Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  With the departure of the Americans and the last remnants of the former Khmer Republic government, the Khmer Communists, led by Pol Pott, assumed control of Cambodia. In the four-year rein of Pol Pott’s ruthless government, the Khmer Rouge, under the direction of Pott’s second in command, Ta Mok, nicknamed the Butcher, put more than 3,979,000 Cambodians to death.

  It would be none other than General Tran Van Tra who would lead Vietnam’s forces into Cambodia in 1979, finally liberating the Khmer people from the horror of Pol Pott’s bloody regime.

  HIGHWAY 1 NORTHEAST OF SAIGON

  “I THOUGHT WE would get a helicopter to Xuan Loc,” Dirck Halstead said, bouncing in the passenger seat of a dusty brown Mercedes sedan that Al Dawson had borrowed from a friend and now manuevered through heavy traffic past the American consulate at Bien Hoa, en route to Brigadier General Le Minh Dao’s Eighteenth Division headquarters.

  “Don’t complain. We did good just getting this car for the day,” Dawson said, turning the air conditioning fan switch to high speed.

  “Would have been nice to fly,” Halstead said. “In this car, we’ll be lucky to get back by tonight.”

  “Just a quick in and out. Grab pictures, I do a short interview with the general, and we get out,” Dawson said, laying on the horn and pushing through the crowds of refugees that packed both sides of Highway 1.

  “He’s supposed to take us to see the front line, right?” Halstead said, counting rolls of film in the side pouches of his camera bag.

  “Right,” Dawson said. “We talk at his headquarters, then board his chopper, and go straight to the front.”

  “Exciting,” Dirck said, looking out the window at the sea of faces that lined the roadway.

  “I want to ask you something, and I want an honest answer,” Dawson said.

  “Sure,” the photographer said, now closing his eyes and lying back in his seat.

  “Nguyen Cao Ky wants to overthrow Nguyen Van Thieu,” Dawson said.

  “Ever since Ky lost the election, what, now eight years ago?” Halstead said sarcastically.

  “I mean a coup d’etat,” Dawson said. “He mentioned it just the other day, maybe now a week or so ago. That’s why Nguyen Van Thieu demanded that Prime Minister Tran Thien Khiem resign and why he fired half his cabinet and then had Assembly Speaker Nguyen Ba Can form a new government with Deputy Prime Minister Tran Van Don as the new PM in place of Khiem.”

  Dirck Halstead kept his eyes shut and said, “I heard that Nguyen Cao Ky had approached Khiem and a few others.”

  “Such as whom?” Dawson asked. “Trust me, I have a point to my interrogation.”

  “General Cao Van Vien, chairman of the Joint General Staff, for example,” Dirck said, now sitting up and looking at the roadway.

  “Le Minh Dao ever creep into the conversation?” Dawson said.

  “Yeah,” Dirck said. “My friends at the embassy say that Dao is the first person whom Nguyen Cao Ky approached.”

  “Check,” Dawson said, “and the CIA too.”

  “I have not heard the CIA slant, but I did suspect as much,” Halstead said.

  “Spooks did not want to touch it with a ten-foot pole,” Dawson said. “Kissinger apparently still buys the heavy line of bullshit that Graham Martin keeps preaching: how Saigon will prevail in the end and that negotiations will save the day. The CIA said that Ky is too extreme a character for the Communists to embrace and believe that General Duong Van Minh, good old Big Minh, is their man. The Communists keep bantering his name, so if anyone steps to the plate for South Vietnam in place of Thieu, whom the NVA hate, I think that person will be Big Minh.”

  “Alan,” Dirck said, “they could have Mickey Mouse holding Ky and Thieu by the balls, and the NVA will not stop until they own Saigon. You know that, and I know that, and damn it, the CIA knows it too. People, just open your fucking eyes, for crying out loud!”

  “To talk to anyone at the embassy, on the record, they express the utmost confidence in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and have full faith that President Nguyen Van Thieu and his forces will finally prevail,” Dawson said facetiously. “Talk to any midlevel or below, and it’s like they know they live in Fantasy Land, but have to pretend they’re all Goofy. Meanwhile, just check out how many of them have hooked up with General Smith’s folks and have boogied on the around-the-clock outbound flights from Tan Son Nhut. Slowly but surely, they’re abandoning ship while ‘Ahab’ Martin steers the Pequod after Moby Dick with his head up his ass.”

