Goodnight Saigon

by Charles Henderson

  Tuan began selling his scissors on the streets of Saigon. Eventually, people who use fine shears in their work, such as barbers and tailors, sought out Tuan and placed orders with him. His business began to grow to the point that he had to employ and train people to help him. So he hired others like himself: people homeless and persecuted because they were South Vietnamese veterans or family members of these men. They all worked illegally in Tuan’s black market, built-from-scraps scissors factory.

  At this same time, the Communist government in Vietnam was undergoing an internal struggle and began some dramatic changes. The people were tired of starving and living without even their most basic needs fulfilled under the hard-line regime. The unrest reached into the higher levels of government as younger, more liberal-thinking people began to replace the aging old guard. Eventually, in the late 1980s, the government of Vietnam began to liberalize and allow private enterprise, private ownership of farms and factories, privately owned homes, and free-market trade that opened its doors to the world. Hanoi even extended its hand toward the United States and sought to establish treaties and diplomatic relations.

  With this liberalized government, Tuan’s friends who had clout with local Communist officials convinced those leaders to allow Tuan to operate and expand his factory in the open. The government expressed no objections, but also offered no help.

  In a matter of three years, Tuan built his factory and began filling international orders for his high-quality, handcrafted scissors and shears. He formally named his business the Nguyen Dinh Scissors Factory and gave his products the brand name of Kevi.

  By 1990, Tuan employed 320 workers at his Saigon factory and manufactured 245,000 pairs of scissors and shears annually. While his Kevi scissors and shears sold widely throughout eastern Europe, they also moved with increasing popularity in free-world markets too, such as Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong.

  In 1992, Nguyen Dinh Scissors Factory won a contract with Corporation Franco Asiatique, a French firm, to produce two million pairs of scissors for $1.8 million in United States currency. This contract gave Tuan and his family of workers a bright future and solidly established them as a major industry in Vietnam.

  After I had spent most of a day interviewing Tuan and touring his factory, as I prepared to depart, he handed me a farewell gift—a pair of his Kevi brand barber shears. To this day, I use those scissors regularly, and they remain sharp and tight and cut hair cleanly with a crisp snap. In my mind, they are the finest quality barber shears I have ever seen.

  To me, Nguyen Manh Tuan embodies the resilient spirit of the Vietnamese people and exemplifies what it means to never quit. He is wealthy today by anyone’s standards, yet what makes him rich in my eyes comes not from the thickness of his wallet, but from what lives in his heart.

  His face and that of Nguyen Giap Ty symbolize the South Vietnamese and the fall of South Vietnam to me. Deep sadness, great frustration with heartless bureaucratic governments, on both sides, yet not utter failure, but hope.

  Then there comes the perspective of the enemy, the North Vietnamese Communists and the Viet Cong. Until I knew these men as humans, I only saw them as angry faces beneath turtle-shell hats, aiming down Russian-made rifles. Like many of my fellow Marines, I believed these people heartless, uncaring, cold to human life. In a word, evil. As quick to crank a bullet in my back as look at me.

  Near Cu Chi, in a national cemetery for Communist soldiers killed in action, I met Le Van Reung, a Viet Cong guerrilla who lost his right leg to a “friendly” booby trap on his way into Saigon, the day before the city fell. He had fought my brother Marines in Da Nang years earlier. He led the assault on Ban Me Thuot from within the South Vietnamese defensive circle, a virtual suicide mission. Yet he survived all of that only to lose his leg, and nearly lose his life, while casually walking toward Saigon.

  As his reward for a lifetime of service to the Viet Cong cause, the Hanoi government made him caretaker of the Vietnam National Cemetery at Cu Chi, and official overseer of the shrine and mass grave of 2,473 unknown Communist soldiers buried there beneath a gray granite tower erected on a wide, flat marble footing. For his caretaker work and national service, his government gave the one-legged Viet Cong veteran a retirement of about eighty dollars per month.

