Tom Glenn's Blog, page 181

April 1975 in Vietnam (9)

By 16 April 1975, I was spending most of my time struggling to get people out of Vietnam. I knew the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese was imminent. So I put aside my two principal missions—keeping the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, up to date on the North Vietnamese as they got closer to Saigon; and assisting the South Vietnamese government in its own efforts to intercept and exploit the communications of the North Vietnamese—and concentrated on saving as many people as I could.

I’ve told in passing the story of my work to move people out of South Vietnam earlier in this blog, but here I’ll recap the whole story, starting with a quote from my published article, “Bitter Memories: The fall of Saigon”:

Since the middle of March [1975], my principal concern had been seeing to it that none of my people was killed or wounded in the forthcoming attack. I had 43 American men working for me and I was responsible for the safety of their 22 dependents, wives and children, living in Saigon. My men in Da Nang, Can Tho, and Pleiku all managed to reach Saigon after hair-raising escapes and were working in our Tan Son Nhat office [on the northern edge of Saigon]. I wanted to get all my people out now.

But Ambassador Martin refused to consider evacuations. On the one hand, he wished to avoid doing anything that might stampede the South Vietnamese; on the other, he genuinely believed that the prospect of the Communist flag flying over Saigon was unthinkable.

I was stymied.

My state-side boss, General Lew Allen, the Director of NSA, ordered me to close down the operation and get everyone out before somebody got killed, but the Ambassador wouldn’t hear of it. I made him a proposition: if he would let my people go, I would stay in Saigon until the end with a skeleton staff to assure that the flow of SIGINT [that is, signals intelligence] reports for him from NSA would continue. He turned me down.

End of quote. More tomorrow.

“Men Are the Noisiest Things”

I interrupt my commentary on the events of April 1975 in Vietnam to comment once again on the differences between men and women. I was caught up short the other day when a woman friend asked me what I do in the bathroom.

I had gone to master bathroom to take my medications after eating dinner—I can’t take them on an empty stomach. As usual, I opened the medicine chest, took each pill, put the pill container back on the shelf, and closed the door. Then I looked in the side cabinet for the capsules that come in jars so large they won’t fit in the medicine chest. I took those, put each jar back, and shut the cabinet door. I had spilled some water on the floor when I drank from the plastic cup in a holder by the sink, so I looked for a dry rag in the cabinet under the sink, wiped the floor, and put the rag in the laundry hamper, and closed it. Then I left the room and shut the door firmly behind me.

My friend was in the hall. She looked perplexed. “Were you having a fight in there?” she asked. “What on earth was all that crashing and banging?”

She went into the hall bathroom and closed the door. I stood listening. Not a sound.

As she pointed out later, we men make no attempt to keep the noise down. We stamp around, slam doors, bang into walls, and drop things in place without a thought. For reasons I don’t understand, women go out of their way to avoid conspicuous noise.

I thought back about what I had done in the bathroom. Yes, I closed each cabinet door firmly, dropped bottles and jars back in their place, slammed the laundry hamper to be sure it was properly shut, and pulled the bathroom door closed to confirm it was engaged. That all seemed like the normal things to do.

Not from her point of view. She folded her arms and shook her head. “Men Are the Noisiest Things.”

Marine General Al Gray

My retracing the events of April 1975 in Vietnam has brought back memories of General Al Gray, USMC. It was he who saved my life as Saigon fell, and I’ll have more to say about that later in April. For now, I want to survey my memories of the general before and after the rescue.

I first met Al Gray in the early 1960’s in Vietnam. He was a captain then, having risen to officer rank after serving as an enlisted man. I don’t remember where I first encountered Al—I was wandering all over South Vietnam in those years assisting U.S. combat units with signals intelligence support. As the sixties went on, I kept running into Al, sometimes in the far south, sometimes up north near the DMZ, sometimes in areas in between, like the highlands where I spent a good deal of time.

By the time Saigon fell, Al was a colonel. It was he who pushed me onto a Huey on the night of 29 April 1975 for the escape flight to a ship of the 7th Fleet cruising in the South China Sea. I’ll tell that story in detail later this month.

What impressed me was that as the years passed, Al stayed in touch, even after he became a general. When I was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2013, he went out of his way to contact me and express his wishes for my recovery. When my former employer, the National Security Agency, invited me back a few years ago to give a presentation on the fall of Saigon, Al was there to speak after me.

As I’ll explain in more detail later, I stopped calling him Al when he became Commandant of the Marine Corps. Now I call him “sir.” I was then and still am today in awe of the general. He is the finest leader I had ever seen in action. To this date, I’ve never met a Marine who doesn’t know who Al Gray is.

Last year, volume 2 of General Gray’s biography was published: Al Gray, Marine: The Early Years 1968-1975, Vol 2 by Scott Laidig. In it, Scott recounts in detail the evacuation of Saigon, Operation FREQUENT WIND PHASE FOUR, headed by then Colonel Al Gray, and describes my situation during the failing days of Saigon.

One of my favorite memories of Al Gray came fairly early, although I can’t now remember where or when the moment occurred. I asked Al why he had never married. I’ll never forget his words: “If the Marine Corps had wanted me to have a wife, they would have issued me one.”