  “Guy in the air force at Tan Son Nhut told me that everyone there is based at Clark and just flies in and out for the day,” Dirck said.

  “What day?” Dawson said and laughed. “Check the flights. They don’t stop. We have one C-141 Starlifter after another taking off all day long, and then at night, nothing but a steady stream of C-130 Herculeses going nonstop. I’ve seen the same air force ground security guys there for days now, and there must be at least fifty or more of them running around in their tiger stripe camouflage. Anyway, I think it’s good that they are here, keeping these flights under control. Look what Da Nang turned into.”

  “The DAO folks have been shipping people out by the planeloads since the C-5 crash,” Dirck said. “They’re taking this mess pretty seriously and evacuating everyone that they can, regardless of what Ambassador Martin says. When I get ready to yank my ripcord, I am going to the DAO.”

  “So back to the matter at hand,” Dawson said. “Do you ask General Dao about Nguyen Cao Ky’s coup and the cabinet shakeup, or do I?”

  “Why would I want to ask him about that?” Halstead said. “You’re the one with the story. Anyway, he will deny it. You know that no one in his right mind would admit to something like that, not even when the NVA are breathing down your neck. I have ten dollars that says he tells you the story is merely a bad rumor.”

  “I have other sources,” Dawson said. “Dao won’t say a word. But I am going to ask him anyway, just for the record. I have good information that Ky’s friend General Cao Van Vien ratted him out to President Thieu’s cousin Hoang Duc Nha, in exchange for amnesty.”

  “The old Texas hedge,” Dirck said and laughed. “Ky thinks Vien is backing him, and at the same time Vien has his backside covered with Thieu. No matter who comes out on top, Vien keeps all his poker chips.”

  “A contact at the embassy told me that General Dao had too much on his plate with Xuan Loc to get involved with Nguyen Cao Ky in the first place,” Dawson said. “In the second place, I hear that besides bellowing and ranting and putting on a loud show, General Dao is a man of honor and conviction. I also hear he watched the movie Patton a dozen times and wanted to find out where George C. Scott got his uniforms made.”

  Both men laughed.

  The dusty brown Mercedes bounced down the deeply rutted dirt road that led to General Le Minh Dao’s forward headquarters, west of Xuan Loc. Even at this rear area location, incoming NVA 130-millimeter artillery fell within sight of the command post. ARVN soldiers scurried about like busy ants cleaning up after a storm.

  “My friends!” Le Minh Dao shouted from the doorway of his command bunker. He strutted to the car where Dirck Halstead busily rigged two cameras and draped their straps around his neck. “What a beautiful day! We are now turning this battle around, you know?”

  “No, I didn’t know that, General,” Al Dawson said, flipping open his notebook and jotting down the quote.

  “We have stopped the enemy dead in his tracks now for a week, and he cannot move past us,” Dao bragged. “ARVN forces have begun to fight inspired and driven because our division has shown them how to beat these Communist dogs and send them running home.”

  The general then laughed at his comment and slapped the side of his green combat utility uniform trousers leg with a two-foot-long rosewood swagger stick with a polished, copper-jacketed .30-caliber bullet fastened on the tapered end and the shiny brass shell casing from the same round mounted on the butt. Dao wore a glossy green helmet wi
th a large silver star fastened to the center of the front.

  Both journalists looked at the strutting general and thought of George C. Scott’s portrayal of the great American warrior general, George S. Patton. Boisterous, coarse, loud talking, and full of himself, all General Dao lacked was an ivory handled, chrome .45-caliber revolver riding on his hip.

  MACHINE GUN AND rifle bullets snapped through the air above the two journalists’ and the general’s heads as they leaped from the olive green UH-1E Huey utility helicopter as it touched the ground with its skids in the center of a debris-strewn roadway in Xuan Loc. Enemy dead littered the pummeled landscape. Some corpses, burned beyond recognition, still smouldered, filling the air with a wretched stench. Dirck Halstead began clicking his camera in nearly every direction, freezing the horror on film, while Alan Dawson ducked low, looking for something substantially impervious to gunfire and shrapnel to squat behind.

