Last Man Out (44 page)

Later, on my own, I arranged for Timmies to meet with Hung, whose briefing differed from the normal ARVN party line. Hung said that the South Vietnamese could not defend the delta, and the North Vietnamese knew that. If all the South Vietnamese Marines and Rangers and other regulars and irregulars, who had lost their positions in the north and were streaming into Saigon, were brought to the delta, organized, and put in fighting position, they could not hold. They did not have the right supplies and felt they had been abandoned.

Polgar wanted to neutralize this opinion at the source. His position was that the North Vietnamese would not occupy Saigon and could not take the delta.

As I walked into the meeting I had to take a seat close to the front. Like Balls before him, Polgar said there would be generations of other case officers after us assigned to the delta, that thing about future generations of case officers apparently being a catchphrase in Saigon. He said, unequivocally, “South Vietnam will survive.”

From the back of the room, Tom F. opined that the resolve of the ARVN to hold out was in question. I agreed, adding that I thought the North Vietnamese were certainly intent on taking Saigon and the delta by force. North Vietnam was run by military people who had been fighting the war for decades. They were unlikely to sue for peace when they could win.

Polgar was unmoved and ended the meeting with a positive statement about the rocky but generally bright future of South Vietnam.

Later, after Polgar left, Tom F. sulked at the Coconut Palms Bar. “Either that guy is crazy or we are.”

I said, “He’s the chief of station, Tom.”

“Well,” he conceded, “then we’re crazy. But crazy or not, I know this, the North Vietnamese are going to win this war, flat out, whether that desk warrior likes it or not.”

We eventually heard an interesting story. Polgar spoke fluent Hungarian and was meeting privately with Hungarian members of the ICCS, the peacekeeping force in Vietnam. They told him the North Vietnamese had no plans to occupy Saigon or the delta. This same information was being passed by Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, D.C., directly
to U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. This apparently orchestrated disinformation from two separate sources made a convincing case to American policy makers on the viability of the South Vietnamese government.

The information was not totally incorrect. The North Vietnamese did not hope to take Saigon within the year and had no occupation plans for the delta. But they never wavered from their intent to occupy all of South Vietnam in time. And the Government of South Vietnam was not viable. Corrupt and totally out of touch with its farmer citizenry, there was no hope that it would survive.

Polgar, however, and possibly Kissinger believed the Hungarians and the Soviets against all reason.

On 17 April 1975, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge—Cambodia was in the hands of the Communists.

I began visiting General Hai every day. He reported that North Vietnamese forces continued to assemble just over the Cambodian border. They were bringing in armor, portable bridges, and artillery. He also said fresh troops had arrived, probably, he thought, to lead the attack forces against Saigon. It was the only realistic target for them, the general said. They were assembling more of a force than they needed just to attack the 7th Division or to secure Route 4. Once they launched there was nothing but open marshy country—the Plain of Reeds—between the border and the southern city gates of Saigon.

Jim D. put his hands over his ears when I briefed him on Hai’s prediction about a pending attack on Saigon. He didn’t want to hear it. Saigon Station continued to put out intelligence reports supporting a negotiated cease-fire, and there were enough other pessimistic reports out of the ARVN. Possibly, he suggested, the North Vietnamese planned to use that force as a cocked gun at the head of the South Vietnamese government to force negotiations. I said, nope, those NVA troops out there in front of General Hai were going to occupy Saigon. I suggested to him that U.S. politicians in Washington and the U.S. government people in Saigon, who were calling the shots, thought only in terms of indoor work such as negotiations and compromises. “I know this war out here in the countryside,” I told him, “and it’s about over.”

A U.S. Navy armada was assembling off the coast of South Vietnam. It could have been considered a deterrent to major North Vietnam attacks in the Saigon environs, but we understood that its primary function was to ensure the safe evacuation of Americans from the country. Mac, flying along the coast one day in an Air America chopper, said he could see Navy ships to the edge of the horizon.

Under pressure from Washington, U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin ordered all but essential personnel to leave the country. We were reduced to twelve officers at the CIA base in the consulate—the only U.S. government facility still open outside Saigon.

