Goodnight Saigon Read online

  Thieu smiled at the American diplomat. He knew Ambassador Martin believed what he had just told him. It was hard to imagine the United States indifferently turning its back on a ten-year-old commitment for which it had paid with more than fifty-six thousand American lives and countless billions of dollars. However, Thieu’s intelligence network channeled information not only from deep within the inner circles of the United States Embassy, but from the Defense Attachés Office, American military headquarters in Okinawa and Hawaii, and the State and Defense departments themselves in Washington, DC. All those sources contradicted what Ambassador Martin had just stated. The United States would not, under any conditions, land forces anywhere in South Vietnam, except in relationship with evacuation operations, focused primarily to rescue Americans.

  Graham Martin, however, argued angrily with anyone who suggested that the United States would allow Saigon to fall into Communist hands. He truly believed this could never happen. The aging diplomat’s idealism had cast him into the light where many, including President Thieu, now regarded him as a Don Quixote caricature.

  “If only the hearts of your countrymen were as true as yours, my good sir,” President Thieu told Ambassador Martin. “But even you cannot make such a promise for your country. I know that they think little of betrayal, even to a well-meaning, loyal man like you. I hope you are correct in your promise but, I fear the worst and must plan for that event.”

  “MY BEAUTIFUL LADIES, I am home,” Nguyen Thanh Trung called to his wife and trio of young daughters, three, five, and seven years old. A first lieutenant in the Air Force of the Republic of Vietnam, Trung had trained in the United States to fly the F-5 Freedom Fighter jet. Returning to South Vietnam, he passed along his skills to other pilots, as well as flying sorties against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army.

  This evening he had just finished another mission with three other F-5 jets in his formation. They had tried to attack new enemy positions in Phuoc Long Province, yet had to settle on secondary targets. Enemy air defenses simply proved too well established. So the flight of fighters dropped their bombs on suspected enemy emplacements west of Saigon, near the village of Cu Chi.

  Trung knew their mission had simply wasted precious bombs, hitting no enemy positions, just trees and wrecked buildings demolished by previous bombings. He felt satisfied about it, though, since he had secretly joined the Viet Cong many months ago.

  South Vietnamese ground forces had killed his father, calling him Viet Cong. He was simply an old man, not a soldier for anyone nor a politician. However, they had shot him, called him an enemy.

  The soldiers had also arrested Trung’s brother. They put him in prison because they had accused his father of treason and had killed him in the young man’s presence. If the father was Viet Cong, so must be the son.

  Trung hated the war. He detested politics too. Most of all, he wanted the killing to stop.

  When he saw how corrupt the South Vietnamese leaders had become, lining their own pockets while the country and its people crumbled, he realized that President Nguyen Van Thieu’s regime would surely fall. He knew that it was only a matter of time before the Communists finally triumphed. Then what would happen to his wife and three daughters?

  It was not hard to join the Viet Cong. They were everywhere nowadays.

  Once a member of the Communist Party, Trung discovered several others who had also turned coats. One man, a civilian architect at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Dang Quang Phung, became his closest partisan.

  For years, Dang had kept his Viet Cong contacts briefed on the layout and any engineering changes at Tan Son Nhut Air Base and the surrounding community, including the Americans’ Defense Attachés Office compound.

  Trung sat on the couch in his living room and sipped hot tea as he took a stack of papers from a manila envelope. Dang had handed the package to him as the two men met for drinks at the Tan Son Nhut officers club after work. Several other South Vietnamese flight officers had sat at the table with the two men and had seen Dang casually hand Trung the envelope.

  Thus when Trung realized what the papers contained, the fright of it seized him so strongly that he struggled to catch his breath. Had any of the other officers seen what Dang had put in the envelope, both men would have faced a firing squad. Dang had given Trung a complete set of overhead printouts of the entire Tan Son Nhut Air Base and the DAO compound. Dang had even annotated exact distances and dimensions on each of the more than forty pages of drawings.

