JIM ECKES WASN’T THE only one who wanted an American FNCB contact back in Saigon. At the end of the second week of April, the US embassy in Saigon formally invited the bank to send one staff member to South Vietnam. The chosen representative would receive a day of top-level briefings. From the embassy’s perspective, it was a chance to prevail on the American commercial interests in Saigon to keep a cool head. For the bank, it was a due diligence trip, a chance to kick the tires on whatever emergency plans the embassy might have in place for the staff.
It was also seen as something of an olive branch. My first and only meeting with Ambassador Martin before leaving the country had been a disaster, albeit not one of my making. It was in the interest of both the bank and the embassy to smooth things over.
In Hong Kong, a few of us were called into the office of the regional senior officer for a meeting with Dick Freytag. He explained, “We’ve been able to prevail on the US government to be more cooperative . . . and we have been invited by the United States embassy in Saigon to send one representative of FNCB back to Saigon. He won’t need to do anything, just go in there and listen to what they have to say.” Also at the meeting were Mike McTighe and Bill Walker, FNCB Saigon’s head of operations, who had preceded me to Hong Kong by a few days. Freytag, in consultation with George Vojta, the executive vice president and head of FNCB’s international banking division in New York, thought it might help FNCB’s Vietnamese staff if we could get back on Martin’s good side, but they admitted that they were still torn, given the fact that the bank had spent $70,000 to fly me out of Saigon just ten days earlier.
I looked around the room and considered the options. Walker was married with a young son, and McTighe was without a passport, so he was grounded. None of the other bankers in Hong Kong had any experience in Saigon.
I was it. I had the experience, and I was unattached. FNCB had a tradition of recruiting bachelors for employment in the bank’s international operations. It used to be that managers looked with “disfavor” on any employee who married without the consent of his district vice president, at least until he had been in the bank’s service for five years. Those regulations were actually written down somewhere, but this was 1975. All that was left of that rule was an unspoken sense that a young man should not take on family responsibilities until he had proven himself.1
Though the bank’s policies had been moderated and reformed, there were still at least two important constraints for employees. These were unwritten, but biases all the same. One discouraged marriage between an American banker employed overseas and a local woman. That didn’t apply to me, but the other policy did. Later in my banking career I knew people who had sat in on promotion meetings. Supposedly, if a male candidate for promotion to vice president or higher was unmarried, it wasn’t uncommon for the others in the room to question his sexual orientation. Being gay was an impediment to promotion. I wasn’t open about my sexuality back then, but no one really asked. I had to look for other ways to impress the senior management.
Those kinds of strategic career decisions were far from my mind in Freytag’s Hong Kong office. There was simply no time. Freytag and the other bank officers were looking at me expectantly. Would I go back to Saigon? A quick gut check was all it took.
“Okay,” I said matter-of-factly. “I’ll do it.”
After I volunteered, it struck me that I was carrying out something of a family tradition.
My mother’s brothers, the Murphy boys, had been missionary priests in China. It had seemed exotic to me as a young boy. They would come home to my grandmother’s dining table in Chicago with stories of their adventures. They had sailed over on a boat from Vancouver to Peking and wove tales of their life there as if they were from the pages of an adventure book. They dashed around the teeming city in rickshaws or on motorcycles, bicycles, and even donkeys. Their mission sites were schools and orphanages, but they also told stories about the bandit hideouts in the mountains. Their mission had intensified with the Japanese invasion of China and the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.
We called one of our uncles, Clarence, by his nickname, Slug—a diminutive of Slugger. Clarence had been a crack baseball player before going off to seminary. Family lore has it that he was even scouted by the Chicago White Sox but chose the priesthood anyway.
Slug was the priest in a Chinese parish church on the outskirts of Peking during World War II. If any American flyers who came into his region were downed, the Chinese would bring the airmen to Slug. They knew he would take care of them. One time he was hiding a bunch of US military men in the church, when the Japanese started sniffing around. Slug and the military men got out just in time by scaling over the back wall.
Slug managed to get away a few times from the Japanese but not from the Communists. In 1949, he was taken prisoner by the Red Army. Slug stayed in a Communist concentration camp for one horrible year. When he was finally released and sent back to Chicago, he made it his life’s purpose to try to get back to China, but his bishop said no—Slug’s order, the Vincentians, would not send him back in.
As his family, we understood his call to the mission. Slug felt he had to do all he could to fight against the Communists in China, and for him, that was ministering to the millions of Chinese who would have to bend to Communist rule. But anyone not related to us must have thought Slug had gone slightly bonkers from his time in captivity. Who in their right mind would choose to go back into a country in such turmoil?