I visited General Hung occasionally in Can Tho. He was aware of the military situation throughout the country, but he remained calm and resigned as he waited for the outcome. Not one of the delta’s sixteen provincial capitals was under North Vietnamese control. Possibly half of the population of South Vietnam was there and out of harm’s way. He would sit and wait.

During our 19 April meeting, General Hai told me there did not appear to be as many new additions to the North Vietnamese forces collecting across the Cambodian border. They were repositioning in their assembly area. He thought that when they began to line up with the new troops close to the border behind the bridge units and heavy attack tanks, their push to Saigon would be imminent. It would take them seven days to get from their sanctuaries in Cambodia across the Plain of Reeds to the underside of Saigon. The general’s 7th Division forces could only slow their progress.

“We cannot stop them,” Hai said. “There are too many, we are too few.”

On the morning of 21 April, Xiam Luc, one of the last ARVN strongholds north of Saigon, fell after a heroic stand against a vastly superior North Vietnamese force. The president of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, resigned later that day.

I flew out to 7th Division headquarters 22 April. It was dark inside Hai’s office. He was sitting in his regular chair near a small table and couch, and smoking.

“The NVA’s heavy tanks are lining up. The new, young troops are falling in formation behind them. They are getting ready to
launch. Saigon will fall to the North Vietnamese in seven days,” he predicted. “29 April 1975.”

Raising his cup of lukewarm coffee, he proposed a toast to all the soldiers who had died and to our future, but he did not smile.

The remaining base officers were in the consulate when I returned that afternoon. They gathered in Jim’s office and listened quietly when I reported on my visit with General Hai.

“A week,” Jim D. said when I finished. “He’s saying attacks on Saigon will start next Tuesday, 29 April.” Over the past month, he had developed an appreciation for the 7th Division commander’s reporting. Although Hai was morose, the information obtained by his observation planes and his analysis of that information had proved to be accurate, corroborated by overhead and other special intelligence.

“That’s a shame,” the base chief continued to muse as he looked off into space. Finally, he said, “Saigon doesn’t want to hear this. They’ve sent out more developments on the negotiated peace theme today. Do we try to get anyone’s attention back in Washington?” He paused. “As if they care. They’ve already given up on South Vietnam.”

“First,” Mac asked, “do we believe it?”

“I do,” I said without hesitation. “Saigon will fall in seven days.” No mysterious force, no promise by the Hungarians, nothing the CIA leadership in Saigon could imagine would prevent it. The North Vietnamese had more than one hundred thousand soldiers in an ever-tightening circle around Saigon. North Vietnamese would occupy the city in seven days. Standing in the base chief’s office, I was sure of it.

Jim polled the others in the office. No one doubted Hai’s information.

We had seven days.

In the map room I sat down at my desk and began to draft the report of my meeting with Hai. Jim asked that I keep it lean, leading with the general’s statement that he believed Saigon would fall in seven days, followed by the general’s reasoning that the North Vietnamese were preparing to launch from their sanctuaries in Cambodia west/southwest of the city and that they would be moving through an area where they could not hide. Their intentions were clear to Hai. They’d get to Saigon in seven
days because ARVN 7th Division forces would not be able to stop them.

At dusk, after some small changes to my draft, we sent the report to Saigon and Washington.

We gathered in Jim D.’s office the next morning to receive our work assignments for what we considered to be our last week in Vietnam. Jim told me to continue visiting General Hai until he evacuated his headquarters, which was on the edge of the North Vietnamese advance, and to work out arrangements with Air America to have enough helicopters on hand for evacuation in the event of an attack against Can Tho. The South Vietnamese military’s ability to provide for our safety could suddenly deteriorate. Mac and the Sarge would continue to collect most of the KIP in safe houses around town and in outlying areas.

Tom was to work on ways to get the KIP out of the country. He told Bill A. to pursue the possibility of a back-door escape route through the island off Rach Gia suggested by the ex-GI and his Vietnamese girlfriend. In developing that option, Bill was to truck the base’s speedboat from Can Tho to Rach Gia and position barrels of fuel on the island for possible use by Air America and boat crews.

