April 29 and 30 are two days that I observe as a kind of
personal anniversary. It was 37 years ago yesterday and today that Saigon fell
to the North Vietnamese Communists and it was during those hectic, panic-filled
hours that I witnessed the end of an almost 10 year-long war that some have
called America ’s
“lost crusade.”
This is the story of the last day of that crusade—a 24 hour
period between April 29-30,
1975 when America ’s
political and military involvement in Vietnam came to a frenzied, sad and
ignominious end. The memories of the final day of America’s involvement in
Vietnam remain etched in my mind even after 30 years.
During that final day 1,373 Americans, 5,680 Vietnamese and
an exhausted and ailing American ambassador with the American flag folded under
one arm and his pet poodle under the other would flee a land infamous for its
coups d'etat and its byzantine cabals—a stunningly beautiful land of soaring
green hills, lush forests, vast rubber plantations and fertile rice paddies that
had become a political and military swamp for several American presidents.
Most Americans have subsequently concluded that the longest
war in this nation’s history was also the first war America ever lost. In fact, however,
as a former North Vietnamese colonel told me several years ago, one of the
great ironies of Vietnam
is that the American military was never defeated in any battle of consequence.
“You lost the war in the cities and villages of America , not on
the battlefields of Vietnam ,”
said Col. Ba
Thang political commissar of the Saigon Gia
Dinh Special Action Unit. “We could never hope for a military victory against
such a formidable foe. Our strategy was to survive, to make the war last so
long that you Americans would eventually tire and go home. That is what
happened. We divided you politically and sapped your will to fight a war in a
country few Americans had ever heard of or cared about.”
Indeed, while the specter of Vietnam still haunts us today, in
the 1960s and 1970s it divided the nation like nothing since the Civil War. In
some ways, it continues to do so.
References to American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan as America ’s “new Vietnams ” are
constantly seen and heard in the news media. The phrase “no more Vietnams” adorns
placards at nearly every demonstration against U.S. involvement in Iraq and one
even hears references to “the light at the end of the tunnel,” the phrase used
in the 1960s by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to describe U.S.
progress toward winning the war in Vietnam.
Continental Palace Hotel Ca. 1975 |
Then I realized why. The ancient window air conditioner had
stopped its moaning and coughing. There was no electricity. Apparently the
North Vietnamese had hit one of Saigon ’s power
plants—a common occurrence during the past few weeks. I lit one of the dozen or
so candles I always kept ready and looked up at the ceiling. The gecko lizards
had stopped chasing after mosquitoes and were retreating down the walls.
Cockroaches the size of credit cards were scampering into the cracks of the
ruby floor tiles. Even the rat that regularly patrolled my room was gone (I had
named him General Giap ,
after the architect of North
Vietnam ’s military campaign).
I wondered if what I had heard had been thunder. April 28th
had been a day of thunderstorms with lightening flashing over the city. Then, a
few moments later the unmistakable metallic sound of a 122 mm rocket shrieked
through the heavy humid night air and exploded nearby. This time chunks of
ancient plaster fell from the ceiling and the walls of the 100-year-old hotel shuddered.
That was not thunder. These were the first rockets to hit Saigon since April 27 when one slammed into the roof of
the Majestic Hotel overlooking the Saigon
River a few blocks away
killing a hotel porter. Later that same morning another rocket smashed into Saigon ’s bustling Ben Thanh
Market killing more than a dozen people.
I jumped from bed, scampered barefoot over the cool crimson
tiles to the small balcony overlooking Lam Son Square and threw open the French
windows. Before me, looming in all its hulking alabaster majesty, was the old National Assembly Building
and beyond it the high rise Caravelle Hotel. Both were intact.
To my right where Le
Loi Street bisected Tu Do Street several members of the South
Vietnamese home guard with red rosettes in their buttonholes identifying them
as loyalists, were firing their ancient M-1 carbines. For the past several
weeks home guard troops, who were mostly teenagers, had patrolled the streets
by day and at night had slept on sidewalks wrapped in ponchos.
