The Fall of Saigon

April 30, 1975

This is How we left Vietnam.

The 11 U.S. Marines on the roof of the American embassy in downtown Saigon thought they might have been forgotten. The sun was just up, and over the past 18 hours, U.S. Navy helicopters had extracted almost 1400 Americans and 5600 Vietnamese from Tan Son Nhut air base, on the northern fringe of the city, and from the embassy compound itself, flying them to aircraft carriers offshore. But there had been nothing for a good two hours, and Vietnamese were looting the embassy. It was dicey. The remaining Marines had to jam a wall locker against the flimsy door that led to the roof; the door had a window in it, and they had to station a guy there to jerk arms into the broken glass. The major in charge was seriously discussing the possibility that they would have to deploy down the concrete rocket shield that sheathed the fortress embassy and make their way to water.

Then, at 7:49 A.M., specks appeared in the southeastern sky. A few moments later, they were identifiable as one Chinook-46, escorted by nimble Cobra gunships, which looked and maneuvered as much like dragonflies as any machines man had ever devised.

(continued on page 118)The Fall of Saigon(continued from page 113)

The Marines unloaded tear-gas grenades over the building onto the heads of the Vietnamese below. Over the back, from which came the major threat, they put a hand grenade in a box of tear-gas canisters.

They forgot that a settling helicopter sucks up air. So the last official Americans out of Vietnam--the 11 Marines and the crew of the CH-46, including the pilot--all flew blind and choking out of Saigon. And as they lifted off and banked into the sun, the door slammed shut on what was to have been the American century.

April 28

The final offensive of the long war had begun just seven weeks earlier. In the ensuing days, an entire society built on the ideals, strategies, money and blood of the United States had all but collapsed. The greatest horror had come at the end of the third week, in the final days of March, when South Vietnamese marines and foot soldiers in Da Nang, the country's second-largest city, had terrorized and killed civilians to get onto aircraft and boats and barges in the city's harbor.

Now, on the evening of Monday, April 28, the equivalent of 16 North Vietnamese divisions--140,000 men--were ranged around Saigon, their lead elements in the city itself. The capital's 60,000 Vietnamese defenders had not broken, even though most would die if there were to be a battle for Saigon. They waited at their posts.

In large part, that was due to the poise of Graham Anderson Martin of Thomasville, North Carolina, the last American Ambassador to Saigon. During the month of April, Martin had performed an extraordinary balancing act. Under enormous pressure from the U.S. military and Washington, he had evacuated most of the 7000 Americans left in South Vietnam, as well as tens of thousands of Vietnamese--all the time maintaining the fiction that everything was normal.

As of that last Monday in April, Ambassador Martin had been on the job for almost two years. He had proved himself to be a man of deep commitment to his ideals and of infinite cunning in his pursuit both of those ideals and of his standing in the corridors of power. He needed the cunning, because his self-righteousness tended to make him reckless. He was a maverick who was cunning enough to recognize a fellow maverick when one arrived on the scene--and to cut him dead.

In Saigon, the fellow maverick was Alan Carter, the gregarious chief of the United States Information Service (USIS). Carter had been in Saigon just eight months, but within weeks of his arrival, he had been effectively shut out of the place in the senior councils of the mission that normally would have come with his position. For the Ambassador, Carter was flawed and dangerous: He was not Martin's man--and he actually liked some of the shallow young journalists who, in the Ambassador's mind, were fighting America's interests in Vietnam.

Carter had spent his time in Saigon doing what little he could to repair the poisonous relations between the resident American press corps and its embassy. But it was precious little, since the task required some mutual trust and--above all--inside knowledge, the "true gen," that which Graham Martin had decided Carter would not have.

Martin was approaching the end of 40-plus years in Government service. Carter was in the middle of his career, after a particularly successful posting in Tokyo. Most of the remaining American officials in Saigon were younger. One of those was Ken Moorefield, a 31-year-old blond Vietnam veteran who had returned with Martin as the Ambassador's personal aide. But Martin had never taken Moorefield into his confidence; and a few months after they arrived, the younger man asked to be given something more interesting to do than managing the cable traffic into and out of the Ambassador's office. Martin allowed him to take on odd jobs in the mission.

Three men, then--Martin, Carter and Moorefield--in the final days of Saigon.

•

Ken Moorefield and a few other young American-embassy officials were working that late Monday afternoon in what was called Dodge City, a complex of barracks and recreational facilities inside Tan Son Nhut air base. For the past ten days, Dodge City had been the processing center for the evacuation of people from Saigon; the great majority of the evacuees were Vietnamese, all of whom had a claim--firm, tenuous or false--on America.

The first string of explosions was distant. But the old wooden building, which stood on stilts, shook with the second. A fluorescent-lighting fixture fell from the ceiling onto one of the desks. Moorefield jumped up from his chair in a corner office and ran into the main processing room. With the second string of explosions, the 15 or 20 Vietnamese in the room broke from their lines. Women were screaming. Moorefield rushed down the open front staircase to the ground.

