Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  “Where we go?” they chimed together.

  “You go stateside,” Hargis called back. “You go big PX (post exchange), beaucoup GIs. Lots of boom-boom. Buy you Honda.”

  “Greg! You so crazy!” the three girls cackled.

  “Girls, VC come. NVA come,” the Marine then said in a serious voice. “I’ll take you to Tan Son Nhut and put you on a C-141 heading out to Clark Air Base this afternoon. Then you’ll go stateside. You get in now. The VC will definitely kill you if you stay here.”

  By the time the Marine had idled the length of the boulevard, lined by such illustrious nightspots as Mimi’s, Moulin Rouge, Club Tiger, Venus, and Mona Lisa and had stopped on the corner beneath the gigantic, lightbulb-covered Rex Hotel sign to count noses, he had the bread truck packed with fifty Tu Do Street hostesses.

  Hargis’s staff noncommissioned officer in charge, Master Sergeant Juan “John” Valdez, had himself made several trips to the Saigon strip rescuing the girlfriends of many of his young Marines who stood embassy watch. He quietly slipped them aboard outbound air force C- 141s and C-130s, one or two girls at a time.

  Not one to devote a lot of effort to such covert tactics as hiding one or two Tu Do hookers among a group of school teachers, Greg Hargis believed in going for maximum impact. So taking a break from an afternoon of shredding and burning chores, he absconded with the embassy bread truck and went to the city’s center, prowling the streets for working girls who wanted to leave Saigon.

  He had already convinced the United States Air Force ground security crew at Tan Son Nhut that what he proposed had a noble purpose, and personally vouching for each girl, he easily won the guards’ cooperation. However, the platoon of bubbly young women needed some sort of documentation to account for the fifty boat spaces that they occupied on the aircraft.

  “Look, sir,” Hargis said to a chief master sergeant processing paperwork for the boarding passengers, “these young women certainly are not missionaries, but they’re good girls, very resourceful, and get by really well on their own in a tough place like Saigon. So move them somewhere like Oceanside or Laguna Beach, and they will do great.”

  The senior air force sergeant just looked up at Hargis and said, “Put down their names here, real names. None of this Amy, Suzi, Kim, and Lolita bullshit.”

  Then the sergeant pointed across the sheet of information blocks and said to the Marine, “You put your name in this box. That means you accept responsibility for them. That clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Sergeant Hargis said. “Where do I sign?”

  Almost immediately following the crash of the Operation Babylift C-5A Galaxy, the Thirteenth Air Force began daily shuttle flights, striving to evacuate all American citizens living in and around Saigon to Clark Air Base in the Philippines, where they could catch flights to places like Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and the United States.

  By April 21, the shuttle flights operated around the clock, one after another, averaging a launch from Tan Son Nhut every twenty minutes. While air force C-141 Starlifters transported qualified refugees and Americans by day, C-130 Herculeses carried similar loads throughout the night, never falling below the three-planes-per-hour pace. The Third Security Police Group from Clark Air Base now had thirty-six military policemen based at Tan Son Nhut on temporary duty for the duration of the emergency.

  In the eight days of around-the-clock evacuations, the Air Force C-141 and C-130 flights successfully transported out of Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport more than forty thousand Americans and South Vietnamese refugees.

  Simultaneously, as the Air Force evacuation flights increased in frequency, the civilian carriers who had serviced Saigon began to disappear. Pan American, Bird Airways, and World Airways jets no longer arrived. By Monday afternoon, even Air Vietnam launched its final voyages from Saigon.

  Meanwhile, United States Air Force transports jammed the taxiways and flew nonstop, shuttling out the few remaining Americans and thousands of South Vietnamese citizens identified by the defense attaché and the American embassy as persons important to the government of the United States. These people included CIA operatives whose names had now fallen into the hands of the Communists by way of volumes of highly classified documents left behind unburned at consulate offices across the country. Other South Vietnamese refugees included public service professionals, government workers, loyal employees of the American facilities, friends, families of friends, friends of news media, and a scattering of sweet-smelling hookers from Tu Do street.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC

  “SIR, DR. KISSINGER is holding for you,” White House Chief of Staff Donald H. Rumsfeld said to President Gerald Ford after Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff Dick Cheney had passed him a note, interrupting the President’s late afternoon meeting. Ford sat in the Oval Office discussing economic and energy strategy with several of his key policy advisors: Ken Rush, William Seidman, Elliot Richardson, Rogers Morton, and Frank Zarb.

