Escape from Saigon Read online

  “Jesus!” Carwood thought for a moment. “Screw it. The tree has to come down. I’ll deal with the ambassador—and, if necessary, defend you, or maybe both of us, at any trial. But it’s not going to get any easier when those big choppers start coming in. Your men will have their hands full keeping the people out there from mobbing them as soon as they touch down.”

  “We know what happened when Da Nang was overrun,” said the colonel. “Don’t you worry, the Marines have some experience when it comes to organizing a fallback—and this won’t be our first rodeo. I was a young buck private in China when the Kuomintang fell to Mao’s communists and we had to evacuate Chiang Kai-shek’s entire army to Taiwan. We did a good job then and we can do it now!”

  * * *

  Ever since Carwood told her about the evacuation plan, Thu kept her transistor radio tuned to Armed Forces Radio. She was in her office at the embassy when at last she heard the song, “White Christmas.” She immediately set her own plan in motion.

  Her bag was packed and waiting behind the door. Thu avoided the elevator and took the stairs to the first floor, exited by a side door, and walked as casually as possible to the parking area. She pulled her Honda out from the row of motorbikes and slowly walked it toward a rear gate. Just as she reached the gate, Ambassador Martin entered the compound followed by his cook and two bodyguards, one carrying a pair of suitcases and the other leading his Yorkshire terrier on a leash.

  “Taking a trip, Mr. Ambassador?” Thu said, as Martin brushed past her, avoiding eye contact.

  Thu was not about to let it go. She wheeled her bike around and blocked his way.

  “You have room for your dog but not Vietnamese people. Is that your ‘contingency’ plan?” she said.

  As Martin stammered unintelligibly, Thu turned her back and moved past. The Marine guard opened the gate. Martin didn’t see him give her a thumbs-up as she passed.

  Getting through the crowds massing at the wall was her next obstacle. She gunned the engine and blasted the horn. The crowd parted enough to let her through.

  Thu sped to the Cholon district, less than three kilometers away, hoping Vinh had heard the signal as well. As she steered down the alley behind their apartment, she could see Vinh already standing outside, holding a suitcase. He hopped on behind her and Thu turned toward their assigned rendezvous point, the University of Saigon’s football pitch.

  People mobbed the streets, many of them on foot, all heading for Tan Son Nhut. As quickly as the refugees abandoned their homes and shops, looters followed, smashing windows and breaking down security grates to grab anything of value.

  “The university is only a kilometer away,” Thu shouted. “As soon as we cross the canal we’ll be there. The helicopter will be waiting.”

  As they rounded the corner, Thu and Vinh could see a big Marine helicopter, a Jolly Green Giant, settling to the ground in the distance. The chopper was huge—it could seat fifty passengers and pack in twice that number in a pinch. Fortunately, the plan to keep the pickup locations secret worked. The chopper would be able to move in and out so quickly there wouldn’t be time for panicked crowds to gather and rush the scene.

  “There’s the bridge!” Thu yelled. “Almost there!”

  As they neared the overpass, two North Vietnamese soldiers ran up the embankment and began waving everyone back. Several people in the street, realizing they were enemy soldiers, panicked and started to run toward the bridge. To stop them, one of the soldiers fired a burst over their heads with his AK-47. The crowd turned as one, ducking away from the bullets, just as the bridge exploded, sending wood and debris flying everywhere. The shockwave knocked Thu and Vinh off the bike and sent it skidding across the road, where it slammed against a utility pole.

  Everyone scattered, screaming. With a ferocious roar, the Jolly Green Giant rose in the distance, turned, and hurtled away from the area. Within seconds the streets around Vinh and Thu were empty. In the confusion, the North Vietnamese soldiers had also vanished.

  Vinh didn’t hesitate. He got to his feet and, hobbling on his withered leg, retrieved the motorbike and wheeled it over to Thu, who was kneeling by the curb, rummaging through her broken suitcase.

  “Do not bother with that now!” Vinh said. “Our lives are more important than clothes and perfumes. Now we need to leave!”