Jim would work with MacNamara to come up with a practical evacuation plan for the remaining Americans at the consulate. We were to stay in contact with Phyllis. It was no time for performing missions of mercy or focusing on anything but the job at hand. Jim wanted us to coordinate with him on everything we did. We were to carry our diplomatic passports wherever we went. We were to leave no loose ends. If we had to go “right now,” we would just get up and go.

“There is to be no ‘Oh, wait, there’s something I’ve got to do across town,’ ” he said. I thought about the two children.

Our primary rally point for the evacuation was the CIA housing compound and club, the Coconut Palms. Tom sent a work crew there later in the day to cut down all the trees around the tennis court in order to facilitate helicopter landings.

After the meeting I helped arrange with O. B., the CIA air operations officer in Saigon, for three Air America helicopters to remain in the delta twenty-four hours a day, with at least two
parked on the Coconut Palms tennis court at night. Pilots would rotate back to Saigon every other day.

I visited General Hung in Can Tho later that day. He reported that North Vietnamese forces had launched across the border near General Hai’s forces early in the morning and were heading toward Saigon. Hung had begun to direct the limited South Vietnamese Air Force and artillery resources available to him in the delta against the advancing enemy, but, as yet, the North Vietnamese advance had not been impeded. He remained calm but kept his family close by.

Jim D. and MacNamara were not able to agree on a joint evacuation plan for the consulate. Sitting around Phyllis’s desk, we sometimes heard them yelling in MacNamara’s office below us. One confrontation went something like this:

JIM:
“The safest, surest means of evacuation is by helicopter.”

MACNAMARA
(louder): “There are not enough helicopters to go around, there are too many Vietnamese that we must get out.”

JIM
(louder): “What Vietnamese do you have to get out?”

MACNAMARA
(still louder): “I do not answer to
you
. Listen to what I’m saying. If we have to evacuate, this consulate goes out by boat down the Bassac River. Period. End of discussion.”

JIM
(softer): “That is ridiculous. We might have to fight our way out, and we are not combatants. We get up in the air, and we go out by helicopters.”

MACNAMARA
(softer): “We cannot control the helicopters. I have had my experiences with your Air America helicopter pilots. They have the last say. They could leave us all here. They are wild, uncontrollable animals, the Air America people. We control our own destiny if we go out by boat. I have many, many Vietnamese—and Cambodians—I am obligated to get out, and going by boat is the only way we’re going to do it. I am the senior man on the scene here, do not forget.”

JIM
(even voice, determined): “I have my people to protect, and I have helicopters. My people go out by helicopter.”

MACNAMARA
(screaming): “You will do what I say or, God as my witness, I’ll have you out of here. You—hear—me? [We heard a crash, like an ashtray hitting the floor.] Get out of my office.”

In normal times the shouting and bitter wrangling would not have happened. But it was a situation of unusual proportions, and in view of the personalities of the participants, it was not unexpected. Jim D. was a large, forceful, competitive Irishman, a Georgetown law school graduate and a world-class tennis player. Two of his sons were All-American tennis players at Stanford University. Terry MacNamara, a career diplomat, had firm ideas of his responsibilities and powers as the senior American official on the scene. He was intelligent and tenacious, and he did not back down. Both men sincerely believed in their separate positions.

MacNamara’s plan, however, was dangerous. It was sixty miles from Can Tho down the Bassac River to the South China Sea, and a boat filled with Americans certainly would draw attention. It could be overtaken by South Vietnamese forces or, worse, attacked by VC or North Vietnamese who occupied positions along the river. Not long before, a base officer had been shot in the head while riding on a boat near Can Tho.

Second, MacNamara was not an experienced boatman. He had no idea how to negotiate the navigable channels or of their locations, especially where the river lets out into the ocean. And he didn’t have access to the radio frequencies of Air America, the U.S. Navy, and ARVN units. He would have been completely out of communication during his sixty-mile run down the river. Obviously his plan had not been developed by anyone with a military background.