Last Days in Vietnam Storyville

As we began to contemplate evacuation,

the question, the burning question was,

"Who goes...and who gets left behind?"

I borrowed a truck...

and I basically sent the signal to my folks,

and this meant a group of South Vietnamese majors,

lieutenant colonels, colonels and their families

to muster at an address in downtown Saigon.

I drove down there, they loaded up onto the truck,

and I drove them to the airbase.

And I had told them, "When you hear three thumps,

"that means hold the babies' mouths.

"Don't breathe, don't talk, don't make any noise

"because we're going through the gatepost."

I saluted in uniform as a captain of the United States Army.

The guard waved me through,

and I drove straight out to the flight line

to an aircraft that was awaiting.

One Vietnamese colonel that was putting his family on the plane,

he had wanted to stay in Vietnam to defend the country.

And this full colonel had, like, eight kids and a wife.

And he was in tears, the family...

The family were in tears,

and I said to him, "Get on the plane.

"Just...go.

"Go."

It was a terrible, terrible, terrible moral dilemma

for everybody.

We today have concluded an agreement to end the war

and bring peace with honour in Vietnam.

'We have adopted a plan for the complete withdrawal

'of all US combat ground forces.

'We are finally bringing American men home.'

We who made the agreement thought that it would be the beginning

not of peace in the American sense,

but the beginning of a period of coexistence

which might evolve as it did in Korea into two states.

Reconciliation between North and South Vietnam

we knew would be extremely difficult.

But I was hopeful.

Because of the Paris Agreement,

American soldiers were going home.

But I was on my way back to Vietnam.

I was assigned to Saigon in the first week of August 1973,

so about six months after the ceasefire.

I would say that between the State Department people and CIA people,

the contractors who were there to maintain infrastructure,

maintain aircraft, as well as people like me,

we had 5,000 to 7,000 Americans in country.

A lot of the guys had Vietnamese girlfriends and wives,

in many cases with children.

In general, things were...eerily calm

and in many ways normal in Saigon.

My sense was that we were going to be there,

you know, pretty much for a long time to come.

I was assigned to the American embassy in Saigon.

I was in charge of the 84 Marine security guards that were there,

making sure that they kept up with their physical fitness training.

We were there to protect American lives

as well as American property.

It was just a day-to-day job.

The Ambassador there was a guy named Graham Martin,

a North Carolinian, just as I was.

He spoke with a slow Southern drawl.

He was a great gentleman.

He was a cold warrior in the old stripe.

He'd lost an adopted son in Vietnam to combat.

And he was not going to give up South Vietnam to the Communists.

He was determined to keep US aid flowing into Saigon.

When the ceasefire occurred in 1973,

everybody toasted it with Bloody Marys in the US embassy.

It was a grand party.

We thought peace was at hand.

But the Paris Peace Accord was a masterpiece of ambiguity.

In order to get President Thieu and the South Vietnamese

to go along with the Paris Agreement,

President Nixon pulled out all the stops,

and in a letter to President Thieu,

he promised that if the North Vietnamese

were to substantially violate the terms of the Paris Agreement,

the United States would respond with full force.

In other words, re-enter the war.

The North Vietnamese viewed Nixon as a madman.

They were terrified of him.

They believed that Nixon, if necessary,

would bring back American air power.

But in August 1974, he was gone.

Nixon resigned because of Watergate.

And overnight, everything changed.

CHEERING

Hanoi suddenly saw the road to Saigon as being open.

GUNFIRE

The South Vietnamese population

had ample reason to fear the Vietnamese Communists.

The Communist conduct throughout the course of the war

had been violent and unforgiving.

For example, when the city of Hue

was taken over by the North Vietnamese,

several thousand people on a long blacklist were rounded up,

schoolteachers, government civil servants,

people who were known anti-Communists,

and they were executed,

in some cases even buried alive.

WOMAN WAILS

So panic was but a millimetre away.

Hundreds of thousands of refugees

are in a blind rush to flee even further

from the rapidly advancing Communists.

Bruce Dunning reports.

MAN'S INDISTINCT VOICE OVER TANNOY

'President Thieu broadcast a strong appeal

'to the soldiers and the people of Da Nang,

'urging them to stay and fight.'

IN VIETNAMESE

As the enemy approaches, the panic has swept

from the coastal city's crowded backstreets and pagodas

onto runways at the airport.

Our plane is surrounded here.

I don't know how the hell we're going to get out.

We're racing down the runway,

leaving behind hundreds and thousands of people.

Another dozen of them running along, grabbing at the air stair.

We're pulling them on as fast as we can.

There's a sea of humanity jamming on.

Impossible to stop the crowd.

We're pulling away. We're leaving them behind.

We're pulling up with the... People are falling off the air stairs!

The plane is taking off.

It was every man for himself.

So you saw the World Airways flight

being mobbed by South Vietnamese soldiers.

You saw ships with thousands of refugees,

including lots of soldiers.

You saw out-of-control panic.

Basically any boats, trucks, airplanes, or anything going south

were besieged by people wanting to get onboard.

The Americans were gone,

and as a result, the house of cards began to collapse.

The North Vietnamese decided to escalate,

escalate, escalate, escalate at every turn

to see if the United States would react.

In April of '75, I was with President Gerald Ford,

and we were flying across the country on Air Force One

when one of the airplane's crew

comes and hands me a note,

and it says, "Da Nang has fallen."

Ford was bombarded by questions from the press

after he got off Air Force One.

Around 150,000 to 175,000

well-trained North Vietnamese regular forces

in violation of the Paris Peace Accords moved into South Vietnam.

We have...objected to that violation.

It's a tragedy unbelievable in its ramifications.

We are now in a crisis.

We had a wave of humanity,

500,000 refugees rolling, rolling south towards Saigon...

..and 160,000 North Vietnamese troops moving right behind them.

I had become so concerned, I decided to pull

our best Vietnamese agents in out of the woodwork

to try to see what they could tell us

about Communist planning, which obviously was rapidly evolving.

On the 8th of April,

I met with one of our best agents,

who said, "The Communists are going to drive on Saigon.

"They're going to be in there by Ho China Minh's birthday,"

which was May 19th, literally a month away.

