TWENTY-ONE TWENTY-ONE I visited the mother and her kids almost every night. At first the children were suspicious of me because their mother was so distraught when I was around, but the boy’s natural curiosity brought him closer and closer to me until he came naturally into my lap when I arrived. Before long he was taking off my glasses and investigating what I had in my pockets. The girl often sat beside me and held my hand. She examined my fingers and occasionally looked up at me. She spoke some English and usually looked at my lips as I talked.
The mother always sat in her chair across the room. She had taken the kids out of school and kept small plastic suitcases packed with their clothes by the front door. On advice of the Consular Section, I had her sign a note giving up her rights to the children. The note and the children’s birth certificates were in one of the bags.
It was clear after a few visits that the mother hated me. My countrymen had gotten her pregnant, twice, and left, twice. Both men had said that they would marry her, but they had dropped out of touch. And now my country had abandoned her country, had dropped out of touch, and broken its promises.
Her comments were in this vein, “Is this the American way to be a friend? You don’t care about us. You used us. You. Yes, you. You and your countrymen. I cry inside all the time. I will die soon because of you. You have destroyed my life. My country. We trusted you. You used us and now you leave. ‘Good-bye, Vietnam. Sorry.’ ”
I told her I could not explain how the war had turned out the way it had, but I promised her that, if I had to be evacuated, I would come by for the children. She would probably know if an evacuation was under way. I told her to stay in the house. She was not to try to bring them to the consulate because I could miss them on the way. If we left, I told her, I would have little time. The kids had to be at home.
Sometimes the girl went over to her mother as we talked and wiped her eyes or held her hand or leaned against her. She looked back at me, confused, unable to understand what made her mother cry, why exactly she and her brother might be leaving with me someday.
The boy could not remain serious for long, and he squirmed. When he slowed down, his body tiring from a full afternoon of rowdiness, I knew it was time to go home.
After a while the woman stopped seeing me off when I left. Usually the girl was the last one I saw as I got in my Jeep and left. She stood with her arms wedged in the door frame, her brightly colored suitcase near her feet. She waved as I turned the corner and looked back.
We had four days to go. All of our delta KIP were identified and in separate areas. Bill A., assisted by Larry D., an officer from a closed base to the north, had visited the island off Rach Gia several times and made a convincing case to Jim D. that it was ready to receive our KIP if evacuation through Saigon or by boat out to sea was not possible.
Jim sent Glenn to Saigon that day with what turned out to be three missions. One was to arrange for the evacuation of fifty delta KIP who had homes or families in or near Saigon. He was to try to put them and their families on aircraft leaving Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon. His second mission was to arrange for a U.S. Navy ship, with a landing platform, to position itself off the coast somewhere near the mouth of the Mekong as a receiving station for Air America helicopters shuttling people out of the delta. The third mission was to talk with CIA management in Saigon and, if possible, Ambassador Martin, in an effort to get permission for us to evacuate our KIP to the Navy platform, to the island, or through Tan Son Nhut.
The same day, I went out to the 7th Division area on an Air America helicopter. General Hai’s headquarters had been evacuated. The tents and building of the command complex had been torn down. All I could see on the ground were scars from the old structures. Deserted bunkers ringed the area. Off in the distance, near the North Vietnamese line of advance, I saw large dust columns like those made by armored vehicles crossing open fields.
Returning to General Hung’s headquarters at Can Tho, I found the general serene, as usual. He said that the 7th Division was mobile and that the North Vietnamese forces were large and not temporizing. They were moving aggressively toward Saigon.
Glenn telephoned Jim from Saigon. He said there was bedlam at the embassy. Everybody was talking; no one was listening. No one, other than a few close associates, was able to see Ambassador Martin. Word was that he was not acting rationally; he was walking around in a daze and unresponsive. His secretary had been asking people for amphetamines. No one wanted to make decisions, so the ambassador’s existing orders not to facilitate evacuation of Vietnamese civilians by any element of the embassy had not changed. People were getting out, however, through Tan Son Nhut, Glenn said, and he had been successful in getting the fifty delta KIP placed on a nonscheduled flight that would leave the country within the next couple of days.
Jim told Glenn to continue working on getting a Navy platform and permission to evacuate our KIP. He added, “Oh, and Glenn, don’t let them forget about us down here.”
Early the following morning, Sunday, 27 April, the few of us who were left gathered in Jim’s office.
