Banished from Brinks, I continued to inch along the wall on Thong Nhut Boulevard toward the embassy. I wanted to be nearby when we took it back, which I thought would be instantly. I didn’t know yet how few of our soldiers were inside the compound, nor how those few had been hamstrung at every turn.
I could see the six-story embassy chancellery building down the wide boulevard lined with consulates. The chancellery, which looked like a giant concrete cheese grater surrounded by an eight-foot-high reinforced concrete wall, had opened in September.
I was only two blocks away now, and the gunfire was growing louder and louder. Chopper blades pummeled the air overhead. There were armed Americans, not in uniform, on the other side of the street, and they hand signaled me to stay on my side.
Just before three in the morning, Vietcong commandos in a taxi had pulled up to the embassy compound side gate and fired AK-47 automatics at the two young MPs guarding it. Specialist Fourth Class (SP4) Charles L. Daniel, of Durham, North Carolina, and Corporal William Sebast, of Albany, New York, fired back as they slammed the gate shut.
“They’re coming in! They’re coming in!” Daniel radioed. “Help us!”
Some people that day, including me, believed they had opened the gate to let in a longtime embassy driver, who had ID, and whom they never imagined was an undercover VC.
The military told reporters that guerrillas from the highly trained Vietcong C-10 Sapper Battalion jumped out of a truck and within moments blew a three-foot hole in the wall near the side gate. Their leader, Nguyen Van Sau, slipped through first. He was killed immediately by Sebast and Daniel, and so was his second-in-command, who followed behind him, top brass claimed.
Seventeen more VC soldiers, all armed with machine guns, stormed the embassy grounds. Sebast, twenty, and Daniel, twenty-three, fought them off as best they could out in the open until, tragically, they were gunned down.
US Marine Sergeant Ronald W. Harper, twenty, of Cambridge, Minnesota, was on the perimeter when the gunfire erupted. Aware that personnel were working upstairs in the embassy, he tore across the grounds and into the embassy lobby, past fellow marine George Zahuranic, also twenty, who was putting out a call for help over the radio. Harper bolted shut the huge wooden front doors of the embassy.
Seconds later, an antitank rocket blasted through the embassy wall and exploded in the lobby. Zahuranic, of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, was seriously wounded in the head and chest, and their radio was destroyed. Two more rockets smashed through the lobby. Harper ran to Zahuranic to administer first aid. A sapper threw a grenade through a window grill, and it blew a hole in the marble floor next to them.
Two young MPs, responding to the first radio call for help, sped to the front gate. Sergeant Jonnie B. Thomas, twenty-four, of Detroit and SP4 Owen Mebust, twenty, of Lynwood, California, were ambushed and killed in a fusillade of Russian-made Kalashnikov fire.
The VC cut the phone lines, leaving Harper to guard the embassy’s ground floor alone, without communications, and armed with only a .38 pistol, a 12-gauge shotgun, a Beretta M12 submachine gun with pistol cartridges and whatever other ammo he had. He could hear the voices of the VC right outside and had no idea how many of them were out there. Upstairs were three CIA staffers and five others, armed only with pistols. Harper thought he was going to die there, but he was determined not to leave his post or to let the VC inside.
Here’s what I mean by hamstrung: although five North Vietnamese army companies had prematurely invaded thirteen cities the night before because they’d used an old calendar to determine New Year’s Day, top US brass had taken that clue and put the military on alert, but added exactly one extra marine to guard the US embassy building in Saigon, for a total of three marines. They posted Sergeant Rudy Soto of Selma, California, on the roof, armed with a pistol and an M16 rifle, which jammed within minutes of the invasion. As for the consulate building that I had visited so often, top brass deemed it sufficient to have the usual single marine guard it.
At least Soto had a radio on the chancellery rooftop, but because he wasn’t getting a response from inside, he assumed that Harper and Zahuranic must be dead. The twenty-five-year-old sergeant did his best with his pistol from six stories up after the seventeen VC commandos took over the grounds.
Meanwhile, Major Hillel Schwartz and other pilots of the 101st Airborne kept trying to land their choppers on the rooftop helipad, but they were driven off repeatedly by a barrage of machine-gun fire. At some point in the night, the wounded Zahuranic was brought to the roof and Schwartz landed only long enough to airlift him out. The major flew back, and he and other chopper pilots with the 101st were hovering above as I moved along the boulevard.
I was going from tree to tree at this point. Some of the palms were three feet wide—the French had planted a canopy along the boulevard, like a tropical Champs-Élysées. Thank God for this vestige of French colonialism. I would hide behind one, dash forward, and then take cover behind the next.
