April 3, Disaster Preparedness
AT THE END OF MARCH, Bill Walker, one of the three Americans at the Saigon branch, had thought to arrange air freight out of Saigon for his personal belongings. Walker had noticed that the Saigon classifieds, once offering piano lessons and language study, were suddenly full of cars for sale and rental villas. Companies advertised their packing services in the margins of newspapers, with cute cartoon characters asking boldly, “Going Away?” Walker got the hint and suggested McTighe and I follow him and get out one trunk of stuff, the maximum that could be shipped by air at that time. Since McTighe wasn’t back from vacation, I offered to pack what I could for him at his villa.
“Don’t worry too much about it, John. I just want you to take the framed picture of my dad—it’s on the bureau,” McTighe told me. “That’s the only thing I need.” I reluctantly got the framed black-and-white photo off McTighe’s dresser and packed it for him in plenty of paper. Years later, his daughter, Heather McTighe, expressed surprise that the photo was the one thing McTighe wanted to take. She had always known the relations between her father and grandfather to be tension-filled; for a while they had even stopped speaking. Heather remembered hearing as a child about the items McTighe had left behind, the things he told me not to bother to take. He lost all the photographs from his childhood and his varsity letter jacket from the Princeton crew team.
I dutifully packed up a trunk of my things, but never imagined that it would be the only thing I would have of my two years at the bank in Vietnam. Around that time, I had made up a list of everything I owned at my villa. The itemized inventory of my household goods included a marble elephant statue, Japanese paintings, a carved wooden chess set, closets full of clothing, and even a French racing bicycle in storage. True to my banker identity, I assigned a dollar value to each and was not surprised to find that the single most valuable thing I owned was my collection of books. I had about two hundred hardcover business books. I estimated that they must have been worth about $1,500. I came to regret leaving behind so much, but I am grateful for my foresight in coming up with such a detailed list. It never was clear to me whether those personal items were covered under the bank’s risk insurance policy, but the bank did cover my losses. In the summer of 1975 when I returned to New York, they handed me a check for $23,887, no questions asked.
Shortly after he arranged for our trunks to be shipped, Bill Walker got his family out of Saigon. Claudio, his stepson, was crying when he was picked up from school one day. The boy had been dropped off for kindergarten at the American school in Saigon as usual that morning. Walker’s wife left to do the market shopping and daily errands around town. She hadn’t noticed that the school was closed. Overnight, the administrators and teachers had decided to leave town and shutter the school. Too many of their students had already left town, or maybe the Communists were just too close for their comfort. In any event, the school had closed one night and did not reopen the next day. They had not told Walker’s family, or presumably the families of any of the other students. For more than six hours Claudio clutched his knapsack and waited, crouched at the stoop next to the entrance of the school building, for his mother to pick him up.
As soon as Walker’s superiors at the bank got wind of the story, they realized just how vulnerable their employees with families were in Saigon. That was not only an unacceptable personal risk, but a potential public relations disaster for the bank. The very next day, Walker got a telex from FNCB’s regional center in Hong Kong. He had been promoted; he was needed in Hong Kong immediately.
Walker read between the lines. FNCB wasn’t really promoting him, but they were giving him a way out. They couldn’t directly say it had gotten too dangerous in Saigon for a man with a wife and a kid. The South Vietnamese authorities were monitoring communications, and telexes were intercepted all the time. The bank had to disguise why Walker and his family had to leave. It was the wrong moment for the bank to ruffle any more feathers, either in the South Vietnamese government or in our own.
The bank had waited about a week after the Walkers’ departure to tell me that it was time to close the bank. Since I was unattached, there was no rush to get me out of Saigon, and I was fine with that. I still felt that South Vietnam had life in it. The country had come through plenty of Communist scares before. Even if South Vietnam really was on its way to the end, and to my mind, that was still a big if, it would be a slow and prolonged process. I knew my history. It had taken the Germans months of assault to try to capture Stalingrad, and the Russians held out—they had the snow to help their defenses. The South Vietnamese had a tropical monsoon season that was set to begin any moment. The Communists knew that. It would be illogical for them to begin any offensive against Saigon until after the storm season. I was sure it would take months, if not a full year. In that time, anything could happen.
The commanders of the North Vietnamese Army disagreed. A golden opportunity had materialized for them, and they were not about to let it slip away.
