Escape from Saigon Read online

  The date was April third. Riordan wondered how much time they really had left.

  Friday, April 4

  THE SPEEDOMETER WAS PUSHING EIGHTY KILOMETERS per hour as Lisette dodged the mud-filled bomb craters that pockmarked the dirt road. The potholes could be six feet deep, for all she knew. If she hit one the wrong way, the transmission would drop right out of the car.

  Lisette downshifted and navigated her prized Citroën around the obstacles. This was the only route leading to the plume of black smoke and orange-red flames rising above the trees. After passing some nasty-looking craters, she floored the gas pedal and sped toward the crash site, a few kilometers east of the air base.

  Despite the Citroën’s vaunted pneumatic shock absorbers, it kept bottoming out in the deep ruts, and she briefly worried about the brand-new CP-16 sound camera that her network recently issued to all the news crews. It was bouncing around on the backseat and looked like it would get dumped on the floor together with the canvas bag full of film magazines, microphones, gaffer tape, and the ever-present twenty dollar bill needed to bribe officials whenever they claimed they needed to “inspect” a bag and threatened to confiscate the “unauthorized” equipment.

  I wish Tuan were here to film. Where the hell is he? Lisette thought as she watched the flames shooting into the air. She then gripped the steering wheel tighter, hit the gas, and kept going as she glanced back to make sure her camera didn’t hit the floor. No camera, no story, she thought.

  Lisette had made a sign out of gaffer tape for the passenger side of the windshield. The foot-high letters spelled out BAO CHI, Vietnamese for PRESS.

  She figured the BAO CHI sign would get her through any South Vietnamese Army roadblocks. Or she hoped it would. Since the press was reporting on their defeats north of Saigon every day and portraying their army as being in disarray, bao chi was increasingly coming to mean persona non grata.

  “Damn, I wish Tuan were with me,” she said aloud. Tuan was a great camera and sound man, but more importantly, he was her fixer. Tuan could talk his way into and out of any situation. Without him, Lisette had only herself to rely on—that and her government-issued press pass, which showed she worked for the American broadcaster NBS.

  As Lisette drew closer to the crash site, the smoke thickened and grew more acrid. She could barely make out the gray carcass of the mammoth C-5 Galaxy transport plane that had fallen to earth less than an hour ago, cutting a mile-long swath of burning jet fuel through the rice paddies and grass before coming to a halt half-buried in the mud. A few peasants and what looked like several Western civilians—embassy staffers or journalists, perhaps—wandered among the pieces of ripped aluminum panels, smoldering seats cushions, and hundreds of suitcases burst open from the impact. The burning jet fuel stung her eyes, but it wasn’t the only smell in the air. The North Vietnamese Army had shelled this area the previous night, and the distinct odor of cordite from the artillery mingled with the smoke.

  As she pressed closer, two South Vietnamese soldiers from the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, or ARVN, who were guarding the road hopped from their jeep. Both looked like teenagers. The younger of the two raised his hand, signaling her to stop.

  “What are you doing here? You have no business, no business here!” the soldier challenged in English.

  Lisette stopped the car and got out, but instead of answering the soldier, she reached into the backseat for the camera, popped in a four-hundred-foot film magazine, hoisted it to her shoulder, and walked toward the jeep. In perfect Vietnamese, she told him, “I am a journalist with the American TV network NBS and it’s my job to be here, corporal. If I can’t drive any closer, I’ll roll up my pants and walk across the paddies. Please let me pass.”

  The soldiers didn’t know what to make of this vaguely Asian-American looking woman, who spoke Vietnamese like a native, but didn’t really look Vietnamese. She was too tall and she didn’t wear pajamas like the peasants, or an ao dai like a proper Vietnamese lady. “I got my mother’s ass. No way am I even trying on one of those,” she liked to tell her friends.

  When the soldiers didn’t respond, Lisette tried a more aggressive tack, again in perfect Vietnamese. “I need to get closer. I need film for TV,” she said, patting the camera. The Bao Chi press pass she wore on a lanyard around her neck had their attention now, she realized, most likely because it emphasized her tits.