  “I’m not looking for our things,” Thu replied, pulling out a wallet—stuffed with U.S. dollars—that she had hidden in the lining. “It’s this that we will need when we leave.”

  As Thu jumped on the backseat, she glanced around to see the helicopter flying toward the sea where the U.S. Navy ships would be waiting.

  She yelled to Vinh, “We have to get to the CIA station on Gia Long Street! We’ll never get near the embassy, not anymore. The CIA evacuation point is our last chance!”

  * * *

  “Kowalski! Get in there and spell that man! I want this tree gone—today!”

  The gunnery sergeant was furious. The tamarind tree was proving to be made of ironwood. With two axes swinging at once, even his biggest Marines barely dented it. He knew that if they didn’t get the embassy courtyard clear in a hurry, the inbound choppers would have no place to set down. He couldn’t let that happen.

  “Where’s that chain saw! We called for it an hour ago! Tell those engineers I want to see it up here on the double, and that means now!”

  Two building maintenance engineers—the only two remaining at the compound—ran up from the equipment shed. One of them held a chain saw, and the look on his face told the sergeant there was something wrong.

  “We had to dig this out of the tool locker,” the man said, breathless. “No telling when the last time it was used. The carb’s all gummed up and—”

  “Are you telling me your equipment has a problem?” the sergeant bellowed. “I don’t want to hear it! You get that friggin’ saw running—now!—or I will personally tear you a new asshole!”

  Crouched down on the grass, the engineers worked anxiously, dousing the saw with solvent while scraping away at the crud caking the engine. Finally, one of them sprayed ether into the carburetor while the other repeatedly yanked the machine’s starter cord. The saw sputtered, then coughed into life.

  “Outstanding!” the sergeant yelled over the engine roar. “Now cut ’er down!”

  It took less than five minutes to fell the tamarind and cut the limbs into pieces small enough to be carried away. The courtyard was clear.

  “Let’s get some paint on that asphalt! We need a bull’s-eye big enough for the choppers to see—and some lights, once it gets dark. They’ll be coming in quick and then getting the hell out quick, so we gotta clear their path.”

  The Marines went to work setting up the LZ, detailing men for crowd control, organizing the outgoing Vietnamese into separate lifts the helicopters could rapidly load. When the first H-53, a USAF chopper from the carrier Midway, roared down out of the sky, they were ready for it. The big chopper barely touched the asphalt, loaded up, then turned 360 degrees and flew out the way it came in—between the trees and buildings surrounding the embassy.

  While the Marines worked in the courtyard, the smaller Sea Knight helicopters continued to take American evacuees off the rooftop and fly them out to the Fleet. The tension inside and outside the embassy spiked when both LZs began operating at the same time, until Timson, the CIA Comms chief, took over as air traffic controller, coordinating the landings and takeoffs for both LZs.

  All went well for a while until the incoming helicopters abruptly disappeared when the chopper pilots reported heavy smoke coming from the embassy roof. Thinking the building had been attacked, the Fleet ordered them to back off.

  Carwood, too, saw the smoke pouring off the roof. He ran up the stairs, exiting the rooftop door in time to see three of his men furiously attempting to douse the flames in their burn barrels.

  “It’s the sodium nitrate!” one of them yelled. “Once it gets going—man, you can’t stop it!”

 
The fifty-five-gallon drums they were using to destroy their equipment had melted inches-deep into the roof’s built-up asphalt surface. Carwood and his men could only watch and wait until the fiery substance burned itself out. After a few minutes the flames died down, the smoke dissipated, and the air cleared. Carwood went to the roof edge and whistled loudly to the men below, signaling the all-clear.

  The airlift was back on.

  * * *

  Like a massive prehistoric beast, the scarred, battle-worn North Vietnamese T-59 tank clanked and growled to a halt a few meters short of the Ong Lanh Bridge. Below, the Saigon River moved listlessly, absent of traffic, its piers and moorings—normally crowded with river commerce—now empty. Across the span was the heart of the city, the central district, where most of the important buildings and offices were located. Directly ahead were the reconnaissance targets for this scouting mission—the embassies of the despised Americans and the equally despised French, as well as the soon-to-be-defeated nationalist government’s command center, the Presidential Palace.