  Talking to him seemed haunting in one respect, but very familiar in another. After all, we both were veterans of the same war. We had common feelings, common ground that made us more alike than different.

  In Saigon, when I interviewed General Tran Van Tra, commander in chief of the Viet Cong, on the second or third occasion, we talked about these apparent common links among warriors, even people from opposing sides.

  I told the old general, “Had I seen you in my sights twenty years ago, I would have killed you.”

  He told me, “Had I the chance then, I would have killed you too.”

  Then he added, “But isn’t it nice that we can now be friends.”

  The aged warrior had gained my consideration. He wasn’t such a bad guy. Or was he? Like a pendulum, my emotions swung wide each way with every contrasting event.

  That night, in Saigon at the hotel where I stayed, my friendly bartender whispered to me in confidence, between straight shots of Scotch, that he had some important information that I needed to know. Something terribly secret, but terribly important for him to tell me about a man whose name I had mentioned the previous night: Brigadier General Le Minh Dao, commander of the ARVN’s Eighteenth Division.

  We had talked about General Dao’s valiant stand at Xuan Loc, a town only a couple of hours’ drive north of Saigon on Highway 1. We talked about how he fiercely led his division and had held the overwhelming power of the North Vietnamese Army at bay for many days while thousands of people managed to evacuate from Saigon. The general had sacrificed himself and his division for the people of his country.

  The bartender whispered, “General Dao is alive!”

  “Where?” I asked. “I want to see him!”

  The bartender shushed me, told me to speak lower, and then said, “I was released from re-education only last month. I was with General Dao when I was a captain in the Eighteenth Division at Xuan Loc. I was with him in prison too.”

  I whispered to the bartender that the Vietnam government press service and foreign ministry in Hanoi had told me that General Dao had been released and had left the country. “They say he is somewhere in America.” I said.

  “No!” the bartender whispered emphatically. “He is in prison, north from here. I was with him. They will never allow him to leave. He will die in chains. They hate him, and he will not bend their way.”

  Checks with both the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service turned up empty. They had no record of Le Minh Dao’s ever coming to America, despite the Hanoi government’s insisting that he had.

  During the autumn of 1994, I zigzagged my way throughout Vietnam, border to coast, from Saigon to Hanoi. I met Montagnards in the western mountains, next to Laos and Cambodia, who had not seen a Westerner in more than twenty-five years. For their children, I was the first one they had ever seen. With rifles on their shoulders, deep in the wild country where they live, these natives of the woodlands frightened away my Communist escorts but surrounded me with warmth and jubilation. America was back! It was hard to leave.

  Later, in Da Nang, I talked with a woman, Huynh Thit, who had served as a cost accountant for the commanding general of the First Marine Air Wing, based there and at Phu Bai and Chu Lai. Since the Americans only gave Huynh passage for herself and not her family too, she chose to remain in Vietnam when the city the French called Tourane, succumbed. Defiantly loyal to America and her South Vietnamese cause, Huynh Thit continues to be persecuted by the Communists still today. She cannot hold a job, not even after so many years, and so she illegally teaches English to earn money to buy her food. The woman still wanted badly to come to America, but only with her family in tow.

  A cyclo driver who had se
rved as one of the South Vietnamese Marines who defended Da Nang to the bitter end introduced her to me after I talked to him in the place where he lived, squatted in the burned-out hulk of what used to be the United States Consulate. When I left Da Nang to fly to Hanoi, she was at the airport to say farewell to me. The Marine cyclo driver had carried her there, I am sure, for free. Huynh Thit hugged my neck long and hard. She still loved her Marines.

  I passed her name and address to retired Marine Corps Commandant General Al Gray, hoping that he or some of his well-placed friends might find a way to help her.

  A few days later, I met Nguyen Duc Cui in Hanoi, on what turned into an emotionally challenging afternoon.