North and South Vietnam had been locked in conflict for decades. Before 1954, differences between the Communists and the rest of the population had been somewhat obscured, first by the turmoil of World War II, and then by a grueling nine-year war for independence from French colonial rule. From North to South, the Communists were part of a nationalist fight for an independent Vietnam. When their army, the Viet Minh, defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, the prospect of a Communist country scared many Vietnamese into fleeing for the South. Prosperous land-owning families knew their property would be confiscated and nationalized—or worse: collectivized. Catholics feared persecution for their religious beliefs. The Vietnamese intelligentsia had long sat on the highest rung on the social ladder. They weren’t the richest, but in the traditional order of things, they were the most elite, and they feared that the topsy-turvy Communist priorities would have the proletariat ordering educated scholars to toil in rice fields.
The United States was just as fearful of the Communists in North Vietnam. It was the height of the Cold War, and the Hot War of Korea was fresh in everyone’s memory. Losing another country to Communism in Asia would mean the further shrinking of the Free World, and the spread of the Soviet Red Empire.
The Geneva Accords in 1954 split Vietnam into two separate countries along the seventeenth parallel. The North would be led by Ho Chi Minh and the Communists, while the South was supposed to be free. In a few years, there were to be elections throughout the country so that the Vietnamese people could determine their fates. But too much was at stake. The Americans poured money, resources, and men into South Vietnam to keep it from being a “falling domino.” From 1965 to 1975, America spent $111 billion just on military operations in Vietnam; adjusted for inflation, that would be nearly $700 billion today.1 That figure doesn’t include the other billions in aid money for development, or the cost of outfitting a first-rate South Vietnamese Army. It also doesn’t begin to cover the human cost. Nearly 4 million members of the US armed forces were deployed to Southeast Asia; of those 58,220 never came home because they were either killed or missing in action.2 The Vietnamese cost was much higher. Although there are no official records, best estimates put the number of South Vietnamese soldier deaths at 250,000, North Vietnamese combatant casualties at 1.5 million, and civilian casualties in both countries at 4 million.3
Everyone was looking for an honorable way out of the war. Peace talks in Paris had started in 1968, but they moved glacially. It took eight months of negotiation just for the United States and Hanoi to agree on the shape of the conference table. When a resolution was finally reached on January 27, 1973, there was a cease-fire. The United States would withdraw its troops, and the North promised to stop sending troops into the South. But American president Richard Nixon promised the South Vietnamese that if the North did not abide by the peace, the United States would reenter the war.
It was a promise he didn’t intend to keep. In August 1972, Nixon was already pessimistic about South Vietnam. “Let’s be perfectly coldblooded about it,” he said in a private, but recorded, conversation to Henry Kissinger. “South Vietnam is probably never going to survive anyway.” Kissinger agreed but saw the situation from a practical political eye. “We’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together for a year or two.” Kissinger’s formula became known as the Decent Interval—a period of time after the withdrawal of military troops long enough so that, in Kissinger’s words, “no one will give a damn” if and when South Vietnam finally fell.4
The Watergate scandal helped. The United States was so bogged down in domestic political strife that there was no support whatsoever for American military reengagement to intervene in Vietnam. It was an excellent opportunity for Hanoi to act; the North realized it might not get this kind of chance again. Hundreds of thousands of troops were sent south. Some of the more cautious politburo members of the North Vietnamese government worried that such rash and obvious action would bring back the Americans, but their concerns were dismissed by Le Duan, Ho Chi Minh’s successor to the Communist leadership. He felt there was no need for the North to honor the Paris agreement any longer. To his way of thinking, the South had already violated it time and time again, so the North Vietnamese incursion was perfectly legitimate. Even Le Duan was stunned at how fast, and easily, the South caved to Communist pressure in early 1975. One defeat led to another. Panic built. The country the Americans had helped build and reinforce was finally abandoned. South Vietnam would fold.5
But that was not yet apparent to me. After all, I had been to Vietnam before. I had arrived in Saigon as a first lieutenant, US Army Medical Service Corps (Administration), just after the Tet offensive of 1968. I saw airplane bombing, strafing, and napalming. At night I heard firefights right in Saigon. On moonless nights, the pink bursts of tracer fire would light up the sky bright as day. The closest I came to getting killed was when I was resupplying a secret military base near Danang with medical equipment. An army lieutenant friend asked me to stay; it was already getting late, and he said the girlie dancers were coming to entertain the base that night. I said no thanks, and I went back to Saigon. It turned out that I got out just in time. Sometime in the middle of the night, the base was overrun.