Anti-aircraft fire had opened up over the air base, and the sky was filled with blossoming puffs of smoke. Moorefield picked out two jets lazily twisting into a dive. He suddenly felt naked. Gotta get these people under cover, he thought.

Back upstairs, the women were still screaming and parents crouched with babies under the folding tables and against the walls. Some of the consular officers were still trying to work. Moorefield shouted orders. In less than five minutes, he and the few other embassy and military officers shepherded 80 or 100 Vietnamese in the compound into an abandoned barracks across the road from the processing center. This barracks was more substantial, set on the ground, and they were able to get everyone to crouch or lie against the walls in the long hallways. The attack lasted only about 15 minutes, but the antiaircraft fire continued for at least another 20 minutes.

Moorefield had known when he first saw them that the attacking planes were A-37s, light U.S. fighter bombers taken by the North Vietnamese. He had assumed that their target was the evacuation itself, his evacuation--him. He thought of the dozens of times he had called in helicopter gunships and tactical air support against Viet Cong positions. Now he was the target. And if he went, it would be an American bomb that got him.

•

Late that afternoon, a few Vietnamese were being transferred to Tan Son Nhut from the compound of the United States Information Service, about half a mile from the embassy proper. About 150 people had spent the past few nights in the compound. Some were local USIS staffers and their families; others were Vietnamese businessmen, intellectuals or government officials for whom the agency had been given responsibility.

When the rolling fusillades of antiaircraft and small-arms fire shattered the dusk, one bus of would-be evacuees was leaving the compound, another waiting inside it. Alan Carter ordered the departing bus back in and the gates locked.

The agency had sent about 30 of its Vietnamese employees and their dependents to the evacuation center at Tan Son Nhut the day before. That was very late in an evacuation that had moved into high gear eight days earlier, because Carter was adhering to the letter of embassy directives. He alone among the agency chiefs was not bending the rules, which still insisted that draft-age males and (so Carter thought) parents of local employees could not be evacuated. In the past few days, he had seen grown men fall to their knees in tears when he told them they could go with their wives and their (continued on page 174)The Fall of Saigon(continued from page 118) younger children, but they would have to leave their parents or their 18-year-old son. No, they pleaded, don't make me make that choice.

Carter did not know that almost every other official in Vietnam was bending the rules, because he was not in the know. And because he was not in the know, he was more Catholic than the Pope. He told his own USIS staffers that they had to stay until the last moment, when they would be seen to. And, as instructed, he passed along to the embassy list after list of persons who should be included in the evacuation, with the principal name and why he or she should go; and under each principal name, five or ten or 30 relatives.

After the firing subsided, Carter and his deputy circulated among the Vietnamese, assuring them that the Americans were still there and would take care of them.

•

When the shooting finally died away at Tan Son Nhut, Ken Moorefield checked with the few military officers in Dodge City, where he and more than 3000 Vietnamese now seemed trapped. He also called the embassy. The assumption seemed to be that the evacuation would get going again within a few hours.

Moorefield was not so sure. If they bombed you at six, why not bomb you again at midnight? He also considered it entirely possible that the base would come under ground attack that night.

During the eight days that Moorefield had been at Tan Son Nhut working on the accelerated evacuation, no one had given much thought to feeding the evacuees. They had always managed to clear the processing center by nightfall.

Now--in part to do something--Moorefield organized a feeding. He raided a small dry-goods warehouse, loaded a jeep with everything that looked edible, broke into an abandoned mess hall and called for volunteer cooks from among the ranks of evacuees and official Americans. It took three hours to move everyone through.

That done, Moorefield decided to make a last check of the perimeter. You could tell that the Marines were green because they were so white. They didn't even have sunburns, let alone tans. And they were tense. It was 30 or 40 of them against--what? In the Marines' minds, probably a whole country. Two of them were out on the narrow road running into the compound from the only access gate. Moorefield approached them, making a note of how exposed they were there.

A Vietnamese called to him from the gate. In a hurried exchange, Moorefield learned that there was a group of about 40 Vietnamese there, in a ditch in which they had lain or squatted since the bombing.

Moorefield returned to the two young Marines and introduced himself. He explained that he was the embassy officer in charge of that part of the evacuation and asked how they were doing and where they were from. One was from Iowa, the other from Massachusetts. They answered in soft voices, volunteering only what Moorefield asked for, their eyes constantly flicking away from him to the darkness.

"OK, look, we've got a problem," Moorefield said. "Things are tense. We don't know what's going to happen tonight. That guy I just talked to has got a group of people who belong on our side of the perimeter. I want to get them inside."

"OK, sir," one of them said.

Moorefield told the people from the ditch where to go without bothering to look at their papers. He was glad he had gone to the trouble.

•

Ambassador Martin was suffering from bronchitis and pneumonia, which made him gray and hoarse behind his cigarette smoke. But Martin was incapable of appearing weak. He wore his suit coat and his tie was still knotted when Wolfgang Lehmann, his deputy chief of mission, was summoned to the office about midnight.