As I looked down at the home guard, bullets buzzed through
the dank night air and ricocheted off nearby buildings. I ducked as several
rounds slammed into the white façade of the hotel. During the past several
months I had gotten to know several of these home guard militia. Their job was
to enforce Saigon ’s nighttime curfew. I paid
them to escort me after curfew to the Public Telephone and Telegraph Office so
I could telex my stories back to the Chicago
Tribune.
“What are you shooting at?” I yelled.
“V.C. , beaucoup
V.C.,” a 17-year-old named Nha shouted back.
“Where?”
“They everywhere…you better hide.” Then Nha, who was usually
wasted on Vietnamese “33” beer by this time, shrieked with laughter. “Khong co
gi,” (it doesn’t matter). We kill all number ten V.C.”
Yeah, I remember thinking, if you don’t kill everybody else
in the city first. Nha lifted his rifle and fired several more rounds into the
air. I had seen Nha in action with his M-1 carbine during our after curfew
hikes to the PTT office. He often amused himself by blasting away at the giant
rats that roamed Saigon ’s deserted streets
after the cyclos and ancient smoke-belching Renault
taxis had stopped running for the night.
I retreated back into my room. In the distance there were
more heavy explosions—what sounded like 80 mm mortar rounds and 130mm heavy
artillery hitting Tan Son Nhut, Saigon ’s main
airport some 7 miles away. The temperature was already approaching 90 degrees
as I got dressed, and the sun wasn’t even up. I decided to forgo what would
have been a cold shower. I needed to get downstairs to see what was going on.
Was this it? I can recall thinking. Is this the end? As it
turned out, America 's
ill-fated crusade in Vietnam
was indeed over. And this was the way it would end: not with honor, as one
president had suggested, but in ignominy and humiliation and chaos.
Even
though the city was now under a 24-hour curfew, for much of that final day some
20,000 terrified, shrieking Vietnamese—many of them former U.S. government
employees—would surround the American Embassy, pleading with Marine guards to
allow them inside the 10-foot walls so they could board the choppers that would
take them to the armada of 44 American ships waiting off the Vietnamese coast.
Crowds forming at U.S. Embassy early April 29 |
Some
would make it over the walls and onto the choppers. But only some. Most would
be held at bay by U.S.
soldiers—former allies—who pointed M-16s at them, cursed them, pounded their
clawing fingers with rifle butts and threatened to blow their heads off.
I can still hear the voices of American embassy officials
and their Vietnamese interpreters shouting: “Khong ai se bi bo lai!” (No one will be left behind) at the frantic
throng outside the Embassy compound.
It was a
scene that still saddens me today—one that made me ashamed to be an American,
not because we were leaving in abject defeat but because we were betraying
thousands if not millions of Vietnamese who believed our promises of a free and
better Vietnam if they supported our policies.
I had arrived in Vietnam from my Tokyo base in January 1975, and with the
exception of a few weeks spent in Phnom
Penh , Cambodia
in late February and early March, I had lived in Saigon
at the Continental
Palace .
The North Vietnamese push for Saigon
began March 7 in Vietnam 's
central highlands. Four days later, the provincial capital city of Ban Me Thuot , 180 miles
north of Saigon fell. A few days later, South Vietnamese President Nguyen
Van Thieu decided to adopt a plan
of “strategic withdrawal,” which, in effect, conceded the northern half of South Vietnam
to the Communists and precipitated one of the greatest routs in military
history.
By early April, the North Vietnamese controlled almost 75
percent of the country and a palpable sense of doom enveloped Saigon .
The city’s ubiquitous bars, famous for their “Saigon
tea,” were mostly empty. Vendors selling “pho” and “ca-phe sua” (beef noodle
soup and “white” coffee), beggars and hundreds of homeless children had all retreated
from the streets.
While these
were ominous signs, I knew the end was near when the Indian tailor on Tu Do
Street where I had gotten shirts made and changed dollars into Vietnamese
piastres, began producing North Vietnamese and Viet Cong flags instead of
American and South Vietnamese banners.
