When I left my villa in Saigon for the last time, it was hours before dawn on Saturday, April 26, 1975. Everything was dark. I don’t remember the stars that night, or any winking lights of aircraft. Everything not blacked out by the nighttime curfew was obscured by rainclouds. I still had no idea how many divisions of the North Vietnamese Army were close to the city. They were no longer bothering to hide.
Breakfast was ready for me before I came downstairs. My housekeeper, Tao, was a good cook, and I knew I would miss her. So I took my time, enjoying every bite and a cup of tea. It seemed it was the first time all week that I was not rushing. I hugged my housekeeper good-bye and thanked her for all her help. Then I gave her the rest of the quickly depreciating South Vietnamese piasters and told her to spend them as quickly as possible. “Anything else you want in the house is yours,” I told her. There was a tuxedo still hanging in the closet and golf clubs in the shed. It was an inside joke with myself, imagining the face of a North Vietnamese general when confronted with these imperialist artifacts, the remnants of my capitalist life. The one thing I did take with me was my London Fog raincoat, lightweight but long.
I drove myself back to the airport one last time, going carefully and slowly so it wouldn’t look as if I were running away. The rain hadn’t started up again yet, so the windows were down, a detail I thought helped me look casual. The main roads were lined with sandbags and concertina wire. I could hear the South Vietnamese Army soldiers talking behind the emplacements and see the tips of their glowing cigarettes. I was very aware that I was breaking a curfew that was supposed to last until dawn. I fully expected to be stopped and checked at any moment. I can’t imagine what I would have said.
When I finally arrived at the airport parking lot, the field was already littered with other abandoned vehicles—Peugeots, Mercedes-Benzes, and Fords. I parked the blue rally wagon and pocketed the keys after locking it. I was picking my way through the metal carcasses toward the terminal when I thought better of it. The van had served us well, especially these last few days ferrying the staff to the airport. Whoever gets this van will get a good vehicle, I thought. So I went back, unlocked the driver’s door, and put the key in the ignition.
I never did hear the famous signal for the evacuation of Saigon. The public affairs officer at the DAO had worked it out weeks earlier, but that officer was killed on the orphans’ flight that crashed, Operation Babylift. Chuck Neil, the Armed Forces Radio announcer, was supposed to read the words, “The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising.” This was to be followed by a recording of “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” played continuously. Some say the announcer finally got the call to put in the track after the bombing of Tan Son Nhut on Monday, but I don’t know that anyone actually heard the recording. In any case, by the time the DAO signaled for the real evacuation to begin, it was too late for just about anyone who wasn’t already inside the embassy gates.1
The last FNCB group of employees and husbands of employees was waiting for me at the tennis courts. They had spent all of Friday night there. I felt a bit bad about the nice shave and shower I had had in my villa. Because of my white skin, I lived like a little prince all over Asia. In some places, we were called “white devils,” and the locals made fun of our big noses and hairy legs, but in practice, whites were deferred to and given preferential treatment. The racial lines were especially vivid in anything having to do with the evacuation. As long as I was by myself, no one bothered me at all, whether it was in the van or walking into the evacuation center without having to show any documentation. There were military checkpoints all along the road to Tan Son Nhut, but they dropped their barbed wire when I had come along alone that morning. Nobody stopped me unless I was with a Vietnamese person. Then it was an interrogation. I would come to learn that the final evacuation by helicopter was marked by the same blatant racism. Asians, even with a US passport, were turned away at the embassy gates while any white face, American or not, was pulled inside.2
Chi’s husband, Van, the lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese Air Force, sat right next to me on the bus taking us from the tennis courts out to where the C-130 waited for us, engine already thrumming to leave. The rear loading ramp was down. It reminded me of Moby Dick, an open-mouthed whale ready to swallow us whole. That wasn’t what made Van grab my arm in fright.
“I can’t—I can’t get out,” he stammered. “John, I cannot go with you on this flight.”
“You’ve got to, Van,” I told him.
He shook his head. “That’s my general, standing right by the gate. If he sees me, he might shoot me, right here.”
I squinted into the drizzle. A half dozen men were milling around by the ramp, and I saw an older, portly man in a blue Vietnamese Air Force uniform with all the military markings of a general—I assumed he was the general Van was afraid of. But we couldn’t turn around now. We were so close. I snatched up my long raincoat lying on the seat between us. “You are coming with us, Van. You’ll get under my raincoat, and I’ll hide you.” Or else I’ll die trying, I thought, but left that last bit unsaid.
The rain picked up. Thick drops streaked down the windows of the bus. I had the coat up over my head as if I were shielding myself from the weather. When I stepped off the bus, Van dove under the coat with me. He was squeezed against my left side, hiding underneath the coat’s overhang. It was hot as hell, but I could feel his body shivering with fear next to me. As it would turn out, the air force general Van was so afraid would shoot him for desertion was getting out of Saigon too. He was on the very next flight out.
