Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  While his comrades celebrated, while the Viet Cong constabulary established order and discipline on the chaotic streets, while they hunted down spies and arrested traitors, Trung searched for his family.

  When he found no one at his home, and the few belongings that remained inside it trashed, he walked to the center of Ho Chi Minh City and the central police jail. There outside, sitting on a bench by the street, his beautiful wife and three daughters waited for him to claim them.

  At first life came hard for the nation, and Trung lived as poor as he could ever remember in his whole life. Then after twenty years, the struggling country of starving people began to emerge and reach out toward the West.

  Air Vietnam again began to fly passenger jets. First with old Soviet Aeroflot planes, flying junk iron and bricks, with no thrust and little lift. Then came the French Airbus, and finally the American Boeing and McDonnell Douglas jumbo jets.

  Trung remained a pilot and helped Vietnam build its airline as their chief pilot. His three angelic daughters, who sat at the center of his life with his devoted wife, all became leading flight attendants for the airline.

  His old F-5A Skoshi Tiger moved from the Da Nang Air Base to Ho Chi Minh City and the military museum. It sits there today, a symbol of his country’s liberation.

  MAI THAO VILLA, NORTHWEST SAIGON

  MAI THAO SLIPPED through the small gate at the back of his garden and out into the narrow backstreet. He saw the men coming to his front door, led by Le, his former houseboy, who had warned him to leave Saigon. That night they had split a bottle of cognac, Le had nearly spilled the beans that like so many who served the wealthy, he moon-lighted as a Viet Cong agent. Loyal to his cause, he duly reported every visitor and most of what Mai Thao said. Now they came to arrest him. He topped their list.

  Nha Ca and Tran Da Tu also topped that list, a roster of artists and writers, dangerous to the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam. They needed re-education into the proper way to live life and treat their brethren.

  While Mai Thao slipped out the gate and, through miracles and sly maneuvering, evaded the VC’s capturing him for nine months, finally slipping free of Vung Tao in a sampan and catching a lift on an Indian freighter bound for Long Beach, California, his friends Nha Ca and Tran Da Tu did not manage quite as well.

  A dozen years of hard labor, learning the error of their ways, greeted the two artists. Nha Ca spent most of those years sitting in a four-foot-wide cell. She ate once a day and saw little daylight. She paid for her sins with solitary. Her husband toiled digging roadbeds. When the enlightened government finally released them in 1988, they could hardly recognize each other.

  Like their friend Mai Thao, they finally escaped Communist Vietnam too and made their homes near him in southern California.

  DIRCK HALSTEAD WENT home to Washington, DC, and resumed his work as TIME magazine’s senior White House photographer. He took assignments during the months that he did not cover the President and became one of the world’s foremost photojournalists. He led the pioneer movement into digital photography and filmmaking and opened the horizons for photojournalism on the Internet.

  David Hume Kennerly also succeeded in his world of photography, contracting for national and international publications.

  Neil B. Davis, born in Tasmania on St. Valentine’s Day, 1934, died in Bangkok on September 9, 1985. As a contract motion picture news photographer for major news networks, such as his service for NBC in Vietnam, he covered war on three continents, had seen it all, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his film coverage of the surrender of Saigon.

  Like his friends Al Dawson, Derek Williams, and Hubert “Hugh” Van Es, Davis found that life in Bangkok pleased him best, and he settled there. Doing what he loved best, standing behind his lens, filming the drama of war, Neil Davis died.

  In the summer of 1985, a segment of the Royal Thai armed forces splintered and attempted a coup d’etat. Just as he had done on the steps of the Presidential Palace, Neil Davis filmed the rebel Thai tank rolling at him. He waved at them, to show he presented no harm. They cut him down with a machine gun.

  Neil remained in Ho Chi Minh City with friends, such as Peter Arnett, Dawson, Williams, and Van Es, for many weeks until one by one the Vietnamese Communist regime expelled them for insulting their host.

