Last Days in Vietnam Page #4

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 gonna continue

shelling Tan Son Nhut?

They had given us a warning, you know?

"Get out. "

As the sun came up, General Smith,

who was our defense

attach 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 gonna work.

"And we need to

consider that this is it.

"Option 4:

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," and 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 4.

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 form 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 we would

have to go to Option 4.

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

10:
00 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 treetops

glisten and children listen

To hear sleigh

bells in the snow...

That morning, Ambassador Martin

received a message that

said within 24 hours,

the U.S. 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, 300 feet 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

want 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.

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 O.B. Harnage.

He was blind in one

eye and lame in one leg.

And I said, "Harnage, we

got people at 6 Gia Long.

You gotta go pick them up. "

It was the deputy CIA station

chief's apartment building.

There were a number of

very high-risk Vietnamese,

including the defense

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 U.S. 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.

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,

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