When the bombing had stopped, the Ambassador had put two of his people in charge of planning for the movement of 10,000 evacuees the next day. "I think you and I both ought to go home and get some sleep," Martin told Lehmann in a voice just above a whisper. "We'll need to be rested in the morning. I have an idea that we're going to have to make some life-and-death decisions."

April 29

After the Vietnamese at the USIS had bedded down for the night on mats or blankets, Alan Carter was driven north a couple of blocks to the villa that came with the job. He showered and ate, and then the driver took him to the embassy for an emergency midnight meeting.

It was held in the big conference room on the third floor of the embassy building and was chaired by Colonel George Jacobson, one of the men Martin had charged with organizing the next day's evacuation. But attention quickly focused on a political officer named Shep Lowman, who had emerged during the month as the central repository for lists of evacuees.

Through the preceding 28 days of April, at a constantly accelerating rate, 43,479 people had been flown out of Saigon on Air Force planes or civilian chartered aircraft. About 5000 were Americans; the rest were orphans and bar girls, wives and children of Americans, the families of military and police officers, employees of some U.S. businesses in South Vietnam and some, but not many, Vietnamese employees of the embassy. The Ambassador had resisted attempts to evacuate U.S.-mission employees, out of fear that it might trigger the panic in Saigon that he most feared.

Especially in the past ten days, the heads of various mission components--USIS, USAID (the Agency for International Development), the CIA--had been feeding into the embassy lists of people they thought should be evacuated. Half of Saigon, it seemed, was on those lists. But now the end was drawing near, and the 10,000 who would leave tomorrow should be the ones who really deserved to go, not the cooks and the chauffeurs. Lowman told Carter that he would have to quickly list his "priority contacts."

"You son of a bitch, Shep!" Carter said. "I've been giving you lists for days! What are you talking about? Where did those other lists go?"

"They're all screwed up," Lowman said. "We've gotta start from scratch."

•

The evacuation did get going again, deep in the bend of the night. Then, at four A.M., the pilot of one of three U.S. Air Force C-130s on the ground at Tan Son Nhut saw what he thought was lightning and said to his copilot, "Gee, that thunderstorm is getting closer. It's moving toward the field."

Then the flashes were not only white but red and blue and green, and the pilot realized that they were rockets and mortars, raining on the field with great accuracy.

Within the first minute, they hit a fuel truck and the control tower and the Air America flight line. A rocket landed just under one of the wings of the third C-130 and exploded. Its crew scrambled from it and up into the hold of the second C-130.

One of the first rockets was a direct hit on two young Marines manning an isolated position on the narrow road running into Dodge City. They were Darwin Judge, from Iowa, and Charlie McMahon, from Massachusetts. They died instantly.

•

Ambassador Martin arrived at the embassy shortly before six A.M. For about half an hour, he and Thomas Polgar, the CIA station chief, were alone in Martin's office. The Ambassador's illnesses had left him with almost no voice. He listened to Polgar's quick briefing and then called the Defense Attaché's Office (DAO) at Tan Son Nhut. In the first calls that morning--calls tightly focused on conditions at Tan Son Nhut--Polgar acted as an intermediary, relaying Martin's whispered questions and replies.

By seven, the DAO commander, General Homer Smith, had determined that the main flight line and the runways were littered with jettisoned ordnance and wing tanks. Admiral Noel Gayler, the commander in chief for the Pacific (CINCPAC), called from Honolulu to ask what was going on. A few minutes later, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called from Washington. Neither Gayler nor Kissinger was yet talking about what was referred to in the standing evacuation plan as Option Four: the full-scale helicopter evacuation of Saigon. Option Four was the last and least desirable of the options in the plan, the first three of which envisioned the use of fixed-wing aircraft.

At 7:30 A.M., a note was delivered to the embassy. It was from the new president of South Vietnam, a general named Duong Van "Big" Minh, who had been inaugurated the previous afternoon. He was the third president in the past eight days.

The note was immediately translated and rushed to Martin:

Dear Mr. Ambassador:

I respectfully request that you give an order for the personnel of the Defense Attaché's Office to leave Vietnam within 24 hours beginning April 29, 1975, in order that the question of peace for Vietnam can be settled early.

(signed April 28 by Duong Van Minh)

Without a moment's hesitation, the Ambassador called in his secretary and dictated his reply. Then, with the original typed and signed and sent off to be hand delivered to Big Minh, the Ambassador got around to informing Kissinger that he had just ordered all American military men, save the Marines, out of Vietnam.

He began the cable with the two notes. Then:

In view of the above, I repeat my request to permit me and about 20 of my staff to remain behind, at least for a day or two, to at least give some dignity to our departure [and] to facilitate an orderly disposition of our extensive properties here.

I can keep two air America helicopters and we can depart at a moment's notice. I do seriously recommend this course and hope for your prompt approval.