  Colonel Binh Anh Le squinted through the tank’s periscope at the empty, trash-strewn streets. Darkness was coming early, a result of the heavy monsoon clouds that hung low overhead, a thick, damp blanket that blocked the sunlight and cast a gray pall across the scene.

  The colonel’s mood was equally gray. He should have been elated. Seven years to get here, he thought. More like an eternity since he left his mother and father in Hanoi and followed his brothers down the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos. Then, he was a lowly assistant gunner in his first tank—Shining Star they called it when they set out, Rusting Star as the weeks wore on—a snarling, foul-smelling, mechanically troubled antique leftover from the French war that somehow carried them all the way down into the southern Kontum wilderness. It took months, traversing terrifyingly steep mountain passes, then descending into jungle swamps that swallowed vehicles whole, fording one unnamed forest stream after another, grinding over teeth-rattling corduroy roads laboriously fashioned from logs. Through it all they endured countless nightmare days and nights when huge, thundering explosions—bombs dropped from invisible bombers high overhead—laid entire mountainsides to waste. Many comrades disappeared in those raids, vaporized or buried under the torn earth. The colonel recalled how he barely escaped with his own life in the first battle he took part in, their attack on a Montagnard and American military encampment at Polei Kleng, a victory that left his tank a smoking ruin but presaged the beginning of the long war’s end.

  “Do we cross, comrade colonel?” his driver asked from the dark innards of the tank, beneath and to the left of the colonel’s turret seat. Squeezed in among the racks of high-explosive cannon shells, the driver, a beardless youth named Kang, looked to be about fifteen or sixteen at the most. Looked very much like himself, Le thought, when he drove the Rusting Star.

  The colonel released the turret latch and raised the hatch cover. He wanted a better look at the Saigon he had heard so much about but had only seen in grainy photos and newsreels. Slowly lifting his head above the turret, he cautiously scanned the empty streets for enemy soldiers. Nothing moved. Perhaps the snipers were already asleep at this hour, he thought. He looked up the broad avenue that stretched away from the bridge—Nguyen Thai Hoc, according to his map. The city within view was impressive, much bigger than the Hanoi he remembered, with taller buildings. He hoped they would not have to destroy it when the invasion began.

  He ordered the driver to move forward, slowly. As the tank crossed the bridge and neared an intersection, a high-pitched whine signaled a vehicle rapidly approaching, then suddenly a motorbike with two people astride burst into the intersection. Its driver was already swerving onto Nguyen Thai Hoc when he spotted the tank. Too late to turn away, the man slammed on the brakes and swerved to a stop in the middle of the street, nearly throwing his passenger, a young woman, onto the pavement.

  Han, the tank gunner, reacted immediately, swiveling the turret around while simultaneously lowering the big 100-mm cannon to bear directly on the target. Kang also quickly sighted in on the motorbike with the tank’s forward-mounted machine gun.

  Before they could fire, the colonel commanded them to wait—he could see the pair was unarmed. They appeared to be two teenagers, civilians, probably trying to find a way to escape the inevitable invasion. For long moments, he watched the pair while the young couple stared back at him in silence. He imagined they were terrified—he would be, if he were staring down the barrel of a tank.

  If the young man was afraid he didn’t show it. He slowly edged forward to stand in front of the woman, who looked thoroughly surprised at encountering a tank—an enemy tank, no less—in the middle of Saigon, but who also showed no fear. When the tank didn’t fire the man said something to the woman that the colonel couldn’t hear, then he calmly righted the motorbike. Tentatively, the two began walking the bike out of the intersection, their gaze never leaving the tank, until they reached the corner of a building. The man nodded once at the soldier in the turret and without a word they disappeared around the corner.

  The colonel let out a sigh of relief. After all the killing and bloodshed he had seen in the years and months leading up to this moment, an encounter that did not result in lives lost was an unexpectedly welcome event. He suddenly felt lighter in spirit, the monsoon clouds notwithstanding.

