Goodnight Saigon Page 3

  “And been dead too,” the major reminded his Marines.

  Nobody left those two on purpose. Somebody got them, they had thought. Everybody thought. Besides, too many lives still needed saving. Too many living left to get free.

  No room here for the dead. Not aboard these birds. No way to get them now, anyway. Impossible. But guilt still chewed on their hearts. Always faithful. Semper fi—do or die—kept turning in their heads. Never fear. Your buds are here. Don’t look back, Mac.

  And what about themselves? Had that same semper fidelis credo of never deserting your own—tattooed on the spirit of every Marine, blending the blood of this brotherhood stronger than Spartan will. Had this single most absolute belief of any Marine with breath in his sails given these final eleven cause for morose celebration? Their brother Marines had not forsaken them, after all.

  TWO HOURS EARLIER

  RETURNING TO SHIP from a search-and-rescue sortie somewhere over Vung Tao, Captain Tom Holden and his crew aboard Swift Two-Two heard the news. Eleven still waited.

  “No fuel,” he had told Captain Doug Cook, sitting at his right. Barely enough for a direct shot from the USS Hancock for the forty-minute flight to Saigon. But hardly enough fuel to get back to the ship. No more.

  “Maybe more,” the copilot suggested.

  “We might go down,” they both agreed.

  But they were nearest. The best bet to save those stranded Marines. The only real hope to pluck those eleven tired men who sat while terror closed around by the second. A matter of life and death. The airmen knew it.

  On the jump seat, by the door, crew chief Chris Woods blinked cold eyed at fellow sergeant Stan Hughes. But the gunner just shrugged as he leaned back, grasping the double-handle grip mounted on the butt of his M2, .50-caliber machine gun. No big thing, his emotions told. Don’t sweat the gas. Take the chance—or go down trying.

  SERGEANT TERRY BENNINGTON saw the chopper first, then Jim Kean, and the other nine. A speck in the sky. Hope on whirling wings.

  Slowly the silhouette grew against the rising sun.

  High above came the coursing sound of a navy A-7 Corsair attack jet, call-sign, Frito, fast mover escort, on station. Then another noise: beating blades. A Marine AH-1J Cobra, known on the radio net as Space Gun, turned a steep circle while Swift Two-Two made her descent.

  “Pop the gas!” Kean ordered the men.

  Sergeant Duane Gevers and Corporal Steve Bauer let go of the door behind which a hysterical mob choked from tear gas the two Marines had released. Big cans. Clouds thick as smoke. It had instantly covered the roof and filled the stairway to it. Nobody, not even the Marines, had gas masks.

  Master Sergeant Juan Valdez jumped aboard last, just as Tom Holden lifted the chopper off its wheels. The pilot’s eyes filled so full of tears from the gas that he had to set down and try up once more. Ahead of a swarm of frenzied people, who had now broken through the rooftop door, Swift Two-Two cleared the deck and raced southward.

  Kean and Valdez, Bennington, Gevers, and Bauer watched the pad grow small. Steve Schuller, Bobby Frain, Philip Babel, Michael Sullivan, Dave Norman, and Bobby Schlager all looked too, taking one last glance at Nam. A final memory. A lifetime’s thought. Aimless, hopeless, lost people crowded atop the embassy shrank in the distance.

  “GOD HAS FORSAKEN us,” Nguyen Giap Ty told his wife, Ninh, while holding her close to him. His once unshakable, soft-spoken voice now trembled. Their whole family had missed its chance to leave.

  First, they had gone to the Defense Attaché’s Office compound, all the way through the hubbub of Saigon to its northwestern corner near Tan Son Nhut Airport, then back across the chaotic city to the American embassy. But no one at either place would let them through the gates. Too many people jammed ahead of them.

  None of the Nguyen family had slept, although the traveling they had done through the night had worn them beyond feeling. Only the oldest daughter, Tuong-Van, now closed her eyes.

  Mentally disabled since birth, she understood little more than something bad now came, so terrible that it had sent her family fleeing in the night. This horrible thing had gripped her hard. She was tired and wanted to go home, but the panic had kept her family on the streets all night.

