Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  DAO COMPOUND, SAIGON

  A CIRCLE OF automobile, bus, and truck headlights ringed the six landing zones at the Defense Attaché’s Office compound, nicknamed Dodge City, and its annex, nicknamed the Alamo. Gunnery Sergeant Russ Thurman and Lance Corporal Eric Carlson busily snapped pictures as the Marines who had stood the security around the compound’s perimeter fell back and boarded the waiting helicopters.

  Among the crowd, a few American news reporters and photographers lingered. Each of them wanted to outwait the other to be the last man aboard the last helicopter out.

  Dirck Halstead had developed masterful skills at lingering and now had managed to outwait everyone. As Marines gathered other reporters and photographers and pushed them on departing birds through the long night that now had lasted into the early hours of morning, Dirck had slipped from one cluster of activity to another.

  Finally, he had no place to run when Gunny Thurman cornered him.

  “Look, if you’re waiting on the last chopper out, this is it,” Thurman said. Having served multiple combat tours in I Corps and having cut his public affairs teeth on escorting journalists much like Dirck Halstead, he knew exactly the photographer’s motives.

  “So we better head out then,” Dirck said, walking with the Marine, both men shooting photographs of the activities in the headlights.

  As they sauntered toward the waiting CH-53D Sea Stallion, Halstead saw two Marines run toward the main buildings.

  “What’s going on there?” he asked.

  Russ Thurman saw the two running Marines and recognized them both. Captain Raymond J. McManus and Master Sergeant William East. They had led their team of explosive ordnance technicians through the entire DAO compound, wiring and setting thermite charges throughout the complex of structures. Now with the last helicopter preparing to depart, the two senior Marines from their team went to their control point to detonate the incendiary explosives.

  “They’re going to burn the building,” Thurman said and jogged to the helicopter.

  Dirck Halstead started to wander over to the place where the two Marines knelt, but heard the helicopter turning up the speed of its main rotor and instead ran up the rear ramp.

  He watched out the rear of the helicopter as the two Marines stood and then ran for their waiting ride.

  As the helicopter lifted, most of the Marines and the few civilians inside looked out the open rear door as the headlights of the cars, buses, and trucks shown in the now empty circle that had since noon the prior day served as the landing site for hundreds of Marine helicopters and a number of air force Jolly Green Giants.

  With the headlamps now a distant ring of light, every building at Dodge City and the Alamo suddenly came aglow with white and red light. Although built of concrete blocks and steel, the structures literally melted to the ground, destroying everything within their walls.

  In the night sky, Dirck Halstead looked overhead and was amazed at the hundreds of lights from aircraft of all shapes and sizes. Several flew forward air control missions, keeping the thousands of sorties from any midair mishaps. Others, such as a team of Marine Corps EA- 6B Prowlers, spent a day and a night jamming North Vietnamese antiaircraft fire control radar and communications signals, keeping a vast array of Communist SAM SA-7 antiaircraft missiles grounded.

  Dozens of fighters from the Midway, Coral Sea, Enterprise, and Hancock flew high cover, along with the air force tactical jets based in Thailand and the Philippines that joined them. Seeing the immense array of ships as his helicopter finally landed on the deck of the USS Okinawa, Dirck Halstead suddenly realized just how massive this evacuation had been.

  The Time photographer, finally feeling safe and relaxed, took out a cigarette and lit it, his first in a dozen hours. He had almost forgotten that he smoked them. As he took the first long, satisfying pull of the tobacco, he wondered if Al Dawson, Peter Arnett, Neil Davis, Hugh Van Es, or any of his other friends that he had left on the streets of Saigon, busy covering their stories, had managed to catch one of the buses to the embassy or the DAO compound.

  Dirck stood on the deck in the darkness, his cameras put away, and felt sad for the nation he had left behind. He had stood on Red Beach in Da Nang in March of 1965 and had photographed the first Marine Corps ground combat units as they came ashore. Tonight, he rode with some of the last Marine Corps combat units to set foot in South Vietnam.

  SOUTH CHINA SEA, SOUTH OF CAN THO

  “LIGHTS!” TERRY MCNAMARA shouted. “Send up the flares!”

