Honorable Exit Read online

  As Caron’s helicopter lifted off, a passenger noticed her teenage son standing on the stairs and burst into tears. Tuyet-Dong “Janet” Bui had been excited to take her first helicopter ride, but as Saigon slipped away, she thought, “Oh my God, I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know anybody. Where are my parents?” and began weeping. She and the other passengers were, in their way, as courageous as Caron and Harnage. They were leaving behind friends, family, country, and culture to become exiles in a nation where, according to a recent poll, two-thirds of its citizens did not want them. On the same day that Harnage’s evacuees were flying over Saigon, U.S. senator George McGovern, who had run for president in 1972 on an antiwar platform, was telling reporters in Ohio, “I am opposed to large numbers of Vietnamese coming, not only because I think it is not in our interests. I don’t think it is in their interest. I think the Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam, including the orphans.”

  Harnage looked down from the skids of Caron’s helicopter and saw smoke: puffs of smoke rising from backyards where South Vietnamese were burning photographs, documents, and anything else connecting them to the United States or the Thieu government; plumes of it spiraling from the American embassy as diplomats fed files into a rooftop incinerator; black clouds of it billowing from oil tanks and warehouses along the docks; and more smoke marking the bridges and boulevards where some South Vietnamese soldiers were mounting a brave resistance so that politicians like Tran Van Don could escape on helicopters like this one.

  Caron’s helicopter joined dozens of others stitching a patchwork of contrails across the sky. Helicopters had become symbolic of the Vietnam War, and their whomp-whomp-whomping was its descant. They flew troops into battle, rescued the wounded, retrieved the dead, and brought journalists and generals back to Saigon for clean sheets and French restaurants. Before Senator Robert F. Kennedy opposed the Vietnam War, he had told a reporter that the United States would win it because it had helicopters. “We have them,” he said, “the French did not.” Instead, America’s first helicopter war would become its first lost war, one ending with the largest helicopter evacuation in military history.

  The passengers on Harnage’s last run were among the 1,000 evacuees whom Air America pilots extracted from rooftops and paddies on April 29. Between noon and 5:00 a.m. the next day, U.S. military and civilian helicopters airlifted 1,373 Americans and 5,595 South Vietnamese and third-country nationals to the U.S. fleet. Add them to the 45,000 South Vietnamese and third-country nationals that U.S. Air Force transports had evacuated during the month of April, the 73,000 South Vietnamese that the U.S. Navy rescued at sea, the 2,000 Vietnamese airmen and their families who escaped to Thailand, and the others who had already left on Air America fixed-wing planes and so-called black flights, and you have more than 130,000 South Vietnamese refugees whom the U.S. government and military would process through transit camps in the Philippines, Wake Island, and Guam before flying them to relocation camps on the U.S. mainland. It would be the greatest evacuation under wartime conditions since Dunkirk and the largest humanitarian operation in American history, although at the time few Americans recognized or celebrated it as such. It occurred largely because U.S. military personnel, government employees, and private citizens staged a spontaneous, uncoordinated, and clandestine mutiny against the policies and inaction of senior U.S. officials in Saigon and Washington, and against the wishes and prejudices of a majority of Americans and their elected representatives in Congress, risking their careers and lives to evacuate South Vietnamese who they believed were facing years of incarceration or worse under a Communist regime.

  Jackie Bong, the widow of a South Vietnamese politician assassinated by the Vietcong, later compared the Americans who spirited her out of Saigon to the Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, men like Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler. The wife of a U.S. Foreign Service officer arranged to have Bong and her children collected in a car with diplomatic plates. As they neared the airport, their chauffeur pulled in to a villa that American diplomats were using as a safe house for stashing their Vietnamese evacuees. Bong and her children were hustled into a large black sedan flying an American flag from one bumper and a South Vietnamese flag from the other. Jim Eckes, a longtime American resident of Saigon who managed a charter airline, sat in front next to the driver. Bong and her children climbed into the backseat to join Pat Barnett, an American in his late thirties whom Eckes introduced as “your husband.” President Thieu had ordered the MPs and national police manning the gate at Tan Son Nhut airport to arrest South Vietnamese attempting to leave without passports and exit visas. Eckes explained that they would bluff their way through by having her pretend to be the Vietnamese wife of a senior U.S. official. “I was being shipped out clandestinely with the help of Americans,” she wrote later. “It reminded me of the stories of Jews being helped to flee Europe during World War II.”