Communist forces in South Vietnam,

already solidly in control of 11 provinces,

began working on yet another one today - Binh Dinh.

IN VIETNAMESE

I kept a map every day

on the progress of the North Vietnamese onslaught.

By the 5th of April,

the North Vietnamese had 15, even 16 divisions

heading in the direction of Saigon.

They were bringing SA-2 missiles down

to provide anti-aircraft cover for their forces.

There were people who were saying, "Look, we've got to do some heavy, heavy planning here

"because depending on how this goes, and it doesn't look good now, we may all have to evacuate."

And Ambassador Martin wouldn't tolerate or countenance such thought.

That was defeatism. That was poisonous to the prospects

of the people we're here to help.

But people could see what was going on...

and they started leaving...

especially the Americans.

-I'm leaving Vietnam.

-Why?

-I'm kind of scared, to be honest with you.

To be perfectly honest with you, I'm really scared.

I think the situation's a lot worse than we know about.

There was always a standing evacuation plan in the embassy.

It held that in an emergency,

all Americans still in the country,

about 6,000 people, would be evacuated

and that no South Vietnamese would be evacuated with them.

I was a student.

The school's not closing,

but it seemed like nobody's interested in school any more.

You can't stay here.

You can't live with the Communists,

especially if you have a connection with the Americans.

Then you really got to get out.

If we really made up a list of endangered South Vietnamese,

the ones who really worked closely with us during the war,

this number could be 150-200,000.

Including their families, many more than that.

But the idea of talking about an evacuation

and of planning for an evacuation of Americans,

let alone an evacuation of Vietnamese,

was still anathema in the embassy.

If you mean, "Is South Vietnam on the imminent verge of collapse?"

I think the answer is quite definitely no.

We were dealing with an ambassador

who was just convinced that somehow,

he was going to be able to pull this out

and that there wouldn't have to be an evacuation

and therefore, there wouldn't have to be a concern

about evacuating South Vietnamese.

The situation in South Vietnam has reached a critical phase

requiring immediate and positive decisions by this government.

There are tens of thousands

of South Vietnamese employees of the United States government,

of news agencies, of contractors and businesses for many years

whose lives, with their dependents,

are in very grave peril.

I'm therefore asking the Congress

to appropriate without delay 722 million

for emergency military assistance for South Vietnam.

If the very worst were to happen,

at least allow the orderly evacuation of Americans

and endangered South Vietnamese to places of safety.

There was no way in 1975

that the Congress was going to vote any money

to go to the aid of South Vietnam.

We had pulled out our troops in 1973

and public opinion at that point shifted.

The people of the United States, having seen Watergate,

having seen the deception of the generals,

weren't about to give any help in Southeast Asia.

And, you know, Kissinger knew this.

We knew we were not going to get the 722 million.

By that time it made no big difference,

but President Ford said he owed it to Vietnam to make a request.

We've sent, so to speak, battleship after battleship

and bomber after bomber and 500,000 and more men

and billions and billions of dollars.

If billions and billions didn't do

at a time when we had all our men there,

how can 722 million save the day?

This is the way my map looked in mid-April.

The North Vietnamese just rolled down the coast.

Saigon was clearly threatened.

The situation was...urgent.

Urgent understates it.

At this time, Ambassador Martin had been back in Washington

trying to persuade Congress to vote additional aid.

Do you have anything to say on your arrival?

He has no statement to make.

He came back to Saigon,

and my boss, the CIA Station Chief, said,

"Go down and tell the old man what's happening."

I went and I said, "Mr Ambassador,

"half of the South Vietnamese Army has disintegrated.

"We're in grave trouble.

"Please, sir, plan for an evacuation.

"At least allow us to begin putting together

"lists of South Vietnamese we should rescue."

And he said, "No, Frank.

"It's not so bleak and I won't have this negative talk."

Young officers in the embassy

began to mobilise a black operation,

meaning a makeshift underground rare way evacuation

using outgoing cargo aircraft

that would be totally below the radar of the Ambassador.

People like myself and others

took the bull by the horns and organized an evacuation.

In my case, that meant friends of mine

who were senior officers in the South Vietnamese military.

As the North Vietnamese came closer and closer to Saigon,

these people were dead men walking.

I had arranged a signal with my intelligence community friends

that if I said, "I'm having a barbecue,"

that meant come to a certain pre-designated place

and bring your families and only bring one suitcase

because we're going to have a party.

But it was understood the party meant I was going to get them out.

Black Ops were essentially violating the rules.

In this case meaning,

you're not allowed to bring out Vietnamese military people

who were under obligation to stand and fight.

We were fully expecting if we got caught doing this

that we would be run out of country.

End of career, do not pass go.

But sometimes there's an issue not of legal and illegal,

but right or wrong.

The deputy defence attache moved out Vietnamese personnel

and their families to Clark Air Base in the Philippines

without any approval whatsoever,

without any immigration papers, anything.

Passports, you name it.

And when they began showing up in the Philippines,

Martin hit the roof and fired him!

But that didn't stop other State Department people

who had Vietnamese friends and family members.

They continued to organise these makeshift airlifts.

TERRY MCNAMARA: That April, I was in Can Tho,

which was about 100 miles from Saigon.

And we were getting reports

of this town falling and that province falling and so on.

EXPLOSION And then we were attacked.

Sergeant Hasty came by to give me a report on the damage.

Can Tho came under pretty intense artillery bombardment.

The North Vietnamese had overrun

some South Vietnamese artillery batteries

and managed to turn those around and shell the centre of Can Tho.

We knew that the situation was bad.

We could see that the South Vietnamese Army was eroding.

Supplies had been cut-off

and you could see the...the armaments dwindling.

MCNAMARA: We were, under the terms of the Paris Agreement,

committed to resupplying the South Vietnamese.

They lacked simple things, like barbed wire and bags for sand bags.

They were rationing their artillery shells

because they were running out.

The military support, the material support, was not coming.

-KISSINGER:

-When President Ford went before the Congress,

he had two major concerns.

The first was to save as many people as we could.

He cared for the human beings involved, they were not just pawns

that once they had lost their military power were abandoned.