He began by saying, “Things are deteriorating as fast as we predicted. Cable traffic this morning indicates to me that no one knows what’s happening. Everyone in Saigon is breathless, confused. As far as I can tell, here, we’re ready to go. We’ll have two Air America helicopters working for us today, and Parker says we have good pilots. If we get the word to evacuate right now—Parker, Mac, Sarge will work on sending the KIP out of the country by helicopter. Everyone else goes to Coconut Palms.” He paused and looked around the room. “We assemble there and we go out with MacNamara by boat. That’s the plan for now. We send the KIP out by helicopter and we go out with the Congen by boat. He has a couple of landing craft tied up at the State Department compound that are ready to make the trip down the Bassac. He’s got the Marines and boat pilots, and God knows he needs our help. That’s what happens if that telephone rings right now with orders to get out of Dodge.” He looked down at a pad on his desk and made a check mark.
“Number two. But we can’t wait for that telephone to ring to do something. We got to decide what to do with our KIP, and we gotta do it. Our options are: One, we can move them to the island off Rach Gia. Two, we can send them out to the U.S. Navy. Or three, we can send them to Saigon in hopes of getting them out through Tan Son Nhut. We can just start doing one of these three things or we can try again to get Saigon’s permission. What do you think?” he asked the group.
Tom suggested that sending the KIP to the Navy ships immediately was best, going to the island was number two, and sending them through Saigon was a distant, improbable third. He agreed that doing nothing—waiting for the evacuation order—was waiting for events to overtake us. Mac suggested that we get Glenn in Saigon to try one more time to get permission to move the Vietnamese out to the Navy and, if he couldn’t, that we move them to the island.
Jim said Mac’s plan works. Glenn would be contacted that morning with instructions to get permission from someone in the embassy, or at Tan Son Nhut airfield, for us to move the KIP to U.S. Navy ships offshore.
As a backup, Bill A. would take a helicopter to Rach Gia and continue work to prepare the island as a safe haven. In either event, we were moving our KIP the next day, 28 April. We had them at launch sites, we had two helicopters at our disposal, and the clock was ticking.
In the morning I would load up one helicopter with the group from Chau Doc and either head east to the armada of U.S. Navy ships at sea or go south with the group to meet up with Bill A. on the island. So as not to cause panic, all the KIP would be told that they were being moved to an evacuation point near Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon.
Jim said, “There it is. Go out and make it work.”
Several days before, I had moved from the apartment near the consulate to the Coconut Palms, the agency compound in Can Tho, which was on the way to the airport and convenient to the kids’ house. I had left instructions with the guards at my former apartment house to send Loi to the compound when he returned from visiting his family.
Loi was waiting beside his truck in front of my apartment when I pulled into the compound later that morning. He had a pensive look and tried to make eye contact as I got out of my Jeep and walked over to him. I told him that the situation was deteriorating. He was to get his family and return to my apartment there the following evening. He hugged me and left. We were together only a few minutes.
For the rest of the day I collected KIP from separate safe houses and moved them into groups. I told them they would be moved to Saigon the following day for eventual movement out of Vietnam by airplane from Tan Son Nhut.
Jim telephoned Glenn at the embassy in Saigon and passed on our plans. When he finished, Glenn hung up the telephone, took a deep breath, and went outside to the parking lot. He found a Jeep with keys in it and drove out to the MACV compound at Tan Son Nhut, where he met with Rear Adm. Hugh Benton and asked him how long it would take to have a U.S. Navy ship within reach of evacuation choppers from the delta.
Benton, claiming surprise that someone was taking action on a sealift, said, “You are the first embassy person to come to me with a request for U.S. Navy support. The first. I’ve had ships steaming around in circles for five days waiting for instructions. Let’s get on with it.”
Glenn asked for a time and place where the Air America helicopters could find the U.S. Navy platform. Benton said he’d have something ready in a few hours and promised to advise us of the coordinates when he got them. With that information, Glenn tried to telephone Jim in Can Tho but was told by the operator that the lines to the delta were down.
When Glenn returned to the embassy in the commandeered Jeep, a red-faced, angry George Jacobson, the ambassador’s special assistant, confronted him. “What the hell is going on? What is this request in to Admiral Benton to evacuate people out of the delta? On whose authorization? And why didn’t this request go through this office or through MacNamara? You people know anything about proper channels? You taken leave of your senses?”
“They’re Vietnamese,” Glenn said. “Longtime CIA agents. That’s who we’re evacuating. We don’t have access to the Tan Son Nhut gateway for these folks like you do. Or are there other plans to move our key local people from the delta that we don’t know about? And MacNamara knows about this. He has been moving his people out of country for days through the airport here. Well, ours are old CIA agents. They don’t have a clue, we don’t have a clue how to move them through Saigon and get ’em booked on flights out. Our people have no passports, no destinations, no nothing. No one’s helping us. We’re just doing what we can. That’s all.”