  The unassuming architect who had worked as a trusted civil service employee at Tan Son Nhut for more than ten years had compiled drawings that clearly laid out the exact locations of every building, fence, sidewalk, and street, and their measurements. On many of the buildings, he had even included their functions, especially if they constituted strategic targets, such as ammunition storage or armories, barracks, or headquarters.

  Trung read the small, handwritten note that Dang had taped to the top sheet of paper. “You will need these updated plans for your mission. Good luck.”

  Chapter 4

  LOTUS BUDS

  CENTRAL HIGHLANDS, RVN—THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1975

  CLAPPING HIS BADLY worn sandals together, knocking loose the sharp pebbles and dirt that had packed in them during the day’s long trek, Nguyen Duc Cui sat on a large, shady rock beneath dense, overhanging trees and dangled his bare feet in a narrow stream to soothe them. The clear, mountain water felt good on his sore soles and toes, now heavily calloused from so many years of walking.

  The communications officer for the 320th NVA Division loosened his backpack’s badly frayed straps from his shoulders and let the dusty haversack slide down his arms and fall behind him. Then he reached inside the canvas bag and felt for the flat can of American-made C ration cheese he had saved for the past two weeks and took it out. South Vietnamese soldiers on patrol near Da Nang had apparently discarded it on the trail, and Cui claimed the prize when his unit later crossed their path.

  Turning it in his fingers, looking at the English words printed in black letters on its lid, Cui started to open the small, military green tin with his knife, but then he changed his mind. Other soldiers had begun cooking rice, and this cheese might taste better after he had rested and had filled his stomach.

  The can, barely a half an inch thick and two inches in diameter, contained less than three ounces of pasturized, processed American cheese, hardly enough to satisfy anyone’s appetite. However, it held enough of the delicacy for a person to enjoy, if he ate it slowly. Thus with a satisfied stomach, Nguyen Duc Cui could savor to a much higher degree each small taste of the creamy, sharp cheddar.

  When he dug through his belongings, searching for the can of cheese, Cui had felt the pair of brown oxford shoes that he had kept tucked in the bottom of his pack, now, for nearly five years. He looked at his worn sandals, held together by salvaged American-made communications wire, whipped around braided hemp straps that had broken several times. The shoes in his pack had no wear at all on them. Their layered leather soles and laminated heels remained unmarred and clean. The brown, cowhide tops still retained their crisp, glossy finish.

  For many, it seemed ridiculous for him to carry new shoes in his pack while such badly worn sandals covered his feet. However, for Cui, the brown oxfords held a far greater purpose than simply that of mere footwear. For him, they spoke a profound statement of this war. They also embodied an ironclad promise that he had sworn to keep.

  His friend and companion from Hanoi, Nguyen Sinh Tuan, a documentary photographer with the 320th Division, understood why his friend did not wear the shoes. Few others knew the story, but Tuan had seen it happen. He had tearfully watched as his friend Cui inherited the unworn brown oxfords from another friend.

  Adherence to proper etiquette and respect for Cui’s privacy had prevented the photographer from talking with others about the sad event, including many men who had recently attached to the unit. Not knowing Cui’s reasons, they scoffed at the communicati
ons officer for carrying new shoes in his pack while wearing worn-out sandals. Some of Cui’s fellow officers openly made wisecracks to him while enlisted men joked privately among themselves. The photographer reasoned that if Cui wanted the reason explained to anyone, he would do that himself. For others to discuss it constituted gossip, and disrespect. It displayed poor character and ignorance to anyone who valued good manners.

  Tuan had confidence that one day the soldiers who derided Cui would understand this protracted act of loyalty too. They would also feel rightfully embarrassed for their shameful conduct toward such a good and decent man.

  Tuan sat on the ground near Cui and snapped his picture.

  “Don’t do that,” Cui scolded. “You will be reprimanded for wasting film.”

  Tuan snapped another photograph of Cui and laughed, “I am doing my job, documenting today’s events. Sore feet after a long hike.”

