Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  “If there is no further enemy activity beyond the initial contact, we will wait one hour in position before movement. Then as one squad moves out, we will dispatch a runner to the trailing squad, informing them that we have moved, and relay that word backward, until we again have the column moving at safe intervals on our route.”

  Through most of the night the Viet Marines slowly trekked southward, following the coastline. Then as the sky began to show the first gray light of morning, a runner slipped through the trees and met Lieutenant Colonel Toan.

  “Sir,” the runner said quietly, his teeth showing brightly in a gaunt-faced smile, “we spotted a patrol, moving ahead of fixed positions, coming our way.”

  “What do you make of it?” Toan asked.

  “They look like ARVN because their helmets are round, not flat,” the scout then said, smiling even more.

  The commander passed back word to hold the formation’s position, and he slipped quietly through the trees for half a mile until he too saw the soldiers walking in the increasing light. They wore American-style helmets and carried American-made weapons.

  “Take cover, in case they are Viet Cong wanting to look like our people,” Toan said. Then he stepped forward another fifty yards, took cover behind a tree, and shouted to the lead man in the patrol.

  “Chu hoi!” he cried out. “Do not shoot!”

  Immediately the patrol jumped to the sides of their trail and dove for the ground, pointing their rifles toward the trees where Tran Ngoc Toan hid.

  “Step to the open, and put your hands above your head!” the patrol leader shouted.

  Toan swallowed the lump in his throat and moved from the cover of the trees into the open meadow and stood on a narrow trail where he held his hands up high.

  “VC!” the leader shouted at him. “You are VC! On your face!”

  “No!” the lieutenant colonel said and knelt to the ground, keeping his hands well above his head where the soldiers could clearly see them.

  As they came closer, the darkness of their uniforms revealed the tiger-stripe pattern of fellow Marines. Toan smiled, and tears began to roll from his eyes.

  “I am Lieutenant Colonel Tran Ngoc Toan, commanding officer of the 4th Battalion, 147th Brigade, Marine Corps of the Republic of Vietnam!” he cried to the men, still kneeling.

  Then the skinny and ragged Marine raised his face toward the patrol leader and said, “I assume that you come from the 468th Brigade or a unit that escaped from Da Nang. I have 450 survivors from the massacre of the 147th Brigade on the beaches at Tan My, nearly one month ago. Please send for your commander and take me to General Bui!”

  That morning, Major General Bui The Lan, commandant of the South Vietnamese Marine Corps, did not wait for the survivors of the lost brigade to come to him at his Vung Tao headquarters. He rode out to the trail and met the haggard tribe of warriors as they marched the final miles of their long escape.

  During the more than two weeks that Tran Ngoc Toan and his 450 Viet Marines had struggled southward from Da Nang, remaining faithful to each other and to their country and corps, General Bui had spent each day gathering Marines as they too straggled to Vung Tao. After feeding the men and putting them back into uniforms, he sent them to join the growing brigade and prepare to again fight.

  MAI THAO VILLA IN NORTHWEST SAIGON

  “MY GOD!” Kieu Chinh cried as she banged on the front gate at Mai Thao’s villa courtyard. “Please, Mai, open the gate!”

  “What has happened?” Mai Thao said as he pushed the decorative iron and wood doors apart and allowed the sobbing actress to hurry inside. He immediately took her in his arms and held her close to him.

  “I just came home from Singapore,” Kieu said, her eyes flooding tears. “You know I have a diplomatic passport because of my relationships with India and the motion picture industry, so President Thieu gave me ambassador status.”

  “Yes, yes,” the novelist said, trying to help his friend regain composure. “Of course, it’s diplomatic. What about your passport?”

  “When I got off the plane at Tan Son Nhut, they took it from me!” she cried. “The police there confiscated it.”

  “We can ask our friend Senator Tran Van Dong to get it back for you,” Thao said confidently. “Why on earth did you come back here to begin with?”

  “I was afraid,” she said. “My husband and my in-law family, I worried for them. I came home because of my duty as his wife.”