  My interview with him came after a surreptitious, high-speed, and very unauthorized tour of the brig where the North Vietnamese had, for so many years, incarcerated and tortured, some to death, American prisoners of war. My trusty guide, Hoang Huy Chung, followed the little side-trip adventure with a serene visit to a neighborhood where the tail section of an American B-52 jutted out of a lotus pond.

  In a twisted way, the aircraft wreckage symbolizes for the Communiststheir victory. I assume, however, that since they did not want me to see the infamous “Hanoi Hilton,” it likely reflects a perspective of their shame.

  While we kept the driver turning left at each corner, taking us around and around the old prison with its high, barbed wire-topped, pinkish brown stucco walls and matching buildings, Hoang must have seen the deep sadness that filled my heart and expressed itself on my face. He offered honest words of consolation, trying to ease my feelings. War truly is an ugly experience for anyone. He added that today the facility no longer houses prisoners, but serves the Vietnam government with an important internal mission, too sensitive, however, for him to reveal to me.

  Nonetheless, it still looked like a jail, harsh and ugly, badly in need of a salvo of napalm.

  After making several passes, trying to see the place where my brothers in arms had year upon year languished so horribly, many of them succumbing there in slow, torturous deaths, and without seeming to look at it or stop, since the government had strictly forbidden my even noticing the “Hanoi Hilton,” my nervous-wreck escort finally succeeded in prying me away and directed our driver to the park where the bomber had crashed. As we proceeded to the park, where all of us could stretch our legs, I felt smugly proud of myself. Hoang would have died of heart failure had he known that while we circled the famous military keep I had secretly pointed my camera out the car window and snapped half a roll of color slides of the jail that helped to endear Jane Fonda in the hearts of so many millions of America’s Vietnam War era veterans.

  At the park, several dozen elementary schoolchildren surrounded me and cheered me because I was American. Their teachers explained that the preteen students had learned of America in school, and they were excited and very happy to actually see a citizen of my country in theirs.

  As the giggling youngsters departed, I then noticed a man scowling at me. When I made eye contact with him, he approached and spoke angrily at me. He too recognized me as an American and gave me a taste of his bitterness.

  Thus, sitting in the front room of Nguyen Duc Cui’s home that afternoon, sipping hot tea, talking about the battles and the end of the war with him and his old friend, Nguyen Sinh Tuan, a documentary photographer with Cui’s unit, the 320th NVA Division, I struggled with my mixed emotions.

  Tuan showed me his camera and took my photograph, while Cui smiled quietly. Apparently, Tuan, just like photographers I had known in the Marine Corps, was an outgoing and friendly fellow. Cui, on the other hand, seemed sullen, almost too quiet.

  He explained that when the people at Hanoi’s foreign press office had told him that I had served as a United States Marine, it troubled him. He did not know how he could handle meeting in a social presence his former enemy face-to-face, much less tell this person of the part he had played in the war and the final campaign that led to North Vietnam’s victory.

  I told Cui about the angry man I met in the park, how he had spit at my feet and stormed away. My escort, Hoang, said something in Vietnamese, trying to soften the moment, but Cui cut him off. Then he fought back tears.

  The war had been very difficult for him. He told me that he did not like Americans very much, even now. He understood how the man in the park felt, but disagreed with his actions toward me.

  “We were only soldiers, then, after all,” Cui said.

  We talked about sacred honor, duty, and obligations as warriors, and we agreed on every point. Over time, Cui relaxed.

  Then, after an hour of talking, he told me how much alike he now realized that we were, and how sad this made him feel. We both had lost dear friends in the war. We both stood loyally with our countries when our duty called us.

  I told him that I had also discovered those same feelings when I had talked to some of his comrades in the south a week or two earlier.

  Cui told me of his best friend, Huong Chinh, who died in the war far west of Da Nang under the bombs dropped by American B-52s. He told me how his friend had bought a pair of shoes after their last class in college in Hanoi and had carried those shoes with him for two years as they fought in South Vietnam.