I would intend in either case to ask the French embassy to assume normal caretaker responsibilities. There is no other embassy left....

At 8:15, there was a meeting in Martin's office, again focusing on conditions at Tan Son Nhut. The plan that had emerged from the midnight meeting counted on 60 C-130 sorties during the day--enough to remove 10,000 people from Vietnam.

Colonel Jacobson called General Smith at DAO. Smith said he was convinced that the runways were unusable. Martin disagreed and announced that he would take a look at the runways himself. He ordered a helicopter, but there were no Air America choppers available. Some of them had been crippled in the rocketing. Others were shuttling Polgar's CIA people from Can Tho, in the Delta, to the Seventh Fleet, which lay just outside Vietnam's territorial waters.

"Fine," Martin said, with a glare at Polgar and then a self-possessed grin. His strength was returning minute by minute as the adrenaline began to take over. "Better to go by road, anyway. I can get a look at conditions in the city."

"Sir, that would be a big mistake," Jacobson said.

"Well, we all make mistakes, don't we, Jake?" Martin said. "Someone call my car. I'm going."

•

Ken Moorefield was also awakened by the four-A.M. rocketing of Tan Son Nhut. At first light, he was at the air base. He checked with some Vietnamese he was concerned about at Dodge City and talked with Americans there. But, instinctively, he felt that his duties at the evacuation center were over. This would be the day the Americans left Saigon. What was his role now? he asked himself.

At the DAO and the operations center, everyone was talking about the final roundup of the remaining DAO employees--Americans and Vietnamese. Moorefield realized that some of the officers involved, especially the recently arrived Marines, did not have a good grasp of the city.

"Listen," he said to one of the military men, "I know the city pretty well. If you give me some support, I can guide the buses around."

Moorefield piled into a DAO staff car--a white Chevy--with a Marine captain and some civilians who would act as drivers. They proceeded to the motor pool, where the situation was normal: all fucked up. None of the buses was fully gassed, and it quickly became evident that they didn't have enough drivers. Then there was a small shower of mortar rounds. Moorefield and the others dove for cover in a ditch. While they were lying there, Moorefield told a Vietnamese who happened to have been standing nearby that he could get him out of Vietnam if he was willing to drive a bus for a few hours.

Eventually, they arranged two convoys of three buses each, with Chevys and jeeps fore and aft, and headed into the city.

•

As had been the case all morning, Ambassador Martin was unimpressed by accounts of litter on or damage to the runways. In the DAO's readiness room at Tan Son Nhut, General Smith had an Air Force colonel give Martin a quick briefing. Smith's chief intelligence officer was with them, as was the intelligence chief of the South Vietnamese joint general staff (J.G.S.). When Martin was told about troops milling about on the field, he asked the Vietnamese intelligence man to call someone at J.G.S. about restoring order.

The man made the call. And there was no answer. Even the switchboard operators had left. Smith then told the Ambassador that he had the commander of the South Vietnamese air force and most of the rest of the South Vietnamese command under guard in this building. They had presented themselves at DAO a couple of hours before and had demanded to be included in that day's evacuation. Smith and his colleagues had been telling those commanders for weeks that if they stayed at their posts and maintained order until the end, they would be taken care of. And as far as Smith was concerned, this was the end.

Now Martin was concerned. From the secure phone in Smith's office, Martin spoke with both Brent Scowcroft, the deputy director of the National Security Council, and Henry Kissinger. When he emerged from the office, he walked with Smith back down to the readiness room. On the way, he said that Washington had agreed to continue with the fixed- wing lift if order could be restored on the runways.

"But, Mr. Ambassador...."

"If we can't, OK, but let's try." Then he moved on to the most important point. He told Smith that both of them were going to be under tremendous pressure all day, from Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and the Joint Chiefs and CINCPAC, to yank the Americans and leave the Vietnamese. He said that he had thousands of high-risk Vietnamese lined up and ready to go and they had to get out just as many of them as possible. The United States had a moral obligation to them. If we failed them, Martin said, it would be one last ghastly mistake capping the thousands of mistakes the United States had made in Vietnam. And it would be a failure with unforeseeable impact on relations between the U.S. and the two other superpowers.

In the first 15 minutes back in the office, poring over cables and again talking with Washington, Martin made time to call Homer Smith twice. In the first call, he reported that he had had a message from the White House confirming the decision to stay with a fixed-wing evacuation for as long as possible. In the second, he reiterated what he was now calling "my order" that great numbers of Vietnamese be included in any evacuation.

Between those two calls, about 10:40, Smith called Admiral Gayler in Honolulu. Smith repeated his belief that there was "no way" they could continue to land C-130s. Gayler had been of the same belief for hours. He told Smith that he was now going to tell the Joint Chiefs that they had to go to Option Four.

Out of deference, Smith called Martin. "Mr. Ambassador," he said, "CINCPAC is at this moment recommending to the Joint Chiefs that we go to Option Four. I thought you should know."