"It’s the
reality of the situation you see,” he told me matter-of-factly one afternoon. “You do what you must to survive. You press chaps
can leave, I cannot. Frankly, I am happy that this nasty affair is ending finally
after so many terrible years.”
The official length of the war is generally conceded to have
been eight years—from 1965, when President Lyndon B.
Johnson sent in the U.S. Marines,
to 1973, when the Paris
peace accord was signed. However, if you count the first advisers sent to Vietnam by Harry Truman
in 1950, America 's
involvement in S. E. Asia spanned three decades. During that time, about 3.1
million military personnel (including 7,200 women) served in Vietnam .
The human toll was staggering. By the time America 's
active involvement in the war officially ended in 1973, it had claimed the
lives of 58,183 American men and women. Another 304,000 Americans came home wounded,
sometimes physically and sometimes mentally. One of every 10 soldiers who
served in Vietnam
was a casualty.
In addition, some 75 journalists died covering the war—more
than in any other conflict in world history. Several are still missing.
Then there are the MIAs —the 2,211
Americans still unaccounted for in Southeast Asia ,
including 1,651 in Vietnam .
The dollar cost of the war: More than $165 billion—a figure
which includes the loss of 3,689 fixed-wing aircraft, 4,857 helicopters and 15
million tons of ammunition.
In Vietnam
the impact of America 's
involvement in the war was even more conspicuous: 3 million Vietnamese killed,
including 1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers; 250,000 South
Vietnamese soldiers; and 2 million civilians, according to Vietnam 's
Ministry of Labor, War Invalids and Social Affairs. More than 600,000 North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops were wounded, while 500,000 South Vietnamese
troops were wounded and 2 million civilians on both sides were crippled by
mines, artillery fire, chemical defoliants, bombings and the general mayhem of
war.
In early April I had driven my rented jeep to a town called Phouc Hiep
and found myself in the middle of a rice paddy along with a handful of other reporters
when a fire fight broke out between ARVN (South Vietnamese) and North
Vietnamese troops.
We broke into a wild run across a wide expanse of dry
paddies toward a hamlet when we heard the telltale “thump” of a mortar shell
being fired.
“Eat dirt,” someone yelled and we plunged en masse into a
3-foot deep irrigation ditch. Seconds later an earsplitting explosion sent huge
chunks of dirt and rock flying through the air and on top of us. We were fully
exposed in the middle of a 10-acre chain of rice paddies. The nearest cover was
a small river about 300 yards away. We thought about making a dash for it, but
small arms fire from both sides kept us pinned down. We remained there in the
muddy ditch for what seemed like hours as bullets kicked up dirt all around us.
In fact, the battle lasted only about 15 minutes.
When the shooting subsided we scampered toward the river,
zigging and zagging as we went. When we got there we paid some farmers who had
taken cover along the river bank to ferry us to the other side in their wooden
canoes. Once, there we were met with the aftermath of the battle. The bodies of
perhaps 15 NVA soldiers were strewn across a field. They had walked into an
ambush.
A dead NVA soldier after battle at Phouc Hiep |
I was making a few notes and photographing the scene when
several children from the nearby village emerged and began stripping the
soldiers of any valuables they had—watches, rings, shoes. Others were amusing
themselves by jumping back and forth over the wire cable that connected several
anti-personnel claymore mines to a triggering device. One touch and the mines could
have killed six or seven children and anybody else in standing within the
effective killing range. When detonated a Claymore sends some 700 steel balls
flying in a 60-degree horizontal arc at a height of 6 feet over a radius of 300
feet.
In Vietnam ,
I wrote in my notebook, the war and its instruments of destruction had become a
deadly amusement park.
***********************
On April 20, the provincial capital of Xuan Loc
just 46 miles east of Saigon fell after
holding out for several days against a tenacious siege by NVA troops. The fall
of Xuan Loc was a signal for people to proclaim
what quickly became Saigon 's epitaph: "La
Guerre est fini; Saigon est fini; everything
est fini."