  Others made the same comparison. Teenager Linh Duy Vo escaped from Saigon on an American helicopter on April 29. He settled in California, where he raised a family and became a poet. He credited the U.S. defense attaché in South Vietnam, Major General Homer Smith, with saving his life, writing in a poem, “The general issued an order, / His soldier put my name on the list…/ I will never forget my American Schindler.” He established the General Homer Smith Prize, awarded annually to “a U.S. citizen’s distinguished contribution which makes one proud to be an American.” In 2011 he traveled eighty-seven hours round trip on Greyhound buses to attend Smith’s funeral in San Antonio, writing in a tribute, “You had saved thousands of lives, a repeat of the Schindler’s List. I was among them.”

  Many among the approximately seven thousand Americans residing in South Vietnam at the beginning of April 1975 had fallen in love with the country and its people. Two decades earlier, author Graham Greene had written of falling in love with Indochina “by chance,” seduced by the “tall elegant girls in white silk trousers,” “the pewter evening light on flat paddy fields,” and “that feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to a visitor with a return ticket.” General Marcel Bigeard, the commander of the French paratroopers who had suffered a catastrophic defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, claimed to have “left half his heart” in Vietnam and later asked to have his ashes scattered over the battlefield. White House press secretary and former war correspondent Ron Nessen thought there was something “seductive about Vietnam and its people.” During Nessen’s first posting to Saigon, the noted French journalist Bernard Fall warned him that he had contracted “the yellow sickness,” an incurable affection for Asia and Asians. But the two most powerful Americans in South Vietnam in 1975 were resistant to its charms. Ambassador Graham Martin admitted never developing “any great attachment to the Vietnamese, North or South,” adding, “I don’t particularly like any of them. I love the Thai.” And CIA station chief Thomas Polgar confessed to being “not one of the people who was wedded to Vietnam,” saying he lacked “a great emotional attachment to it like some of my colleagues who really fell in love with the country.”

  There had always been romantics and idealists among Americans posted to South Vietnam: diplomats who believed in winning hearts and minds, soldiers risking their lives to protect noncombatants, generals skeptical of the Pentagon’s body-count mentality, members of John F. Kennedy’s “ask not” generation who still considered government service an honorable calling, and others who had crossed the tracks—making close Vietnamese friends, fighting with Vietnamese units, and falling in love with Vietnamese women. After the 1973 treaty and cease-fire reduced the size of the U.S. civilian and military community, they became a larger percentage of the remaining Americans, and many of the Righteous Americans came from their ranks. Many believed that their country’s political and military leaders had mismanaged the war, that Americans had a moral duty to evacuate their South Vietnamese allies, that a nation built by immigrants had room for more, and that they were saving Vietnamese fro
m years of imprisonment in a Communist gulag, or a bloodbath like that occurring in neighboring Cambodia. And so they cobbled together underground railroads of safe houses, black flights, disguises, and fake flag vehicles, and smuggled friends, co-workers, and strangers past the police checkpoints at Tan Son Nhut airport in ambulances, metal shipping crates, and refrigerator trucks with airholes drilled in their floors. They impersonated chauffeurs, generals, and hospital patients, and they embossed documents with counterfeit consular stamps and signed affidavits stating that they would be financially responsible for the Vietnamese adults whom they claimed to have “adopted.”

