Last Men Out of Vietnam: Evacuating Saigon

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories in a thrilling, moment-by-moment narrative. Based on a wealth of recently declassified documents and in-depth interviews, authors Bob Drury and Tom Claven tell the remarkable story of the evacuation of Saigon in “Last Man Out, The True Story of America’s Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam.” This closing chapter of the war became the largest-scale evacuation ever carried out, as improvised by a very small unit of Marines. Here’s Bob Drury with the story.

00:00:47
Speaker 2: In 1973, the United States, South Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords. Now, according to those accords, everybody hoped and wished, especially in the United States, that we were going to have another Korea situation, that it was going to be a country divided in two; there was going to be a DMZ; there was going to be a peace line for whenever. The North Vietnamese never had any idea of standing by these accords. They were constantly probing, probing, probing. They even were allowed to leave men—one hundred thirty thousand men, construction workers—on the soil of the Republic of Vietnam. Finally, in the fall of 1974, led by a charismatic and strategic and tactical genius, and unfortunately named genius, General Van Tien Dung, they decided to invade. They broke the Paris Peace Accords. Now, we knew they were doing this. We had satellites, we had B-52 photos, we had everything. But Congress was just so sick of the war in Vietnam. We were out. We had some men. We had Marine Security Guards (MSGs) at provincial consulates. We had a half a platoon in Saigon. We had some advisors in. We were in the middle of the recession here in the United States. Just didn’t want to spend any more money. We just wanted to kind of wipe our hands of Vietnam. It was a bad deal. Dung didn’t believe that. He thought us capitalist running dogs: ‘We have something up our sleeve.’ So he probed at first, sending out scout teams. They met with no resistance. The South Vietnamese Army, the ARVNs, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, fell apart. Their officers deserted. Men were left leaderless, nowhere to go, did not know what to do. What happened was, after a while, General Dung, the North Vietnamese General Dung, said, ‘You know what? The Americans aren’t going to do anything.’ He was expecting a B-52 strike like the last time North Vietnam that invaded South Vietnam. It never came. So gradually he picked up speed, and the North Vietnamese army, one hundred fifty thousand men, more than one hundred fifty thousand men, sluiced through South Vietnamese provinces. Cities fell: Pleiku fell, Huế City fell. Da Nang, a beautiful little port city of half a million people, became a swollen, seething cauldron of ARVN deserters, ARVN retreats, civilians on the road. The roads were just as the ARVNs. As the South Vietnamese soldiers retreated into Da Nang, they raped and they looted, and Da Nang just became the swollen city. And finally we decided we have to have a plan, we have to get people out of here. What we tried to do is we tried an evac, both a fixed-wing and a helicopter out of Da Nang, fell apart immediately, in large part because our own allies, our former allies, the ARVNs, thought we were cutting and running—which we were—and started firing on the American aircraft coming in. The MSG unit, the Marine Security Guard unit, a small unit in Da Nang, got it—almost got into several firefights with their ostensible allies—until they were finally snuck out in the back of a garbage truck. Finally, a sealift was instituted. The US and South Vietnam took as many boats, barges, ships as they could, sent them up there, and it became a total mess. Women were tossing their babies into the water. ARVN units were boarding fishing smacks, throwing the civilians overboard, old men and old women, just throwing them overboard and commandeering these fishing smacks to get south. It was ugly. There were no ARVN commanders, no South Vietnamese commanders to keep any kind of order. And we learned something from Da Nang, and that was: a sealift from anywhere else is going to be kind of dicey. So now General Dung, he hadn’t planned on taking Saigon until perhaps late in 1975, but most likely in 1976, after the rainy season. Yet here he is. He finds himself. This started in late 1974; in early April, mid-April 1975, he finds himself with an army of one hundred fifty thousand people encircling Saigon. He’s going back and forth with it. Dung was a smart man. He knew that now was the time to strike. It was just, what were the Americans going to do? The Americans in Saigon?

