The fireworks were getting incredibly loud as we got closer to Saigon. South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen van Thieu, had lifted a ban on fireworks that had been in effect for years, and I had seen all manner of them being sold in the markets. People had strung them in long red chains from their eaves in anticipation of the day. What a cacophony they produced. I wondered if kids were putting M-80 firecrackers in garbage cans for a bigger bang, like we used to do in New York.
Back at the hotel, in the lobby, the manager had strung little red and gold envelopes around the desk, probably in hope of tips. I rang the bell, and he came out of the back room, rubbing his eyes. I felt bad about waking him up, but I wanted to pay the bill and remind him that he was driving me to the American embassy before dawn to connect with the military transport to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in the morning. He’d remembered. I asked him to wake me up at five in the morning—in just two hours. I hoped he wouldn’t sleep through it. The flight wasn’t until eleven, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
I saw that his dusty altar to Buddha up in the corner was now sparkly and festooned with fruits and flowers. “Dao?” I asked, pointing to the buds. “Dao,” he answered, nodding and looking surprised.
I went up to my room and quickly threw my stuff into a bag. I didn’t have much. Then I collapsed on the bed, but I needn’t have worried about not waking up in time. The boom-boom-boom was ridiculously loud, and I tried to fall asleep through it for an hour, to no avail.
Man, these people really love their New Year’s fireworks, I thought.
At that moment, something burst through my window. Glass shattered all over the floor, and I heard yelling in the street.
What the hell?! I thought. Traffic is gonna be murder in this New Year’s chaos—I gotta vamoose. I grabbed my bag and tore down the stairs. It was a little after four o’clock.
The lobby was empty. I yelled over the front desk into the back room:
“Papasan! Papasan! Doko iku no?!! Where are you? I need a ride to the American embassy now! I’ll pay you double!”
The manager came running out and seemed to crouch behind the desk. He started screaming at me in Korean. Somehow I thought he was screaming at me to keep quiet, which was ironic. Then he switched to French.
“Beaucoup VC!” he yelled.
Beaucoup VC? You know, beaucoup—that’s French for “a lot,” or, as we used to say in New York when we won big in a card game or bet, “boocoo” bucks. I hadn’t seen anybody on the ride home, let alone VC. What was he talking about? The dozen or so guys I had heard yelling a few minutes before? I kept pressing him to leave; I offered him almost every American dollar I had left.
He was frantic. He looked like he would do anything to be rid of me. He shouted at me in Japanese to follow him. It was pitch black out—no moon. We ran out the back to his car, jumped in, and sped off at about ninety miles per hour. I mean, I was in a hurry to reach the embassy, but this was ridiculous. He was in a panic. But he was racing down all the side streets instead of the main drag, and I thought, We’ll never get there at this rate. Why the hell is he taking this route? I looked up and down, and absolutely nobody was on the streets. Sleeping off the celebratory drinking of the night before, I figured. There wasn’t a vehicle or a person moving; not even a cat. But there were choppers overhead. Then the car squealed to a stop.
Concertina wire was strung across the street on all four corners, blocking the entire intersection. Something was wrong, but not wrong enough that I wouldn’t keep heading to the embassy.
Papasan drove up on the sidewalk and down about a block when suddenly cops surrounded us. These were the South Vietnamese National Police—called White Mice by the people both for their white shirts and for the lack of respect they were given. There were about ten of them, pointing their machine guns into the car and screaming at us in Vietnamese.
I was yelling back, “Okay! Okay! Calm down! Take it easy!” I didn’t want either of us killed by South Vietnamese “friendly fire.”
I had about fifty bucks in my pocket. I gave Papasan forty-eight of it and said in his native Korean (that, out of respect, I had finally been learning), “Annyeong, Abeonim, gam sa ham ni da.” Good-bye, Pops; thanks for everything. I’ve got a plane to catch.
