Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  Undoubtedly, Kean thought, his superiors on the ships were looking for his debrief by now, certainly the general. Even if they assumed they had everyone aboard those last three birds, surely by now they realized they came out eleven short. They would at least be looking for the commander, the boot major.

  “Nobody’s forgotten us,” he told himself. But that didn’t help as he looked toward the sunrise, hoping to see the silhouette of a helicopter and saw only horizon.

  They were done in, Kean and these marines. They just wanted to go home. Logically, they reassured each other, it was only a delay. Chopper had to get gas, probably, or had a flat. Some reason. There had to be a good one why the bird had not yet shown.

  “They know we’re here,” Staff Sergeant Mike Sullivan said.

  “But then that dead radio,” the inside of his head retorted. “No answer. Sorry little backpack Prick-25 doesn’t get that far anyway.”

  He looked at Bobby Schlager who lay next to him, listening to the staff sergeant call on the handset to an unresponsive world. Schlager heard Sullivan pretending to talk to some unreal chopper.

  “Don’t bullshit, man,” Schlager whispered. “There’s nobody there.”

  “Say, what are the ships, fifty or sixty miles out?” Sullivan spoke in return.

  Schlager looked back at Sullivan and tiredly nodded his head, yes. It sounded right. Who cared?

  “No way a Prick can call that far, anyway. Chopper will come. Semper fi, do or die. They’ll come,” someone behind the two said. Then they looked at the sun and silently prayed.

  Take another drink of Jack Daniels Black, or was it the Johnnie Walker? Black Label, you know. Best there is, at least in these parts. A half-gallon bottle of each was floating around, robbed from Ambassador Graham Martin’s liquor box. What the hell. Now that everything’s done but this waiting for the last bird out.

  Somewhere, though, the ugly thoughts kept blurting out.

  “Think they left us?”

  “Shut up, asshole.”

  Steve Schuller, who had been lying against the wall, hurting, looked up. He heard the question. He had asked it too—in his head. But he didn’t like his feelings about the answer.

  The bayonet wound in his side throbbed. So he dug in his finger and pulled out the knot of T-shirt he had stuffed inside the hole, revealing black, dripping, syrupy blood. He sent the disgusting mess skidding a red streak across the embassy’s roof.

  The lanky sergeant took another drink from a canteen of piss-warm water. Then he doused a strip of fresh T-shirt he had ripped from what was left of the one he wore, nearly losing his breath when he shoved the wad inside. Then Schuller felt another rush of chill and sweat hit him, so he closed his eyes and sucked hard on his cigarette.

  “Just gear down and cool it,” he told himself. But the voices from somewhere over there, beyond his closed eyes, pulled at his ears and made him think it too.

  “No man, really. They might believe they got us on that last bird.”

  Schuller opened his eyes to see who was talking, but didn’t feel like turning his head.

  “Think so? No way, man. The major, he told them. Got the crew chief, remember? Don’t forget us, I heard him yell.”

  “They’ll be here,” a different voice interrupted.

  It was Bennington, Terry Sergeant fucking Bennington. Schuller looked to him and gave him a wink. Skinny fart, but tough as shit.

  He thought about the incident out at the gate the day before. The crowd, nonstop faces, going from the embassy wall to forever. Everybody wanted inside the gates and on the choppers. Bennington had stood next to Schuller on that watch.

  They used M14 rifles, not because they shot a bigger round, but they presented a heavier club. They didn’t want to kill the people, just hold them back. More stopping power with a 14’s long stock and barrel.

  Schuller remembered seeing the soldier. South Vietnamese, crazy, maybe drunk. Maybe both. He locked eyes with him and suddenly the guy lowered his rifle and charged.

  The side step hadn’t worked. Schuller felt the blade of the long bayonet fixed on the man’s rifle pop through his shirt and his skin and bury in his gut. It felt as if it headed out the other side when Bennington stopped it.

  He had seen the crazy soldier too, met him in the jaw with the steel tailpiece of his M14. Vertical butt stroke, they called it in boot camp. Terry was always the studious type, learned that hand-to-hand well. And Steve Schuller thanked God he did.