  Arnett departed first. He found it easy to insult the new government.

  Then came Van Es and Williams.

  Van Es won the Pulitzer Prize for his picture of the helicopter on the roof with the ladder filled with people trying to scramble to it.

  Days before the fall, Derek Williams married his longtime girlfriend in Saigon. He managed to get tickets out of Saigon for her and all of his in-laws. They flew to Thailand and settled in Bangkok. When the Viet Cong kicked him out of Ho Chi Minh City, he simply went home to her.

  On the day that Saigon welcomed its new name, Ho Chi Minh City, the streets still remained dangerous. The American journalists banded together, trying to still cover the chaos but stay alive too.

  That day Ha Thuc Can and Ky Wahn showed their Viet Cong credentials to the Americans, not on purpose but by necessity.

  Angry VC, recognizing the round eyes and light skin of the men, put their guns on them. They wanted to kill some of them, sassy talking, back talking Westerners, like Peter Arnett and Hubert Van Es.

  Always diplomatic and quick to think on his feet, and use them when opportunity offered, Al Dawson tried to explain to the soldiers that the members of his group were journalists, certainly not CIA.

  The gun-wielding VC did not hear it, but only wanted to march the reporters to the nearest wall and shoot them, or at best case cart them to jail.

  Ky Wahn then introduced himself to these brethren of the red, blue, and yellow cloth.

  “These are my friends,” he said.

  The VC shrugged and let the men go.

  Al Dawson stayed longest. More than three months he rattled cages in Ho Chi Minh City. Finally, Hanoi had enough of him and showed him the door too.

  The Marines went home. America tried to forget her war. After a ten-year letting of blood, the forgetting took effort. Even after thirty years since the last day of that war, tempers still run at the high end of anybody’s thermostat. Tops still blow easily when a young know-it-all buff on that bad war tells an old vet that he lost that war. It was an illegal bad war. He deserved to lose it.

  Even with wrinkles, gray hair, and a mellowed-out attitude, guys like Master Sergeant Joe Carr, a crusty old retired jarhead, will still throw furniture. Insult the man and his service, insult the sacrifice that he and his brothers and sisters paid for that ten-year cultivation of fruitless cherry blossoms, Old Joe Carr will throw a chair, bust a nose too, and curse like hell when he does it. The man did set a high standard at cursing.

  Half of those last four dead Americans never did come home. Captain William C. Nystul and First Lieutenant Michael J. Shea at last word still lay in the deep of the South China Sea off the coast of Vung Tao. They rest amid the wreckage of hundreds of helicopters and planes and sunken boats and rafts. They rest among many thousands of those that they tried to help, people they died for, people who also died that same day.

  One year after Corporal Charles McMahon, Jr., and Lance Corporal Darwin D. Judge fell under that rocket blast outside the gates at Dodge City and the Alamo, they finally got to come home.

  McMahon, a good Irish lad from Massachusetts, had a lot of passion in his family. They would not let their senator, Edward Kennedy, rest until he got the boy home to Woburn. Kennedy stayed on the job, and he brought both Marines home. God bless him.

  Brigadier General Le Minh Dao went to the Communist prison. Re-education, they called it. Poor student, that one. They never let him out.

  Chapter 22

  REFLECTIONS

  GOODNIGHT SAIGON IS the fourth book that I have written about the Vietnam War. It is without a doubt the most difficult of any I have ever written, and I suspect it will remain the most diffic
ult book that I will ever write. This, primarily because I am too close to the subject. I know too many details. I know too many of the faces.

  I was a sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, stationed in the Southeast Asian theater when these events took place. Therefore, a bit of my soul lies scattered among these pages, along with pieces of many others’ souls.

  Included among these are those of our enemy at the time, as well as those of our allies and brothers in arms.

  I spent much of the fall season of 1994 in Vietnam, researching this book, interviewing South Vietnamese veterans and civilians caught up in the demise of their nation, many who spent years in prison. I also interviewed many veterans from the other side: Viet Cong soldiers, North Vietnamese Army troops, and their leaders.