  “Henry,” President Ford said, “what’s the news?”

  The secretary of state had just received a telephone call from GrahamA. Martin, who conveyed the tragic news that at two minutes before 4:00 a.m., Saigon time, the North Vietnamese had attacked Tan Son Nhut Airport with more than one hundred fifty 122-millimeter rockets and 130-millimeter artillery shells. Some of the rockets struck outside the Defense Attaché’s Office compound, killing two United States Marines standing guard there.

  When the attack began, an Air Force C-130 had taxied onto the active runway and took a direct hit, setting it ablaze. The aircraft’s five-man crew and two Air Force security police riding shotgun on the plane managed to clear all the passengers from the aircraft and led them to shelter under concrete abutments nearby. The aircrew and two security policemen then ran to a second C-130 preparing to depart and managed to get aboard and flew on to Clark Air Base.

  “We have approximately four hundred passengers stranded under the concrete abutment with a dozen or so Air Force security police providing them protection,” the secretary of state told the President. “General Smith immediately suspended further flight operations for the time being.”

  “We have the names of the Marines?” Ford said.

  “Corporal Charles McMahon, Jr., of Woburn, Massachusetts, and Lance Corporal Darwin D. Judge of Marshalltown, Iowa,” Kissinger said.

  “Can you be here by seven o’clock?” the President said.

  “Yes, sir,” Kissinger replied.

  “I will see you then,” Ford said and put the telephone receiver back in its cradle.

  The President took a blank note sheet from a small wooden tray and jotted a message on it. Folding it in half, he waved at Dick Cheney to come forward and handed him the paper.

  “Get this to General Scowcroft,” the President said.

  Cheney immediately had the note hand carried to Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, deputy director of the National Security Council. Folded inside the small sheet with The White House embossed in dark blue block letters at the top, President Ford had written, “We’d better have an NSC meeting at 7.”

  UNITED STATES CONSULATE, CAN THO

  WHILE FIFTEEN OF Clark Air Base’s Third Security Police Group sentries spent Tuesday morning squatted behind the concrete barriers along the runways at Tan Son Nhut, protecting the four hundred stranded evacuation passengers, exchanging automatic weapons fire with either Viet Cong guerrillas or renegade ARVN soldiers now rapidly deserting the front lines en masse, Consul General Francis “Terry” McNamara faced a similarly stressing dilemma at Can Tho, the last remaining United States consulate in South Vietnam.

  “But sir!” Terry McNamara pled with Ambassador Graham Martin. “Saigon is completely surrounded. We have no other means of getting to the embassy except by air. We’re cut off too. We need those four helicopters to evacuate people here at Can Tho.”

  “I’m in no mood for this,” Martin snapped back. “Send the four helicopters now, with no passengers aboard any of them. Beside
s, you have other options for evacuation. What about the four LCM landing crafts and the rice barge that you bought from the Alaska Barge and Transport Company? You might even be able to get Air Force planes into your airfield too.”

  “Fixed-wing operation would draw every VC and NVA for miles,” McNamara said. “We already explored that idea and realized that the first plane would never make it off the ground. So our only option is that we drive the landing vessels down the river to the coast.”

  “I will ensure that a ship is sitting right there to pick you up,” Martin said firmly. “Trust me. You will get out of there in fine shape.”

  In less than an hour, McNamara, a former navy officer, walked down to the docks and found Staff Sergeant Boyette S. Hasty swearing and chewing out two Filipino clerks that worked for the CIA section and an American CIA logistics man.