  “Your husband, of course, is nowhere near, is he?” Thao said.

  “No. When I got home, I found the house empty. My husband’s family had all flown out of the country already, and he is with the army fighting,” she said. “Thank God my three daughters are at school in Canada, or else I don’t know what I would do.”

  “I think everything will be all right. Just settle down, and have a martini with me,” Mai Thao said, escorting the actress into his house. “Tomorrow or the next day, Senator Dong will obtain your passport for you, and you will simply buy a ticket to Canada.”

  “How can I buy a ticket to anyplace?” Kieu again sobbed. “I have no money!”

  Mai Thao raised his dark eyebrows and frowned. And then he sighed.

  “I had quite forgotten,” he said. “Our illustrious President Thieu and his corrupt cabinet have declared a state of national emergency and closed all the banks and frozen all assets. Mine too!”

  “What shall we do?” Kieu said.

  “I shall have a martini,” Mai Thao said and smiled confidently. “Relax, and we will resolve the problems. Your three daughters sit safely in Canada, your mother-in-law has flown to the Philippines, your husband remains with his unit, so you really have to worry about no one but yourself.”

  “Thank you, dear friend,” Kieu said, sitting on the jade green couch and taking a martini. The warmth of its spirits trickling down her throat helped her to relax.

  “You know,” she said, “I have not seen my father since 1956. My sister in Paris can communicate with him and tells me that he has spent five years in prison and now has poor health. He is so terribly poor in Hanoi. I love him so very much, and I have missed him each day since I last saw him. I was only fifteen years old.

  “He sent me to stay with his friends here in Saigon, and I married their son. I have done my best to be a dutiful wife, and they have treated me so very well. My mother-in-law has allowed me to be a movie star because she trusts me.

  “When I made that first movie, The Quiet American, and Burt Reynolds kissed me, so that everyone saw it on the film, I was so frightened. My husband and his family accepted that as just part of my work.

  “Now I am torn. I could stay here, and when the Communists come, I could once again see my father. Then, on the other hand, I have my three daughters in Canada. What shall I do?”

  “Your duty, my dear,” Mai Thao said. “You love your father, but he is old. Poor health will take him, and then where will you be? The Communists will most certainly jail you, if they do not first shoot you. Kieu, my precious flower, your duty remains with your daughters, just as your husband’s duty remains at the front with his soldiers.”

  “You make it sound so simple when it seems so complicated and difficult for me,” she said, wiping her eyes with a napkin.

  “We can often decide upon solutions to many problems with great ease,” Thao said. “Living with the decisions that we make regarding them can often come quite hard.”

  PRESIDENTIAL PALACE, SAIGON

  “PETER, PETER, HURRY!” Ky Wahn shouted to his friend and fellow Associated Press colleague Peter Arnett. “They will start before we can get there.”

  Hurrying up the walkway to the steps of the Presidential Palace, the AP correspondent and his photographer joined a crowd that included every member of the Western press.

  Vice President Tran Van Huong stepped to a lectern covered with microphones and in his broken English told the world, “Nguyen Van Thieu has resigned as President of the Republic of Vietnam, effective toda
y, April 21, 1975. By constitutional authority I humbly accept the office of president and will now pursue a path toward a negotiated peace with the North Vietnamese.”

  Immediately, when the small man disappeared back up the steps among a crowd of soldiers and cabinet officers, the journalists ran out the gates toward the American embassy, hoping to find Ambassador Graham Martin willing to now speak about the issue of Saigon falling to the Communists.

  Already, the bureaucrats in Washington, DC, admitted to an ongoing evacuation of American citizens from Saigon since early April and offered the press an estimate of slightly more than thirteen hundred United States citizens still remaining in South Vietnam, including diplomats, military officials, and civilian press corps. They announced that shuttle flights for members of the press and other Americans wishing to leave the distressed capital would commence immediately.