The second was the honour of America,

that we would not be seen at the final agony of South Vietnam

as having stabbed it in the back.

Congress wouldn't pass it.

They said, "No more.

"No more troops, no more money, no more aid to the Vietnamese."

Well, I had to go into President Ford's office to tell him.

I had never heard Ford use a curse word in all the time I'd known him.

But when I showed him this story, he said,

"Those sons of bitches."

I think there were a total of 50 ships that were there.

I mean, it wasn't just us, it was a whole bunch of ships.

We were standing by for the evacuation of Americans.

I was a terrible letter writer.

I would write one letter for my wife's ten letters,

and she didn't like that, so she said,

"We're going to exchange tapes."

So I would run into my stateroom,

turn the tape recorder on for a couple of minutes

and tell her what's happening.

'I really don't know where to start. It's been such an unusual couple days for us.

'We went with the rest of this huge task force of ours

'up into about, oh, 20 miles off the coast,

'basically east of Saigon.'

As most Navy operations are, it was very carefully planned.

We planned it to death.

The chain of command, as I understood it

as a captain of the United States Marine Corps,

and I think I got it right,

is that for any evacuation,

that decision is the Ambassador's decision.

Graham Martin is the responsible guy.

But the military is responsible for giving him all kinds of plans.

And this is how we got into the four options.

The first option was

you would take commercial ships right up the Saigon River

to a couple blocks from the embassy.

You would load whoever you wanted to bring out on these ships

and you'd be done with it.

The second option was, you know,

United and Continental and Flying Tiger Airlines

were still using Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base at the time,

and you could've brought anybody you wanted out by commercial aviation.

The third option was military fixed-wing aviation.

The C5As, the C-141s, which carry a lot of people.

You could've brought them out of Tan Son Nhut on those.

The very last option, the very last option,

was helicopters off the carriers

in the Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base.

We had 75 Marine Corps helicopters out there.

The helicopter option, that was absolutely the last resort.

You know, they don't go very fast, they don't carry that many people.

That was if everything else failed.

I got into Vietnam late on the 24th of April, 1975.

Saigon was full of rumour, of false stories,

whether we were going to have a last attempt

to draw a line across the country,

that Saigon and the south would remain a free republic,

all of these things, and it was all churning all around.

The fighting was close to Saigon

but hadn't shown up in the streets of Saigon.

I served as a naval officer

in three and a half tours in Vietnam,

two of those years as a Special Forces advisor

with a 20-boat River Division, all Vietnamese.

I could tell jokes and hear jokes in Vietnamese.

And once you start off like that,

you eventually end up being able to dream in Vietnamese.

In 1975, my mission was to remove or destroy

as many ships, swift boats, anything that I considered

to be a benefit to the enemy.

I met with Captain Do Kiem,

who was the operations officer of the Vietnamese Navy.

The plan was to sail all the large ships of the South Vietnamese Navy

down the Saigon River to the sea...

and rendezvous at Con Son Island.

We had to keep this secret.

If word got out, it would have had an effect

on the morale of the people in the street.

JOE MCBRIDE: We knew that there were roughly 5,000 Americans

still in the country.

Many of them had Vietnamese wives, mistresses, whatever,

just hadn't left.

And they were basically letting us know,

"We're not leaving without our families."

Finally, we were given authority by the Ambassador

to bypass the immigration laws

and send these Vietnamese out of the country.

So then we started an operation

basically to get out the Americans and their Vietnamese dependents.

It was not an official evacuation.

We still had no organized plan

for evacuating high-risk South Vietnamese

because we had an ambassador

who was making up his mind on the wing.

The President also asked Congress

for authorisation to use American troops here to evacuate Americans

and Vietnamese who worked for Americans.

-If it were necessary.

-Do you have plans for that?

Well, of course, every embassy in the world has plans for it.

-Do you think it will be necessary?

-That again, you see, is a judgment

that I can't possibly make at this time.

We have been reducing the population here as measure of prudency

and will take measures to reduce it further as a question of prudence.

The Ambassador was extremely skittish,

and I guess understandably so, about talking about evacuation,

about sending signals that an evacuation

was being planned or even executed.

He feared it would trigger a panic.

It's time to get out.

And in Saigon at that time, it was like, "Who do you know?"

The key word would be "connection."

There's a lot of people, they try to get their money

because if the people have money,

maybe they will find a connection to get out.

You know, and so, "You want to go? Give me this kind of money."

One guy said to me, "Your family, tell them to come to the boat dock.

"I'll be waiting for them."

Of course they took the money, but they never got us.

There was chaos in Saigon at that time.

Everybody was looking for ways to get out as soon as possible.

Of course, the Americans we worked with had a plan in place for us.

They told us to get to the meeting place,

which was a safe house near the American embassy,

and to wait for buses to come to pick us up.

If we were going to get people out,

we were going to have to make it happen

and deliver the Vietnamese to the big airplanes

in some form or fashion.

And the only way we could do that

was keeping the airport open as long as we could.

Ambassador Martin still hoped that somehow,

this thing would not end with the North Vietnamese

humiliating the United States by attacking Saigon.

But it seemed like the North Vietnamese had other ideas.

What may be the final battle of Saigon has begun.

Communist ground forces have started moving in

on Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport.

'Rockets exploded all over the base,

'setting off three major fires.'

The air base was under continuous artillery fire.

I felt the rounds.

They were so close,

the shrapnel was plinking against the fence behind us.

It was abundantly clear that it was a whole new ball game.

We never expected any trouble out there.

And then, of course, fear a little bit set in,

because now we knew that it really meant business, you know?

Were they going to continue shelling Tan Son Nhut?

They'd given us a warning, you know?

"Get out."

As the sun came up, General Smith,

who was our defence attache out at Tan Son Nhut,

contacted the Ambassador and said,

"The plan to use the fixed-wing

"to get a few thousand people out today isn't going to work.

"And we need to consider that this is it, option four,

"a heavy-lift helicopter evacuation."

And Ambassador Martin wouldn't hear of it.

He said, "I want to come out there. I want to see it," which he did.

He got in a sedan. He didn't lack for guts.

There were still rounds coming in.

Sporadic, but there was still artillery fire.