I tried some of the gates and doors of the US Information Agency on my side of the street—they were all locked tight.
I saw no other people, no bikes, scooters—nothing moving—down the side streets. The people had fled their homes in chaos or were in hiding. Saigon cops had quickly blocked the major cross streets with concertina wire. But police in the precinct closest to the embassy and tasked with guarding Thong Nhut Boulevard refused to join American MPs who had sped there in a personnel carrier to pick them up. They reportedly locked up the precinct house and hid.
I started running to the next corner, the last block before the embassy grounds.
In the middle of the side street to my right was a sight that nearly stopped me in my tracks. There was a beautiful old Renault limo, but unfortunately, there was a dead guy in the backseat. And the fellow who probably had been his chauffeur was facedown in the road, a puddle of blood forming a halo around his head.
I reached the corner and hid behind the first tree. As the light was coming up, American MPs and men in civilian dress were shooting rifles into the consulate grounds from my side of the street and the choppers continued to hover. Amid the pitch darkness and hampered communications, our soldiers had no idea how many commandos had invaded the grounds, or whether they were inside the embassy or the consulate buildings, or whether Americans were out on the grounds fighting. They didn’t want to shoot an American by mistake.
I read later in the New York Times and other papers that US Marine Master Sergeant James Conrad Marshall, a twenty-year-old from Monroeville, Alabama, had been guarding the separate one-story consulate building alone. He courageously fought the invaders from its rooftop until he was shot through the throat by a VC sniper. Marshall was the first marine in history to die defending an American embassy.
At first light, an army MP captain and Paul Healey, a heroic and street-smart twenty-year-old private from Boston, led other MPs in the rescue assault. Healey was literally serving his last day in Vietnam, and others in that situation might have held back, but not this kid. He tried to ram the front gate open with his jeep; when that failed, he ran in front of the gate under VC fire and shot the lock six times before it finally broke off. He jumped on top of the jeep and was shooting at the enemy over the wall. Then the MPs jumped inside.
Armed with an M16, a .45, and a .38, Healey fought off the VC commandos shooting from behind trees. At one point, a nearby commando threw a Chinese grenade at Healey; it landed against his leg. Healey dove behind the guy who threw it, and the grenade killed the VC commando and wounded Healey’s hand. Down to three bullets, the young private yelled, “The next person who comes in without ammunition, I’m going to shoot him.”
Another VC sapper came from behind the embassy, and Healey shot him. His Boston street instincts told him there were more where that sapper had come from, and there were: three, whom he fought off.
The MPs knew that the unarmed mission coordinator, retired colonel George Jacobson, and another unarmed staffer had been trapped inside the US mission villa during the entire invasion. Healey ran through a hail of bullets toward the villa, as Colonel Jacobson testified later, and he spotted a pair of bloody sandals outside the door. He and a marine went in shooting side by side; the VC guerrilla shot the marine in the groin, and Healey pulled him back out to safety.
Healey then looked up and saw Colonel Jacobson in a second-floor window. “I realized Jacobson didn’t have anything,” he told writer Ron Steinman later. “I went out and took my .45, and I threw it up to him. It took about ten throws to get it up to him.”
Jacobson caught the gun, turned, and was face-to-face with the guerrilla, who shot at him but missed. Jacobson then killed him with Healey’s .45.
I saw one of the army choppers land on the roof of the embassy. After a few minutes, it took off, and then another chopper touched down for a few minutes and left. I couldn’t see up there, but I assumed they were landing personnel.
I found out later that seven of our choppers, with paratroopers from the 502nd Infantry’s C Company, had finally been able to land on the embassy roof. Inside, they found the staffers armed with pistols in a top-secret communications room.
The ground started to vibrate, and one of our tanks rumbled from the side street to the front of the embassy. I watched as its turret turned, and boom! The cannon blasted a hole in the embassy wall. It was a bizarre thing to witness: one of our own tanks shooting at a US diplomatic compound—and, at that point in the battle, unnecessarily. I believe brass at the very top ordered it done so they could claim sappers blew a hole in the wall to cover their own woeful decision to underman security of our embassy when an invasion had already begun up north twenty-four hours before. The US ambassador’s driver, once inside, may have simply killed the two MPs and let all his compadres in the gate.
About this time, all gunfire from inside the compound ceased. I heard someone shout, “Hold your fire!”