  Terry Bennington stopped the assault dead in its tracks and took the soldier off his feet with the force of the rifle stock, sending the cuckoo man skidding on his back through a gap of parted people, all dodging the drama like when Moses parted the Red Sea.

  Two sets of hands pulled Schuller backward inside the embassy compound, and two other Marines filled his slot at the gate.

  He had known he was bleeding, but they had no hospital corps-man, not even a first aid kit. So the Marine took a break, lay against the building, sucked down some water, and stuffed T-shirt material into his wound. After a smoke, and a little more water, he went back to work.

  Bennington sent Schuller to the embassy roof where he hailed chopper traffic with the PRC-25 radio that Staff Sergeant Sullivan now played with while they waited for rescue.

  “Remember, before the others left? We sat for two hours with those guys,” Schuller reminded his buddies. “No birds, just us and the world.”

  “Sure, that was sixty-eight marines, four Seabees, and an hour ago,” David Norman suggested. “Maybe they think they got the whole herd.”

  “No way, Jack. They know we’re here,” Schuller said.

  “So do the NVA,” Bennington reminded the bunch. “How about all these pissed-off people down in the streets? Hope that bird gets here before we gotta deal with that.”

  Steve Schuller looked at the others, “I won’t throw my hands in the air. No way! No POWs. They come up here, man, and it’s the Alamo.”

  Jim Kean heard the talk and walked to the place beneath the platform where his men rested.

  “Nobody forgot us,” he told them in his most confident tone. “But like Bennington said, things could break at any time. So what should we do?”

  John Valdez never said much, but the major’s comment brought him to his feet. He looked at the others and then out to the streets of Saigon.

  Poor, crumbling, frightened Saigon. He had gone over the wall a dozen times, rescuing special people, doing it as much for his Marines as for the people who needed out. Prostitutes mostly, girlfriends his Marines called them, but others too. Shine boys, bar keepers, corner hucksters, kids. People he had come to know out in the ville. Some of them seemed like the people back on his home streets in San Antonio. And that got to him.

  “NVA will kill these broads,” he had told the major. They weren’t the Top’s girls, but he cared about their lives.

  Kean agreed. Who really gives a damn, or will know the difference? After it was done, scuttlebutt on the roof told of a C-130 full of whores that left Tan Son Nhut early yesterday. Top Valdez probably arranged that too, several Marines speculated, or at least had a hand in it.

  “Can we vote on it?” Valdez said to the major and looked at the men who now gathered close.

  Kean thought for a moment and agreed. It was their lives, if the chopper did not get here in time. He didn’t want to think about that possibility. But if it came to it—with nothing to hold, no mission—they ought to have the choice.

  The Marines voted. No discussion, no questions: No surrender. They would fight to the end, if the helicopter did not come, if it got to that.

  With the vote taken, eleven to nothing, Jim Kean felt better. No doubts now, they would all go down together, if it came to it. But he didn’t need the vote to know it. These guys would have fought anyway, and he knew he couldn’t stop them. And he wouldn’t have tried.

  Stephen Bauer ambled back to the fire door where he stood guard with a mace can, squirting people’s eyes anytime one
brave enough, or desperate enough, tried to come through the broken glass in the little window. But no one had done that for several hours now.

  Bennington and Dave Norman walked with Schuller and squatted again by the wall while Sullivan and Schlager flopped by the dead radio.

  “Relax.”

  “Bird’s coming.”

  “Give another hit off that Jack.”

  “Just zeed out, man. Too many hours and no sleep. Got the bugs crawling in your brain. Chill out.”

  Jim Kean walked to the ladder that led up to the helicopter pad and leaned his hip and elbow into the rungs.

  It had been a tough three days, and the last twenty-four hours impossible to reckon. They had hauled out 140,000 Vietnamese, and who knows how many Americans. Nonstop crazy with two landing zones at the embassy and six at the Defense Attaché’s Office compound, scattered across Dodge City and the Alamo, cycling helicopters in right behind those departing. No lull. Just pack them on and wave them off.