And he could see that the main runway

was full of craters from North Vietnamese artillery.

And it was understood that General Smith

was not being premature with the recommendation for option four.

MCBRIDE: Ambassador Martin's concern very clearly up to now

was that once we started an official evacuation,

it's pretty obvious that the game is over.

You've got to remember, this is an ambassador

who had lost his only son in combat in Vietnam.

One becomes pretty invested in that country.

He had been holding out hope

that some kind of third-party solution could be worked out,

so that South Vietnam could continue

with some from of independence or autonomy.

And he was being encouraged

to think that this might be possible.

But the morning of the 29th,

he came to accept the fact that that wasn't going to happen.

And I picked up the phone

and told Secretary Kissinger to inform the President

that I had decided that we would have to go to option four.

When I tell President Ford the airport is being shelled

and that it's now time to pull the plug,

he keeps coming back time and again,

"You really think we have to do it?"

That's how heartbreaking it was for him.

He finally...reluctantly gave the go-ahead

for the final evacuation.

'This is the American Forces Vietnam Network.

The prearranged signal for the evacuation

was broadcast on American radio in Saigon.

The message was,

"The temperature is 105 and rising,"

and then Bing Crosby's White Christmas.

And sure enough,

about ten o'clock in the morning, I believe, on the 29th,

there was Bing Crosby on the airwaves.

# I'm dreaming of a white Christmas

# Just like the ones I used to know

# Where the tree tops glisten

# And children listen

# To hear sleigh bells in the snow. #

That morning, Ambassador Martin

received a message that said within 24 hours,

the US presence in Vietnam had to be closed out,

meaning we had to be gone.

It was obvious that there was the need

for a hasty plan to be developed

for a helicopter airlift out of the embassy to the fleet.

And we had less than 24 hours to pull it off.

MCBRIDE: That morning, there must have been, I would guess,

at least 10,000 people literally ringing the embassy.

The embassy compound was the size of a city block, it was big.

And all sides of it were filled 200-300ft back.

Fortunately, people were by and large very controlled.

They were very...patient.

They were just hoping desperately to get in.

It's like the whole of Saigon

wanted to get inside the American embassy.

So you have to know somebody, you know?

If you're like me, I find my friend

and got a little paper to ensure us to get in.

So several of us went to the embassy.

Then my friend, he showed the paper to the guard,

and he's just kind of pointing at each one of us,

and we, one by one, could go inside of the embassy.

When I first got in, I feel so good.

"I'm in America. I'm almost there."

They have a courtyard and a swimming pool,

and we mostly gather around the swimming pool.

And 1,000 people there, and they just keep coming in.

ROTORS WHIR

That morning, CIA choppers began picking up evacuees

off the roofs of buildings around the city

and bringing them to the embassy.

There was an old pilot named OB Harnage.

He was blind in one eye and lame in one leg.

And I said, "Harnage, we got people at 6 Gia Long,

"you got to go pick 'em up."

It was the deputy CIA Station Chief's apartment building.

There were a number of very high-risk Vietnamese,

including the Defence Minister of South Vietnam,

all waiting to be rescued.

As they climbed up the ladder to the roof,

a photographer took that famous photograph.

Many people thought that was the US embassy, it wasn't.

But it indicated to what extent chaos had descended

on this entire operation.

Inside the embassy, everywhere we looked was teeming with Vietnamese.

We counted them, and the total number was about 2,800.

There was no hiding it

that somehow people had to have let these people into the embassy.

Was it, you know, Marine security guards

who kind of looked the other way?

Was it American employees in the embassy

who were doing kind of what we did with black ops

and taking care of their own?

We never got to the bottom of that

and, frankly, we never pursued it.

One of the Marines said to me, "You know, we should take out the tailor."

There was a tailor who made all our civilian clothes.

So I said, "Why don't we take out the cook too?"

He said, "Well, you should take out the cook too,

"and all the other cooks. They should get out,

"they had business with Americans."

So they took the bread truck

and they rounded up the tailor, the cooks and the dishwashers,

a few others and their families,

and drove them into the embassy compound.

There was in the parking lot of the embassy

a great tamarind tree,

which the Ambassador had often referred to

as "steadfast as the American commitment in Vietnam."

The CIA Station Chief that last morning said,

"Mr Ambassador, we have to cut this tree down."

You could not land any large helicopters on the parking lot

unless the tree and all the shrubbery was all gone.

The Ambassador had resisted us cutting that tree

because he did not want anybody to be alerted

that we were doing any sort of evacuation

or were going to do any sort of evacuation.

He was upset.

But finally he succumbed, you know, to just common sense

and gave up his, uh...

I guess you could call it a dream.

And we cut it down.

CHAINSAW BUZZES

He had also, for the past few days,

prevented us from burning classified documents,

for fear that it would panic the South Vietnamese.

So that morning of the 29th,

we had thousands of pages of classified documents

we had failed to destroy beforehand.

Our next job was just looking at that classified document idea

and getting rid of that.

So we went to every office and told them to start pulling stuff,

and piles and piles of paper began coming out.

And we began shredding 'em.

There was a small building where we handled the pay

for the Vietnamese who worked for the embassy.

And in this building,

there was over 1 million in US currency.

So...we had to send a message to the Navy,

who sent it to the Treasury Department,

who came back and said, "Destroy it."

So I assigned a few Marines to get rid of the money.

And I said, "Oh, by the way, we're going to lock you in there."

It took 'em eight hours to burn a million dollars.

That morning, fear and desperation were the order of the day.

But I had a job to do, and it was an important job to do, I thought,

to deny the enemy the South Vietnamese naval ships.

We had expected, frankly, a longer time period to get ready.

We had been told by people in our intelligence community

that we might have as long as the 4th of May,

but the North Vietnamese were closing in quite tightly,

and clearly it was time to send the signal to leave.

I knew this...

but I didn't know how many civilians were going to be on board.

I had no idea.

I was the first one into the embassy.

And my only mission at this time,

this is early in the afternoon, was to bring the Ambassador out.

It was actually a mission that was called "Embassy Snatch."

I was just supposed to get the Ambassador.

I land and I said to the people,

I said, "I'm here to get the Ambassador."