There were few seats in that roaring cavern, and it was too tight to sit down anyway, so I stood all the way to Guam. Thick nylon cargo straps ran across the floor, but it was hard to see what else was around me, with so many people standing and squatting on metal flooring. Very quickly, the ramp was closed, and the pilot taxied to the runway, turned sharply, and took off.
The appropriately named Hercules had four powerful engines. We used the same kind of plane a lot when I was in the service with SOG. We had painted ours black, but this one was army green. Otherwise the plane was just as I remembered. The steep angle of the climb made everyone slide back. Inside we were fighting for balance while the pilot was trying to navigate to keep the plane over friendly territory, a rapidly shrinking zone. Saigon retreated below us, and then we were above the surface-to-air missile range and over the Rung Sat, the “swamp of death” that lies between Saigon and the sea. My last glimpse of Vietnam was of green, and then it was lost in the dull grey clouds.
I was not the only representative of an American company who came back for Vietnamese employees. I heard that CBS news executives flew over from New York to see what they could do for the many Vietnamese who had helped them through the years. I never did find out what happened to the staff of the other American banks in Saigon. Bank of America and Chase were much larger than we were, so on the optimistic end, they may have had more support getting out. On the other hand, if the staffs were too big, it may have proved unwieldy to evacuate so many. I certainly had my hands full with just our staff members and their immediate families. Had our branch been bigger, would I still have been able to get them all out of Saigon?
Thi Dau, one of the FNCB Saigon employees, had a brother-in-law who worked for Bank of America. He left on a bus like the one a few of the FNCB spouses took, coordinated by the US embassy for American commercial interests in Saigon. But he must have left on a bus that departed after ours, because he had a harrowing story. By the time his bus got to the DAO, the gate was locked. Vietnamese soldiers wouldn’t open up. According to his memory of what happened, tanks came out of the DAO and surrounded the American-led buses, forcing them to retreat. Thi Dau’s brother-in-law and sister ended up leaving on a navy boat that was part of the US Seventh Fleet. (They were surprised to see the former South Vietnamese premier, Nguyen Cao Ky, on deck with them.) Thi Dau’s brother-in-law was eventually relocated to San Francisco, where he got a new job within Bank of America.
IBM had set up a situation room in Guam to coordinate the evacuation of their 154 South Vietnamese employees, but their story was frustratingly similar to what we had gone through in Hong Kong, trying to arrange planes and airlifts. The difference was that they were still in planning mode, and I had gone into Saigon. One of IBM’s senior Vietnamese staff was in daily contact with Ashida, the economic attaché. As he had done with Chuyen on our staff, Ashida made promises to IBM but stalled on delivery.3 He stalled too long.
On April 28, two days after I left Saigon, fourteen North Vietnamese Army divisions surrounded the city. They were armed with antiaircraft weapons but never used them on an evacuating flight. The airport was bombed at dusk on the twenty-eighth to signal their imminent arrival. The heavy bombing started the next morning. It rendered the runways useless and put an end to all fixed-wing traffic, which meant no more evacuations by airplane. Anyone leaving after that had to get out of the city by helicopter or boat. The embassy had made a plan for such an event; it even had a name, Operation Frequent Wind. But nothing proceeded on schedule. There were more refugees than the embassy expected. There was confusion and bad weather. There were not enough helicopters to get everyone out, but even if there had been, there were not enough ships offshore for the helicopters to land. American crews resorted to pitching helicopters off the side of the ships and into the sea to make room for more choppers to land.
In the eighteen hours before Saigon finally fell to the Communists, seventy helicopters and 865 marines made 630 flights out. They took 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese, plus nearly 1,000 from other countries. They would join the nearly 40,000 refugees who had already been evacuated from Saigon between April 1 and April 29.4 But it wasn’t nearly enough. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese were left behind. A huge crowd mobbed the outside walls of the embassy compound. Desperate Vietnamese tried to claw their way up the ten-foot wall, only to be knocked back by rifle butts and marines in battle gear. Some tried to jump the wall and landed on barbed wire strung along the top. People held up their children, begging the departing Americans to take them with them.
The chief strategy analyst for the CIA, Frank Snepp, was ashamed:
When my time came to leave that night, with the last CIA contingent in the Embassy, we had to push Vietnamese out of the way in the halls to get to the chopper on the roof. I couldn’t look into their eyes.
Retreat is the most difficult of all military operations. But as a matter of honor you do not leave friends on the battlefield. In the evacuation of Saigon over half of the Vietnamese who finally got out escaped on their own with no help from us until they were far at sea.
It was five o’clock in the morning on April 30 when the American ambassador, Graham Martin, got on a CH-46 helicopter. He was one of the last civilians to leave before President Ford ordered an end to the airlift. Three hours later, the last Americans to be flown out of South Vietnam were eleven marines who had guarded the end of the evacuation, throwing gas grenades behind them to stop the terrified Vietnamese from charging the last helicopter. At eleven thirty a.m. on April 30, 1975, the revolutionary flag went up over Saigon’s presidential palace. The Communists had won.5