It also sped up the dynamic Saigon
rumor mill. One rumor said that Catholics originally from the north would be
sent on a death march along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Another rumor said that Viet
Cong soldiers in Da Nang
had ripped out the manicured fingernails of prostitutes, prompting a frenzy of
fingernail cutting and polish removing among Saigon 's
bar girls. Yet another rumor said that unmarried Catholic girls would be forced
to marry North Vietnamese war invalids.
The rumors had one cumulative effect: they tended to support
the growing belief that the end was near.
Since early April, several of us had pressed the U.S. Embassy
for details of the evacuation—with no result. U.S.
Ambassador Graham Martin ,
who died in 1990, was intent on not creating panic by discussing the
possibility of an American exodus. Until the last day of the war, he had held
out hope that a negotiated end of hostilities could be worked out. Indeed, two
days before he had gone on Vietnamese television and announced: “I, the
American Ambassador, am not going to run away in the middle of the night. Any
of you can come to my home and see for yourselves that I have not packed my
bags. I give you my word.”
In order to ensure that Talon Vise went smoothly, Martin authorized bribes to Saigon
police so buses could move through checkpoints without a problem. He also
allowed Vietnamese to be smuggled into the American Embassy through a hole cut
into the wall of the adjacent French Embassy.
“What a perfect metaphor for this f…ked up place,” the late Hunter S. Thompson ,
who was covering the end of the war for Rolling Stone Magazine, told me one
evening. We were having dinner at the My Canh floating restaurant on the Saigon River .
“Lies, deceit and betrayal. Hey, I think I have the name for my next book.” The
“gonzo” journalist then took a long drag on a fat Buddha
grass joint and asked if he could ride out with me to “the action” the next
day.
I dreaded taking Thompson with me
because he had a tendency to wander off. I always feared that I would return to
Saigon and have to announce that Thompson was captured by the Viet Cong or had stepped on a
mine. I didn’t want to be responsible for the death or capture of “Uncle Duke”
the Doonesberry cartoon strip character modeled on Thompson .
“What a thought,” someone said one evening. “If Thompson gets captured he will get the whole North
Vietnamese Army high and the war will be over tomorrow.”
As it turned out, Thompson left Saigon for Hong Kong long
before the evacuation and Rolling Stone had to send in another reporter to
cover the story. “This bull shit is going to last forever. I’ve got rigorous shopping
to do,” he told me before he left for the airport.
McNamara's admission that he and others in the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations knew the war was wrong—and even un-winnable—as far back
as 1965 but decided to send Americans to fight and die there anyway makes Martin's
diplomatic dithering seem acceptably innocuous.
Finally, on April 26 with 16 NVA army divisions converging
on the capital from every direction, a special “evacuation code” was revealed
by the U.S. Embassy that would alert us when an evacuation was imminent.
The code, which would be played over a local U.S.-operated
FM station would be this: A short announcement that said “The temperature is 105
degrees and rising,” followed by the first eight bars of the song “White
Christmas.”
I can recall sitting one evening on the "Continental
Shelf"—the open air veranda of the
Continental Palace Hotel (now glassed in and renamed Chez Guido) that overlooks
Tu Do and Le Loi streets—when several Japanese correspondents came rushing up
to my table.
"On The Shelf" of the Continental Hotel |
“How does ‘White Christmas’ go?” they inquired anxiously. I
hummed it for them. For the next few days Japanese and others not familiar with
the old Bing Crosby Christmas standard could be seen standing on Saigon street
corners humming the song to one another.
It was one of those droll little moments that punctuated the
larger agony of the war's last few hours.
But that humor was all but forgotten as April 29 dawned and
several of us huddled in the lobby of the Continental Hotel listening to the
portable UHF receiver an embassy official had given the American press corps.
Over the tiny receiver we could hear radio traffic between
the U.S. Marine contingent charged with guarding the hulking complex of U.S.
Defense Attache Office buildings near Tan Son Nhut Air Base called “Pentagon
East.”