Well, not quite.

The Ambassador refused to leave until he could get

as many Vietnamese on as many choppers as possible.

The evacuation of Vietnamese happened

because Graham Martin wanted it to happen.

So they loaded some Vietnamese onto my helicopter

and because I'm supposed to have the Ambassador on board,

we go right to the command ship, the USS Blue Ridge.

ROTORS WHIR

We land on the Blue Ridge, General Carey comes out,

wants to know where the Ambassador is. I said, "Well, he didn't get on."

I mean, I don't know who I'm supposed to tell,

but I told everybody I was supposed to get the Ambassador

but the Ambassador didn't get on. So that starts the lift.

Like I say, we had 75 Marine Corps helicopters.

You and your wingman would fly into the embassy,

get your passengers loaded,

and fly back out to the ships.

It was a little over an hour back and forth.

On the USS Kirk, our mission was to protect the helicopters moving

from the embassy out to the aircraft carriers and back and forth.

We were very close to the action.

You could stand there on the deck

and you could watch it all happening.

We thought that the USS Kirk was just going to be

an observer to this whole thing,

when all of a sudden on radar we started seeing these little blips

coming out from the shore.

I really don't know where to start.

We looked up at the horizon

and all you could see were helicopters all heading toward us.

These were not Marine Corps helicopters,

they were small helicopters, the little Hueys,

which were never part of the evacuation plan.

But they were flying over top of us.

We were watching them fly over top over and over and over again.

We viewed them as enemy until we could verify who it was.

Then we realised that these were South Vietnamese trying to escape.

I figured if we could save one,

at least we'd save 15, 20 people.

They were packed in there like sardines.

So I made a decision.

Land the helicopter.

One of our sailors could speak rudimentary Vietnamese,

so we put him on the radio and he started broadcasting.

"This is ship 1087. Land here."

MAN SPEAKS VIETNAMESE OVER RADIO

So, we got his attention.

He came flying over and landed on our flight deck.

And it turned out that the pilot, he was the pilot

for the Deputy Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Real high up.

And he had the general with him, who was a two-star general,

and the two-star general's nephew,

three women and about four children.

It was a big deal for us.

When it landed and we got everything off, and I looked up,

because there were five, six, seven stacked up ready to land.

Turned out that all throughout the southern part of Vietnam

there were South Vietnamese Army and Air Force installations

with one or two or three or four helicopters.

And those helicopters were flyable.

Their pilots were there.

And when they realised that the evacuation was happening

and they weren't going to be part of it, they said, "Oh, yeah, we are."

These young Vietnamese pilots would go to their homes,

land right in their front yards, pick up their families

and anybody else, and head out to sea,

hoping they can rendezvous with a ship.

Well, we were one of the first ships they saw.

Our flight deck will only take one helicopter at a time landing.

There are no wheels on them, they just have skids.

We couldn't think of what else to do

and these other planes were looking for a place to land,

so we just physically pushed them.

Of course, this was a big old helicopter, thousands of pounds,

so we had to figure out how to get it 15 feet over

to the edge of the flight deck.

You don't have time to think about what you did, you just had to do it.

So, we open up our flight deck and they begin to land,

one right after the other.

Some of 'em were shot at, holes in 'em.

Most of the Vietnamese who came out, I'm talking about the flight crews,

they were heavily armed,

all with side arms, some with M-16 rifles.

They had no idea what was going to happen,

so they came out ready for anything, really.

So we had to disarm them.

None of them had ever landed on a ship before.

They were Vietnamese Air Force.

Everybody had a gun and we took all the guns away from them.

Then about five minutes later another one came in and landed.

And we pushed his airplane over the side.

That was the second one. I helped push that one over, too.

Then the third plane came in.

It landed also.

We pushed it over the side.

So meanwhile, we've thrown three helicopters in the water so far.

This is incredible. I know you probably don't believe any of this,

but it's all true.

By late afternoon, the chopper flow at the embassy really started.

And each time a bird came in,

here would go another 40-50 people.

But did the right mix of people get out?

You know, who says that these were the people

who either deserved or should have gone out?

SHOUTING

At the embassy a lot of the people who got out

happened to be good wall jumpers.

The choppers started coming in at ten-minute intervals.

One would land on the roof and one would land on the parking lot.

They would put all the Vietnamese in groups,

they would search them, and if they had any weapons

all those weapons were thrown into the swimming pool.

And as soon as the chopper would land,

they would be brought into the restricted area

where a couple of the Marines

would escort 'em into the aircraft.

Then they would raise the ramp up...and take off.

I remember I talked to my friend and he said, "Oh, it's our turn now.

"We're almost there." You know, so we're all excited.

And I remember very distinctively that every time

the helicopter coming down it just blew us away.

We have to duck down to fight with the wind of the chopper.

Three of the choppers that came in

each landed a platoon of 40 Marines from the task force.

And they had to be brought in

because we didn't have enough Marines

in the Embassy Security Guard to secure the walls.

I went with my wife to the embassy.

A lot of people, they clenched to the top of the wall,

but they couldn't get in.

Each gate was besieged like that,

although the side gate was the principal place where they came.

People holding letters saying, you know,

"I worked for the Americans. Please let me in."

Journalists were arriving and counting on being recognised

to be let in by the Marines.

There was a sea of people

wanting to get out by helicopters.

But, well, they looked up at the helicopters leaving

and I could see their eyes.

Desperate eyes.

My dad flew a Chinook helicopter

in the South Vietnamese Air Force.

He had been waiting for orders,

but his captain had, you know, basically just left.

So he and some other pilots

picked out the best Chinooks and took off.

He said it was the Wild West at this point.

Just you and your horse and you just do what you had to do to survive

and take care of your family.

He had given my mom a heads-up

that if she did hear a Chinook coming, to get ready.

I was six and a half years old.

I can still hear the rumbling,

a very, you know, familiar rumbling of a Chinook.

When you hear the Chinook coming, you know it's coming.

I knew my dad was coming.

In Saigon, during my childhood,

it was like, say, living in the middle of busy LA.

So, there's really not a big area to land the Chinook.

So he came in and landed in a play field.

Caused a lot of wind, caused a lot of commotion.