"It's not their decision," Martin said. "Homer, are you absolutely certain we can't get any more planes in there?"

"Yes, Mr. Ambassador, I am."

"Well, you're probably right--for the wrong reasons. We could get them in, but we couldn't control the boarding."

"I agree with that, sir," Smith said. "I've been saying that all morning, too."

At 10:48, from the secure scrambler phone in his office, Martin called Kissinger. He told the Secretary of State it was time to go to Option Four.

During the past few weeks, those officers in the embassy who thought they should be doing a great deal more planning for this moment--and there were a lot of them--had argued that the tamarind tree in the middle of the parking lot behind the chancery should be cut down to make a landing zone. Martin had always vetoed them. He was, in fact, aware of that marvel of Western technology called the chain saw and was not about to fell the tree--the signal to all of Saigon that the Americans were preparing to run--until he had to.

A few minutes after Martin got off the phone with Kissinger, Wolf Lehmann turned to Hank Boudreau, the administrative counselor, and finally gave the order: "OK, Hank," he said. "Now you can tell 'em to take down the damned tree."

•

Alan Carter made his way through the 150 Vietnamese in the USIS compound and got into the office car with its driver. They inched through the throng at the gate and drove the half mile to the embassy, to which Carter had been summoned for a meeting.

On the third floor, Carter found the few remaining secretaries and numerous junior officers furiously destroying files. Wolf Lehmann was tied up in a conference. When Carter finally found him, Lehmann said, "This is it. We're all leaving."

"For Christ's sake!" Carter said. "I've got three Americans over there, Wolf, and 150 Vietnamese. I've been telling them for days that we'll get them all out!"

"Get the Americans over here," Lehmann said and started to turn away.

"How the hell do I do that?" Carter asked. "I had to send my driver away. Goddamn the way this show is being run!"

"Well, get an embassy car, then," Lehmann said. "But do it fast. You're to go out on one of the first choppers."

Carter did not know how to get an embassy car. But at that moment, a quiet, polished political officer named Lacy Wright, who had overheard the exchange, said, "Take it easy, Alan. I've got a car. I can run over and get the Americans."

"But what about the Vietnamese?" asked Carter.

Wright called the USIS compound to alert the Americans that he was coming for them. They, in turn, calmly reassured the 150 Vietnamese with them that buses would be coming for them soon and made their way to the front gate. The embassy car pulled up and they slipped in, as if it were all routine.

•

Ken Moorefield's buses were full. He had a walkie-talkie, but communication with the embassy was spotty. But at 2:30 or three that afternoon, he got an urgent message to proceed to Shep Lowman's villa. With Lacy Wright, Lowman had been responsible for the evacuation of politically compromised "high-risk" Vietnamese. Following the midnight meeting at the embassy and again at dawn, Lowman had made a telephone canvass of the names at the top of his list. Now more than 100 people were at his villa.

Moorefield and Lowman conferred in the tree-shaded street that ran past the villa's high walls. "Shep," said Moorefield, "I don't have room for any of them. And if I try to squeeze one on, you'll have a riot on your hands. I'll try to come back."

Moorefield never made it. Nor did he know that in the middle of the afternoon, as he and his convoys were prowling the streets of the city, two huge sandbagged barges were tugged down the Saigon River to the docks at Khanh Hoi, a southern district of the capital. Before sunset, they left, half empty, for the trip down--river to the open sea and the Seventh Fleet.

At least 8000 Vietnamese, including everyone waiting at the USIS compound, the 100 people at Lowman's villa and the several groups of CIA employees gathered at various facilities around Saigon, could have made it out of Vietnam if their American employers had waited just a few more hours before retreating to the embassy.

The decision not to tell Moorefield about the barges came from the top. It was ruthless, and it worked. Chaos did not descend on Saigon, as it might have if the city at large had known that escape was waiting for them at the docks.

•

To: Graham Martin

From: Kissinger

Ref: Saigon 758

We have studied your request to keep a small staff behind and the president insists on total evacuation. Warm regards.

Until that moment, Martin had hardly contemplated his own departure. When he got out of bed that morning, he had thought he would be staying on as the American representative at negotiations between Big Minh and the Communists. Now he realized that it was time to get some things from the residence. And there was some classified material there as well; it would have to be destroyed.

Fifteen minutes later, Martin and two Marines were in the Ambassador's car. But when they eased open the gate at the back of the compound, Vietnamese swarmed over it. Martin realized they would not get out this way. The driver quickly threw the car into reverse and the gate was secured.

Martin returned to his office and made a phone call. At 3:30, he told the two Marines, "We're going for a little walk."

They walked through the rear of the compound to a door that had been recently created in the wall between the American and French embassies. They were greeted by Jean-Marie Mérillon, the French ambassador. Then Martin and his Marine guards walked from the French embassy to his residence. The crowd hardly noticed the small party.

At home, Martin emptied the safe, which contained biographical sketches of numerous Vietnamese. He gave those and everything else in the house that he didn't want the Communists to find to the Marines, who took it all out onto the patio and burned it.