  Boyette Hasty had been lying back on the deck with his wife, his mother-in-law, and his brothers-in-law, exhausted, when the consul general yelled.

  They had first spotted what looked like ship lights an hour or two after dark. Then the lights disappeared for a time. They had shot flares skyward every twenty minutes, trying to get the ship’s attention, but had thus far failed.

  Since early evening, they had also taken turns calling “Mayday” on the PRC-25 radio that Hasty had managed to leave in the cockpit of the boat. He was thankful that the CIA had not seen it because they had absconded with everything else. As it was, the radio had proved only worth occupying a man’s time. No one ever answered any of their distress signals. Then they saw the lights.

  Throughout the night they chased the distant white and yellow glows. Sometimes the sea reflects lights from distant cities, making them look like ships on the water. He wondered if all they really chased was a ghost, teasing them for half a dozen hours. Hasty had nearly given up and had lain back to relax when Terry McNamara stirred him again.

  “Sergeant Hasty,” McNamara said, his voice filled with joy, “I can see the ship. They have stopped!”

  Marine Captain David A. Garcia and his security detachment of Marines aboard the Pioneer Contender had seen the flares hours earlier and had watched them curiously. They supposed that the fire in the sky came from NVA or Viet Cong because they had already picked up their passengers from Can Tho. At least the CIA field staff from Can Tho had allowed them to believe that lie. Then Captain Garcia realized that the flares signaled distress, and he requested that the shipmaster stop the vessel.

  Now, only a few hours before dawn, April 30, Terry McNamara and his civilian staff, and Sergeant Hasty and his Marines, along with the 283 civilian refugees that they had evacuated, happily climbed aboard the MSC ship. The consul general still wore his United States Navy gray helmet with the single white star and Commodore, Can Tho Yacht Club painted on its front.

  Although the consul general exchanged words with the chief of the Can Tho CIA field unit, he never divulged to anyone what words he said to him. Sergeant Hasty and his fellow Marines had their own opinions about the conduct of the CIA at Can Tho and freely expressed them.

  AMERICAN EMBASSY, SAIGON

  “PULL THEM INSIDE, Top,” Jim Kean shouted from the embassy doorway.

  John Valdez, Bobby Schlager, Terry Bennington, and Stephen Bauer had stood ready with a base of fire while all the other sixty-eight Marines from Regimental Landing Team 4 scrambled inside the building. Now several hundred suddenly panic-stricken South Vietnamese who had waited in the courtyard for their flight, which would never come, rushed at them.

  “Get inside!” Kean shouted as Bennington, Schlager, and Valdez ran for the doorway.

  Stephen Bauer reached the door first, but before he could get inside, he suddenly found himself and his fellow Marines surrounded by Vietnamese screaming and clawing at them. The Marine quickly grabbed the four-inch by six-inch, eight-foot-long beam used for barring the door, put it over his shoulders, and ran at the crowd, spinning the beam at them, knocking several of the frantic people to the ground. While he stood there spinning the heavy length of wood like a helicopter rotor, his comrades ducked inside the embassy.

  Yelling a few profane words at the people, he too jumped inside and slid the beam in the cradles across the door, barring the screaming people outside.

  “Colonel Madison and his people have gone,” Jim Kean told
the seventy-nine Marines and four navy Seabees that now huddled together on the roof. “We’re the last guys out. Now we just sit tight and wait.”

  ABOARD USS BLUE RIDGE IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA

  WHILE THE SECURITY team and embassy Marines waited on the embassy roof, another war raged on the Task Force 76 flagship and at Fleet Marine Force Pacific Headquarters in Hawaii.

  As happens with most messages from higher headquarters, information copies abound and scatter to the four winds in the Pentagon. When President Ford’s order to end the evacuation reached certain bureaucrats at Department of the Navy headquarters, typical of the office drones, they began nitpicking.

  They had in hand a Presidential order that directed an end to the evacuation. Someone also realized that the helicopters had flown nonstop for more than twelve hours now, well beyond the Naval Aviation Tactical Operations Procedures book. As diligent bureaucrats, they issued a directive from the Secretary of the Navy ordering all flight operations party to Task Force 76 and Operation Frequent Wind to immediately cease.