  Then, through all of 1995 and part of 1996 I traveled across the United States, interviewing American leaders, such as President Gerald R. Ford, as well as our own generals, line commanders, grunt veterans, news photographers and reporters, and many South Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, and leaders too, who managed to get away.

  Of all these people, three stand out most in my mind: Nguyen Giap Ty, a retired South Vietnamese Army lieutenant colonel who held the position of master of the Port of Saigon when the city fell; Nguyen Manh Tuan, a South Vietnamese Army lieutenant colonel whom North Vietnamese forces captured in the massacre at Cheo Reo; and Nguyen Duc Cui, a North Vietnamese communications officer for the 320th Division who marched through Saigon wearing the shoes of his best friend, who had fallen in combat more than five years earlier.

  Nguyen Giap Ty stands out because even at the time I interviewed him at his small apartment in Philadelphia, the winter of 1995, nearly twenty years after the war’s end, he and his family had not yet found a lasting sanctuary. They had not stopped their struggle. As a United States Marine Corps veteran, it broke my heart to see it.

  Ty’s wife, Ninh, worked at the Defense Attaché’s Office compound in Saigon while Ty managed the port of Saigon. Ty and Ninh both could have escaped days before the country fell, yet they remained at their posts helping others to flee. They remained at their stations, serving a greater good.

  Once they reached the end of their work, they tried to make their flights. Unknowing and perhaps uncaring people, then in a bitter irony, ignored them. These gatekeepers refused to look at the Nguyen family’s documents that authorized them to board the departing aircraft. Understandably, for the people who turned them away, Ty, Ninh, and their children were simply one more family of faces among a sea of others, all desperately struggling to leave the falling city, all waving papers, or even money.

  Ty and Ninh spent several years in prison, enduring Communist Vietnam’s infamous re-education camps. During those years, all but one of their children managed to sneak out of the country as “boat people.”

  When the Communists finally let Ty out of prison, he and his wife and their mentally disabled daughter, Tuong-Van, also joined the boat people exodus and got out of Vietnam under the cover of darkness. On those ships, they faced utter starvation, pennilessness, and the loss of all personal possessions. Tuong-Van nearly died from the heat, dehydration, and malnutrition.

  Ty, Ninh, and Tuong-Van managed to survive the ordeal at sea and finally landed in the Philippines, but they could not remain since they had no documentation nor any money to bribe any officials. From there they went to Australia, where their daughter, Vanny, had married a citizen of that country. However, she was not financially able to support her parents and her sister, much less able to sponsor them as refugees.

  Once they had regained some health, Ty, Ninh, and Tuong-Van departed Australia for the United States, where their two sons, Nam and Son, and remaining daughter, Bich, now lived in Philadelphia.

  In the city that bore America’s independence, the family spent several months struggling to get on their feet. Ty worked in a local produce market owned by another Vietnamese expatriate, shipping out fruits and vegetables. They finally managed to rent a small apartment for themselves and had begun to rebuild their lives when the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service entered their world with astonishing news for them.

  Since the Nguyen family did not come to the United States first, the INS bureaucrats refused to classify Ty, Ninh, and Tuong-Van as refugees. As a result, the family had to obtain tourist visas to remain in America. Furthermore, they had to join the increasingly long line of immigrants waiting for citizenship quotas, and the delay would easily stretch far beyond the expiration dates of even the longest running visas they might hope to receive.

  Then the bureaucratic nightmare began to worsen. The INS refused to extend their visas when the first ones expired. Ty and his family now faced being deported by the very country that they so deeply loved and had loyally served for more than ten years. Furthermore, the deportation would send them back to Vietnam, where they had suffered so greatly and fought so hard to escape.

  Because they had left their native home without documentation or authorization, Ty, Ninh, and Tuong-Van faced certain imprisonment upon their return. The INS just shrugged it off as not their problem. Furthermore, the Clinton administration busily worked to establish trade and diplomatic relations with Vietnam and did not want to offend the Hanoi government by granting Ty, Ninh, and their daughter refugee status.