  “Sir!” Hasty snapped, wheeling on his toes, still showing his hackles bristling. “Our loyal and faithful CIA staff has already launched a bug-out operation of their own. You recall the four helicopters that were supposed to go to Saigon? Two may have actually flown north, as ordered. However, two have definitely flown south, loaded with the bulk of the CIA pukes and their tribe. They also had their people load all their South Vietnamese operatives in our two best LCMs, the ones I had outfitted with machine guns, and they ripped them off too.”

  “That leaves us with two LCMs and the rice barge?” McNamara said.

  “Correct, sir,” Hasty said. “Two LCMs with no machine guns and one leaky old rice barge. The son of a bitches abandoned us here and even ran out on three of their own people.”

  “Nothing we can do about it now,” the consul general said and took a seat on a bench in the shade of a wooden awning built onto the pier. “Do you have a total head count of whom we have to take with us downriver?”

  “My five Marines, you, your remaining staff of thirteen, and numbnuts here from the CIA makes the American count an even twenty head,” Hasty said. “Then, according to my paperwork, we have 298 other folks that have to go with us.”

  “Divide the number down the middle and spread us among the two LCMs,” McNamara said. “If we try to deploy that old barge, it will just slow us down. We’ll be a bit crowded, but it’s only sixty miles down the Bassac River to the sea. If we get the people down here now, we can make it to the ocean before dark.”

  “Sir,” Hasty said, “have you considered exactly where that sixty miles of river takes us?”

  “Smack through the heart of some of the nastiest VC and North Vietnamese haunts in MR 4,” McNamara said. “That’s why we will all dress like Vietnamese, including the rice straw hats.”

  “Two really bad stretches,” Hasty said. “Just a few miles past that first bend we have one area guaranteed to rouse a few VC attacks. Then, where the river narrows, and they can hit us with rocks from the shore.”

  “We’ll take all that we can carry from the armory and hope that’s enough,” McNamara said. “Oh, and what about your new bride and her family?”

  “Got them all packed and ready to go when you give the word,” Hasty said. The Marine staff sergeant had married a South Vietnamese woman only days earlier and had instructed his wife, her mother, and her brothers to stand by for immediate departure.

  “You need to get your wife and her family right now,” McNamara said. “Get back here as fast as you can because we need to shove off. Saigon is already under artillery attack.”

  An hour later, Consul General Francis “Terry” McNamara sat at the coxswain station of the lead LCM studying the controls. When the CIA had departed without notice, commandeering the two helicopters and two landing crafts, they had also taken with them the seamen capable of operating the flat-bottom boats.

  From prior navy experience, McNamara and one other member of the consulate staff were the only two people remotely skilled enough to operate the two diesel-powered vessels. For nearly twenty minutes the two former navy men studied the controls, helm, and gauges.

  Finally, McNamara looked up and said with a shrug, “I can do this.” Then he turned a switch, pushed a handle forward, and fired the engine.

  Black smoke boiled out of the water aft of the boat, and the people standing inside the boat clapped and cheered. Then the consul general climbed out of the first LCM and walked back to the second and instructed his colleague on the start-up procedure.

  In a moment, the two landing crafts with more than 318 passengers divided between them cruised into the center of the broad-reaching waters of the Bassac River.

  “Here’s a little something that me and the boys fixed up for you,” Staff Sergeant Hasty said with a smile and handed Terry McNamara a gray steel Navy combat helmet. Neatly painted in half-inch tall black letters laid in an arch above a white star read the word Commodore. Then in a straight line beneath the star the Marines had painted, Can Tho Yacht Club.

  McNamara laughed with Hasty, admiring the artwork and creative thought. He tossed to the deck the conical straw hat that he had worn and plopped the helmet atop his head.

  SINGAPORE AIRPORT TERMINAL

  TEARS STREAMED FROM Kieu Chinh’s eyes as she hugged and kissed the four men in her motion picture crew in Singapore who had come to her rescue. When the police had taken her to jail, she called her producer, who then took a collection from everyone connected with her last project.

