, which he would lead.

  AL FRANCIS SAT stroking the black beard that covered his face, intent on reading the gloomy CIA reports produced by Saigon Station Chief Tom Po
lger’s staff. Then, as though to underscore the information that he studied, agreeing with the very logical conclusions that the intelligence analysts had reached, that without significant outside help Saigon was doomed, the first bomb struck the Presidential Palace, rattling Francis’s small, obscure office’s windows. When he saw the smoke rising above the treetops and heard the roaring jet delivering its second shot, he laughed at the absurdity of the politics that now surrounded him.

  He had learned a valuable lesson in the difference between pragmatic reality and stubborn idealism at Da Nang. Holding to blind hope while not accepting resounding evidence to the contrary had cost him dearly. An awakening came to him in the chaos of that collapsing city, and now he recognized those same telltale signs in Saigon. Here, blind hope, driven by an unrelenting master, still prevailed.

  When he had finally reached Saigon, and had gotten a nap, he joined his longtime friend and mentor, Graham Martin, in the ambassador’s suite. He had considered Martin a confidant and teacher and had enjoyed the favor of standing in the senior diplomat’s inner circle. So when he had collapsed on the couch in the boss’s private office chambers and opened his soul to the man, the cool and condescending response that Martin gave him stung deeply.

  “Da Nang is lost, and General Truong’s army is no more,” Francis had said with a sigh, expecting some consolation from his boss.

  “No,” Martin said with a superior whisper coming from deep in his throat, “MR 1 is not lost. I have information to the contrary.”

  The ambassador had earlier met with President Thieu and his generals and had listened, smiling, nodding, and fully endorsing the South Vietnamese leader’s bizarre pipe dream plan to cordon off what little remained in South Vietnam’s control, reconstitute the MR 1 and MR 2 forces that now straggled by increasing numbers into Saigon, and then retake Da Nang and the northern provinces. Tactical, logistical, and intelligence experts wondered what these two aristocratic politicians had been smoking. While the plan sounded grand, it had no substance. The army had no troops, the stragglers had no will to fight, and most significantly, they had no arms or supplies. The enemy now held those chips and bore down like the flail of God on what remained of Thieu’s army.

  The former Da Nang consul general immediately lost his composure and blurted out, “But sir! I have spent the past several days on shipboard with the remains of Truong’s army. MR 1 has fallen, I tell you. If you don’t believe me, take a helicopter and go there and look for yourself!”

  “How’s your health?” Martin purred, after a long silence, speaking again from deep within his throat in a soft, feigned caring, condescending voice. “With this thyroid problem you had so recently, you’ve got to be drained after all you endured at Da Nang. What about taking a little breather?”

  “I’m fine, sir,” Francis said, putting his feelings in check.

  Graham Martin stood as the former consul spoke and put his hand across Al Francis’s back as he led him sanctimoniously from the ambassador’s office and ushered him out of his circle of favor. The young and aspiring diplomat had dared to contradict his lordship. For that sin, he would pay with his lot now cast into the embassy’s backwash of lower, inconsequential offices and do-nothing chores.

  As the fighter plane disappeared, Al Francis hurried into the hallway outside his lower-floor office and joined a gathering crowd of other embassy workers shocked by the attack. He still had the smile on his face.

  COUNTRYSIDE NORTHWEST OF CU CHI BASE

  IN LESS THAN a day, news of the heroic bombing of the Presidential Palace reached the camp where Le Van Reung and four guerrillas from his Viet Cong squad squatted by a fire, watching a pot of rice seasoned with chunks of smoked pork and bean sprouts boil. They had considered the aerial stunt a great joke and grand insult to the pompous leader of their enemy. Its symbolism motivated them as they prepared to eat their evening meal. After dark, with full stomachs and high spirits, they would commence their advance against the ARVN’s Twenty-fifth Division and begin their run at Cu Chi.

  Throughout the five arching battlefronts, Communist soldiers similarly prepared for the coordinated attacks that would launch the sieges toward Saigon with the war’s final victory as their prize.

  With Nha Trang and Cam Ranh now fallen behind the Communist tide, President Nguyen Van Thieu and his remaining council of generals, headed by the MR 3 commander, Lieutenant General Nguyen Van Toan, adjusted the plan that promised to save Saigon. Rather than anchoring the new DMZ at Nha Trang and extending that line to Tay Ninh, on the Cambodian border, they adjusted the new dividing zone southward to the coastal city of Phan Rang, pivoting the line at the critical crossroads of Xuan Loc and then extending it westward again to Tay Ninh.