00:05:02
Speaker 1: Now?

00:05:02
Speaker 2: As I said, there was this Marine Security Guard battalion, but it wasn’t really a battalion. It’s between fifty and sixty people. And three days before the Seventh Fleet, which was cruising the waters off South Vietnam and international waters in the South China Sea, they sent in a platoon of Fleet Marines, early-reaction commando types. According to the Paris Peace Accords, we weren’t allowed to have more than X amount of soldiers in South Vietnam, and the MSGs pretty much took up that quota. So they sent fifty young men, and they had them wearing leisure suits and carrying their guns and uniforms in duffel bags. I remember Top Valdez, who was the NCO in charge of the MSGs in Saigon, said, ‘So, oh yeah, that’s really going to fall the North Vietnamese. They’re never going to know we’re here.’ And there is all kinds of Americans still in there, not only civilians, but State Department ‘spooks,’ CIA. There is Army advisors, Air Force advisors, Navy advisors. But let’s face it, the two main players in Saigon right now are the Ambassador Graham Martin, an elegant man, tall, shock of white hair. I always had a jaunty cigarette dangling from his lips. Unfortunately, he was a young man. He was only in his late fifties, but he looked about seventy-five. Because he was sick. He was physically sick. He had walking pneumonia, and he was under the mental stress that I just can’t imagine being under. He, not only the walking demonia, he was taking drugs for an old car accident. And he was deluded. Now, when I say diluted, I’m not trying to be pejorative, but he thought he was the only man. He was the ambassador; he was the man in charge of South Vietnam. He thought he was the only man who could cut a deal with the North Vietnamese who were slowly but surely encircling Saigon, and he would not call for any kind of evacuation because he thought a deal was imminent. His powers of diplomacy were going to cut a deal with the North Vietnamese. And it was delusional. So finally, enough is enough for General Dung, and he thinks he’s going to poke a little stick at the Americans to get it quicker, because he knows once the Americans go, he’s got the country. He saw what happened to the fourth largest army. South Vietnam had the fourth largest army in the world. He went through it like, you know what, through a goose. He saw what happened up north. He said, ‘I’m going to take Saigon.’ Then there is troops down in the breadbasket, down in the Mekong Delta. But, you know what, ‘I’m just going to encircle them and take them the same way.’ ‘Let’s get these Americans out of here. I don’t want to start another war. I will if I have to. They’re running dogs.’ He hated us. ‘They’re capitalists running dogs.’ He hated us. But my orders are, ‘Don’t start another war.’ So before the morning of April 29th, Ambassador Martin had ordered Jim Kean to split his MSG detachment. He said, ‘I need extra people out at the airport.’ There was a Defense Attaché’s Office next to the airport, adjacent to the airport. It’s where we had run everything during the Vietnam War. Westmoreland was stationed there. All the big generals were stationed there. Now, it was still the same buildings, but it just had advisors. And he said, ‘I need men out of the DAO because if we’re going to do a helicopter evacuation, it’s got to be from the DAO.’ This Defense Attaché’s Office adjacent to the airport. So Kean’s like, ‘No, I can’t split my command. I only have fifty-five people. I can’t split my command.’ And here’s something about the MSGs. They’re the only branch of the Marine Corps that takes their orders from a civilian. They’re not in the normal chain of command. So what the State Department says, usually through a Regional Security Officer (RSO) stationed at every embassy, and the RSO said, ‘Send them out there. The ambassador wants them out there. Send them out there.’ So Kean went to Top Valdez, and he said, ‘We’ve got to send sixteen guys out there. If you pick them, Top, don’t get any of my newbies in trouble.’ Now. There were a couple kids who had just come into South Vietnam. Valdez is thinking, ‘You know what? The North Vietnamese want us out of Saigon so badly. They’re never going to bomb the airport. I’m going to send all my inexperienced newbies out there.’