  “You did well by not firing,” he said to the crew over the tank’s intercom. “Remember, we did not come here to kill civilians. We came to liberate them. The southern forces that have been our enemies all these years will be defeated, and later they will be reeducated and perhaps punished to truly understand their error. But we are still one people. We are all Vietnamese. And when we are victorious we must balance justice with mercy.

  “Now forward, comrade Kang—follow the river south to the next crossing, then let us return to our camp until we are called to fight again, if that is necessary. I think we have seen what we needed to see tonight. But be alert! Unlike those young people, there may be others about who are armed and eager to engage us. The South has not yet surrendered. There is still much to do before we claim Saigon as our prize!”

  * * *

  Nuoc sat quietly as she waited for Matt to return. He had gone in search of a motorbike, saying he knew where several had been abandoned after their owners disappeared. Pham always told her how resourceful he was. And dependable. It looked like Big Sister was right, as always.

  Before Matt arrived Nuoc hadn’t been afraid, but now that he had come all this way to help the family flee Saigon, now that she knew how much her sister Pham worried for their safety, she began to realize how dangerous their situation was, if the world beyond Saigon was afraid for them. On top of that, she still had not heard from her fiancé and no one she had spoken to knew the outcome of the battles at Phan Rang and Xuan Loc—other than that the South’s forces had been badly defeated. Fear was beginning to creep into her consciousness.

  The sound of an approaching motorbike startled her away from her thoughts. She stayed hidden in the alley, not recognizing the driver in his black helmet and sunglasses until he stopped in front of her hiding place.

  “Matt! Why are you scaring me like that?” she said, emerging from the shadows. “I thought you were some cyclo boy coming to get me!”

  “Only me, Nuoc. Just in case there are any NVA around—I don’t want to be picked out as an American, so this is the best disguise I could come up with on short notice.”

  “Nice bike. You buy it or steal it?”

  “Hey, us ex-military types don’t steal—we appropriate. People are leaving stuff all over the place. I found this Yamaha parked next to one of the embassy buses, both with keys in the ignition. I figured someone wanted to pass it along.”

  “Well, the White Mice are all gone, along with everyone else, so I guess it’s ours now.” She straddled the seat and gripped him around the waist. “Where to, cyclo boy?”

  “I’m thinking the U.S. Embassy is our only
way out of Saigon now.” He looked up the empty street, not a car moving and no one in sight. “Hang on, Nuoc—if we hurry, I’ll bet we can beat the traffic.”

  * * *

  As day turned to dusk, Matt and Nuoc cruised the now-deserted boulevards, heading for the central downtown district. It was beyond strange to see Saigon so empty—a city normally so crowded that pedestrians crossing the streets often did so with a prayer on their lips and their eyes closed, hoping the drivers would simply choose to avoid an accident. Neither of them spoke, hushed by the eerie silence beyond the whine of their motorbike. Occasionally, another motorbike or car appeared, but each time the vehicles veered away like fighter jets taking evasive action. Fear ruled the city.

  They crossed the Saigon River and headed northeast. Matt kept to the side streets, parallel to Vo Van Kiet, the graceful, palm-lined drive along the waterfront, hoping to avoid any sort of confrontation. He recognized enough landmarks to know where he was and how to get to the embassy. It wasn’t far now.

  When they entered the intersection at Nguyen Thai Hoc, a major boulevard that ran west from the river toward the Presidential Palace and its surrounding park, Saigon’s sprawling central greenspace, a sudden movement on his right caught Matt’s attention. What he saw when he turned startled him so much he almost let go of the handlebars.

  A tank—a fucking North Vietnamese tank!—sat guarding the intersection, no more than fifty yards from them, its cannon and machine guns pointed in their direction.

  His first thought was to get away, hit the gas and try to get past the intersection or behind one of the buildings before the tank’s guns ripped them apart. At the same moment he realized they would never make it. He slammed on the brakes and threw the bike into a spin. They were too exposed, too far from the nearest wall of protection. He let the bike stop and fall, and he and Nuoc stood there facing the guns, both of them hoping the tank crew might take them prisoner—or end it quickly. Either way, they were done for.