Last Days in Vietnam Page #3

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.

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 honor 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 b*tches. "

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

rumor, 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 authorization 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 time to get out.

And in Saigon at that time,

it was like, "Who do you know?"

The 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 gonna get people out,

we were gonna 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,

touching off three major fires.

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