  When 9th MAB commander Richard Carey saw the order, he went ballistic.

  “Get me Lieutenant General Wilson,” he snarled. He merely had to inform his boss in Hawaii of the facts. He did not have to ask for help.

  Louis H. Wilson, as a Marine captain in World War II, had earned the Medal of Honor heroically leading his infantry company against the Japanese on Guam. Nothing scared him. As commanding general of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, his word stood above all others west of Kansas City. Nothing to Lou Wilson had greater value than the lives and safety of his Marines. Knowing that a detachment of them still sat on the United States Embassy in Saigon while the city surrounded them in chaos, and navy bureaucrats had now ordered that flight operations halt, leaving his Marines on that roof, sent him through the ceiling.

  “General Carey,” Wilson growled in his Mississippi southern gentleman’s drawl, “I want you to inform the entire chain of command there of one important fact. I will personally court-martial anyone, no matter service or rank, who halts these flights until all our Marines in this evacuation are aboard those ships. Are you clear on that?”

  “Sir, yes, sir,” Carey said happily.

  ROOFTOP OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY, SAIGON

  “CHOPPER COMING, MAJOR,” Sergeant Schuller called to Jim Kean.

  “Okay,” the last officer in command of forces ashore in Vietnam said as the CH-46 landed on the rooftop landing platform, “next stick stand up and prepare to embark the chopper.”

  “Sir,” John Valdez said, “we gotta get one more bird after this. When we board these guys, we still have a spillover of eleven bodies.”

  “We can’t squeeze everyone aboard?” Kean questioned, not wanting to sit for another hour for the helicopter to make the round-trip.

  “No way,” Valdez said. “I got them in each other’s laps as it is.”

  Kean walked to the window by the pilot and recognized Major Gerry Berry. Both men exchanged familiar smiles.

  “I hate meeting like this,” Kean said jokingly, raising a laugh from Berry. “We still have eleven of us on the deck here, all my embassy Marines. The last of Colonel Gray’s men and the majority of my guys are loaded on your bird now.”

  Berry gave Kean a thumbs up and turned his eyes to the control panel. Then Jim Kean grabbed the pilot’s sleeve in the open window.

  “Make sure you come back for us,” Kean said as firmly as he knew how. “Don’t leave us here.”

  Chapter 21

  GOOD MORNING HO CHI MINH CITY

  HO CHI MINH CITY, DRVN—WEDNESDAY, APRIL 30

  IT WAS THE last thing Jim Kean wanted creeping in his head right now. He knew if he thought it, so might the ten other Marines who depended on him for leadership. He certainly could not let doubt paint itself on his face. He was their rock in a hurricane-whipped sea.

  “Major Jim Kean, US Marine Corps,” he said to himself, mocking his new rank, although not yet officially promoted to it. “Solid man. Cool head. Last commander of American forces in Vietnam. Got all the answers. Field-grade material. No sweat, not a drop.”

  But in his heart, hidden there, worming a rotten little hole, uncertainty nudged at him. Had they been left behind?

  From the roof of the United States Embassy—four stories and a helicopter platform above Saigon—Kean could see for several miles. And at this moment, his world looked a mess with wrecked cars, trashed streets, and broken windows. Just beyond the courtyard fence, the embassy’s once-beautiful Olympic swimming pool now floated with suitcases, clothing, guns, and chairs. During the night, with no facilities, the Vietnamese waiting to escape had even used the pool as a toilet.

  By daylight, many of them had given up. No more choppers, they knew it. When the Americans barricaded themselves on the roof, the future was obvious. They had now gone home, or wherever, to wait for the Communists.

  Still, scores of others faithfully sat, clustered in the courtyard below, waiting by their sacked-up belongings. Jim Kean could hear their distant mumbles and coughs. Babies cried. Always babies, everywhere in this country. He knew what they told each other, reassuring their faith. America would not forsake them, most certainly not. The helicopters would come again today, and they could leave too. They believed this and continued to wait, and hope.

  The Marine blew a thick wad of spit off the roof, disgusted. He didn’t want these people’s useless vigil creeping around his brain either. The rest of his life would be time enough to wrestle with it, but not now. Nothing he could do, just feel bad for them.