  Most crews had taken the seats out of their choppers, buckled straps across the floors and told the people to hang on. They had packed in two and three times the numbers of bodies the birds’ manufacturers said they could haul.

  One HH-53D Jolly Green Giant driver, an Air Force captain named Joe Gilmartin, claimed carrying 150 souls in his chopper, which Boeing had rated as a 35-passenger aircraft.

  People didn’t care. They wanted to live. They wanted freedom, all so badly that they would risk death for it.

  “Pile in some more,” the crew chief would shout to Kean.

  Throughout the day, he had worked the landing zone in the embassy parking lot. The pilot would haul back on his controls, lift the bird, set it down, and wave to load more people. They repeated this until the helicopter struggled so hard that the pilot knew it could not fly with another soul aboard. Then the big old green grasshopper-looking whirlybird rumbled and shuddered as it climbed in the air and disappeared over the treetops, ship bound with a fresh haul of despair and grief riding inside its belly.

  With every load out, an equal number of infiltrators came over, under, or through the embassy wall. The population of the crowd waiting in the courtyard never really changed. And the marines didn’t have time to check lists or papers. Just shove some more on another chopper and go.

  Bennington had even started telling Kean on the walkie-talkie, “Major, I think we sent four more NVA corporals to Guam.” It became the running joke.

  Jim Kean smiled, thinking about what four North Vietnamese Army corporals would do in Guam. Then he bit the end off the cigar and sucked on it. The tobacco’s sweetness tasted sharp and stung the tip of his tongue. He sniffed its aroma, a good one. Leave it to Top.

  No matches, though. “Who’s got a light?” he said. No one heard him. Kean looked around, but then decided to just settle and think. The cigar tasted good cold.

  MAI THAO VILLA, NORTHWEST SAIGON

  “MY DEAR, THE sun has risen. Dawn brings us a new day. It will be better than our last,” Mai Thao said, rising from the sofa chair where he had fallen asleep. He looked for his martini pitcher and then remembered draining the last when he sat down and dozed while a ring of fire burned around Saigon.

  Tran Da Tu and his wife, Nha Ca, had cuddled together on the fancy jade green couch with the beautiful gold brocade, hand-sewn thread work of Japanese cranes with their wings widespread decorating the heavy, silk-based fabric. Mai Thao swore that the birds looked more like the vile smelling African marabou, a type of stork that he had once seen close-up while visiting the London Zoo and caught a whiff of their dead, rancid odor. Ugly, black, long-legged creatures with bare necks and heads and a ring of white feathers at the tops of their shoulders where their ugly, thin, naked, red necks stretched half a meter to carry their lunking bald heads and monstrous yellow beaks. Feed on rotten carrion, they do, dead, decaying flesh. Wretched, foul birds.

  Those marabou would feast today in Saigon, Mai Thao thought as he gazed at his two sleeping friends.

  Moving quietly, the novelist walked to the kitchen and rummaged through the mess of several days, looking for a clean glass. His houseboy had disappeared on Friday, he supposed to escape the down-falling nation, just like most of his family and friends. They all had run when the getaway was still good.

  The author had rested on his laurels and had depended on his highly placed friends to fetch him when the time to leave had come. Highly placed friends, indeed. Even Marshal Ky had finally taken down his valiant flag, while boasting his valor, and slipped out with the last big crowd to rush the exit. His kind talk a good fight, Mai Thao thought.

  “Here I am, still standing in Saigon,” he said to himself as he climbed the stairs to a balcony that overlooked the city. “Who is the coward, and who is the valiant one now?”

  Then he laughed to himself, “And who is the fool?”

  He looked at the glass of water that he had poured from a bottle he had found half full in the refrigerator. In it he noticed minute flakes of debris swirling in the liquid, soaked loose from the sides of the cleanest looking dirty glass that he found on the counter. He took a sip and dashed the rest over the rail, splashing into his well-kept flower garden on the edge of the patio below him.