  Not only did they obtain her release from the Singapore prison, with the proviso that she would depart the nation immediately, but they had bought her an around-the-world airline ticket.

  “This will take you anywhere you want to go,” the producer said as his three colleagues huddled by him at the gate for the Singapore Boeing 747 jetliner. Two police officers stood nearby to ensure that the actress departed the country.

  “Maybe they will let you stay in Paris with your sister,” another of the producers said.

  “I hope,” Kieu said, her voice choked with tears.

  Her first leg of the journey took her to Hong Kong. There, police stood outside the customs gates, so she stayed on the neutral side and looked for a flight to Europe. The next plane departed for Rome, and because that was close to Paris, she boarded the flight.

  TAN SON NHUT AIRPORT, SAIGON

  THUNDERSTORM CLOUDS BEGAN to build across the southern horizon, and breezes from them cooled the concrete taxiway where the fifteen Air Force security policemen and the four hundred stranded passengers from the rocketed C-130 sat with their backs locked against the concrete abutment that separated them from their attackers.

  The shelling had let up, but automatic rifle fire still grazed across the tarmac, keeping the passengers and SPs pinned behind the cement wall. They had no water, and despite the sky filling with clouds, the high temperature and humidity had taken their toll. Several of the people now moaned from heat sickness and dehydration cramps.

  Once the sun had risen, and the shelling had seemed to subside, a sudden flurry of activity swept over Tan Son Nhut Air Base. South Vietnamese soldiers and airmen swarmed the flight lines and started every aircraft that would fly. Dozens of helicopters, jammed with deserting soldiers, launched directly from the aprons in front of their hangars. Fighter jets, attack aircraft, observation planes, light private airplanes, and several South Vietnamese Air Force transports took off from every direction, on the runways and taxiways and even diagonally across the flight lines.

  Some of the aircraft headed south and west, but most headed toward the sea where the American armada of warships and merchant vessels lay, now picking up refugees by the boatloads.

  As the chaotic launch of every aircraft in any sort of flying condition took place, the pilots let external fuel tanks, loads of bombs, and rocket pods just tumble to the runway behind them as they rotated into the air, littering dangerous debris across most of the taxiways and runways, especially near the terminal and hangar areas.

  While the planes made their mass getaway, NVA and Viet Cong gunners targeted the fleeing aircraft, sending another barrage of 1
30-millimeter artillery and 122-millimeter rockets into the airfield. One AFRVN C-130, just beginning its takeoff roll, took a rocket through the wing, setting the aircraft ablaze. As its passengers and crew ran from the burning plane, a column of black smoke signaled General Homer Smith, who had watched the spectacle from the DAO compound next door, that any further flights at Tan Son Nhut would only involve rescuing the American airmen on the ground with the stranded passengers.

  “Look, a C-130 coming in hot,” a sergeant said, seeing the silhouette of the aircraft banking low from a truncated base line in the pattern to a very short final approach.

  “Get everybody on their toes, ready to run when he stops,” a master sergeant called down the line. “When the plane comes parallel to us, send the people running to the ramp fifty at a time. We’ll cram as many aboard as they’ll let us.”

  “Maybe we can get half on this one,” an airman suggested to the master sergeant.

  “I’ll cram all four hundred, plus myself, if they’ll let us,” a staff sergeant down the line said anxiously.

  “We may have to,” the master sergeant said and pointed across the airfield where hundreds of Vietnamese deserters came running toward them.

  Just as the C-130’s tires skidded on the runway, the pilot used every breaking maneuver in the book, making a near record-setting short-field landing and then gunned the plane’s four big engines, turning directly across taxiways, weeds, and gravel, going directly to the stranded passengers.

  He had not yet stopped when the back ramp came down, and the loadmaster stood in the opening, pumping his arm up and down, encouraging the people to run to him. The exhausted passengers crammed themselves inside the plane, leaving only a handful still waiting outside, along with the master sergeant and seven of his security policemen, who had set up a base of covering fire for the aircraft.