  At home, now, curling next to her mother, her fear finally grew distant, and she slept.

  For Tuong’s sisters, Bich and Vanny, rest seemed impossible. Home was not safe any longer. The night sky had glowed orange as fires from the Communist onslaught ringed the city. Being teenaged girls, they understood what closed upon them. So they sat on the sofa and watched the sun rise.

  This uncertain day struck them deeply, despite their father’s soft voice. Always before, when things seemed too terrible, his quiet and confident words gave them courage. But each of those times, everything had ended as he had reassured them it would.

  Today, he offered no answers. He dared not speculate. Even though his voice still sounded so quiet and so calm, the confidence was gone. He had lost it somewhere in that horrible confusion of Saigon.

  The girls first noticed this after their failures at the gates of Dodge City. There they had seen despair creep on to his face.

  “Sir, sir,” Ty had said to a United States Marine. He clapped his hands together, as if in prayer, and bowed his head to the young man using his rifle to push people back. “I have documents. Please, sir, look at them. My family, we are here to evacuate. We have clearances.”

  The sentry pushed Ty with his rifle and ignored the handful of papers that the desperate man frantically waved only inches from his nose. The man’s persistence irritated the Marine to the point that he finally slammed his rifle against Ty’s hand, knocking the annoying documents away from his face.

  “Please let us pass, sir,” Ty asked again. “We have clearances! Please!”

  The Marine said nothing, but put his rifle in Ty’s chest and pushed hard. He had his orders: no more people, no exceptions, no matter what.

  The girls heard desperation in their father’s voice when he spoke quickly and sharply to the South Vietnamese soldiers at another checkpointoutside the DAO compound. He tried to show them the family’s evacuation papers. The guards shouted back at him and pointed their rifles at him.

  The people Nguyen Giap Ty had spent so many years supporting, for whom he had sacrificed all of his adult life, had now refused to even acknowledge him. The maddening irony overwhelmed him. His throat burned and tightened into a knot.

  Ty fought hard not to break into uncontrollable sobs and tears as his family stood in the street and watched the last people board the helicopters at the DAO compound and leave. The Marines had circled cars and trucks to make a landing site. Now, the vehicles sat in a silent ring, their headlights shining until their batteries would go dead.

  Despite having his heart crushed in the disappointment he felt by everyone he had trusted now turning their backs on him, Ty gathered his family and pushed back to the city, back to its center where helicopters still flew from the roof of the American embassy. Perhaps they might find a way out there.

  Arriving late in the night, Ty shouted and pushed his way through the thousands of frantic people crowded outside the embassy while Ninh and their five children stepped close behind him. Too many other would-be refugees tried the same thing ahead of them. Fear now showed itself clearly on Ty’s face as a sense of panic sent blood rushing inside his head, pounding behind his eyes and ears as though he might suddenly explode.

  Ready to fight, ready to kill, Ty roared at the people around him. He clenched his fists and screamed out his frustration at what he had once thought impossible. This could never happen! Never! Not after what he had given his country. Not after what he had done for these people. Not after he had so loyally supported the Americans, risked his life for them. No, it could never happen!

  When the Marines hurried away from the gates and locked themselves inside the embassy, Ty turned to Ninh and bowed his head. His heart swelled into his throat, and tears fille
d his eyes. Despair overwhelmed him.

  He held Ninh close to his chest, her head under his chin, and he raised his face toward heaven and cried.

  Son and Nam, Ty’s two boys, shouted angrily at the Americans. This after they saw one especially big GI take a wooden beam, lock it behind his back with his elbows crooked around it, and start spinning at the people who rushed toward the embassy’s door.

  “Why would the Americans now want to kill us?” they screamed. Others shouted too and began throwing bricks and bottles.

  Then from behind the Nguyen family, gunshots cracked the air. Some rapid fire and some single reports, all aimed at the embassy roof where a helicopter sat with its blades turning.