  The heavyset, flush-faced General Toan graciously accepted charge of Phan Rang and overall administration and operational control of the plan. Consistent with the general’s crony politics, he activated one of his inner circle friends, Major General Nguyen Vinh Nghi, who had earlier lost his command of MR 4 because of his bald-faced, shameless corruption. Despite the man’s questionable character, Toan placed Nghi in charge of the remaining regiments of the Airborne Division and sent him to operate from the new headquarters at Phan Rang.

  Subordinate to both generals, Brigadier General Le Minh Dao busily drilled and prepared his Eighteenth ARVN Division soldiers for their defense of Xuan Loc. While General Toan sat securely at his Bien Hoa headquarters, and General Nghi’s forces covered his southern flank, General Dao and his reinforced division, augmented by tanks, artillery, and a few helicopters, stood in the breach.

  Xuan Loc stood at the crossroads to Saigon, and Dao knew that the Communists’ main forces would have to come through his defenses in order to take South Vietnam’s capital. Despite his soldiers’ nearly overwhelming dread of what they knew must come, they feared the wrath of their commander even more. While many other ARVN divisions suffered mass desertions as the enemy approached, Dao’s Eighteenth Division stood fast behind their guns.

  FOREST NORTHWEST OF CU CHI BASE

  “QUIETLY, QUIETLY,” Le Van Reung whispered into the ear of his young comrade as he yanked him by the arm. The boy had volunteered to walk on point of their patrol within the Viet Cong battalion’s advance toward the flank fighting positions of the Twenty-fifth ARVN Division. He stepped too heavily and walked too quickly and did not pay careful enough attention to his trek.

  “You will kill yourself and me too,” Reung scolded.

  “Those ARVN have no patrols tonight,” the boy retorted. “They crouch like cowards behind the walls of their bunkers.”

  “Why do you believe such nonsense!” Reung said. “The enemy fought well enough at Ban Me Thuot. These stories of our enemy fleeing at first sight of our forces have no value except to entertain the uninitiated, like you.”

  “Then do not stand so closely to me,” the lad said, still walking at a fast pace along the trail that soon crossed the highway.

  The tribe of guerrillas who walked behind their squad leader, widely spaced and disciplined combat veterans, increased the interval between themselves and the new point man. At only fourteen years of age, he had seen plenty of fighting, but had not participated as a soldier until he joined their group after they had conquered Ban Me Thuot.

  Many new teenaged recruits had enthusiastically volunteered after that battle. This boy had appeared in their camp one night, carrying a bedroll and his father’s old M1 rifle with one clip of very green, badly corroded ammunition for it.

  “You step behind me,” Reung finally said to the boy, yanking him by the shirt. “You will trip a mine walking the way you do.”

  “Mines?” the boy said.

  “Booby traps and such,” Reung answered, walking quickly, trying to build a properly wide interval between him and the lad. “Our own people have put many along trails like this, and they will kill us just as quickly as the ARVN might.”

  Just as the veteran of more than ten years of jungle fighting had finished h
is lecture and turned his eyes to the trail ahead of him, he felt the light tingle of monofilament fishing line press into the skin of his shin.

  “Mine!” Reung screamed and dove as hard as he could backward, throwing his hands and arms over his head and trying to get face down on the ground before the blast.

  The boy stood with his mouth and eyes still wide open when the hand grenade tied to the side of the sapling exploded. At just three paces behind Le Van Reung, the young soldier only saw the flash and never heard the bang. His body pulverized by shrapnel and blast concussion, he tumbled several more paces and landed flat on his back, looking up at the stars with empty eyes.

  “Am I alive?” Le Van Reung said when he finally opened his eyes and saw several faces circled around him while two comrades knelt at his legs.

  “Security out!” he suddenly ordered, now gaining more of his senses.

  “We have security out,” a soldier said softly to him and knelt by his head to keep him calm.

  “Help me up,” Reung said. His ears rang so badly that his voice sounded like an echo inside his head. When he tried to raise to his elbows, the soldier pushed him back to the ground and shook his head.

  “Lay still, and be quiet,” the guerrilla kneeling at his legs then growled at him. “You have bad wounds on your legs, so we must carry you when we leave. For now, help me by lying still.”

  Reung tried to look to see what went on, but in the darkness he saw only silhouettes and the gaps between the trees where the trail cut through them. He felt the painful pinch of a tourniquet crushing through the muscle of his lower thigh, just above his knee, and it took his breath.