On the chance that the French would be able to perform their caretaker role, the Ambassador decided to pack a trunk with some valuables, including the extensive collection of antique maps he and his wife had acquired in their years in Paris. He also intended to place in that trunk a 14th Century Sukhothai platter that international colleagues had presented to him when Dean Rusk had relieved him as Ambassador to Bangkok for what Martin would later call the "pungency" of his cables to Washington. But as he was climbing the stairs with it, he stumbled and fell. The platter shattered.

•

Lacy Wright got the three Americans from the USIS compound into the embassy shortly after noon, and right away they gathered with Carter in an office on the third floor and tried to figure out how to rescue the Vietnamese they had just abandoned. They called the USIS compound and told the Vietnamese to sit tight. Then they tried, without success, to find some spare buses.

About two, Carter wandered into an ad hoc evacuation control center that had been set up in a bull pen of secretaries' desks outside the Ambassador's office. There he heard for the first time that there were barges on the river.

"What barges?" he shouted. "You sons of bitches aren't telling us anything!"

Carter found out as much as he could, but, as usual, he didn't get the true gen. He left the bull pen believing that the barges would leave between 2:30 and three. There was no way his people could make it from the USIS compound to the docks in time. So he never told the Vietnamese about the barges.

Instead, he called USIS back and suggested to the leaders that they leave the compound as quietly as possible and make their way inconspicuously, in small groups, to his villa. He would see if he could get buses to them there.

About four, the first Marine Corps helicopters arrived at the embassy. Wolf Lehmann was now insistent that Carter and his American staffers be on them.

Carter was carrying an attaché case and nothing else. He joined a slow queue up the stair well to the roof. Then, on the roof, he decided that he could not leave yet. "Go," he shouted to his USIS colleagues. They went. Carter moved against the queue back down to the third floor.

There were two telephone lines into the USIS compound, the normal Saigon system line and an embassy line. Carter tried both numbers over and over again, but he never succeeded in getting through.

He wouldn't know until later that about 20 of the people in the USIS compound had made it to his villa. They had called the embassy about four, as he was making his way down from the roof. A Marine had told them that Carter had left, and the 20 Vietnamese had then slipped out of the villa and into the new Vietnam.

•

Two or three times during the day, Moorefield had driven near the embassy. He knew that he was never going to get his buses through that mob. His radio now was of no use, and he needed instructions. He left the car and headed on foot for the nearby Brink Building, a U.S.-mission hotel. There he found a somber, fearful crowd of about 150 Vietnamese filling the courtyard and the small lobby.

Many of the Vietnamese looked like bartenders and waitresses, but there was a healthy representation as well of hard-faced men in their 40s and 50s who could have been members of Provincial Reconnaissance Units five or ten years ago, the guys who did the dirty work in the contest for the peasants' hearts and minds.

Moorefield asked a few questions. They had been instructed by various American friends over the past few days to gather here. But he was the first American they had seen since noon.

He found an office behind the front desk from which he could call the embassy without being overheard by the Vietnamese. Miraculously, he got through to the Ambassador's secretary, Eva Kim.

"Eva," Moorefield said, "I've got about 150 people here at the Brink's. All employees. They've all been told to come here over the past few days. What am I supposed to tell them to do?"

She put him on hold for a long minute. When she came back, the basic message was that there was no help in sight.

Moorefield walked slowly through the lobby, mumbling "Stand fast, stand fast" to the polite men who dared to ask questions, never looking them in the eyes.

Then he was free of them, and in the late--afternoon glow, he double-timed it back to the convoy, trotting as much out of eagerness to distance himself from those faces as to get on with the job.

He was surprised to find the Chevy empty. The Marine captain who had been driving it was gone, but he had left the keys in the ignition. Moorefield started the car and threaded north, assuming the buses would follow. Perhaps they did. More likely, the Marine or one of the bus drivers had heard about the barges and headed for the river. In any case, when Moorefield got to the embassy, the only place he knew of to go, he had lost them.

•

Off and on during the afternoon and early evening, Graham Martin moved from the desk, with its cable traffic, to the windows. He looked down on the people below him and quickly understood the system the military had put in place. The heart of it was tight control between a quadrant of the embassy grounds containing a restaurant and a swimming pool--where the great majority of the would-be evacuees were crowded together--and the landing zone in the parking lot, from which most of them eventually left.

The Ambassador looked at the Marines on the outer walls and knew what was going on there as well: Decent American kids, by and large, were not smashing their rifle butts or the heels of their boots on the desperate Vietnamese trying to climb their way over the walls and through the concertina wire with which the walls had been reinforced. The Vietnamese were getting in. It wasn't a steady flow, but neither was it a trickle.

Every 20 or 30 minutes after the helicopters finally started arriving, a message came from one of the multiple command posts overseeing the evacuation asking how many people remained to be extracted. And even though the choppers were steadily moving people out, every time Martin asked for a new estimate of the number of people in the embassy and the courtyards, it came back at about 2000.