The radio crackled with a running commentary from the
Marine unit assigned to the building as one artillery shell after another
slammed into Tan Son Nhut and the American compound.
“The back end of the gym's been hit!” a Marine shouted
into his radio.
“Roger that,
Whiskey Joe,” came the monotone reply from the embassy which was appropriately
code named “Dodge City .”
“My god, control, we've got two Marine KIAs.”
“Where are the bodies?” asked the voice from the embassy.
“They're right here. What should we do with them?”
Then there was a tremendous explosion, amplified by the
small radio.
“Jesus , the ammo
dump's just been hit! All hell has broken loose out here!”
A few hours later, Operation Frequent Wind (the name given
to the final evacuation) was ordered by President Gerald Ford
and I paid one last visit to my room in the Continental Palace .
I had stockpiled a couple of cases of American beer, soft drinks and a variety
of PX junk food, along with a small library of pirated books.
I found Mr.
Phan , one of the elderly hotel
concierge staffers who slept in a small room on the second floor, sweeping my
room as if nothing had happened. For almost two months Mr. Phan, who always
appeared in clean white cotton pants and jacket, had cleaned my room, kept me
in fresh bottled water and occasionally sprayed my room in a futile gesture at
ridding it of roaches and other critters of the night.
I pressed a wad of Vietnamese piastres into his hand. Then
it occurred to me that the money would be worthless in a few hours—indeed, as
far as Saigon ’s ubiquitous money changers were
concerned, piastres had been worthless for the past two weeks.
I had about $500 in cash and I pealed off $300 and gave it
to him.
“Here, this may come in handy, Mr. Phan ,” I
said. “And please take anything you want from my room.” I suggested he might
want to get out of central Saigon and find a
safe place until the fighting and artillery barrage stopped.
He smiled, bowed ever so slightly and announced: “Thank you, but not to worry, I am V.C!”
Many of us had suspected for some time that a lot of the
“boys,” as Mr. Phan and his co-workers at the Continental
were called, were probably Viet Cong or V.C. sympathizers. One reason many
journalists stayed at the old hotel was because we had heard that the owner
paid “war taxes” to the Viet Cong so it would not be targeted for attack.
As we shook hands he looked up at me and said: “Why do you
not stay. Everything will be OK here. Much better if you stay here.”
I explained that the Tribune
had ordered me to leave and that I had a baby daughter I hadn’t seen for
almost four months.
He nodded. “Yes, yes, maybe better you go now.”
It was the last time I would ever see Phan, who was in his
70s at the time. When I returned in 1985 for the 10th anniversary of
the war’s end, the staff at the Continental
Palace informed me he had
passed away in 1982.
By 10 a.m. ,
a small army of American, European and Asian correspondents lugging
typewriters, sound equipment, suitcases and shoulder bags left the Continental
in silent single file. We had been told to make our way to a point six blocks
away near the Saigon
River .
As we trudged down Tu
Do Street , ARVN soldiers and home guard units
watched our ragtag formation menacingly. In the distance we could hear the
constant explosion of artillery and mortar shells as they slammed into the
city's suburbs.
“You leave now?” Nha, the home guard soldier, asked me as we
slogged toward the river. His M-1 carbine was slung over his back and for the
first time since I had known him and his small squad of home guard soldiers, he
seemed genuinely terrified of what the next few hours would bring.
“Yes, we leave now,” I said sheepishly. Then, for some
reason, I said: “I'm sorry . . . sorry for all of this.”
“Bo di, chang co
sao aau” (Never mind, it doesn’t matter), Nha said. “You come back someday.” He
was right, of course. I would return in 1985 and again in 1995 to witness the
10th and 20th anniversaries of the fall of Saigon .
Finally, we arrived at our evacuation point: a spot facing a
statue of Vietnam 's
6th Century military hero Tran
Hung Dao .
A helipad had been created atop a building, but the South Vietnamese navy had
placed a 50-caliber machine gun on the top of a building next door. It was
decided the machine gun might be used against departing U.S. choppers.