  “That is quite enough, now,” Cui said quietly. “With those two pictures, history will fully comprehend today’s walk. Please put away your camera. My head aches, my back hurts, and my feet throb. I do not need that thing clicking in my ears, adding to my misery.”

  “Give me your tin bowl,” Tuan said, standing and taking his own metal dish from his pack. “I will bring your dinner to you. Should I also bring the wine list, sir, or will you just have your usual, water?”

  “Oh, by all means, bring the wine list,” Cui said, challenging his friend to follow through with the little joke.

  “Ah, I just remembered, sir,” Tuan said, “the wine that we have on hand is simply all wrong for the pork and rice on today’s menu. May I suggest a quite lovely pot of tea instead?”

  “Tea sounds wonderful,” Cui answered as his comrade jogged to a clearing where several soldiers stirred pots of rice and pork, ladling it into the metal bowls of a long line of soldiers, all of them dusty, tired, and showing rings of sweat and salt on their drab green and khaki uniforms.

  As Cui lay back, closing his eyes and resting his head on his pack, he felt the shoes pressing against his neck. He thought of how in a matter of perhaps a year or eighteen months, he might finally fulfill the dying wish that he had promised to keep.

  Cui remembered how silly the idea had at first seemed when his best friend, Huong Chinh, bought the shoes in Hanoi, after their final class at the university. He recalled how he laughed and scoffed when Huong told him of his purchase.

  “NONSENSE!” CUI SAID. “Romantic nonsense. What practical purpose can those brown oxfords truly serve, other than your wearing them?”

  “Carrying these shoes will allow me to always see my goal and better hold onto it,” Huong explained to Cui.

  The pair of newly sworn army recruits sat on a bench in Hanoi’s central park on a warm spring afternoon in 1968. While they talked of their futures, the duo gazed across the long, narrow lake with its ancient Buddhist shrine standing on a tiny island at its center. Across the water, swans and ducks cruised lazily. On the opposite shore, the two lads fixed their attention on a group of beige stucco buildings where a procession of schoolgirls filed through a set of high-arched wooden and wrought iron double doorways dressed in white dai, the traditional Vietnamese costume for young ladies, billowy silk pants and a silk top with long front and back panels that hang to the knees.

  “And what is this goal that these shoes manifest?” Cui finally asked his friend.

  “Our ultimate victory in the people’s revolution, of course,” Huong answered without hesitation.

  “What do oxfords have to do with victory?” Cui asked, perplexed.

  “Oh, the shoes have nothing to do with victory,” Huong said. “However, I bought them to wear when we march in our victory parade in Saigon.”

  “Nonsense!” Cui again exclaimed to his best friend, a young man he had known since the pair had attended grade school together and had now advanced halfway through college, always side by side.

  Nearly two years after that spring day in Hanoi’s central park, the duo still remained united. Now, in the mountains northwest of Da Nang, near the Laos border, the young soldiers of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam anxiously hid beneath a canopy of trees. They huddled under the foliage, hoping that the crew of the American observation plane that climbed and dived overhead, banking in steep S-turns along the ridge, had not spotted their infantry company.

  When the OV-10 Bronco finally departed to the east, the men shouldered their equipment and hurried eastward too. They sought to clear a safe distance from the probable target zone of the American B- 52 bombers that nearly always came within minutes after one of these low-level reconnaissance aircraft had swooped and turned above these far mountains.

  Sweat poured from Cui’s and Huong’s skin as they marched at a running pace. The two men kept their eyes constantly busy, surveying the surroundings. They looked for anything that could provide them sturdy shelter so that they could immediately take cover when they finally heard the faint roar of the big jets’ engines high above, and the bombs dropped.

  “I see one!” Huong cried to his comrades and pointed at white contrails in the distant sky overhead. Then, behind the first bomber, came the contrails of three more planes and the sound of their commander’s whistle for the men of Cui’s company to seek the deepest possible cover.

  Huong wedged himself beneath the side of a huge log while Cui pushed his body inside a tight hole behind the upturned roots of the same fallen tree.