My mom grabbed my little sister,

who was about six months at that time,

and I had a little brother who was about three or four years old, and myself.

We quickly ran into the Chinook

and we all flew off out into the Pacific Ocean.

My dad was afraid for not having enough fuel,

afraid for a lot of things.

He was just flying blind.

And then he saw a ship out there.

In the middle of the day, after we had taken those first helicopters aboard,

this huge helicopter called a Chinook,

it came out and tried to land on the ship.

And oh, we almost... The thing almost crashed onboard our ship.

This big Chinook showed up.

There's no way he could land on Kirk without impacting the ship.

He would have killed everybody on this helicopter plus my crew.

It was way too big to land.

We thought that the helicopter would just fly away.

But as the ship was moving forward,

probably four, five, six knots, something like that,

the pilot communicated that he was running low on fuel.

He opened up the port side of the helicopter

and he hovered across the stern of the Kirk.

Then, all of a sudden, here comes a human.

One by one, we jump out.

I jumped out, my brother jumped out.

My mom was holding my sister...obviously very scared.

And she just, you know, just trustingly, just with one hand,

with her right hand, holding on with her left to brace herself,

you know, just dropped my baby sister.

One fella's standing there and he said he looked up

and he saw this big bundle of stuff come flying out and it was a baby.

It was the one-year-old baby.

And then the mother jumped out and he caught her, too.

Then the pilot flew out on our starboard, right side.

He hovered with his wheels in and out of the water.

He hovered there for like ten minutes and we couldn't figure out what he was doing.

And it turned out what he was doing was taking his flight suit off.

Here's a man flying a twin-rotor helicopter by himself,

at the same time he's taking off a flight suit.

How you do it, I've talked to helicopter pilots

and they can't figure out how he did that, you know,

like a Houdini, trying to get out of this thing.

And, finally, he made the helicopter roll to the right

as he stepped out the door on the left.

ROTORS WHIR

Just...a thunderous loud noise.

The shrapnel is just blowing up.

And suddenly...just quiet.

And he pops up and he's alive.

APPLAUSE

And he swam away.

And the helicopter was only about 20ft from him when it hit the water.

-It was amazing.

-CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

We went out and picked him up. He was no worse for the wear.

He was a little bit wet.

Only one unfortunate thing is he had some small bars of gold,

which was all his worldly possessions,

that were in his shirt pocket and it sank.

So he lost everything. He didn't own a thing but his underwear

when he finally came aboard the ship.

He was a tremendous pilot.

The guy was just so cool and calm.

We've so far taken a total of 17 helicopters.

We ended up with 157 people aboard this ship.

And that crew was very special.

They went, they took their money,

went to the Navy Exchange and Commissary,

bought all the clothes and food they could get,

took it up and gave it to the refugees they had befriended.

They were unbelievable.

We laid mats and all kinds of blankets and stuff out

on the deck for the babies.

And there were all kinds of...there were infants and children and women,

and oh, it was a scene I'll never forget.

We were happy. My mom was just, you know, "Wow!"

Symbolically, it was like, you know, the first step

onto not American soil, but American freedom.

When we started the evacuation we were very, very excited about it.

Then your next emotion probably was

just determined to get this job done and get these people out.

And then, later as it went on, you became fatigued and frustrated

that you could never make a dent in the amount of people

that were coming out of the embassy.

You'd ask questions like, "Was the crowd getting any smaller?

"When are we going to finish this?" you know. And they'd say,

"You know, we're under orders from the Ambassador. We're doing the best we can."

Carrier pilots were saying, look, it's an uncontrollable sea of people

and Ambassador Martin has lost his objectivity,

that Ambassador Martin is trying to evacuate all of Saigon

through the US embassy.

But he was doing his best under terrible circumstances.

JOSEPH MCBRIDE: Ambassador Martin

was dragging out the evacuation as long as he could

to get as many South Vietnamese out as possible.

Each helicopter took about 40 people.

He knew that once the Americans were gone,

the evacuation would be over.

So they just put one or two Americans on each one.

You're very tired and you're not seeing an end to this thing.

So I got the word out,

"You know, we could use some help out here.

"We only have 75 helicopters."

And the word comes back, "No.

"No, Marine pilots don't get tired."

Back at the embassy under the Ambassador's direction,

we, of course, were taking advantage of the presence of the aircraft

to evacuate threatened folks.

But there were other independent efforts...to get people out.

MCBRIDE: Several of us at the embassy agreed that we would drive vans

down to the docks on the Saigon River.

I had an assigned assembly point in the middle of Saigon,

and I crammed about 15 people into a nine-person van

and then drove through the streets of Saigon

through various checkpoints down to the docks.

People would get out

and go running for these commercial boats and get on.

I made a number of runs

and there'd just be more and more and more people.

Finally, as the sun was going down,

we were running out of light.

A man came up to me.

I turned to him and said, "This is my last load.

"You know, I can't take any more."

I said, "Well, get your family." And he said, "Can't do it.

"My family's too big.

"My family's too big."

And he just shook my hand and said, "Thanks for trying,"

and walked away.

So I came back to the embassy and parked the van.

It was already getting well into twilight.

Got my way through the crowd. It was a big crowd.

I had nothing more I could do.

So I went to get on the helicopter

and Ambassador Martin pulled me out of line and he said,

"I know what you've been doing. I know you've been out there.

"We've been talking. I want to thank you."

I thought that was...a kind gesture.

By that time it was definitely dark.

The lights of the...of the helicopter inside

radiated very clearly.

I sat down, looked around.

I was one of maybe two or three Americans.

The rest were all Vietnamese.

And we flew out.

It was very dark, I remember that.

And people started to elbow each other

and try to get in the front line.

And that's when Captain Herrington

started speaking to us in Vietnamese.

-HE SPEAKS VIETNAMESE

-"Nobody is going to be left behind."

HE SPEAKS VIETNAMESE

And then he said, "When you are in American embassy,

"you are in American soil.

"I promise, me and my soldier will be the last one

leave the embassy."

So after that announcement everybody feel relaxed.

Literally, we totally relaxed.

We had nothing to worry about. Yeah.