  Graham Martin met the announcement with yet another dialogue of double-talk. He revised upward the number of Americans in Saigon from thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred and then finally to eighteen hundred. He said that the evacuation flights would be for American citizens only and those Vietnamese citizens whose relationships with the United States might jeopardize their safety. He added that under no circumstances would the United States allow any military-service-age male clearance to depart the country. The United States would not be party to any draft dodging or desertions.

  He then told the media that while President Huong held the leadership office for the interim, the United States would fully support him and would further support the person who finally sat as President.

  Behind closed doors, while Nguyen Van Thieu stormed about his now nearly empty villa, vowing that he would remain in Saigon and face the Communists, the CIA, and American embassy politicians jockeyed to place General Duong Van “Big” Minh in power.

  In 1963, weeks before President John F. Kennedy’s death, in the coup that overthrew and assassinated President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Ngu, a young General Duong Van Minh, along with a young Tran Van Don, now deputy prime minister and defense minister, and a young Tran Thien Khiem, now reluctant to step down as prime minister, had sat at the center of the murderous plot and helped put Nguyen Van Thieu in power.

  Now, with Thieu ranting in open defiance, the new incoming President Big Minh told the Americans that they must eliminate the former South Vietnamese president from their political arena and at least get him out of the country. Thieu’s continued presence and visibility now only distracted the Communists from any negotiations.

  Not to be outdone, PRG spokesman Vo Dong Giang, the press’s beloved Colonel Ba, followed the breaking news of Thieu’s resignation and eminent departure with new demands by the Communists. He stood proudly and told the journalists that all remaining American military advisors, now disguised as civilian contractors, along with all visible American military people must leave Saigon posthaste. He capped the demands with a headline: Ambassador Graham Martin and his henchmen must also depart immediately.

  Giang told the reporters that Martin had not acted in the spirit of diplomacy, but had orchestrated and directed South Vietnam’s military operations from his diplomatic office and had stood as a pillar under the corrupt Saigon regime remaining in power.

  On April 25, wearing an expensive gray suit and escorting more than twenty thousand pounds of baggage, former President Nguyen Van Thieu boarded a plane to Taiwan, where he would remain for the interim with his wife and his eighty-nine-year-old mother at the villa of Nguyen Van Kieu, Saigon’s ambassador there. Heavily guarded in addition to President Thieu’s ten tons of baggage rode more than three and a half tons of gold from South Vietnam’s national treasury, thus accounting for the closing of the banks and seizure of all assets from depositors. Thieu had shipped two and a half tons of the gold by sea while he carried a full ton of it by air with him.

  Weeks later, when finally responding to the increasing barrage of questions about the absconded riches, he claimed that he took the three and a half tons of gold ingots to purchase weapons and build an army to retake South Vietnam from the Communists.

  When news of the deposed President’s planned departure had surfaced, one day before Thieu left Saigon, former Premier and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky sought an audience of reporters by holding a self-ingratiating rally where he challenged the sitting government and dared them to place him at the helm against the Communists.

  “Anyone who flees our beloved country while the enemy advances upon us is a coward!” a colorfully bemedaled and festooned Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, decked in his finest dress uniform, shouted over the loudspeakers. He clearly spoke the words for Nguyen Van Thieu to hear on his final night in Saigon.

  As Ky bellowed his patriotic rhetoric and beat his breast bravely, thousands of Vietnam’s most wealthy and influential citizens flocked to Tan Son Nhut Airport. Using hoarded black market American green-backs, they bought and bribed passage aboard the dwindling numbers of commercial flights out of Saigon. Calamity now began to overwhelm the streets of the city as chaos overtook order.

  As Vice President Huong announced President Thieu’s resignation and his own ascension to the crumbling throne, Brigadier General Le Minh Dao and his valiant soldiers of the Eighteenth ARVN Division, now reinforced by elements of the First Airborne Brigade, prepared for the North Vietnamese Army’s final thrust on Xuan Loc. They would not last another day.

  Already, several advancing Communist divisions maneuvered around the northern flank of General Dao’s stubborn Xuan Loc battlefront and laid in their artillery positions to attack Bien Hoa.