So that evacuation point was abandoned.
I made my way to the U.S. Embassy thinking that might be an
option for catching a chopper out. It was surrounded by thousands of furious Vietnamese
demanding to be let inside the embassy compound. There was no way I was going
to push my way through that mob.
I trudged down Hai
Ba Trung Street . The temperature was already close
to 100 degrees and my shirt was soaked through with perspiration. Eventually, I
made my way to an alternate evacuation point—the University of Maryland 's
Saigon Education Center .
It was padlocked. I waited. Finally, at 12:20
p.m. two olive drab buses arrived and I climbed aboard along with
about 60 other members of the Saigon press corps.
The two buses then began an aimless voyage through Saigon . Every few blocks the buses would stop and the
Marine assigned to our bus would ask for instructions with his two-way radio.
“What's this, the Graham Martin
sightseeing excursion?” someone asked.
The UHF radio in the Marine's hand crackled. It was “Dodge City ” again.
“We're in trouble here!” a voice said. “There are 20,000
people at the front gate of the embassy. It's getting hostile.”
“What should I do with my bus?” our Marine driver shouted
into his radio.
“Looks like Tan Son Nhut's your only option,” came the
reply. “Don't come here!”
“Roger that,” the
Marine said. Then, turning to the 60 people jammed on the bus, he said. “Looks
like we're going to the airport.” In the distance we could hear the explosion
of rockets and mortar shells slamming into Tan Son Nhut.
As the bus approached the main gate of the air base we could
see black pillars of smoke rising from the runway. Then Vietnamese guards at
the gate began firing their M-16s in our direction. We dove for the floor.
Our Marine escort, code named “Wagon master,” yelled into
his radio for instructions. “This looks bad. What should we do? What is the
situation at DAO?”
”It ain't good,” the radio crackled. “We are taking lots of
mortar and artillery fire. Bust through the gate if necessary and then drive
like hell.” The radio crackled and as an afterthought, a voice said: “Good
luck.”
I seriously considered getting off the bus and walking the 7
or 8 miles back to the city. Before I could, the driver moved the bus back some
100 yards from the gate.
“This is it,” he yelled. “Keep low. We’re busting through
the gate!” He stomped on the accelerator and the bus lurched forward. As we
bore down on the gate at about 60 mph, we expected the guards to start
shooting. Instead, they inexplicably backed off and opened the gates seconds before
the lumbering vehicle would have rammed through them.
Off to one side a downed Huey helicopter, one skid broken
off, lay on its side with its motor running and its tail rotor still spinning.
We watched a Vietnamese C-119 transport plane somehow lift
off from the cratered runway and we applauded the pilot's skill. Our applause
turned to horror seconds later when a heat-seeking missile streaked skyward, slammed
into the transport and sent it plummeting toward what looked like the Cholon
section of Saigon .
As we pulled up to the DAO compound, a 122 mm rocket punched
into the Air America terminal just across the road, showering us with debris.
I was in the back of the bus trying frantically to get the locked
emergency rear door open when another artillery shell exploded a few hundred
feet away, pelting the area with shrapnel and breaking several windows in the
bus. By this point I was on my back kicking with all my strength at the door. Finally,
I managed to kick the door open. I slid down to the ground and waited for a few
minutes using the bus as cover. Most of the press corps had already made it
into the building. I took a deep breath, then began my sprint over some 50 feet
of open ground to the DAO building. Another rocket slammed into the road a few
yards behind me. I dove to the ground and flattened myself on the hot concrete.
I could hear razor sharp metal shrapnel slicing through the air behind me. A
few seconds later I pulled myself up and scuttled like a crab toward the door.
Once inside we crouched along interior hallways and waited. A
couple of hours went by. Several Marines handed out paper tags and told us to
write our names and next of kin on them and attach them to our clothing.
“These are for you, not your luggage,” they said. I knew
what they were. I had seen them before—attached to the bodies of battle
casualties.