•

Ken Moorefield spent his first hour inside the embassy compound in a state of slightly dazed relief. For the first time in six hours, Vietnamese were not screaming at him to let them onto buses.

But an hour of idleness was enough for him. He made a tour of the compound, looking for things to do. At dusk, he found himself on the wall that separated the embassy compound from a police station on the northeast corner of the same block. The police there had been assured weeks before that they would be included in the evacuation and were starting to demand that the embassy make good on the pledge. Moorefield and the Marines with him on the wall hauled up some of the policemen and their families, at the same time insisting that others remain on duty.

Later, he made another tour of the compound. The desperation of the Vietnamese at the gates was searingly painful to him. A middle-aged woman at the gate into the part of the compound that held the long, low consulate building was weeping and crying out over and over, "I've got a passport, I've got a passport!" In the gathering darkness, it was difficult to tell what it was that she clutched. And the Marines had learned hours ago that while the crowd would part to allow a Westerner in, hauling up a Vietnamese invited chaos. There was no one to vouch for this woman, and the Marines ignored her.

•

By nine o'clock in the evening, there was truly nothing more Alan Carter could do.

So, hours after he was ordered out of the country, for the second time that day, he joined a line of people snaking to the roof.

The anger built on the short flight to the fleet. When they landed on the U.S.S. Okinawa, one of the first Americans from the mission Carter saw was Lowman.

"Someday," Carter said to him, his tone of voice making it clear that he did not think Lowman himself was primarily responsible, "someone will nail the sons of bitches who fucked this thing up."

•

[9:41 P.M., Saigon Time] Scowcroft to Martin

Understand there are still about 400 Americans in embassy compound. you should ensure that all, repeat all, Americans are evacuated in this operation A.S.A.P. warm regards.

Now the Ambassador was angry. He walked out of the office and asked an aide to go with him up to the communications room on the fourth floor. There he scratched out a message on a legal pad.

The larger Chinooks--the CH-53s--landed in the parking lot. The pad on the roof could support only the smaller model, the CH-46. The normal American capacity of the bigger aircraft was 50. But Martin knew that, even with luggage, the Marines were cramming 60 to 70 people, most of them Vietnamese, onto the 53s.

The aide typed the message and handed it to the communicator:

[10 P.M.]Flash White house for Brent Scowcroft

Perhaps you can tell me how to make some of these Americans abandon their half-Vietnamese children or how the president would look if he ordered this.

For more than 50 minutes there have been no ch-53s here and only one ch-46.

Commander seventh fleet messaged me about hour and a half ago, saying he would like to stand down about 2300 hours and resume 0800 tomorrow morning.

I replied that I damned well. Didn't want to spend another night here.

Four hours ago, I told noel [Gayler] The number of sorties we need. Now the number is 30 CH-53 sorties. I don't really mind giving dao complete priority--They were more exposed than we were here. I need 30 CH-53 sorties damned quick and I have received nothing but silence since I asked for them. Am well aware of the danger here tomorrow and I want to get out tonight. But I damn well need at least 30 CH-53s or the equivalent to do that. Do you think you can think you can get president to order cingpac to finish job quickly? I repeat I need 30 CH-53s and I need them now. Warm regards secret.

A few minutes later, Martin tossed the cable aside and wrote out another message, reformulating for Admiral Gayler in Honolulu what he had just told Scowcroft:

[10:15 P.M.] For cincpac from martin

I need 30 CH-53 sorties to get us out of here. I don't really mind giving dao complete priority--they were exposed. But that lift was finished at 1900, saigon time. I thought we would get that capacity added here, but this has not happened.

I repeat I need 30 CH-53 sorties and I need them now, and I have just asked scowcroft to so inform the president. I don't want to spend the night here. But I can't come out until. The 29th or 30th sortie. So please get them moving. Warm regards.

Gayler answered within minutes that he had Martin's latest message and "you will have already seen the response by the chopper crews"--that is, additional helicopters should have started landing. That was not good enough for Martin:

[10:20 P.M.] Saigon to flash White House

Among Americans here is father [John] McVeigh, Head of Catholic relief services, who will not leave without his Vietnamese staff, who he knows will be persecuted on basis of what has happened in military regions 1 and 2.

How will president explain to bishop [Edwards] Swanstrom, U.S. Head of C.R.S., or FR. MC Veigh's great and good friend Cardinal Cooke why I left him? I repeat I need 30 sorties tonight. Please get them for me. Warm regards, Martin secret.

Twenty-two minutes later:

From Scowcroft, situation room, to Martin, American embassy, Saigon

Defense promises 30 CH-53s on the way.

Then, at 11:06 P.M., a message from President Ford's chief of staff:

To Martin from [Donald] Rumsfeld

I understand that 154 IBM employees. Including their families, are still awaiting removal from Saigon. I further understand that they are now standing in front of the IBM building awaiting instructions where they should go for evacuation. I ask that you do your utmost to see that they are evacuated with the current helicopter lift.