When I was called back to the base the next day, I was with my boss, a doctor. We saw the devastation, though by the time I got there, the dead bodies had been removed. There were burned-out buildings and scorch marks from bombed-out areas. The doctor and I were assigned to talk to the colonel in charge of the base. We found him at the top of the water tower, firing at ghosts into the jungle surrounding Monkey Mountain. He had had a psychological breakdown. It took us hours to get him down and medivaced back to Saigon.
Because of those experiences, I thought I knew what bad looked like. To my eyes, Saigon in the spring of 1975 didn’t look bad—not by any means. The city had not been overtly attacked by the Communists in seven years, and there had not even been an explosion since 1971. There was a midnight curfew, but it was not really enforced. Drunks were just shooed home by policemen. It was still a two-hour drive to anything that could be called a battle zone. In the faces of the 3.5 million people of Saigon I had yet to see any obvious panic. The only sounds of war were the three a.m. detonations set off in the Saigon River, designed to keep North Vietnamese frogmen from mining any boats.
It was easier to read the signs if you lived abroad. The American news reported daily how the South Vietnamese government and the military were falling apart. Those reports were censored in country. But even when my family sent me worried letters, I simply could not get my head around the thought that after all this time, effort, and men lost, the US government might not support the South Vietnamese when they most needed it.
I had gone back to the office after the call at Pan Am, unprepared to tell the staff about closing down the branch. How would they react? How would I react if I were in their shoes? I wouldn’t blame my staff if they got mad at me, I reasoned. Anger was something I could handle. I just wasn’t as sure how I planned to cope with quiet devastation or disappointment. As I mulled it over, I expertly dodged shoeshine boys waving their dirty rags at me and stepped around the women in conical hats squatting near street corners—the black-market money changers. They were making a killing. I could hear them calling after me, “Lots of piasters for one dollah, mistah,” but I kept moving, letting their singsong voices get swallowed by the buzz of street sounds.
FNCB had corporate policies in place for emergency bank closings. Ongoing internal discussions had been taking place within the bank since late autumn 1974, about the time the first signs of Saigon’s deteriorating security situation appeared. There were contingency plans. The branch itself was a rental property, so it would simply be shuttered and locked. The central bank would take care of converting the liquid assets, and the Vietnamese staff was to be laid off. They would all be given a generous severance payment.
These policies reflected the fact that the bank had been operating in Asia since 1902. There was an institutional memory of doing business in a conflict zone. During World War II, the Japanese had interned thirty-one FNCB staff members in the Philippines. They were kept as enemy civilians in Santo Tomas camp, along with over four thousand other poor souls. The living conditions in the camp were abysmal, recalled Walter Wriston, FNCB’s chairman. He hadn’t been with the bank then, but was a young second lieutenant in the army who happened to be in Manila during the war. Wriston remembered going into Santo Tomas shortly after the camp had been liberated. “It was a horrible place,” he shuddered as he recalled it. Wriston was adamant about keeping FNCB’s employees safe from that kind of detainment under his chairmanship. He thought that if the Saigon staff members were no longer official employees of the bank, they might be safer.
FNCB had managed to maneuver its way around plenty of other political turmoil. They had survived the fall of the Qing dynasty and the Russian Revolution. It wasn’t until the Chinese Revolution in 1949 that a branch of FNCB had been caught in the crossfire. The Shanghai branch had tried to continue to function during the Communist takeover of China, but the foreign exchange market had totally dried up. After one year, the bank sought permission to close. Negotiations with the local authorities broke down, and the People’s Army took a hostage—Fred Harnden, Shanghai’s branch manager and a British officer. The Communists demanded that FNCB pay a “liquidation tax” for his release, but of course the bank didn’t want to pay it until they were sure Harnden was actually safe. Months of uncertainty followed. Harnden was released unharmed, and the “tax” was paid, but the experience left its mark on the bank, and on Walter Wriston.
“[Harnden] was the only hostage we ever had,” Wriston said proudly. Since then the bank had managed to avert any situation in which staff might be at risk. In Cuba in 1959, Castro’s revolutionary government had expropriated eleven of FNCB’s branches throughout the country. The American bank’s assets in Cuba were in the millions. The money came from sugar and land, and it had all been absorbed into Cuba’s new national bank and the Ministry of Trade. The bank lost every cent, but Wriston’s point of pride was that no one on the bank’s staff was hurt.6 “When we lost Cuba, I had everybody out of there.”7
Wriston did not want to make any mistakes in Saigon. As a matter of preparedness, our branch had already started something we called the Duplicate Records Program on March 20. Every transaction at our branch, no matter how mundane, was copied. The copies and a daily summary went out every day in an airmail pouch for Hong Kong, the site of FNCB’s regional center.