  Refusing to surrender, the Eighteenth Division fought until the NVA finally overwhelmed the Fifty-second Regiment, which stood the long sentinel over the critical crossroads of Highway 1 and Highway 20 in Xuan Loc, and overran the division’s flanks, wiping out the Forty-eighth Regiment, which had guarded the city’s western edge. The fierce Communist drive killed many hundreds of the embattled ARVN soldiers and took a great number of the valiant warriors prisoner, including the Eighteenth Division’s commander, Brigadier General Le Minh Dao, who stood fast to the end at the crossroads with his Fifty-second Regiment.

  What remained of the Eighteenth ARVN Division and the Airborne Brigade finally managed to retreat southward toward the hamlet of Ba Ria, along Interprovincial Highway 2, out of the central thrust line of the NVA’s Bien Hoa front attack axis.

  Finally tucking Xuan Loc behind them and holding full control over the vital crossroads there, all twenty-one divisions of the NVA forces now sat poised along their five battlefronts surrounding South Vietnam’s capital and at last stood ready to make the final run to claim their prize, Saigon.

  Chapter 19

  RING OF FIRE

  SAIGON, RVN—SUNDAY, APRIL 27

  “HOW DOES LIFE treat you at Ben Cat?” General Van Tien Dung said to General Tran Van Tra, who busily made notes on a tactical map spread across a long table at his new forward command post, only forty miles from the city limits of Saigon. “Putting you and General Tan in concert with each other has proved to make a most impressive symphony.”

  “I am very pleased today, sir,” Tran Van Tra said, showing his old friend a rare and genuine smile.

  “Tran, you flatter me with your humble subordination,” Dung said and walked to the table to examine the adjustments and maneuvers that Tran Van Tra plotted. “I would have thought you would greet me with a haughty celebration after such a decisive annihilation of Bien Hoa. General Tan has his forces occupying the city and now positioned to begin shelling Saigon.”

  Tran Van Tra smiled again and said, “The Americans departed Bien Hoa in such a hurry, they left their flag flying atop their consulate. It still flutters there now.”

  General Dung laughed. “General Tan told me that pig Nguyen Van Toan not only left his flag but most of his staff at his headquarters in Bien Hoa. He fled to Vung Tao instead of Saigon and clambered aboard the first boat that would take him to the American ships.”<
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  “We will occupy Saigon no later than Wednesday,” Tran Van Tra said. “I am confident that we could overwhelm the city today, if we chose to do it.”

  “It serves our political objectives much better to wait and allow all the Americans and other Westerners to leave safely,” Dung said. “We begin shelling the city tomorrow, but only the outskirts. This will prompt the ones still lingering, hoping for this negotiated peace to materialize, to realize that all we really seek is a Saigon government that will finally surrender to us.”

  “This idiot that assumed the presidency after that crook Nguyen Van Thieu has communicated the most ridiculous proposals for a negotiated settlement,” Tran Van Tra said. “Reports from Colonel Vo Dong Giang read like a comedy. First Tran Van Huong offered to send an emissary to Hanoi to negotiate a settlement that would leave Saigon intact. Now he has returned to Colonel Giang’s front door offering to free all the political prisoners now behind bars in their jails and will make a special presentation of the eighteen journalists that they imprisoned more than two months ago and have yet to adjudicate. I wanted to advise Colonel Giang to tell Huong that we will free our people ourselves on Wednesday. However, I told the good colonel to simply make no reply to this or any further offers.”

  “I hope that you kept his notes,” Dung said, chuckling. “Our infamous Paris peace negotiator Le Duc Tho and our senior political officer Pham Hung will find them most amusing when they arrive here tonight.”

  “Elsewhere in Saigon’s political turmoil,” Tran said, “Colonel Giang reports that Nguyen Cao Ky continues to gain a following with his ranting. Last night more than six thousand people attended another of his political rallies. The fascist peacock has vowed that he will remain in Saigon and fight to the end. He said that the current regime has run from the battle, giving away the nation, and now negotiates to save themselves while betraying Saigon.”