  Ty took his two sons by the arms and pulled them next to him. Ninh and the girls held close at his back. He knew remaining here was now foolish. His many years as a soldier told him even the Communists would be safer for them than this crowd.

  After walking several blocks, they found the streets eerily deserted. In fact, given the situation, they looked surreal: Lights on, people at home, an automobile now and then passing. Hauntingly quiet. Yet Ty knew this tranquility told a lie. A great storm would rage here when the Communists came.

  “God has forsaken us,” Ty said to his wife as they walked. She pulled hard at his sleeve, trying to encourage him and urge him to quit such sad talk, especially in front of his children, all in their teens and easily affected by his presence.

  Yet he said it again and again, to himself more than to her, all the way home.

  Everything had gone so wrong. Fairness was something that he had learned, early in life, was foolish to expect. Yet in this case, what he had expected went beyond fairness. It was a return of loyalty.

  Ninh had worked through several days at the DAO, helping the staff there process out refugees. She accepted that her turn for departure must come at the end. She knew her job as a typist was important to the evacuation effort. Ninh trusted that the Americans would not leave without her and her family. So until her time to leave came, she worked.

  Ninh’s husband had retired from the army only one year earlier. He had spent more than twenty-three years in uniform and had risen in rank to lieutenant colonel. A tall, attractive man, born in Hanoi, Ty was an elite soldier—at one time a member of the Imperial Guard under Bao Dai, Vietnam’s last emperor. After the treaty of 1954, he moved to the south.

  From 1967 through 1971, he served at Chu Lai as Vietnamese liaison for the United States Army’s Americal Division. The Americans greatly respected him, and he felt close to them. He even exchanged addresses with several officers and wrote them letters after they had gone home.

  One day at a landing zone near the combat base, a squad of soldiers, sweeping the perimeter, walked into an enemy minefield. Hearing one explode, Ty hurried to the stranded squad. They were mostly boys, frightened and unsure of what to do next.

  Ty shouted to the men to relax and remain still until he reached them. With his many years of dealing with Viet Cong mines and booby traps, he knew well the dangers and the signs. He knew these young men did not. His quiet, confident voice kept the soldiers calm. Slowly and skillfully he guided them out.

  For his heroism, the Americans awarded him the Bronze Star with the combat V device, denoting valor, something rare. Very few of these sorts of decorations had ever been given to soldiers of other countries. Knowing this, Ty wore his Bronze Star with special pride.

  But that was in 1968, a very different time.

  When the Americans left Vietnam during the sixty days that followed their signing of the Paris Peace Accords, on January 27, 1973, Ty moved to Saigon where he sat as a representative of the South Vietnamese Army on the Bilateral Joint Military Commission. Their jobs as representatives of the warring sides, the Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government, was to enforce the peace, to review violations of the Paris Accords and issue sanctions against the violators. To sanction a violator required a unanimous vote by the members of the JMC, which never occurred. He found the politics shameful. Field duty was more to his liking, but rank kept him from that, so he retired.

  For the past year, Nguyen Giap Ty had supervised cargo shipments in and out of Saigon for a company that serviced the American corporation, Sea-Land. He enjoyed the work, leading platoons of men again, even though they were longshoremen instead of soldiers.

  Recently, as terminal manager at the Port of Saigon, he was busy. But instead of container boxes, he loaded people onto the variety of vessels tied to the docks. Like his wife, he had a job that came ahead of his departure. And like Ninh, he trusted that the Americans would not leave without him.

  When Ty and Ninh finally realized that they would not get themselves and their family out, the irony of it all became nearly too bitter to endure. They had spent two days helping the thousands of others, but now there was no one left to help them. With so many of the leaders and administrators gone, the evacuation process turned into a shoving war.

  Saigon had become impassable for anything but foot traffic. And there was Ty at the Port of Saigon, and Ninh with the rest of the family at the other side of the city.

  When Ty had reached his wife and children at the DAO compound, it was already dark. The Americans had burned all the buildings, and they were letting no one else inside the gates. He could see through the fences, the cars parked in a circle with their headlamps turned on, and the helicopters, operating from that light, taking on the last lucky few.