The general did marry later. I made it my business to keep his earlier statement to myself when his wife’s around.

Major General Pham van Phu

I wrote months ago in this blog about my trip to II Corps Headquarters and my courtesy visit with Major General Pham van Phu, the commander of II Corps, in March 1975. Phu, like so many South Vietnamese generals I met, was condescending to a fault. I described my visit in Last of the Annamese in the scene where the protagonist, Chuck, meets with Major General Tri—the character based on Phu—during his stopover at II Corps headquarters:

Standing smoke blurred the room. Cigarettes, two of them still burning, littered the deck. The snake-like man behind the desk, a lit cigarette in hand, gave no indication that he knew eight people were standing before him. He went on reading, smiling at the document in his hands. Without looking up he made a single sound, and the officers sat in a row of chairs facing the desk. Chuck hurriedly joined them. The adjutant served tea.

Chuck squinted through the smoke at the man reading. His fatigues’ name tag read TRI, and his shoulders bore the two stars of a major general. The slant of his egg-shaped bald head drew the eye to his mouth, the lips closed, the corners turned up. Something about his smile activated the tingle low in Chuck’s spine. It was a sardonic smile, a sneer.

End of quote. General Phu continued to smoke throughout our visit, throwing his half-finished cigarettes to the floor, still burning, and lighting new ones. He treated me and the South Vietnamese general by my side with disdain bordering on rudeness. I remember that I was unable to avoid coughing from the cigarette smoke.

Shortly after our visit, the North Vietnamese conquered II Corps. General Phu escaped to the coast and later made his way to Saigon. He committed suicide on 30 April, the day the North Vietnamese completed the seizure of Saigon.

April 1975 in Vietnam (8)

I resume my reminiscing about the last days in Saigon. On this date 43 years ago, the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, was evacuated. Here’s the story as told in the internet’s This Day in History:

At 8:50 a.m. on April 12 [1975], an Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Service HH-53 landed a four-man Air Force combat control team [at the embassy] to coordinate the operation. Three minutes later, it guided in a Marine Corps helicopter with the first element of the Marine security force. Marine and Air Force helicopters then carried 276 evacuees–including 82 Americans, 159 Cambodians, and 35 foreign nationals–to the safety of U.S. Navy assault carriers in the Gulf of Thailand. By 10 a.m., the Marine contingency force, the advance 11-man element, and the combat control team had been evacuated without any casualties.

End of quote. In the days that followed, as I hunkered down, isolated in my office on the northern edge of Saigon waiting for the North Vietnamese to attack, I waited for Phnom Penh to fall to the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists allied to North Vietnam. It happened five days later. I heard press reports of the beheadings of Cambodian official by the Khmer Rouge. For the first time in my life, I learned what terror tasted like.

Veterans Resource Fair

Yesterday afternoon and early evening, I participated in the annual Howard County Veterans Resource Fair, a gathering of organizations who provide services of value to veterans attending. I offered my books for sale and gave a presentation on the fall of Saigon.

I was struck by the number of Vietnam veterans I talked to. They told me when and where they had served in-country and listened wide-eyed as I told the gathering of surviving the fall of Saigon.

Among them was a man who served with me in Saigon in the days before the fall of the city to the North Vietnamese in April 1975. He reminded me, in a public exchange following my presentation, that he had refused my order that he depart Vietnam. He didn’t want to leave me alone to face the end. It took a direct order from me, reinforced by language I can’t use in this blog, to get him on a plane out of the country. He awaited me in Honolulu and saw firsthand the desperate shape I was in when I arrived.

He has stayed in touch with me ever since and still calls me “boss.” I couldn’t ask for a more faithful friend.

April 1975 in Vietnam (7)

On 10 April 1975, President Ford addressed a joint session of Congress asking for $722 million for South Vietnam. General Weyand, the Army Chief of Staff, had just returned from a fact-finding mission in Vietnam. The president’s request was based in part on General Weyand’s findings.

I had briefed General Weyand while he was in Saigon. In Last of the Annamese, I described the briefing, attributed in the novel to the protagonist, Chuck Griffin, based on my memory of what I said:

The northern half of South Vietnam is lost. The southern half could survive temporarily under three conditions: (1) the government is able to extract its forces from the north intact, (2) the North Vietnamese do not increase their forces in the south, and (3) the U.S. immediately resumes the air war and delivers essential ammunition, equipment, and supplies.

As this is written, it is clear that none of these conditions will be met. Casualties in the north have been overwhelming, and the remaining troops are in rout. Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese are infiltrating the southern provinces at an unprecedented rate. And the U.S. has ceased its matériel and air support. In short, what is left of South Vietnam will fall within weeks.

In the long term, the only option available to avoid capitulation is the reintroduction of U.S. forces—ground, naval, and air. President Nixon promised to bring U.S. military strength to bear if North Vietnam violated the Paris Agreement. Gross violations by North Vietnam are now legion. Failure to rescue Vietnam will be recognized world-wide as evidence of bad faith.