  He told me how he promised as his friend lay dying that he would take the shoes and carry them in his pack until he could put them on his feet and march with them in Saigon in the victory parade.

  Tears streamed from Cui’s eyes as he told me the story, and my heart ached too. I could see his friend. I could understand such a promise.I know I would have done the same thing. So would most any good soldier, any good Marine, for his buddy.

  At the end of war’s mess, only battered soldiers stand, bleeding and heartbroken, weary of it all. Our enemy really is not the man in the trench with the rifle, but the man in the white tower, safely insulated from the fight a thousand miles, or a world, away. As warriors we are but instruments of our nations, loyal and serving. We are all pretty much the same.

  I hold little use for politicians. The older I grow, the less respect I have for them. On most occasions, I avoid meeting nearly any of these swindling baby kissers who talk out of both corners of their mouths. Once, at a dinner gala in Georgia, I even refused to shake a certain senator’s hand because I simply knew too much about him. For personal gain, political power, money, or simply a change in the spin of the news that day, men like him put men like Cui and me on the battlefront, facing each other, killing each other, while in a different place, in a different time, we might have been friends.

  For me, Nguyen Duc Cui offers assurance that God’s will eventually does prevail, and everything finally does even out, no matter how we silly humans try to bend it. Meeting Cui in Hanoi, identifying with him as a fellow warrior, but under different flags, getting to know each other’s honor, our shared decency as men, helped put the war to rest, for both of us.

  Goodnight Saigon first formed in my mind as a chronicle of how and why South Vietnam, and America, lost the war. After meeting and getting to intimately know many of the people who appear in these pages, my objective changed.

  While Goodnight Saigon must tell its perspective of this history, it has a greater obligation to reveal the humanity of it. The participants, from all sides, were people. Simple human beings, like most any of us, with fears, hopes, joys, and tears.

  In the Baptist church where I attended Sunday school as a child and let Christ in my heart, I learned the song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” In its verses the song says He loves “all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight . . .”

  When I consider the insight that I gained in Vietnam, researching this book, discovering that my former enemy is more like me than differentfrom me, how he too cries at the loss of his brothers and sisters, and how he too abhors war, but how he will always unflinchingly stand willing to fight for his people, the words of that old Sunday school song ring out in my mind. We should try harder to
love each other, all the children of the world.

  —Charles W. Henderson, Chief Warrant Officer, United States Marine Corps (Retired)

  Appendix

  CHRONOLOGY OF SIGNIFICANT EVENTS 1973-1975

  (Revised and reprinted from U. S. Marines in Vietnam: The Bitter End, 1973-1975, with permission from History and Museums Division, Headquarters, United States Marine Corps)

  1973

  27 JANUARY—The United States, Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam), Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam), and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) sign a peace agreement in Paris, France. The Paris Accords provide for three commissions to oversee the implementation of the agreements and resolve any differences. The commissions are the four-party Joint Military Commission (JMC) representing each of the belligerents, a two-party JMC representing North and South Vietnam and an International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) consisting of representatives from Canada, Poland, Hungary, and Indonesia.

  27 MARCH—The Marine Advisory Unit of the Naval Advisory Group in Vietnam is disestablished and replaced by the United States-Vietnamese Marine Corps Logistics Support Branch. This is the last day of the sixty-day cease-fire period during which the North Vietnamese release American prisoners of war and in turn the United States turns over to the South Vietnamese its military bases and withdraws its last military forces from the RVN.

  29 MARCH—The United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (USMACV), officially ceases to exist, replaced at 1900 Saigon time by the United States Defense Attaché’s Office (DAO).

  13 JUNE—The United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the Viet Cong sign the implementation agreement to the Paris Accords.

  30 JUNE—Less than 250 United States military personnel, which includes the 50 at the DAO, remain in South Vietnam, the maximum allowed by the Paris Peace Accords.