  “Bao Chi,” she insisted, lifting the pass by its lanyard and waving it in front of the soldier’s face.

  “Bao Chi,” she repeated.

  “Soldier!” the corporal countered, slapping the magazine on the M-16 he held across his chest.

  As the argument grew, it attracted a small crowd of onlookers. Within moments, a crowd of journalists had gathered around her and began bombarding the ARVN soldiers with questions and demands to let them through.

  Finally, after some discussion with the soldier, Lisette agreed to leave the car and walk toward the wreckage. The downed jet transport had been flying mercy flights code-named “Operation Babylift” that were aimed at getting orphaned children of mixed American and Vietnamese heritage out of the country.

  Wreckage was strewn everywhere—blackened metal aircraft parts, huge shredded tires embedded in the mud, suitcases that had burst open and scattered clothing and the personal items of the hundreds of people onboard. And corpses, dozens of them, including many, many tiny bodies that looked too small to be real, like toy dolls cast about the field. As she stood in the ankle-deep mud and surveyed the scene, she didn’t know what was more pitiful, the tiny bodies or the stunned survivors wandering around, searching for the children who had been in their care. Their faces were blank. They showed about as much emotion as one does when looking for a quarter dropped in the street. That is until they found a loved one, then the pain became unbearable, the wailing so horrid, that Lisette, without realizing it, covered her ears with her hands to block the sound.

  Lisette then threw up and wiped her face with a Kleenex. Okay, get it together, she told herself, then began filming the wreckage and the faces of the survivors as they walked past. She tried to get one or two to talk, but got little response.

  After logging some footage, she asked an ARVN soldier, one of several who had arrived and were now guarding the site, to help her film her standup. He didn’t show much interest until she pulled out the twenty, which was far preferable to Vietnamese piasters. As soon as he saw the American greenback, the soldier broke into a smile and immediately reached out to hold the camera for her.

  “When I say ‘press here,’” she said, showing him the red button, “you press and hold it. And when I say ‘cut’ you let it go. Okay?” The soldier looked mystified, but he dutifully accepted the camera and aimed it toward Lisette.

  “One take and I get the hell out of here,” Lisette told herself, tapping the mic for a sound check. Then she smoothed her mud-spattered jacket, straightened her shoulders, and looked straight into the camera.

  “This was Operation Babylift, a last-ditch effort by the United States to remove …”

  Not right, damn it.

  “Okay, cut! Let’s start again…. Behind me is the wreckage of an Air Force C-5 Galaxy that was flying missions as part of Operation Babylift. The operation is a last-ditch effort to rescue the many children—orphans mostly, fathered by American soldiers—from the North Vietnamese advance on Saigon, and today it has gone horribly wrong. This huge C-5 transport plane—the largest ship in the U.S. Air Force arsenal—took off from Tan Son Nhut air base this morning carrying those children and over three hundred Americans fearing the worst if North Vietnam’s army overruns the city. All we know at this time is that there was an explosion on board and the pilots tried to return to the runway. No one knows if it was equipment failure, sabotage, or possibly enemy fire. We understand the pilot and co-pilot survived along with several crewmembers and passengers. We are awaiting an official briefing that we hope will provide additional information. Lisette Vo, NBS News, Saigon.�
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  Lisette dropped the mic to her waist. “Okay … cut, stop filming … stop, cut.” After a moment, the soldier got the message and released the Record Button.

  Lisette took the movie camera from the soldier and trudged back to her car. Of the many bad days and hundreds of tragic reports she had aired since arriving in-country, this was the worst. She threw her equipment into the backseat, jumped in, and, as she drove back to Saigon, turned up the volume on her radio as far as it would go.

  “Damn this war! It’s never going to stop,” she screamed, “Never! Not today, not tomorrow, not next month, not next year. Fucking never!”

  * * *

  “You look like crap,” Sam exclaimed the minute he turned toward Lisette, who had taken the bar stool next to him. She usually affected a calm, perfectly composed demeanor off camera as she did when she was doing a standup for NBS. But now her blouse was filthy, her hair was sweaty, her shoes caked with mud; she didn’t even look like the Lisette he had known since he met her over ten years ago.