  An American who had served with the CIA and the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) in South Vietnam and had flown back to rescue his friends wrote afterward that many of his fellow countrymen in Saigon were “determined to protest [U.S. government inaction] in their own way by getting out as many people as possible.” He believed that their mutiny had ultimately forced the U.S. government to relax its immigration restrictions and increase its evacuation flights, and concluded, “When one considers that these Americans had to accept responsibility—financial or otherwise—for these Vietnamese for an indefinite period, it becomes apparent that this impulse to save the Vietnamese was an act of conscience as well as a gesture of contempt for Capitol Hill.”

  The Righteous Americans faced anguishing decisions. Many began by evacuating co-workers and friends but were soon including friends of friends, and strangers. Some favored those whom the Communists seemed most likely to punish; others wanted to rescue the bravest South Vietnamese or those who had sacrificed the most or were most likely to flourish in the United States. Some, like O. B. Harnage, followed a first-come, first-served policy. Others were like U.S. marine colonel Al Gray, who commanded the ground security force of marines who flew into Tan Son Nhut on the afternoon of April 29. Although the Pentagon was pressuring the marines to evacuate Americans as quickly as possible, and although two marines had been killed by a Communist rocket earlier that day, and North Vietnamese units had reached the northern perimeter of the airfield—despite all this, Gray told his officers and men, “We’re not going to play God. We’re taking everyone who wants to go. And we’ll stay here until we’re finished.”

  Many Righteous Americans believed that evacuating Vietnamese who faced retribution under a Communist government represented a last chance to accomplish something noble at the end of an ignoble war—to replace President Nixon’s discredited peace with honor with an honorable exit. While Harnage was rescuing twenty Vietnamese at a time from the roof of 22 Gia Long Street, several blocks away at the U.S. embassy Lieutenant Colonel Harry Summers climbed onto the roof of a soft drink stand in the recreation center and, shouting through a bullhorn, told the several thousand Vietnamese who had taken refuge there, “Every one of you folks is going to get out of here. Let me repeat that: all of you people here with us today are going to be flown to safety and freedom. None of you will be left behind. I will only go after the last of you has left. And the United States ambassador has assured me he will leave right at the end, after you and me. On that we give you our solemn word.” Then he climbed down and walked through the crowd saying, “Don’t you worry,” and “Sure, you’ll get a job in the States.” A journalist who witnessed Summers’s performance called him “a man of honor and of compassion,” writing that he had “taken it upon himself to sweep up some of the dust of America’s honor in Vietnam.”

  CHAPTER 1

  Omens

  It was said that swarms of bees drowned themselves in the South China Sea and a dragon streaked across the sky above the port of Vung Tau. An American diplomat transplanted a black orchid from the Central Highlands to a tree outside the embassy, and his staff accused him of cursing South Vietnam. During a state dinner for a delegation of American congressmen at Independence Palace, a gust of wind blew through the banquet hall, extinguishing candles and flapping the white curtains like flags of surrender. A cabinet minister whispered to an American that it was “a bad sign.”

  A more palpable bad sign appeared on January 6, 1975, when white flags fluttered as North Vietnamese troops entered Phuoc Binh, the ramshackle capital of mountainous and thinly populated Phuoc Long province. The town was only sixty-six miles north of Saigon, but with its large population of Montagnards, a catchall term for Vietnam’s tribal peoples, and with its main boulevard doubling as a landing strip for the cargo planes that had become its lifeline after Communist troops cut its surrounding highways, it felt more like an outpost on a distant frontier. Twenty thousand seasoned North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars easily overwhelmed its defenders, a ragtag collection of militiamen and regular troops. President Nguyen Van Thieu flew in eight hundred elite South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) rangers and ordered them to hold the town “at all costs.” A hundred survived, and according to the official government account, “The few province, village, and hamlet officials who were captured were summarily executed.”