I had no fear of going back to Saigon. I felt that my going would do some good to repair relations between the bank and the embassy.
Freytag had made sure to clarify my choice: “You know, you can say no, and that would be the end of it.”
I knew that no one would think less of me if I chose not to go back to Saigon, but the truth was I felt fine about it. Maybe I felt a little responsible for whatever acrimony my departure had caused. And I still felt that people were prone to overreaction when it came to the situation in Saigon. This would be the trip that changed my mind.
The bank booked me a round-trip ticket from Hong Kong to Saigon on April 14. I was to fly in and then back out on the same day; it seemed safer that way. I had three meetings set up with different government officials, a whirlwind fact-finding mission in the space of a few hours.
The day got off to a good start. Wolf Lehmann, the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, greeted me in the main building of Saigon’s airport with a handshake. His smile at seeing me seemed genuine. It was such a change from the way I had been dismissed by Ambassador Martin in the American embassy before I left. “I apologize for our approach and attitude when you left Saigon and for the ambassador’s way of treating you and the rest of the bankers,” Lehmann said, and his tone was contrite. “It has been a pretty trying time for us.”
Lehmann and I knew each other casually. His home had been the site of the cocktail party I had attended back in February, when he had hosted the disappointing group of congressional delegates. That evening had ended on a sour note for Lehmann. He and Paul McCloskey, the seemingly serious representative from California, had gotten into a terrific argument. McCloskey threatened to subpoena the diplomat, and Lehmann had raged at him to “go ahead and do it already,” before storming away and ending the party.2
I could appreciate the difficulty of Lehmann’s situation. And I was impressed that Lehmann had taken the time to apologize—he seemed to have been otherwise rushing through the airport. Whether he had been coming or going, I couldn’t tell, but I found out later that Lehmann was the main reason that American planes were still flying in and out of Vietnam. Earlier that week, the Federal Aviation Agency in Washington had decided, without a word of warning, to declare the Tan Son Nhut airport no longer safe for American commercial aircraft. Lehmann had recognized that this was the kind of thing that would set off a panic the moment it became public and took it upon himself to bypass it. Lehmann called the White House and got the National Security Council to rescind the FAA declaration. This was the kind of man who could get things done.3
“What can you do to help us get our local staff out?” I asked Lehmann at the airport. When he assured me that the embassy would do all it could, I believed him.
It had been decided that Jim Ashida, the embassy’s economic attaché, would accompany me to the various appointments. Ashida had been in daily contact with Chuyen at our branch ever since I had flown out of Saigon on April 4, so he knew the bank’s situation well. The fifty-five-year-old career diplomat smiled at me and briskly suggested we get on our way, setting the tone for the officially optimistic tour I was to be given.
The first meeting of the day was in the political section of the US embassy. The open floor plan had dozens of people sitting underneath fluorescent lights at desks stacked with paper and files. All those industrious young staffers reminded me of the New York Head Office of FNCB. Two officers brought me to a desk stacked with boxes full of continuous-feed printer paper, with paper spilling out. The text on each page was single-spaced, in small, black, tightly packed type.
“This is a list of 627,000 Vietnamese names. They are all prioritized for departure,” the embassy staffer explained.
“Are all of FNCB’s Vietnamese employees in here?” I asked incredulously.
“Well, yes, but you can, of course, confirm.”
No, really, I couldn’t. It was a needle in a haystack. There were too many boxes to count, and I didn’t have the time. Besides, I didn’t know most of the staff’s full Vietnamese names. Many of them went by Americanized versions for bank business. To my untrained eye, it was unclear to me how Anh Tuyet and Mong Chi ever became Betty and Yolande, but I was glad for the help. There was also the issue of first names and last names. In Vietnam, the family name comes first, followed by the middle name, and then the given name. But at the bank, we inverted the order to more closely match that of American names, and even then people had nicknames. I didn’t know how the embassy had everyone listed—Americanized name or Vietnamese name? Vietnamese name order or American?
It seemed completely overwhelming to me, but the officers bobbed their heads, assuring me up and down that the US government was going to be able to get all of these 627,000 individuals out of South Vietnam. It was an organizational feat of wonder. There was a list and, presumably, some sort of plan, but I found little comfort in the thought. Something seemed suspicious to me, even if I couldn’t very well argue it.
I was whisked off to my next briefing, this one with a CIA officer. Ashida and I were ushered into a windowless room in another wing of the embassy. We were the only ones in the room, along with the intelligence officer, but he put on quite a show. His projector flashed country maps and statistics on troop buildups around South Vietnam. It boiled down to this, he told me: The CIA had intelligence operatives throughout the country. Their information was that the South Vietnamese military was still strong. “Of course the United States is still supporting them,” he confided, “and the advancing North Vietnamese troops are now at a distinct disadvantage. They moved too quickly; they’ve outpaced their supply operations.”