“I beg your pardon, MacNamara didn’t know about this,” Jacobson countered. “He blew his top when I called him a few minutes ago and asked what was going on. Blew up. He said you have been trying all along to make your own evacuation plans, to take over, and he was going to put a stop to it.”
“Look,” Glenn told Jacobson, “Saigon’s gonna fall in two days. Two days. Forty-eight hours. Poooof. Gone. No chance to get our people out then. It’s now or never. MacNamara can rant all he wants but this thing is bigger than he is, there’s more at stake. We’re just trying to do in the delta what you’re doing up here … getting people out while we can.”
Jacobson seemed understanding although he was oddly unaffected by Glenn’s report that the NVA would be in Saigon soon.
In parting to answer an anxious call from a colleague down the hall, he said, “Well, good luck. I’ll try to help with MacNamara.”
Glenn took the ambassador’s special assistant’s manner to indicate that he supported our effort to move the KIP to the U.S. Navy.
While this conversation was taking place in Saigon, MacNamara was calling Jim into his office. He yelled that he had just heard from Saigon that Jim was acting as if he were the law unto himself in the delta. Jim called MacNamara hypocritical—everyone in the consulate knew that MacNamara had facilitated the evacuation of his Cambodian in-laws, plus cooks and drivers and others of questionable eligibility through Tan Son Nhut while refusing to allow the base to evacuate its more vulnerable KIP.
MacNamara yelled that he was in charge and that Jim was “fired.”
Jim returned to the base offices and cabled the Saigon CIA Station.
Unaware of the problems that Glenn and Jim had encountered that day, I returned to the consulate in the early evening before curfew and called Brenda. I told her that I thought I would be home soon, that I would be flying out of the delta the next day but that things were under control. She wasn’t to worry. On the way back to the compound I drove by the kids’ house but the lights were out. I hesitated before going in, then decided that I would see them the next evening and give the mother a radio.
Returning to the Coconut Palms, I learned about the latest developments in Jim’s continuing problems with MacNamara. As we were discussing the ramifications, Jim walked in and said MacNamara had just been told in State Department communication channels to continue working with him—he wasn’t “fired”—and to stand down on objections to evacuate CIA KIP. Tan Son Nhut was mentioned in the text. Although there was no reference to taking the KIP directly out to the U.S. Navy, Jim said that’s what we’re going to do, first thing in the morning.
At first light the next day Monday, 28 April, I went by the State Department club complex. One of the Air America helicopters was going to land that night on top of the compound, and several trees had to be cut down. The tree-cutting crews were at work as I left.
Air America pilots George Taylor and Charlie Weitz were flying for me that day. They were just coming in from Saigon when I arrived at the airport and I briefed them on our plans. Sarge, who would be getting KIP ready to go at the different launch sites, had already left on a chopper to meet the group driving in from Chau Doc.
The airport was quiet. There was nothing to do but wait for Sarge to call in that the Chau Doc group was ready. Standing on the tarmac, near the radio room, I had the sense of impending conflict, not unlike the feeling I had here in Vietnam ten years before as we staged for heliborne assaults. There were so many unknowns about the day ahead. We had to pluck people from rooftops and empty fields, and then head out to sea. Was the Navy going to receive us? Had they gotten the word? And it was hard to tell what was happening around Can Tho. Would we be overrun by fleeing South Vietnamese soldiers or attacked by North Vietnamese? Where exactly was that large force of North Vietnamese moving on Saigon? At last report they were only a few miles to our northwest. Had an element been sent to occupy Can Tho?
I had worked with copilot Taylor, an implacably cool individual, going on four years. He said, “Mule, I’ve never seen you so tense.” Trying to reassure me, he said that we could stay in contact with everyone from the helicopter so we decided to take off and see how the tree-cutting was going. Taylor said it would stop my pacing. As we were gaining altitude, Sarge called in to say that he had the Chau Doc group in a field west of Can Tho and was waiting for us.
We headed due west and soon landed where Sarge was waiting for us. The Vietnamese agents and their families—wives, children, and some unexpected parents—scrambled on board with their luggage. We lifted off with twelve people, including Ros, my former Cambodian agent. Flying high, we headed due east down the Bassac River to the South China Sea. As we neared the coast we could see U.S. Navy ships.
I had on the customer headset. Taylor contacted a Navy air controller and told him that we had Vietnamese on board and that U.S. embassy officials had directed that they be taken to the U.S. Navy evacuation force.