  Phuoc Long had little strategic or economic value, but losing an entire province was a psychological catastrophe for South Vietnam. Thieu closed cinemas and nightclubs, declared three days of national mourning, and ordered “Phuoc Long Will Be Retaken” banners hung over boulevards. North Vietnam’s chief of staff, General Van Tien Dung, wrote that the battle had demonstrated that the United States lacked the political will to reenter the war. South Vietnamese chief of staff General Cao Van Vien called it the Communists’ “first big step toward total military conquest, boldly taken yet apparently without fear of any reaction from the United States,” and asked, “What more encouragement could the Communists have asked for?”

  Soon after Phuoc Long fell, two of Washington’s foremost Vietnam experts, Sandy Berger and Douglas Pike, were walking down the Mall after judging a doctoral thesis titled “Is the South Vietnamese Defense Viable Without the Americans?” Its author claimed that it was. They disagreed. “It’s all over, isn’t it?” Berger asked. Pike took a few steps before saying, “Yeah, it is.” Meanwhile, the State Department and the Pentagon were telling some personnel who had been on home leave over the holidays not to return to South Vietnam. Nelson Kieff, a military intelligence officer operating undercover as a civilian in the Central Highlands, received orders to recruit “stay-behind” agents.

  President Gerald Ford issued a statement condemning Communist aggression but several days later neglected to mention Vietnam during his State of the Union address and told reporters that he could not foresee any set of circumstances leading him to order U.S. military units back to Vietnam. In fact, there was little he could do without outraging Congress and the American people. The U.S. Senate had passed an amendment in June 1973 named for Senators Clifford Case (R-N.J.) and Frank Church (D-Idaho) that prohibited the Pentagon from funding U.S. military operations in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos without the approval of Congress. This was followed five months later by the War Powers Resolution, a bill barring a president from sending the military into combat anywhere in the world for more than sixty days without congressional authorization or a declaration of war. The circumstances elevating Ford to the presidency also constrained him. President Nixon had appointed him vice president in 1973, after Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace for accepting bribes. He had become president eight months later after Nixon resigned in disgrace due to the Watergate scandal. His unpopular decision to pardon Nixon was courageous but further weakened his accidental presidency.

  Ford’s tepid response to Phuoc Long unnerved General Alexander Haig, Nixon’s former chief of staff. Haig flew to Washington from his post in Brussels as NATO commander hoping to persuade him to defy Congress and retaliate militarily. “Roll up your sleeves like Harry Truman did and take a principled stand,” he said, warning that otherwise Ford might not be reelected. “Al, I can’t,” Ford replied. “The American people have no stomach for it.” Haig rose to his feet and said, “I think you’ll be a one term president.”

/>   There was no evidence that Phuoc Long had fallen because its defenders lacked weapons or munitions. Henry Kissinger, who was serving as Ford’s secretary of state as well as his national security adviser, nevertheless blamed its loss on Congress’s refusal to increase military assistance to South Vietnam. He told a meeting of the administration’s interdepartmental Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG) on Vietnam and Cambodia, “The cuts they [Congress] have made last year have resulted in a deterioration of the situation and that is their god-damn fault,” adding that Congress should “take responsibility for the fact that 50,000 men [the United States had lost 58,220 troops in the Vietnam War] died in vain.”

  While author and Vietnam War critic Frances FitzGerald was visiting Hanoi that winter, the editor of the Communist Party newspaper informed her that some in North Vietnam’s Politburo subscribed to the “decent interval” theory. The editor explained that the theory posited that Kissinger would accept a two-year interval between the withdrawal of U.S. forces and a Communist victory in South Vietnam, and added, “The two years are over.”

  Kissinger had used the term “decent interval” while preparing for his secret trip to Beijing in 1971. His briefing book included this talking point: “We are ready to withdraw all our forces [from South Vietnam] by a fixed date and let objective realities shape the political future.” Next to this he had written in the margin, “We want a decent interval. You have our assurance.” When he accompanied Nixon to China the following year, he told Premier Zhou Enlai, “If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.” He also said that the United States considered the Hanoi government a “permanent factor” and had “no intention of destroying or even defeating it.”