Chuyen was the last person I expected to protest the bank’s closing. He knew all about the bank’s safety precautions because he had been an integral part of the monthly strategy meetings that had been taking place for the last six months. Chuyen knew the procedures for closing the bank as well as anyone.
But Chuyen was also well informed about the bleak security situation. His cousin did intelligence work in the Central Highlands, so Chuyen had it on good authority that the bumpy spine of the country was essentially lost—only “ghost soldiers” of the South Vietnamese Army were defending it. (They were drawing a paycheck for their families while ignoring the inevitable.) It was the first time I had seen Chuyen scared.
“You can go, but we cannot,” Chuyen said in a voice that was full of regret and reproach.
“I know. Listen, I am going to see what I can do. As soon as I get to Hong Kong and get it sorted out, we will have a plan,” I said apologetically. The orders to close the bank had come from the top. I couldn’t ignore them.
I had deep respect for Chuyen’s accomplishments, and I hated that something as superficial as a passport was standing in the way of his safety. At fifteen years old, Chuyen had left his family in North Vietnam to come south as a refugee. He wanted to make a life away from the Communists. He served in the South Vietnamese military for nine years, from 1956 to 1965, and earned college scholarships, first to San Jose State University in California and then to Tufts University in Massachusetts. As a student, Chuyen didn’t intend to be a banker. He was fascinated with international studies, so he got a master’s degree in law and diplomacy. But when he returned to South Vietnam in 1971, he had learned, in some ways, too much from his books. Chuyen could no longer bear the stink of his own country’s corrupt politics. Without taking bribes, a civil servant’s salary wasn’t enough to support a family anyway.
FNCB had courted Chuyen for a position with the bank even before the branch was officially open. But Chuyen held out against the first offer. He asked for more money than the bank was prepared to offer, so he was turned down. Chuyen was pleased when FNCB came back to him with another offer six months later. They had finally matched his salary demand. It was only after Chuyen entered the banking world that he realized the bank hadn’t come up that much in real terms—inflation had just surged.
Chuyen learned quickly on the job. He moved up from bank clerk to assistant manager. Chuyen’s ambition was to rise even higher before his banking career was over.
When I told him about the call from New York, and that it was time to close the bank, Chuyen’s black eyes flashed with angry sparks. “It’s too early!”
“Well, I agree with you. But New York’s ordered it, and we can’t do anything about that.”
“If they close the bank, we will be out of a job. The men will now be at risk for conscription into the military. It is not safe.” Chuyen shook his head in disappointment. “The police and the military will trouble us.”
Chuyen was not going to back down easily. He knew that he was right. If the bank closed and the employees were given severance pay, the men would most assuredly be drafted into the starved military, which was facing a looming disaster. Shutting down would also send a signal to the government. Government officials would further lose face, taking the consequences out on those who stayed behind.
So he took his argument to FNCB corporate. There were calls to New York and telexes between Hong Kong and Saigon. It didn’t seem to take long before Chuyen’s arguments won the right people over.
Because of him, the bank stayed open for business, and a slightly revised plan was put into action. I was still leaving, but FNCB would not totally cease all banking operations in Saigon. Chuyen would take over from me as manager. The foreign exchange side of things would close down, but since that was the most substantial piece of our business, the Saigon branch would be just a shell. All the same, it was an incredibly important one. The shell provided cover for all thirty-four South Vietnamese employees.
The bank’s willingness to bend to Chuyen’s reasoning showed me something remarkable was happening. FNCB was putting the safety of its people above anything else. It was an extraordinary shift. Until that point, all the communication about emergency procedures for the Saigon branch had focused solely on business and money. Now the bank was indicating that it was willing to put assets at risk if it could protect human capital. The company’s generosity would continue to impress me from that moment on.
I was too busy to read the newspaper the day they called to tell me to close the bank. It was only years later that I finally took notice of the front-page article that day. When I finally read it, I laughed. That day’s front page of the Saigon Post read: “US FIRMS IN SAIGON KEEP GOING.” According to the paper, foreign companies in Saigon were maintaining a wait-and-see attitude. Someone in the press department of my own bank had commented cagily, “We wouldn’t say business there [in Vietnam] is normal, but as of today, the branch is open.” Indeed, thanks to Chuyen, it was.