-KISSINGER:

-We were told that the North Vietnamese tanks

were coming very close.

So we asked, we in the White House,

asked the Defence Department how many South Vietnamese were left.

"Left" meant inside the embassy compound.

And then we calculated how many helicopters

it would take to get them out.

We told Martin that he had to be on the last helicopter.

All I know is that in Washington

there was confusion about the numbers on the ground.

At 1am there were 1,100 people left to evacuate.

After we'd had a flurry of choppers

and cleaned out more than half of them

and there were 420 people left,

we received an order from Washington that the lift was over

other than the extraction of the remaining Americans.

About 4:00 in the morning, 4:30, I land on the USS Blue Ridge again.

So, General Carey comes out...

gives me an apple and a cup of coffee or something and says,

"We're under orders from the President.

"You got to get the Ambassador out."

So we fly in. I land on the roof exactly at 4:50 in the morning

and I said, "I'm not leaving until the Ambassador's onboard."

One of the Marines lowered the flag, folded it up,

and escorted the Ambassador up to the landing zone up on top of the embassy

and he gave him the flag.

And, uh, that was it.

Major Kean came to Colonel Madison, said, "No more.

"Only Americans from this point on."

And Madison said, "The hell you say. We've got these people over here."

And Kean said, "Sir, not going to happen.

"It's a presidential order."

And Madison said, "I'll take this up with the Ambassador."

He was very hot under the collar.

And Kean said, "You can't, that's him,"

and pointed to the CH-46 that was just flying away.

So the Ambassador's on board.

And...out we go.

We land on the Blue Ridge.

15 or 20, maybe 25 people get off with the Ambassador

and that was the end of it.

I flew 18.3 hours straight through.

Graham Martin looked very tired, extremely haggard.

I mean, he looked like... I'm sure the pressure was immense.

And at what time were you to cease evacuation?

Cease evacuation?

We could still be flying if we hadn't gotten the Ambassador out,

cos he...he refused to stop the lift.

-I think about 3:00.

-3:00 in the morning?

-No, 3:45.

Colonel Madison says to me, "We're screwed.

"Stu, you stay down here in the parking lot

"and keep these 420 people warm."

Meaning, if they see us all leave at the same time they'll panic.

"And then make your way to the roof. We've got to go."

And he was very angry and very disappointed.

So they disappeared into the embassy.

And I went to where the remaining Vietnamese who were waiting

-and told them...

-HE SPEAKS VIETNAMESE

"Big helicopters about to come."

And...waited a few minutes.

Then I saw a chopper take off and I thought,

"Shit! Was I supposed to be on that one?"

So, I looked at the Vietnamese and I said...

HE SPEAKS VIETNAMESE

"I've got to take a leak."

And I left into the shadows.

I made my way around in a circuitous route

and went into the embassy.

I thought about how this really, really was wrong.

I thought maybe I should just say, "I'm not leaving till they go, cos I promised 'em."

Then I said, "Don't be a fool.

"Maybe they've started shooting down helicopters for all you know.

"You're not going to get anybody else out.

"It's a presidential order.

"This decision has been made."

So, I got to the roof and a CH-46 alighted on the rooftop,

put its ramp down and we got on board.

As it took off, the door was open.

And down in the parking lot I could see the group of 420 of them.

They were right were we had left them marshalled on this little patch of grass.

I felt absolutely awful.

It was just so...serious and deep a betrayal.

Later that night, I was quite surprised

that I got a call to "Come alongside the flagship.

"The Admiral wants to speak to you."

My first reaction, as any CO, is, "What did we do?"

Not realising we had been picked for a special mission.

We were supposed to pick up this person.

He was 30 years old, came aboard, civilian clothes.

And...the Captain was just told

to take his direction from this guy.

I went aboard the Kirk and met with Captain Paul Jacobs.

And the first thing he said to me is,

"Young man, I'm not accustomed

"to strange civilians coming aboard my ship armed

in the middle of the night." And I said, "Captain, I assure you, neither am I."

He smelled like a Naval officer, you know.

You know, one officer can smell another one.

So, I looked him up in the blue book. He's a graduate of the Naval Academy.

So from that point on we were fine. "What do you want to do?"

And we worked together as a team.

We steamed down to Con Son Island

and we could see on the radar display that there were a lot of blips.

And I remember dawn breaking and the sun coming up,

and seeing what I had seen as a radar display in person.

There were dozens of ships.

And not just Vietnamese naval ships,

but also civilian ships.

And they were all totally crammed with...with people.

There are no words to describe

what a ship looks like that holds 200 and it's got 2,000 on it.

I don't think anybody really understood the magnitude of it

until we looked at what we had got in front of us.

It looked like something out of Exodus.

Our mission was to help the ships into international waters.

But now they had all these people.

My reaction is, "How the hell are we going to do this?"

Most of the Vietnamese Navy ships were dead in the water,

some were anchored, some were just adrift.

So, we sent over our engineering, technical people

to see what we could do to help them and get 'em under way.

We had worked a plan out to sail the ships to the Philippines.

And the Kirk was going to escort them.

But the fact that they're going to be crammed with an unknown number of civilians

was somewhat problematic.

The US Government already had a refugee problem

with the US Naval ships.

This was another 30,000 or more people to deal with.

We were up all night talking about it.

And I'm convinced that if we sent them back or took them back,

they would have killed them all. And Armitage decided to bring 'em.

And he didn't get permission from Washington to do that.

I thought it was a lot easier to beg forgiveness

than to get permission.

So the decision was made.

And they all went with us.

SHIP'S HORN

We had finally got out the last of the refugees

that we could get out.

Now we had to evacuate the Marines.

They were all inside the embassy building except for us.

I was still on the embassy grounds with two of my sergeants

and I said, "You two stay right with me.

"Don't leave my side."

We slowly walked backwards to the embassy door

and a couple of Vietnamese came towards me.

I said, "We have no more helicopters. That's it. I'm sorry.

"We cannot take you."

And they began to argue with me. They spoke good English, too.

"We can ride in your helicopter." I said, "I'm sorry, no more."

So we spun around and slammed these huge doors,

and we locked it from behind.

I kind of fall asleep off and on,

but what gets me woke up is the noise.