  By the time Ty and his family had reached the American embassy, well past midnight, the same confusion greeted them. Angry crowds. Pleading people waving papers at United States Marines who held the gates closed. No more refugees.

  Now at home, an attractive, small villa near the outskirts of Saigon, the Nguyen family waited. Nam and Son, and Tuong-Van, Bich, and Vanny, sat in their house’s living room, together with Ty and Ninh.

  Holding to each other.

  Wondering.

  Chapter 2

  WINDS OF CHANGE

  DA NANG, RVN—THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1974

  GNATS SWARMED LE Van Reung’s face and mired themselves in the sweat around his eyes and mouth, waking the skinny Viet Cong soldier. Squatting on his haunches, he took the black-and-white-checked scarf that he carried tied in an overhand knot around his neck and wiped his face, shaking his head to free any insects that had crawled into his hair while he slept, hidden in a brush pile.

  Combing his hair with his fingers, he watched the foliage around him shake and move as others in his platoon awakened from their day-long sleep. Their sentry, a boy from Phu Cat, smiled at him and then yawned. Reung did not return the smile, but only looked blankly at the young man, hardly more than fourteen or fifteen years of age.

  Reung stared at the four small, cloth sacks at the boy’s side, each filled with one or two pounds of high-velocity explosive, fused with pull-string detonators, sapper charges to blow holes in the barbed wire that always surrounded South Vietnamese defense positions. Several strips of old communications wire lay across the tops of the sacks.

  In a few moments, this lad and twenty or thirty others like him would take that wire and tie it tightly around their upper thighs and around their arms, just above the biceps, restricting blood flow. That way, when they launched their attack and the South Vietnamese bullets struck their arms and legs, as they breached the defensive wire, they would not bleed out so quickly. They could advance a few additional yards, and make their lives and their crude satchel charges count for something more than if they dropped in their tracks with the first few shots that hit them.

  Sapper duty. Suicide missions quite often. Like standing sentry watch, it represented the tasks performed by their lowest and newest, the most expendable. Reung had himself attacked fences and barbed wire barriers, his arms and legs aching from running with his blood flow tied off. Several bullet scars on his back and his legs reminded him that he had paid his dues. It was this boy’s turn, so he should not feel bad a
bout it. Yet he did.

  He cared a great deal for his fellow soldiers, especially for the younger ones. They knew so little, yet did so much.

  Tonight, many of them would die, perhaps this youngster who had smiled at him. Reung knew the intensity of fire they would face as they pushed their way up the big mountain on the western edge of Da Nang. A test of enemy resolve, and perhaps a chance to destroy a few communications and radar antennas, if they made it to the top.

  They had never before made it to the top, not that he could remember, not even when the Americans had first come here, nearly ten years ago. But they had always tried, every few months.

  Now, however, their attack held a greater purpose than harassing the enemy, destroying some equipment, and perhaps killing a few of their soldiers. They would spend their lives to test the enemy’s defenses and assess their willingness to expend firepower. Somewhere high in the revolutionary government’s leadership, military planners of something quite grand wanted to know this information. How intensely did the enemy fight today compared to previous times when the Americans had kept them fully supplied? Would he defend his ground conservatively or fight with full force? Were they in short supply? Were they becoming demoralized, as rumors reported?

  Reung had heard the stories of corrupt South Vietnamese officers who hoarded munitions and sold their supply to soldiers who desperately needed the support of that firepower. Artillery shells, mortar rounds, even grenades all held cash value for these capitalistic traitors of the people.

  He knew that such a thing would never happen among his army’s leaders. Their cause was much greater than personal profit. Reung believed, with almost religious conviction, that all men and women who shared his rice and wore the red star, also shared his dream. One day, he could stop carrying his rifle and live at peace in his country, finally unified north and south.

  For eight years he had fought as a full-fledged soldier of the people as a member of the National Liberation Front, and before that as a boy reservist. He could not remember the feel of a bed, only earth with leaves for a pillow.