00:09:00
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to a riveting account of the evacuation of Saigon. You’re listening to Bob Drury, co-author of “Last Man Out.” When we come back, more of this compelling story, a story you haven’t heard, probably, here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories, and with Bob Drury telling the story of our evacuation of Saigon. In the end, he’s telling the story of the last days of Vietnam and the Vietnam War. Let’s pick up where we last left off, here again, Bob Drury.

00:10:28
Speaker 2: Before dawn on the morning of April 29th, General Dung rocketed and shelled the airport with heavy artillery. There is like six thousand rockets and shells landing every minute. But one of those shells landed right on Darwin Judge. He had been in country two months. Corporal Charles McMahon. They were manning the guard posts. They were obliterated by a rocket. The airfields are now… you can’t land a fixed-wing. They’re cratered. And Martin, still in his delusional state, ‘We could fix this! We could fix this and start getting C-130s in here!’ He gets back to the embassy, and Major Jim Kean knows this. Two men are dead. Now there is two kids, and he says, ‘Uh, I don’t want you to report this to the Marine Corps chain of command.’ Major Kean says, ‘Well, what do you mean you don’t want?’ He said, ‘You take orders from me.’ ‘If they find out these guys are dead, they’re going to pull the plug on me.’ And Kean is…

00:11:24
Speaker 3: Thinking, ‘Pull the plug on you!’ ‘The plug is already pulled! Plug is pulled for Darwin Judge! Plug is pulled for Charles McMahon!’ That’s when Kean realized he and Top Valdez were going to have to manage this evacuation with the Marines they had on hand. Now, these MSGs: what happens is, commanders take the top one percent. They’re less than one percent of the Marine Corps. The commanders—company commanders—pluck the top guys in their units.