  “You really know how to put on the charm,” Lisette responded halfheartedly.

  Sam looked at her again, “Yeah, but you still look like crap … So what’s wrong?”

  “I can’t talk about it right now.”

  “Okay,” Sam said as he turned slightly away and went back to sipping his drink.

  “Sam, it was horrible.”

  “This sounds like talking about it,” Sam interjected.

  “I mean, I’ve seen dead soldiers but not this, Sam, the dead babies from the crash. They were strewn about the rice paddies like they’d been discarded. The loadmasters strapped them into the lower level in these little cardboard carton bassinettes. Then the plane bellied in. The embassy put the count at seventy-eight. Seventy-eight babies died in the crash, Sam! They never stood a chance.”

  Jean Paul placed Lisette’s gin and tonic in front of her. “Something stronger, Jean Paul,” Sam asked. Jean Paul returned with two shots of Jim Beam and slid them over to Sam and Lisette.

  “Sam, there were three hundred people on that plane. Those kids are dead now. They were orphans, mostly children of GIs and their Vietnamese girlfriends. They were all mixed race, they never had a chance before the crash, and they wouldn’t have had any kind of life in Vietnam. And now this! Plus the embassy people—my God, we saw some of those people every day. They were our friends. And the eleven crew members. All dead. Dead, Sam! Fucking dead.”

  “And the survivors?”

  “Huh?”

  “Survivors? Were … there … any … survivors?”

  “Yes, Sam. There were survivors. You’re the one who always looks at the dark side of everything that happens in this country. Now you want to switch and see something positive in all this? Okay, two hundred people survived. They’re flying the orphans to the Philippines. They’ll make it to American or Australia. They’ll be adopted. They’ll have lives …”

  “You survived, didn’t you?”

  While Sam’s version of a pep talk didn’t help much, the tear he wiped from Lisette’s cheek did. For the first time in a long while Lisette had shown some vulnerability. Sam liked it, but he didn’t linger in the moment.

  “Come on, let’s take a walk by the river, you can see the stars from there. It always makes me feel better,” Sam said, touching Lisette’s shoulder. As he motioned her toward the exit, she turned toward him and kissed him.

  “I don’t need the stars, Sam. I need you.”

  Lisette grabbed Sam by the hand and dragged him down the hallway to the Caravelle lobby, where an elevator was waiting. As soon as the door closed and the elevator reached the third floor, she flipped the switch to Out-of-Service. Lisette wanted Sam inside her now. She wanted to feel alive, connected, and she wanted to be rid of all the death she had seen that morning. She wanted it out of her, out in a single burst of passion. They made love, deep and hard, keeping their moans to a whisper.

  Sam held Lisette close to him, looked into her face, and kissed her. She held him tight, savoring the moment, until someone from the gathering crowd in the lobby yelled, “Hey, who’s holding up the elevator?”

  Lisette pushed Sam away, hiked up her black lace panties, and pulled her bra down to cover her breasts. She buttoned her blouse and fluffed up her hair.

  “I need to get to my floor!” chimed in another from the lobby below.

  “Send the car down!”

  Sam, who never even took off his glasses, composed himself and flipped the switch to In-Service. The elevator groaned back to life and descended to the lobby. As soon as the door opened, a half dozen people squeezed into the waiting car, barely giving Lisette and Sam a chance to get out.

  Sam spoke first. “What was that, Lise? Emergency sex?”

  “Yes, Sam, it was emergency sex. That’s all it was, nothing more,” she said, as she turned her back on him and walked away, muttering under her breath, “Sam, you are such an asshole.”

  Saturday, April 5

  SAM ESPOSITO HAD BEEN IN SOUTH Vietnam for thirteen years, arriving in 1963 with the same red Olivetti portable he used to type his term papers at Yale. At the time he showed up there were 3,200 American military advisors in-country under the newly organized Military Assistance Command—Vietnam, or MAC-V, which would remain in charge of a war that started out as a humanitarian effort with limited military involvement. As the government explained in a mimeographed press release: “The MAC-V mission in South Vietnam is to secure over ten thousand villages and hamlets in the country. As part of that mission the U.S. Army will build schools, provide water and other needed services to ward against insurgents and the spread of Communism in Asia.”