  The wait seemed eternal. With each minute the men’s dread increased. Finally, the earth shook with a terrible rumble as the first of many two thousand-pound bombs exploded.

  Cui sighed with a sense of relief. The initial salvo had struck at a comfortable distance from them. The bombs had landed where the company had sat while the observation plane had flown overhead. However, he had no more than finished the thought and had only begun to sense the emotional relief when the showers of one-ton bombs from the other three B-52s began to explode. The second volley landed much closer, the third cluster even closer, and the last fusillade fell directly on top of them.

  In a matter of seconds, the entire upheaval had begun and ended. However, for the men who lay in the fury, the seconds seemed to last forever.

  Cui’s body racked with pain from the concussion rendered by the explosions. The blasts released such force that they robbed the atmosphere of air, leaving the men who still survived, breathless. Each detonation uprooted three and four trees at once and blew craters in the earth twenty feet deep and forty feet across. Large chunks of metal, shattered from the bombs’ thick iron casings, spun through the air at blinding speeds, ripping through anything that stood or lay within their line of trajectory.

  With each burst, cries of agony mixed into the smoke and dirt that filled the air. Bodies lay in pieces, strewn across the ground, twisted in the brush, scattered and slung over the grizzled branches of the fallen trees. Heads, arms, legs, torsos. Strips of torn flesh, shattered bones, and shredded clothing. The gore dangled among splattered globs of blood, body fluids, and human entrails, and covered the hacked foliage, splintered wood, and churned earth in a gruesome decoration of carnage.

  Cui could feel blood running from his nose, his ears, and his bowels, leaving the crotch of his khaki shorts wet and red. He felt tears coming from his eyes, bloody tears that he smeared across his face with the back of his grimy hand.

  “Huong!” the soldier finally cried out, realizing that the bomb that had left so many of his body’s small blood vessels and capillaries ruptured and bleeding had landed on the same side of the log where his best friend had sought cover.

  Every tree and bush, large and small, in any direction that Cui looked, lay fallen or leaned severely, uprooted and fractured. Gray smoke and the heavy smell of burned cordite boiled thick in the air, swirling with the massive cloud of orange dust that rose skyward more than a hundred feet and drifted eastward on the prevailing breezes.

  Hatred for this faceless enemy that had appeared as mere white streaks a
cross the blue sky surged through Cui’s heart as he saw Huong’s bloody back and his twisted legs, bent at places where the soldier had no joints. The pain from the sight of his lifelong best friend stung Cui’s skin, chewed through his stomach, and pounded in his lungs. His knees buckled, and he fell sobbing.

  “He’s still alive!” a soldier standing above Cui said, pointing to Huong, who now tried to roll onto his back. “We must help him. Hurry!”

  Cui glanced at the soldier’s face and saw his friend, Nguyen Sinh Tuan. Both men knelt by Huong, and Cui cradled his dying friend’s head in his hands.

  “Huong!” Cui cried, looking at his friend’s eyes, which darted in confusion and then focused back on him.

  “My pack,” Huong said. “I stuffed it under the log.”

  “I see it, there,” Cui said, pointing for Tuan, who then stretched beneath the downed tree and dragged out Huong’s knapsack.

  “Cui,” Huong said, “take my shoes, the ones I bought in Hanoi, and put them in your pack. Promise me that you will carry them with you, always.”

  “I am doing it now, Huong,” Cui said as tears streamed from his eyes.

  “When we finally end this war, and you march victoriously through Saigon, then take out my shoes. If they do not fit your feet, then find someone whose feet match their size, and put them on. Walk with my shoes in your victory parade through Saigon. That is why I bought them. Even though I am not with you, my spirit will march with you, in these shoes.”

  “I promise you, I will, Huong,” Cui said, sobbing. “I give you my pledge.”

  TEARS STREAMED FROM Nguyen Duc Cui’s eyes as he lay on his back, remembering his friend and the sacred vow he had made to him as he died in his arms. Cui could feel the wetness dripping into his ears as his old friend, Nguyen Sinh Tuan, returned with their evening meal of pork, rice, and tea.