After a while, I started to see MPs and marine guards and paratroopers and civilians moving around in the courtyard. I wanted to stay out of their way, so I went around to the side street, Mac Dinh Chi Street, to the vehicle entrance.
On the sidewalk, just inside the side gate, the two young MPs lay dead on the ground, with their MP brothers guarding them. I paused and said a prayer.
I saw ten or twelve dead Vietcong in their black clothes and red armbands lying near the planters around the trees. Other dead VC had disguised themselves in South Vietnamese army uniforms.
Somebody who worked at the embassy told me that two of the dead guerrillas had embassy employee IDs on them. The one who had been a driver at the embassy for years had most recently served as Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s chauffeur. He’d probably gotten an earful of intelligence tooling around Saigon with the ambassador in the back. Some say the plan was to obtain the classified documents and bring them to General Giap—that’s probably why the CIA agents were guarding them upstairs.
It took only nineteen VC guerrillas to take over our embassy at three in the morning and hold it until our troops took it back around nine o’clock. Seventeen of the Vietcong were killed, two captured.
I looked at the bodies lying on the ground, and wondered how could they have thought for a second that they would succeed in overtaking and holding the US embassy. And, of course, they didn’t. They had to know they were going to be killed. There was no way they could stay there; the next day, the whole place would be exactly as it was before. But they would be dead. It was dumb dedication, I thought. But if, to them, success was getting in there and sounding a wakeup call back in the States, well, they had succeeded. The American public was shocked that our new, fortified embassy and all of Saigon—the capital of South Vietnam—had been overrun by the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong during the Tet offensive. These men in their black pajamas died young for General Giap’s propaganda coup. Then he lived to the ripe old age of 102.
People were milling around in the compound, and there was confusion, so I went in. The concrete facade had been shredded in three places by Soviet antitank rockets, and bazooka rockets had pierced holes in the wall around the grounds. Five or six more dead North Vietnamese guerrillas were on the grass and in the driveway. They were thin, but I was surprised at how strong they looked. Most looked to be the same age as our boys.
I went inside, and it wasn’t as if staffers had gone back to work, hands folded on their desks, waiting to continue the quotidian business of the embassy and help me on my merry way. No, it was all military now, frantically trying to answer the question “How the hell did this happen?”
I saw one guy I knew.
“How many of them were there?! Did any of them get into the embassy?” I asked him.
“There were nineteen of them, and they never got in!” he said. “The paratroopers landed on the roof and went through floor by floor. They found about eight staffers upstairs—one of them was hiding under a bed.
“One lone marine kept firing at them from the lobby all night long,” he continued. “He had a partner on the shift who was wounded pretty bad from minute one. Another marine was guarding the consulate alone, and he got killed trying to shoot from the roof. Listen, man, I gotta go—Westmoreland’s on his way over here.”
It made me proud to have been a marine.
I was wandering around the embassy, and nobody questioned me. I guess they assumed I had a purpose, like I was one of the armed men in plain clothes I had seen fighting outside, who were undoubtedly CIA. But then I found him: the guy I called Heller the Bureaucrat. Now I called him Heller the Hero, and I needed his help again. He wasn’t his usual clean and crisp self, probably having hurtled here at ninety miles per hour.
“Oh, no,” he said when he saw me.
“Heller! I’m so glad I found you!”
“Donohue, what the hell are you doing here?!”
“Don’t you remember? You got me a flight out of Tan Son Nhut this morning to catch up with my ship in Manila? Is there still transport to the airfield?” He looked at me as if I were dumb, crazy, or suffering from shock. Maybe I was in shock—I couldn’t believe what I had seen.
“They have Tan Son Nhut, man! Don’t you get it?! Forget about Manila! Forget about your ship! Go back to your hotel!”
“I can’t go back to my hotel!”
“I’m not asking you, pal, I’m telling you. Go back to your hotel—that’s a direct order.”
“My hotel is in Cholon,” I said.
He shot back, “No, no, wait. You can’t go to Cholon. The VC have Cholon!” He walked away, then stopped, and heaved a big sigh.
“All right, hold on a minute,” he said, going behind a desk, grabbing a form, quickly scribbling on it, and handing it to me.
“Take this and go to one of the big hotels on Tu Do Street,” he instructed. “Give it to the concierge.”
I looked down, and, bearing the seal of the United States, was a voucher for a hotel stay “to be paid by the US Embassy.” He had filled in my name and written the start date—January 31, 1968—but no end date. “Wow, man, how can I thank you?”
“By getting the hell outta here,” he said, and left.