I didn’t know what the hell was going on, but I was still of the mind-set that if I made it to the embassy, my ride would be awaiting me. We would glide off to the airport, and I would be on my merry way to catch up with my ship in Manila and then back home.
Man, was I in denial.
I gingerly stepped out of the car and said, “American embassy,” over and over. Maybe they thought I worked there. They let me walk away. They couldn’t have cared less about me.
I continued along the Saigon River until I got to the Hotel Majestic, a beautiful, old French colonial hotel. From its rooftop, you could see the village on the other side of the river, which still had farm patches and thatch-roofed huts. It had always reminded me of New York, where you have New Jersey’s tree-covered Palisades cliffs on the west bank of the Hudson, right across from our metropolis.
But now it was anything but peaceful. Armed men, not in uniform, were outside the Majestic speaking English—they were Americans.
“What the hell’s going on?” I asked.
“Beaucoup VC, man,” one said.
Now even the Americans are saying it, I thought.
“Whaddaya mean?” I pressed.
“The Vietcong attacked Saigon a couple of hours ago,” another guy said. “They got half of Cholon. There’s fighting all over Saigon; they’re trying to take the whole city.”
“What?! Well, I gotta get to the American embassy,” I insisted irrationally. It sure as hell hadn’t been cherry bombs I’d heard exploding all night.
“Charlie has the embassy, man!” he yelled. “The MPs and marines are in there fighting them off!”
Vietcong guerrillas had overrun the United States embassy? How could that be possible?
Three personnel carriers screeched up, and about ten American commandos, armed like Rambo, jumped out. They had every freaking gun going. They looked up and down the street and then escorted some VIP, whose face I couldn’t see, into the Majestic. It could have been Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, for all I know. But the guys looked beat to hell—they had been through more than one firefight to bring him here.
I could hear gunfire coming from the South Vietnamese navy headquarters across the street and from somewhere across the river. I headed up Tu Do Street, and it looked like the streets in that 1959 sci-fi movie starring Harry Belafonte, The World, the Flesh and the Devil, about the end of the world. Nobody. Zip. Not a sign of life, except maybe the furtive movement of a curtain up above. I thought that if I could maneuver down the five blocks to the embassy, I would be safe. I still didn’t believe that Charlie had really taken it. Maybe there was still armed transport running to the Tan Son Nhut military airfield. But I had no idea who was hiding in what doorway, so I inched along close to the buildings and the stucco walls in between.
I was almost at the Brinks Hotel, which during wartime had been transformed into the US Army Bachelors Officers’ Quarters. It had been kind of a swinging place until the Vietcong blew it up on Christmas Eve 1964, killing two officers and wounding sixty people celebrating the holiday. Security had been beefed up ever since, but now the Brinks resembled a fortress. There was an armored vehicle outside, MPs armed to the teeth all around the perimeter, and sandbags piled up at the front.
“Did the VC get in here?!” I asked an MP.
“No, but they’ve got our embassy, they’ve got the airfield at Tan Son Nhut, and they’re trying to take the Presidential Palace right now. VC and the NVA have hit every town in the country, man!”
They got the airfield, too?! General Westmoreland had his huge Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) headquarters, known as Pentagon East, at Tan Son Nhut. How could that be possible? I pictured a few VC invading the airfield and being quickly dispatched by our MPs. Little did I know that three entire battalions of Vietcong had invaded the airfield, with only one small force of the 716th Military Police and two companies of the South Vietnamese army fighting them off, sustaining heavy casualties, until tanks from the 25th Infantry Division arrived.
“You’ll have to move along, sir,” the MP said.
I wanted to move along, but I didn’t like this guy telling me to.
“Lemme get this straight,” I said. “You’re telling me that the VC have invaded Saigon, and this is a US Army outpost, and I’m an American, and you’re telling me to move along? Where the hell do you want me to go?”
I thought my army existed to protect American civilians first and foremost.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t stay here, sir. I’ve got my orders.”
“I’ve heard that before,” I said.