00:11:52
Speaker 2: They have to go through a selection process, and if they get to MSG school, there is still a thirty- or forty-percent attrition rate. So these guys are kids, but they’re tough kids, and they’re smart kids, and they’re dedicated kids. These are some of the kids that—boom—not only the personal tension between the ambassador and Kean, but now the city of Saigon is turning into a churning, roiling, chaotic mess. They have to keep it together. So the original plan was everybody from the embassy was going to go over to the Defense Attaché’s Office, and we’re all going to helicopter out from there. Well, Kean and Valdez said, ‘Nah, that’s not going to happen.’ ‘You know, people are going to run to the flag.’ ‘We’re not going to be able to get through these choked streets.’ Saigon is now like Da Nang. There’s two million ARVN, whether you want to call them deserters, whether you want to call them defeated soldiers, but the fact is they’re walking around with guns, and they are very pissed-off at the Americans who they’re obviously leaving. So all day this is going on. The ambassador had Henry Kissinger on his side. Graham Martin and Kissinger were kind of the leftovers from Nixon’s legacy, and they kept kept saying, ‘If Nixon were still in office, we’d be given General Dung a good dose in vite in B-52.’ But Nixon had been impeached. President Gerald Ford wanted to wash his hands of it, so Kissinger had the most to lose, so they kept kept stalling. Finally, the Marine High Command, the Secretary of Defense, and Gerald Ford convinced Ambassador Martin and Kissinger: ‘It’s time to get out!’ So begins a day, April 29th, 1975, of just manic helicopters out in five thousand five hundred feet, out of four thousand five hundred feet, small-arms fire the entire time. Is it coming from ARVNs? Is it coming from NVA snipers who are now they could see the NVA? The MSGs are up on the roof; they’re working twenty-four hours, shoveling classified information into this brace of furnaces. They could see; they could look over the roof. They could see firefights between the NVA and the few ARVNs—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam—who are still fighting, who are still standing tall and fighting. They’re watching these firefights while the sho. They shoveled five million dollars in cash into these furnaces, American cash. Who knows how many Vietnamese piastres? All day long this goes on. So finally, during the daylight hours they managed to clear out the Defense Attaché’s Office. The Fleet Marines send a small platoon over to the embassy. Now the only thing that’s left in the city is this one little outpost, the United States Embassy, a three-square-mile outpost, and the crowds around it, which had been two thousand, which had been ten thousand, which had been fifty thousand, are now sixty thousand, and a lot of them are armed, and a lot of them are pissed-off soldiers. So all day long this is going on, the crowd surging, and some of the stories—I mean, Jim Kean and Top Valdez and, to an extent, Mike Sullivan—are kind of like the Little Dutch Boy. They’re plugging holes in the dike. ‘Here! Here, they’re coming over the wall! Here! Lock that gate! Lock that gate!’ and the guys they’re standing there, and they have to let in Americans—American reporters, American State Department guys—who maybe were stuck downtown. Anybody’s got an American passport, and third-party nationals—our allies—are Koreans. There is a few Brits left in town. And they’re standing at the gate, and they’re lifting people over the gate. And while they’re doing it, people are coming up to them, and they’re opening bags of jewels or Krugerrands. Bobby Fraind’s watching one time, and this woman comes; her husband’s making way through the crowd with his elbows. The woman’s carrying something. Sure enough, they get close. The husband takes it, heaves it up. It’s a baby, gets caught on the barbed wire on top. One of the MSGs runs up, unhooks it, but per orders, gently drops it back down. ‘Can’t take it!’ In heartbreaking stories, Mister Nah came up to an MSG, and he got close enough to the gate; he’s kind of a withered old Vietnamese man, and he’s got an old Vietnamese army jacket on with a row of medals. And he pulls a yellowed, creased envelope out of his pocket, and he slips it through. And one of the MSGs opens it up, and it’s from the Pleiku Officers Club, dated 1967, and it says, ‘Mister Nah has served not only his country, but the United States of America.’ ‘Well, please consider that when you deal with Mister Nah.’ And Mister Nah had one arm, and he starts—he holds a thing—and he starts: ‘Washed dishes, washed dishes, Officers Club, washed dishes.’ And I remember the MSG just turned around and just said, ‘Who am I to play God like this? Who am I to say yes, you can come in?’ And in the meanwhile, all the Vietnamese that are in there—it’s like a thousand Vietnamese inside the compound already—they’re all the fat cats. They’re the ghost soldiers, the sons of politicians that didn’t have to go into the army, that bought their way out—fat cats with suitcases. And you know what’s in those suitcases: they’re smuggling out gold, they’re smuggling out jewels, they’re smuggling out money. And these poor MSGs, they’re on the gates. And even though they were kids, they had to make this decision. These are nineteen, twenty-year-old kids put in this position, who joined the Marines. Don’t forget: you’re not drafted by the Marines, who joined the Marines to fight for their country, to fight in Vietnam for their country. It went on all night. The big Sea Stallions—you know, the Chinook, the Army Chinook—the helicopter that’s emblematic of Vietnam. They were landing in the parking lot. The CH-46 Sea Knights were landing on the roof. They had an assembly line going. The DAO is already empty, so now it’s just the embassy. Jim Kean. The Sea Stallions are made to carry maybe thirty, thirty-five Marines. Jim Kean is packing seventy Vietnamese—smaller, lighter Vietnamese. At first, he was letting him take one bag. After a while: no bags, no bags. But the crowd—so many people are sneaking in—the crowd doesn’t seem like it’s getting any smaller. This goes on all day, all night. They line up every vehicle they have, to form a ring of light. And these helicopter pilots were just magnificent. The only room these big choppers had to come down was straight down: fill up. Kean would throw seventy-five on. If the guy couldn’t at air, he take five off. The guy got a little air straight up. One crash, one crash in, boom, ‘Here goes your chopper pad and evacuation’s over!’

00:18:09
Speaker 1: And you’ve been listening to Bob Drury tell a heck of a story. And by the way, he is co-author, along with Tom Claven, of the book “Last Man Out: The True Story of America’s Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam.” And heroic indeed they were, remarkable were these final hours. And it’s a story most Americans don’t know and should know.