  Shortly after my last conversation with him, in 1996, I lost contact with Nguyen Giap Ty and his entire family. It was well past the INS deadline too.

  I do not know if Ty and his family succeeded in staying in America or went back to Vietnam. I suspect that they may have fled Philadelphia for some other place in America where they could blend in and disappear.

  The United States Army awarded Ty the Bronze Star with combat V for valor, for rescuing a squad of American soldiers out of a minefield near Chu Lai. Despite his heroism and sacrifice for America, the INS still wanted to deport the man, his wife, and their child back to Vietnam and to certain imprisonment.

  I think of Nguyen Giap Ty, Ninh, and their family quite often, and I include them in my prayers.

  Like Ty and his wife, Nguyen Manh Tuan also spent many years in the Vietnamese Communist re-education camps. Tuan lost his entire family, and all of his dreams seemed doomed after his capture by North Vietnamese at Cheo Reo. However, his story has a bright ending, if not inspirational.

  Tuan commanded an artillery regiment with the ARVN II Army Corps in Pleiku and Kontum, in the Central Highlands. He spoke eloquent English after the years that he spent in the United States, graduating command and staff college and training at the United States Army’s artillery school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

  When the Communists released Tuan from prison, he had no place to live and no money, and the government would not allow him to hold any sort of regular job. Dressed in prison rags, he was literally left to panhandle on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.

  Tuan, however, refused to beg. He considered himself a better man than to sit on the streets and ask for handouts. Battling for survival, he noticed people with broken bicycles and offered to fix them in exchange for a few dong (the currency of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam).

  So on a busy street corner each day, he set up his shop on a flap of cardboard, which also served as his bed at night, and repaired bicycles. He felt lucky if his customers had tool kits with their bikes. Otherwise he had to use his fingers or tools that he improvised from scraps of wood or metal.

  Eventually, Tuan located his wife and children. However, they had disowned him. So for the next year, he lived on the streets of Saigon, shunned by his family, repairing bicycles often with little more than his fingers and earning only pennies.

  One day, an old friend happened past Tuan and recognized him. While this man had served in the South Vietnamese Army with Tuan, he had also joined the Viet Cong too and at war’s end had landed himself a decent job as manager of a foundry. The friend went to local Communist Party leaders and tried to persuade them to allow Tuan to work,
if only as a custodian sweeping the factory floor. However, they remained steadfast that as long as people loyal to them during the war needed jobs, they would not give one to a former enemy, especially a lieutenant colonel.

  Despite the denial, Tuan’s friend still allowed him to take up residence in the foundry, where he could secretly sweep the floors at night when no one watched.

  Living in the factory, Tuan also learned metallurgy and spent his free time between bike repairs developing skills in metal crafts, electroplating, grinding, and manufacturing tools.

  Finally, Tuan decided to try making hand tools on his own and thought that he could perhaps sell a few of them on Saigon’s growing black market. However, a man with no money and no way of legally obtaining financial backing, much less the means of purchasing even the most meager materials and equipment, faced a significant challenge.

  Tuan had told himself many times since the day the Communists captured him that he had only two choices, to live or to die. If he chose life, then he must persevere against whatever obstacles he faced.

  Undaunted and determined to live, he went to the local dump and began salvaging wires, metal containers, whatever materials he could use to fabricate the equipment that he needed to craft his tools. He even swept up the Carborundum dust from the factory floor at night and glued the abrasive grit to strips of fabric that he attached around cylinders of his own creation, thus making grinding wheels from scratch.

  In a rickety shed that he built from scraps, and illegally tying his electrical power input to that of the factory, Tuan began to cut, grind and chrome plate scissors and shears of his own design. He made them from discarded scrap metal and gleaned his needed chemicals and other such products from the waste fluids dumped by the factory.