It's the different noise.

So I kind of look up.

And the first thing in my sight was

I didn't see that soldier there any more on that wall.

There were people throwing blankets or jackets

and materials over the barbed wire

so they can climb over the wire to come in.

It was like, "Where are the soldiers?"

We were going up the stairs

and below me I could hear feet running on the stairway.

When we got to the roof, Master Sergeant Valdez was there.

He says, "We got everybody?"

"Yeah." I said, "Man, there's somebody chasing me up those stairs."

There were wall lockers up on the roof

and those big fire extinguishers with wheels,

so we tilted all those wall lockers and the fire extinguishers,

put 'em against the door.

There was a little window there that we could see 'em in there,

all the Vietnamese trying to get to the roof.

The Marines started going out as choppers came in.

Then all of a sudden choppers all ceased.

There was 11 of us still left there.

The briefing was delayed until the evacuation was completed

and the last helicopters are now in the air.

The President commends the personnel of the armed forces

who accomplished it, as well as Ambassador Graham Martin

and the staff of his mission who served so well

under difficult conditions.

-KISSINGER:

-We were told that Martin had left on the last helicopter

and that the evacuation had ended.

I'm confident that every American who wanted to come out is...is out.

So we held a briefing.

Well, it turned out not to be the last helicopter,

because there was another horrendous screw-up.

There were no helicopters.

You know, we were just kind of sitting down around

looking at each other,

wondering, you know, what's going to happen here,

you know, whether they truly had forgotten about us.

So I got on my radio and I began saying, "US Navy, US Navy,

"American Embassy, request extraction immediate."

And I repeated this over and over and over.

The only option we had was sit on the stupid roof,

like a sitting duck.

And I kept thinking, "Where are the North Vietnamese?"

About 7:45 in the morning,

you could start seeing the North Vietnamese coming down the road.

My thoughts were, "What's to keep them from bombing

the top of the embassy roof and blowing us off," you know?

A tank is going to take one shot, if it hits the building, you're gone.

So I didn't like the idea of being up there,

but where else are you going to go?

Finally, I looked out and I saw a black dot.

When that chopper landed, I told the Marines, "Go! Get in!"

I was the last one out.

And as I was putting my foot on the ramp, I fell down,

and I'm just hanging on and the ramp's going up.

The ramp is closing

and I did what I was trained in my first tour...count.

So I went, "One, two, three, four, five, six...ten.

"Ten?! One, two, three, four, five, six...ten. Ten!"

And I looked at the crew chief and I said, "Put it down."

I knew I was missing one man.

HE LAUGHS I remember looking at the ramp

and two hands were over the top of it.

So the Marines just kind of grabbed me and then just pulled me in.

We left, by my watch, at 7:58 Saigon time.

And we were the last 11.

My cameraman, Neil Davis, and I decided to stay.

We saw the last helicopter leave from the roof.

We then tried to scramble into the embassy ourselves.

Neil got to the roof, I did not.

And he saw dozens of Vietnamese

just sitting on the helicopter pad on the roof of the embassy,

waiting, wanting to get out.

And, of course, no more helicopters were going to come.

I didn't join 'em.

I was actually...scared.

If the Communists come in,

the last thing we want them to see us is in the American Embassy.

So we get out.

People were coming in and out of the buildings.

Literally, anything that could not be fastened down

or was not fastened down was being taken away.

Any souvenirs from the Ambassador's office were taken away.

Almost brick by brick the embassy was being dismantled.

It was ordinary looting,

but more than that, I think it was just frustration and anger

and an opportunity to get back, perhaps, at the Americans,

because in the view of many in that crowd that day,

we had deserted 'em.

NBC news correspondent, Jim Laurie,

is one of the few Americans still left in Saigon,

in the city when President Duong Van Minh went on the radio

and told the Viet Cong

that his country would surrender unconditionally

and that he had told its army to lay down its arms.

Here from Saigon radio hook-up is Laurie's report on the surrender.

In the words of General Minh, "We are here to hand over

the power of government to you in order to avoid bloodshed."

It is a unilateral ceasefire and an unconditional surrender.

The 30-year war in South Vietnam is at last over.

The first thing I did was to destroy my documents,

my badges, just keeping the civilian ID.

And then I went around Saigon to see what happened.

I saw a lot of South Vietnamese soldiers in underwear.

They took off all their military clothes, boots,

and they threw them away.

And I thought, well, what would happen to them?

And to me, to myself.

Right.

I thought of my friends who were killed in action.

And I thought, "Well, is this what we fought for?"

"Is this what the Americans came for?"

And I didn't have the answer.

I have wrestled with this...ever since.

I realised that I had become...

the quintessential American in Vietnam.

I had all these causes, all these big things I was doing.

I was trying to get the truth back to Washington.

I was talking to agents, trying to persuade the Ambassador,

and I forgot...that what was at stake were human lives.

For years after that, I hear that sound in my head,

that sound like, "Tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk."

In the middle of the night I just jump up.

I thought the helicopter had come to pick me up.

I called it "dream in the wind."

Later we found out the big fleet is out there.

You can just take a boat and go there. They take everybody.

If you can get out there, you're on board.

And I just didn't know that.

You know, so...

As we approached the Philippines with our refugees,

there was a big problem.

They wouldn't let us in.

And the reason they wouldn't let us in

is because the government there had recognised the new regime in Vietnam

and these Navy ships we were escorting,

they were all flying South Vietnamese flags.

And the solution was to reflag all these ships

as American ships.

They lowered their Vietnamese flag, people crying.

It was very emotional for them to lose their country,

their flag, their ship.

Everything was gone.

And then we raised the American flag.

We tried to do that with as much dignity as we could.

There were thousands and thousands of Americans

who served in Vietnam who were sitting at home heartbroken

at watching this whole thing come to naught.

The end of April of 1975 was...

the whole Vietnam involvement in a microcosm.

Promises made in good faith, promises broken,

people being hurt because we didn't get our act together.

You know, the whole Vietnam War is a story that kind of sounds like that.

But on the other hand,

sometimes there are moments when good people

have to rise to the occasion and do the things that need to be done.

And in Saigon, there was no shortage of people like that.