  This supposedly altruistic plan did not last long. The South Vietnamese forces, under an oppressive “democratic” regime, proved too weak and inept to withstand their determined North Vietnamese enemies. Before long, the number of American soldiers in Vietnam grew into the hundreds of thousands as U.S. forces gradually took on the task of fighting a communist takeover.

  In one of Sam’s earlier dispatches for the Legend, he wrote: “The danger is being presented here and in Washington as a domino effect, with military advisors claiming that if South Vietnam falls to the communists, so falls Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand to Communist rule.”

  By 1967 a half million American servicemen were in Vietnam. As fighting intensified and many of those soldiers died, protests against the war increased at home. Ultimately, the war was viewed as a failed mission, unwinnable by American military power. The U.S. reversed course and started reducing its involvement. Every year fewer solders were sent to Vietnam. In 1973, the war was officially turned over to the South Vietnamese in a process called “Vietnamization.” With American boys no longer being sent to Vietnam, the home-front protests also stopped. Politicians declared the war over and Vietnamization a huge success, and said the world had been saved from the communist tide.

  Two years after the official end of America’s involvement, Sam wrote a piece for the Legend’s Sunday Week in Review:

  “Though Pentagon officials put the number of U.S. military in Vietnam at fifty, he wrote, there is not a single correspondent in the country who believes the number is anywhere near that low. For that matter, neither do the North Vietnamese, who claim there are thousands of Americans still fighting in Vietnam and are demanding they leave before they will even talk about a negotiated peace. Since I counted fifty U.S. servicemen at Le P’tit last Friday night, I’m guessing there are a few more American soldiers somewhere in-country. Perhaps they are on KP peeling onions at a secret mess hall.”

  April 1975 was a sharp contrast to the war that began while Sam was at Yale in the 1960s. Back then there was no doubt—come up with an alternative or be drafted and sent to fight in Vietnam right after graduation. Sam, who was to graduate in 1962, was caught in that wave. He even wrote articles for the campus newspaper about how students weighed the options: “Enlist for two years and get it over with? Join the National Health Service
? Defect to Canada? Poke out an eye? Act crazy? Get a deferment as a Conscientious Objector? These are all considered acceptable options by my fellow students. No one passed judgment on how to deal with—or dodge—the draft. Guys who volunteered for the Marines remain friends with classmates who fled to Canada or became conscientious objectors.”

  Sam thought about going to graduate school, then maybe work on a doctorate, hoping by that time the war would be over. But he never got around to applying. He liked the idea of flying, but since he had 20/200 eyesight, it was a sure bet he could not avoid the draft by becoming a fighter pilot like the Naval Reserve Officer Training students on campus. He simply left things to chance.

  Graduation day was gloriously sunny in New Haven. Sam’s parents drove from Norwalk to see him receive his diploma. President John F. Kennedy delivered the commencement address. After the ceremony, Sam and his parents got to shake hands with the president. Then, Sam’s mother, who had promised his father not to mar Sam’s day, couldn’t hold it in any longer: “Sam, I’m sorry,” she said tearfully as she handed him a letter that had arrived from the local draft board that morning.

  The decision had been made for him, so Sam resigned himself to a two-year stint in the Army. He dutifully appeared for his physical exam, where he was asked, “Did anyone ever tell you that you have a heart murmur?” Sam was reclassified 1-Y, which meant he could be called to fight only in a national emergency. The Army was out. Flying was out. Since he’d written a few articles for the school paper, Sam figured news writing was something he could do. So he went down to the UPI office in New Haven, where the bureau chief, Parker Reines III, offered him a job as a reporter for seventy-five dollars a week.

  * * *

  Reines wore bow ties and walked with a walrus tusk-handled cane. He had been bureau chief since 1955. Reines criticized Sam mercilessly. “Too many adjectives,” he would say. “You buried your lead. Percent is one word, not hyphenated. It’s police, not THE police.”