  Le Minh Dao strutted down the middle of the roadway, seemingly oblivious to the hail of gunfire, artillery, and mortars that now struck close to the spot where the helicopter beat its wings for a hasty departure. Then, before the chopper could clear the landing area, several panic-stricken ARVN soldiers, covered in white, disheveled and ragged from enduring days of intense battle, dashed for the departing bird.

  “Stop! Cowards!” General Dao screamed at the men and pulled his Colt M1911A1 .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol from a shoulder holster that he wore and opened fire on three of the men who now clung stubbornly to the helicopter’s skids.

  The chopper never slowed its progress and flew fast from the fighting with the trio of deserters holding onto its undercarriage for dear life.

  “I think this may represent the most brutal fighting of the war,” Dao said cooly as he shoved his pistol back in its holster and looked at the two journalists, who both now squatted behind a wrecked and burned truck.

  Halstead framed the general in a wide-angle shot with smoking dead bodies from both sides scattered here and there and a Catholic church steeple rising from behind a high stucco wall with two great solid iron gates in the background. Bullet and shell holes pockmarked the wall and heavy gunfire still chewed at the bell tower, leaving wisps of smoke and dust drifting in the air as each new round struck it.

  “General, we’re under fire!” Dawson shouted incredulously at the man.

  “Oh, this?’ the general responded. “Nothing to fear. We are in defilade to their direct fire here. Everything, except their mortars and artillery, pass well over our heads. Come out, gentlemen, look around. Meet my men.”

  Dirck timidly walked to the corner of the truck and squatted again, snapping a different angle of the Eighteenth Division commander.

  “I’m fine right here,” Dawson called back from where he knelt behind the truck. General Dao laughed and slapped his trousers leg with his swagger stick.

  “Show yourselves!” the commander then bellowed, still slapping his leg with the polished rosewood stick. His shiny green helmet with its single silver star gleamed in the bright midday sunlight as the egotistical commander stood amid several bodies of his fallen enemy on the dirty, debris-littered, artillery-riddled roadway.

  “Come out!” the general shouted again. “I am standing in the middle of this street, and you men still cower in holes. What sort of warriors are you?”

  One by one, faces began to appear from holes and behind walls, hundreds of faces, dirty, white with blast dust, haggard, and ragged.

  “These are the finest, the bravest soldiers in all of our republic!” General Dao then said to Al Dawson, who now sat cross-legged, writing in a notepad balanced on his knee. Dirck Halstead took frame after frame as he began to scurry to one soldier after another, snapping close-ups and medium shots of the defenders of Xuan Loc.

  “I have to agree with you, General,” Dawson called back to him.

  “Forget those three cowards you saw run,” Dao said, waving his arm in the direction that the helicopter had departed. “I would not dirty this sacred ground with their blood, not among these valiant men, not among their dead, nor even the dead of our enemy that you see scattered here.”

  Dawson jotted notes while Halstead kept his camera working.

  “We met the Communists nose to nose here on this street,” Dao said in a coarse voice, slightly breaking from emotion. “We sent them running! They have brought tanks and every kind of artillery that they possess to bear on us here. We stand! We fight! We prevail!”

  Dao walked up the street to a low bunkered machine gun nest and pointed his swagger stick at the men inside it.

  “Each day and night they run straight at these brave lads behind these guns,” Dao shouted to Dawson. “Each day and night, these men turn back those assaults.”

  Le Minh Dao then walked back to the wreck where Dirck had rejoined his colleague.

  “This is why the Communists will not succeed in their quest to seize Saigon,” Dao said in a now quiet voice. Then he turned and stormed to the center of the street.

  “These lawless invaders of my homeland will not succeed!” Dao roared, again slapping his leg with the swagger stick to punctuate his words. “This division of heroic patriots who keep the wolves at bay, here at Xuan Loc, will inspire courage among all of the Republic of Vietnam’s armed forces. The Eighteenth Division will then step to the forefront of that great legion and will lead the offensive that sends these Communist dogs cowering back to hell.”

  General Dao then turned his eyes toward the street corner behind the wreck where the two American journalists had taken shelter from the ongoing barrage and raised his swagger stick over his head, motioning it in a circle. A moment later the helicopter returned.