It would be at least six more months before anything serious happened to Saigon, the officer guaranteed. I listened politely and made mental notes on the statistics he had presented. But all that optimism rang hollow. A queasy knot formed in my gut. Instinct told me that this was too good to be true.
For my last briefing, Ashida and I took an embassy vehicle out to Tan Son Nhut airport. The embassy’s military attaché, US Army Colonel Charles Wahle, had moved his office out of the embassy compound. Reportedly, he and Ambassador Martin had not been getting along. I knew what that was like.
Colonel Wahle had installed himself at an office in the Defense Attaché’s Office. The DAO was the principal US military headquarters remaining in Saigon after Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, was disbanded in April 1973. The office’s main function was arranging the delivery of US military aid, but it also had an intelligence role, trying to keep track of developments in the military situation. The DAO’s nickname was Pentagon East. I was familiar enough with it from my days in the army, but I couldn’t have imagined how well I would get to know the place in the week to come.
The DAO’s huge grey buildings were behind a high fence and adjacent to Tan Son Nhut airport. I could look out at the tarmac where my plane would be taxiing off for the flight back to Hong Kong in just a few more hours.
Ashida approached the secretary’s desk outside Colonel Wahle’s office and introduced me: “This is Mr. Riordan from FNCB Saigon. The ambassador sent him. He’s to be briefed by Colonel Wahle about the military situation.”
“I’ll let the colonel know.” The secretary excused herself and slipped into the colonel’s office, leaving the door ajar.
We heard Colonel Wahle before we saw him. He boomed from inside his office: “I have no goddamn time to be giving bankers any briefings.”
Ashida tried his diplomatic best, moving ahead of me into the office. He spoke courteously, but his words cut right to the point: “The ambassador insists you give Mr. Riordan a briefing.”
I listened in on the exchange between the two embassy attachés with unabashed interest. My escort for the day could keep his cool because he had the trump card. The ambassador had ordered this briefing. Even if Colonel Wahle didn’t like Martin, he knew the ambassador could pull rank.
“Ok, send him in here. I’ve got sixty seconds for him.”
I walked in and said hello, but the colonel made no time for pleasantries.
“Don’t sit down,” he ordered me. “This will be quick. Here’s the story: They have ten divisions surrounding the city. We have two defending the city. Do you see that plane on the tarmac out there?” Without waiting for an answer he continued, “Get your ass out of this office and onto that plane. Get the hell out of this country as fast as you can.”
Ashida and I stared at the colonel, but he seemed to have forgotten us as he dropped back down into the seat at his desk to confront a pile of papers in front of him. When he finally noticed us still standing around, the colonel barked at us, “Get the hell out of here—now!”
Colonel Wahle was the first authentic voice I had heard all day. The meetings at the embassy had gone on for an hour or longer, but it had taken sixty seconds at the DAO for the colonel to make his case. I knew the truth as soon as I heard it.
Colonel Wahle would be a minor figure in books about the American evacuation of South Vietnam, but in my mind, his speech was decisive. I wouldn’t find out until later that the colonel had been trying to warn anyone he could about Saigon’s imminent fall. He had been involved in the evacuation of Danang and knew how quickly things could get bad. The colonel had been on the record since Easter Sunday saying, “This thing is not going to last much longer.”4 But as I had already found out firsthand, the ambassador did not like people to contradict his knowledge of South Vietnam. He kept Colonel Wahle as quiet as he could.
Ashida threw his hands up in the air. I thought he was going to scold Wahle for going against the embassy’s line, but something about the colonel’s finite tone had unmoored the State Department employee. Ashida was stammering, “But the ambassador says we have nothing to worry about. I have my family here, my household. My wife and children!”
Wahle nearly floored the diminutive Ashida with his roared response: “Well, get your ass in gear and get them out of here.”
I left Saigon and went back to Hong Kong on the Air Vietnam flight that afternoon. I relayed the day’s meetings to Freytag. He had been joined by George Vojta, the head of all of the bank’s international banking operations, who had just flown in from New York. I told them that the embassy was officially optimistic. “But if you want my opinion,” I ventured, “we better get our staff out of there.” I believed Colonel Wahle. We were running out of time. Vojta nodded that he understood. He didn’t have me write up any report; he was just glad to have me back, he said.
The other bosses in New York had gotten very upset when they found out I had gone back to Saigon. It had gone all the way to Walter Wriston, the chairman of the bank. He had given Vojta a terrible time about authorizing my return, however brief and however well intended. “My ass is grass,” Vojta told me without cracking a smile.