End of quote. Meanwhile, I hunkered down in Saigon. I continued getting my 43 subordinates and their families out of Vietnam any way I could. Most of those who were still in-country were sleeping in the office spaces. We followed the moves of the North Vietnamese as they came closer to Saigon, and I continued to warn the ambassador on their express intent to attack us. He didn’t respond.

April 1975 in Vietnam (6)

More on April 1975 in Vietnam:

On 9 April 1975, my wife and four children departed Vietnam for Bangkok on the first leg of their journey to the U.S. Making that trip happen took some doing.

The U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, had forbidden me to evacuate my 43 subordinates and their families. He had been reassured by the Hungarian member of the International Commission for Control and Supervision (ICCS) that the North Vietnamese had no intenti0n of attacking Saigon. The ICCS was a group established as part of the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement; its function was to monitor the supposed cease-fire.

Martin, in other words, was persuaded by a representative of a communist nation allied to North Vietnam that the North Vietnamese would not attack Saigon. Meanwhile, I was daily sending him irrefutable evidence that the North Vietnamese were about to assault the city.

At a coffee for dependents at the U.S. embassy, my wife had been assured that no strike against the city was in the offing. She enjoyed living in Saigon and brushed aside my entreaties for her and children to leave as soon as possible. She finally agreed to go under three conditions: she could choose her date of departure, she and the children would tour the world on the way back to the states, and, when she got back, she would buy a brand-new Buick station wagon.

I got my family tickets out—supposedly for a holiday in Bangkok—on 9 April. The day before that. a renegade South Vietnamese pilot bombed the presidential palace, near our villa. Now my wife was more than ready to leave Vietnam. But on the morning of 9 April as I tried to drive my family to the airport at Tan Son Nhat, we were repeatedly stopped at police roadblocks. The South Vietnamese government had declared a curfew as a result of the previous day’s bombing. I finally had to pull rank to get through the roadblocks and get my family on an airplane out of the country.

As soon as my family was safely gone, I moved out of the villa we had shared. I put a cot in front my desk in the front office of our office suite (my office) in the DAO building at Tan Son Nhat and slept there with a .38 revolver under my pillow.

April 1975 in Vietnam (5)

More on April 1975 in Vietnam:

On 8 April, as the fall of Saigon loomed, a renegade South Vietnamese pilot, later identified as a North Vietnamese infiltrator, bombed the presidential palace, near the villa where my family and I lived. Here’s the Wikipedia story of what happened:

On April 8 [1975], a formation of three Republic of Vietnam Air Force F-5E Tiger fighter-bombers lined up at Bien Hoa Air Base, each armed with four 250-pound bombs, for an attack on North Vietnamese positions in Bình Thuận Province. Before the second aircraft took off, First Lieutenant Nguyen Thanh Trung, who piloted the third F-5, reported his aircraft was experiencing afterburner problems. When the second aircraft departed, Trung also took off, but flew towards Saigon instead of joining the formation. At around 8.30am Trung dived on the Presidential Palace and dropped two bombs; the first bomb landed on the Palace grounds and caused some damage, but the second bomb failed to explode. Trung climbed to over 1,000 meters (3,300 ft) before making a second pass, this time both bombs exploded, causing minor structural damage but no casualties.

End of quote. At the time of the bombing, my wife and four children were in our villa, near the presidential palace. They were preparing to depart South Vietnam at my insistence—I knew the fall of Saigon was only weeks away. My wife had been hesitant to leave—she loved living in Vietnam and believed the assurances of the U.S. Ambassador, Graham Martin, that there was nothing to fear. The bombing of the palace persuaded her that leaving was in her and the children’s best interest.

April 1975 in Vietnam (4)

Remembering the last month in Saigon, April 1975, before South Vietnam fell to the communists, brings back fond recollections of my personnel section, responsible for the logistics of housing and moving my employees. When I decided that I had to evacuate my subordinates, even though the ambassador had forbidden it, I had to use ruses to explain sending my people out of the country. In the beginning, those responsible for planning travel and booking flights resisted my orders on the grounds that I was asking them to do things that violated regulations and were just plain illegal.

I remember a conversation I had with one of my personnel guys. I asked him what locations he could get airline reservations for immediately, then ordered him to book flights out. When he asked for justification, I told him “TDY”—“temporary duty,” meaning business travel. He pointed out that we had no business connections in the places I was telling him to send people and that he couldn’t legally use the TDY justification. I told him to do it anyway. He balked. I finally had to give him a direct order.

We went through the same drill on “home leave” and “vacation.” My crew winced at sending out people on home leave when they had no home leave coming. And booking people out for vacations without requiring them to be on annual leave was against the rules.

As the coming fall of Saigon became more obvious, my team ceased complaining and became quite artful at creating fictitious justifications for airline tickets. Toward the end, when all my personnel staff had been evacuated, I authorized virtually all those left in country to purchase airline tickets with government funds for any location they could get a flight to. Finally, after chaos set in, I took money from my own pocket, bought a ticket on Pan Am, and with no authorization or justification, put one of my comms guys on a flight and told him to go. That turned out to be the last Pan Am flight out of Saigon.

In the end, I got all my people and their families out safely. I rest easy today knowing none of them died during the fall of Saigon.