  And what about himself? His little covey of Marines? Were they just as stupid as those poor souls?

  Kean scanned the empty sky. He strained his ears for the sound of a helicopter beating its blades against the morning air. But he heard nothing, saw nothing, for the dozenth time in the past twenty minutes. Nothing. Just a ball of orange sun about a fingernail’s width above the horizon.

  “Chopper will come. Give it a chance,” he told himself. Then he looked at the people below who also waited, believing in the faithfulness of President Ford, America, and the United States Marines.

  “Sure,” his frustration answered in a sarcastic growl. Then he let fly with his pistol. Pumped a full magazine of .45-caliber lead into the embassy’s satellite antenna, shooting it to hell.

  Kean looked at the smoking barrel and shoved the piece back in the shoulder holster he wore. Then he looked at his Marines who sat silently, dazed, not really caring that their boss had just cranked off the last shots fired in anger by an American in Vietnam, killing an antenna.

  “Now that was certainly a field grade thing to do,” he said, looking at Master Sergeant John Valdez, who sat with his back against the two-foot tall parapet that surrounded the roof.

  “Skipper, you’re a major now, so I guess it was,” Valdez said, pulling a long, Monte Cristo Havana from his shirt. “Have a cigar.”

  Kean took the panatela and twisted off its cellophane. He let the wrapper go and watched it drift off the roof. He thought about his wife, Rosanne, at home in Hong Kong. They had hardly had time to celebrate the news of his selection for promotion. And now, less than twenty-three hours ago, she had gotten word to him that she was going to have a baby, their fourth.

  He was still a captain despite what his men called him, although in Saigon no one really knew what rank he actually carried. Dressed in a polo shirt, slacks, and a shoulder holster that held his own Colt Gold Cup pistol with fine walnut grips and engraved receiver, he could be anything.

  The square-faced Marine commanded Charlie Company, Marine Security Guard Battalion, an odd outfit compared to most other of the corps’s organizations. He had several hundred Marines scattered across the Asian part of Earth. He mainly oversaw their training and administrative needs. Outside that, his men worked for the ambassadors and came under the operational authority of the security officers of the respective embassies where they stood interior watch and bodyguard duty.

  Hi
s largest crop of Marine security guards worked in Vietnam, sixty-two of them in Saigon alone. That’s why he had come here in the first place. When the security boss for the Far East, Jim Ellis, had suddenly left Hong Kong for emergency discussions in Beijing, Kean knew he had better go to Saigon.

  When he arrived on April 17, Kean recognized all the signs. Vietnam’s northern provinces had fallen more than two weeks earlier. Hue, Da Nang, Chu Lai, and all of I Corps, his old hunting grounds from his previous tours, were gone. Marine First Lieutenant Sandy Kempner came to mind when he thought of those places now held by the Communists. Sandy had died up there. Now it was lost. And it would not be long before the whole country followed.

  The public’s nervousness was much like what he had seen in Cambodia two weeks earlier. Now Pol Pott and his Khmer Rouge had begun murdering those people by the millions. Kean had gone in and out of that disaster and then to Vientiane, Laos. There he watched the Laotian capital fall under joint occupation by the government and the Pathet Lao forces. Interestingly to Kean, the Pathet Lao men in uniform seemed to have taken on a more disciplined aspect. In fact, to him they looked more like North Vietnamese troops.

  After he had arrived in Saigon, one day, and he couldn’t put his finger on exactly which, Top Valdez and the others decided he was not a captain any longer. No ceremony, but they began to call him major. So did General Carey when he talked to him nearly four hours ago.

  For that conversation, Kean had used a headset aboard one of the helicopters while it embarked passengers at the embassy. At that late hour, it was his only means of communication with the ships.

  Nothing else worked now. Just a little backpack radio, a PRC-25, not much better than a walkie-talkie. Choppers, close in, were about all it could raise. With weak batteries, now, maybe not even those, it was as useful as a brick. But it kept a couple of Marines busy, twisting knobs and talking on the handset. Charlie and Nguyen Victor were probably laughing in the weeds, listening to the boys.