  Beyond the treetops, he saw black smoke filling the sky. It rose from every direction. The noise of battle, stubborn ARVN soldiers and Viet Marines fighting to save their country, had now grown strangely silent, except for a sporadic rifle shot or a pistol close by. Once in awhile an explosion crunched from a far distant place. People still died. Some still fought. Most had now, however, quit.

  While shelling Saigon’s outskirts and shutting down Tan Son Nhut, the Communists had virtually left his beloved city untouched, the novelist suddenly realized. He looked from the balcony as the newly dawning day cast its orange light across the rooftops of his home. The tall cathedral tower stood unblemished. Dense leaves still covered the trees surrounding it and other buildings, rustling in the morning breeze. Houses, hotels, the opera house, all remained undamaged. Except for the smoke that encircled the city, Saigon still looked much its old self.

  However, the silence seemed odd, out of place. Mai Thao could not recall hearing such quietness. In the center of the city, he could hear a small helicopter still beating its wings, Air America still trying to salvage a few lives. Yet no horns honked. No bicycle bells chimed the morning as they had always done until now. No trucks. No cars. No people.

  “My friends, you have awakened,” Mai Thao said, seeing Tran Da Tu and Nha Ca step through the downstairs sliding door and walk onto the patio in the fresh day’s light.

  “There you are,” Nha Ca said and smiled.

  “We’re going back to our house and wait for our fate there,” Tran Da Tu said.

  “Hold on, please,” Mai Thao called back and hurried downstairs.

  Reaching his two friends at the front door, Thao said, “Do not return to your house. I implore you, if you value your lives. Le, my houseboy,told me this one night, when I shared a glass or two of cognac with him, the Viet Cong have a list. You both are on it, and so am I. Kieu Chinh, and many others. Do you recall how the Chinese purged the intellectuals and artists from their society? The VC want the same thing. They want to rid themselves of us and our strange ways.”

  “Where else can we go?” Tran Da Tu said. “We have only our home.”

  “Then stay on the streets,” Mai Thao said.

  THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC

  “HENRY, WHAT’S THE problem?” President Gerald Ford said to the secretary of state.

  “Apparently, we have left about a dozen Marines on the roof of the embassy,” Kissinger said, dressed in a tuxedo.

  “My God!” President Ford exclaimed. “How on earth did that happen? I thought they had reported everyone out.”

  “Initial reports indicated that all had been extracted, and the operation ceased,” Kissinger explained. “Apparently, when the helicopter carrying out Ambassador Martin, Lady Ace Zero-Nine
, made its radio report that they had the ‘Code Two’ aboard and ‘Tiger is out,’ meaning the ambassador,” he said, reading from a message sheet, “the outbound flight of helicopters sent to pick up the remaining Marines apparently turned around. They misunderstood ‘Tiger is out’ to mean that they had all the remaining Marines aboard and were inbound with them. Lady Ace Nine and his wingman meanwhile returned to the embassy roof and picked up all they could carry, but had to leave behind eleven of the Marines. They naturally assumed that the other flight of helicopters would pick up the remaining men.”

  “The other flight had actually shut down,” the President added.

  “Precisely,” Kissinger said. “I am expected at the State Department dinner tonight, but I cannot leave here until I know those Marines are safely aboard ship. So, if you don’t mind, I will wait this out with you.”

  “Thank you,” President Ford said and took a seat at the dining table where Henry Kissinger stood, dressed in his black tie, gripping the back of one of the side chairs, waiting for the telephone to ring.

  “Those two Marines killed yesterday, Henry,” President Ford said, “their bodies are still in Saigon.”

  “I also heard that bit of news when I got the call about the Marines left on the embassy roof,” Kissinger said. “I understand that someone had called the hospital to retrieve the bodies, but were told that they had already been flown out. We have begun working through the French to obtain the two Marines, but it does not look promising. Not for the near future.”

  “We’ve also lost two Marine pilots at sea this morning,” President Ford said. “Two enlisted crewmen escaped and were picked up, but the pilot and copilot, a Captain William C. Nystul and First Lieutenant Michael J. Shea, did not make it out of the aircraft. With the depth of the water and the conditions there, we are not hopeful of recovering their bodies either.”