  The whole time of their visit to the front, the shelling and gunfire had never relented. Dirck Halstead and Alan Dawson ran to the waiting chopper, still ducking the sounds of the bullets high over their heads. Fully erect, Le Minh Dao walked.

  COASTLINE NORTH OF VUNG TAO

  PASSING NHA TRANG and Cam Ranh, Lieutenant Colonel Tran Ngoc Toan and his 450 Viet Marines who had escaped the disaster at Tan My veered off the main track of Highway 1 and followed the coast. They made their way south, scattered among refugees looking for boats to take them to sea and to the several ships whose silhouettes lay on the horizon.

  Although the sight looked tempting, the Viet Marines knew better than to attempt crossing that several-mile stretch of open sea. Even with adequate numbers of the small boats that fought the strong tidal currents among the treacherous rocks and reefs, overloaded with fleeing refugees, the odds of finally reaching the ships stood against them.

  By land, they faced few encounters with enemy forces. So far, those had remained friendly. The Communists that passed them, mostly riding in the backs of trucks, merely waved to the crowds along the roadways. The NVA had no time to waste searching through the refugee masses for South Vietnamese soldiers. They presented them little threat and would only serve to distract the army from its primary objective: Saigon.

  The 450 Viet Marines had now walked for more than two weeks, mingled among the endless flow of battle-fleeing peasants and deserters, since they left the old sergeant major’s rice farm southwest of Da Nang. Finally, they reached a place where the sounds of gunfire and shelling echoed from several miles to their northwest.

  “Beyond those hills and trees, somewhere over the horizon, lies Xuan Loc,” Tran Ngoc Toan told his battalion sergeant major as the two men squatted by a small campfire in the rocks above the beach where the South China Sea washed rhythmically across the sand below them. Hundreds of other small fires twinkled in the darkness as refugees hunkered by them, some cooking rice and others wishing that they had rice to cook.

  “The battle sounds fierce,” the sergeant major said. “It also fires two directions, which I regard as good news.”

  “Yes,” Toan said, “our forces have made a stand.”

  “Soon this coastline will turn westward, and we will find the Mekong River and Saigon River flowing int
o the sea,” the sergeant major said. “We cannot go much beyond that point.”

  “I hope that the port at Vung Tao remains free,” Toan said.

  The sergeant major, squatting on his heels, using a piece of stiff, rusty wire to stir the driftwood coals that burned in their small fire and wishing that he had rice to boil over it, nodded to his commander.

  “Once these people have gone to sleep for the night, I want our Marines to assemble on the beach among these rocks below us,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Have a relay of men surreptitiously mingle among our camps and ensure that everyone has the word.”

  Shortly past midnight, the Marines walking alone, in pairs, and a few in small bunches casually made their way down the cliff to the beach and gathered among the rocks. No one spoke or uttered a sound. While the majority of them waited silently, representative leaders from each small bunch squatted in a circle around Lieutenant Colonel Toan.

  “With the sounds of the fighting to our west, and now behind our position, I believe that we have begun to emerge beyond our enemy’s front lines,” Toan said in a low voice while the roar of the waves crashing across the beach and the wind covered the sounds that he made.

  “Tonight we will at long last assemble again as a military unit in formation. We will deploy in a column, one platoon at a time, spread over typical patrol intervals. Have each squad spaced about five minutes apart,” Toan said. “I want four scouts working ahead of the lead element at all times, with two scouts relaying information to the main body. If they encounter anyone, they should make no contact. The scout will move rearward from that location and inform a runner who will then intercept the head of our formation. I will come forward and deal with the encounter appropriately. Any questions?”

  The lieutenant colonel looked at each face of the men sitting in the small circle.

  “What if we make contact with the enemy from the rear?” one man finally asked.

  “Excellent question,” Toan said. “Minimize contact. We have few weapons, so any firefight will not bode well for the squad who engages. Our best defense remains our elusiveness and ability to hide. If we hear gunfire, all squads will disperse to cover well away from our track and hide. Hopefully, if the enemy encounters you and takes you prisoner, they will likely assume that your squad or what few men they actually see represent the full measure of the group.