Outside a constant deluge of rockets, mortars and artillery
shells rained on Tan Son Nhut and the DAO compound. I closed my eyes and
actually managed a few minutes of sleep between explosions.
It was almost 6 p.m. ,
some 14 hours since the final bombardment of Saigon
had begun. I was exhausted. I was sure every ounce of adrenalin in my body was
used up. I thought about the C-119 I had watched get knocked out the sky by a
SAM-7 missile and began to wonder if I had made the right choice. Maybe I
should stay. After all, during one of the Saturday briefings at the Viet Cong
compound at Tan Son Nhut, which was established as part of the 1973 Peace
Accords, Col. Ba had told me all correspondents would be treated as “guests” by
the conquering North Vietnamese Army.
“We are not barbarians like the Khmer Rouge,” Col. Ba said, referring
to the news of the carnage in Phnom
Penh that was beginning to filter into Saigon . “Just remain in your hotel room and someone will
come for you. Those who earn an honest living will be welcome.”
Of course, I had not remained in my hotel room. I was inside
the DAO compound, more than 7 miles from the Continental Palace Hotel. How
would I get back to the city center? Catch a ride on a NVA T-54 tank? Hardly.
The shelling outside intensified. The huge DAO building trembled
as one artillery shell after another slammed the compound. I was on the verge
of getting up and hoofing it back to central Saigon
when a Marine captain walked into the corridor and bellowed:
“OK, this is it! We’re moving out! Di di
mao …Go, go, go!”
We spilled out of the DAO building. Two Sikorsky CH-53 Sea
Stallion heavy helicopters were waiting on a tennis court about 300 feet away,
their blades whooshing slowly in the hot sticky air. After what seemed an
eternity I and about 80 others scrambled up the rear loading ramp hunkered on the
floor and canvas bench seats. Seconds later the load master raised the ramp and
we lifted off.
We flew low at first, then the pilot put the
helicopter into a steady climb. I stood up and looked down at Saigon
over door gunner’s shoulder. The city looked bizarrely peaceful and idyllic
with the Saigon River meandering through the city and
toward the South China Sea some 50 miles away.
CH-53 Door Gunner During Evacuation |
Forty minutes later we were landing on the deck of the USS
Denver, a Landing Platform Dock about 35 miles off the coast of Vung Tau .
For the next several hours we watched one helicopter after
another arrive. Some unauthorized South Vietnamese army helicopters were
allowed to land and then were pushed over the side into the sea.
Eventually, with the ship’s decks filled, Vietnamese pilots
were no longer allowed to land, so they would fly their Hueys to within 100
yards of the ship, open the doors and jump into the sea along with their
passengers. The chopper would remain in flight for a few moments and then pitch
into the ocean-sometimes dangerously close to those swimming toward our ship.
At 4:58 a.m.
April 30, Ambassador Martin
closed down the embassy, destroyed its communications equipment and climbed
aboard a helicopter on the embassy roof.
The helicopter pilot sent a message to the fleet: “Lady
Ace Zero Nine, Code Two is aboard.” Lady Ace Zero Nine was the chopper’s own
call sign; “Code Two” was the designation for an ambassador.
At 7:52 a.m., the last chopper lifted off the roof of the
U.S. Embassy, carrying out the small detachment of Marines who had guarded the
embassy compound and engaged terrified Vietnamese in a running floor-by-floor
holding action throughout April 29 and early April 30.
As the last Huey lifted off, the pilot radioed the final
official U.S.
message from Saigon : “Swift-Two-Two is
airborne with 11 passengers. Ground security force is aboard.”
Then, the radio crackled again: “Bye, bye Vietnam ,” a
voice said. “Bye, bye for now.”
Aboard the USS Denver several of us looked at one another in
stunned silence. The longest war of the 20th Century was finally
over. Our emotions ran the gamut: relief, guilt, anger, disgust, joy,
sadness—depending on who you were and what country you were from.
“So this is what the light at the end of the tunnel looks
like,” I said to no one in particular. I then went below decks to write my last
story of America ’s
war in Vietnam .
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