"Damn," Martin said.

[11:45 P.M.] To: Flash white house for general Scowcroft

Since my last message 19, repeat 19, CH-46s have come and gone. They carry about two fifths of CH-53 capacity. I needed 30 CH-53 sorties capacity. I still do can't you get someone. To tell us what is going on? Warm regards.

And at precisely midnight:

From Martin for admiral Gayler

Inform general Brown, Brent Scowcroft:

There is now another lull.Nothing in last 20 minutes. We needed the capacity, repeat capacity, of 30 CH-53 sorties to get us out of here. As I recall, a CH-46 has about two fifths the capacity of a ch-53.

We still need the capacity, repeat capacity of the 30 CH-53 sorties requested in my previous message. It now seems I will spend part of April 30 here--A bery small part I hope.

But I sure don't want to spend may day here. Warm regards.

April 30

Shortly after midnight, Martin asked for another head count.

If he had waited just another half hour to do so, 420 people who had as much right as any who were evacuated from the embassy that day and night might have made it out. The mission had stranded others all over Saigon. But if the Ambassador had not asked for that one census around midnight, he might have been able to say later that at least they had cleared the compound.

The figures he got were estimates, and they were wrong. As a result, Martin told the fleet that he had 726 people to go--about 500 Vietnamese, 173 Marines and 53 other Americans.

But once the helicopters started landing again, the Marines moved virtually everyone left in the recreation compound through the gate, and that time they actually counted heads as the people moved through. The figure Martin should have been given for "Vietnamese"--the group included several Koreans and Filipinos--was not 500 but 875.

Working the Marines' radio net, Martin reached the fleet and told them of the new count. It was too late. Commanders with the fleet in Honolulu and in Washington now thought that he was playing with them. They figured he was holding back Americans to evacuate a bottomless well of Vietnamese.

At two o'clock that morning in Saigon, it was two in the afternoon in Washington, and Kissinger was telling reporters that the evacuation was going smoothly. He 184 would talk to them again at four. And when he talked to them at four, he damned well wanted to be able to tell them that there were no more Americans in Saigon.

About 3:15 A.M. in Saigon, the pilot of a Chinook-46 landing on the roof passed a piece of paper with a handwritten message scrawled on it. The words "no more" were underlined with two bold strokes:

From CINCPAC to Saigon

I have been directed to send you the following message from the President: "On the basis of the reported total of 726 evacuees, CINCPAC is authorized to send 19 helicopters and no more. The President expects Ambassador Martin to be on the last helicopter...."

F.Y.I: Please acknowledge this Presidential message.

•

From Moorefield's vantage point on the roof, the last hours of the last picture show were Felliniesque.

Shortly before two in the morning, a Marine on the rooftop helipad had fallen from the pad to the roof itself, suffering a serious skull injury. He had been taken out on the next helicopter and Moorefield had gone up to the roof to take his place.

Very soon after that, the Marines had withdrawn from the restaurant/swimming-pool compound and sealed it off. Now, below, people lined the embassy corridors and stair wells. And in the parking lot, with maybe 500 people waiting for evacuation, order prevailed. But the now-unguarded recreational compound was quickly violated, and a macabre carnival was soon under way there.

The bottom of the rancid swimming pool--people had been pissing into it all day--was littered with handguns. Its surface was covered with papers and the big-flaked ash of the documents and U.S. currency that Marines were burning in barrels on the roof. Old momma-sans in white blouses and black-silk pajama pants were looting the restaurant. Drunks were playing bumper cars with the embassy vehicles that had been abandoned there. And at some point deep in the night, someone he couldn't see out on Thong Nhut, in front of the embassy, had a bullhorn and was leading what Moorefield assumed to be an anti-American rally.

•

With the helicopter crews now truly overextended and Kissinger's four-P.M., Washington-time, news conference rapidly approaching, President Ford and Kissinger and Defense Secretary Schlesinger and Gayler in Honolulu and Air Force General John Burns in Thailand called Martin's bluff.

At 3:30 in the morning, the C-130 communications-and-control plane circling high over the city transmitted this message, in the clear, to all aircraft in the area:

"The following message is from the President of the United States and should be passed on by the first helicopter in contact with Ambassador Martin. Only 19 lifts remain. Americans only will be transported. Ambassador Martin will board the first available helicopter and that helicopter will broadcast, 'Tiger, Tiger, Tiger' once it is airborne and en route."

Major James Kean, the officer in charge of all embassy guards in Southeast Asia, picked up the message directly from the fleet on his Marine Corps network. He marched down to the third floor and told the Ambassador that he would go on the next chopper.

"Well, there's a little more to be done, Major," Martin drawled. "Wolf, let's go upstairs."

Martin scrawled out the last message on the legal pad at 4:15 A.M. Lehmann typed it and handed it to the communicator:

Flash Martin to Scowcroft

Plan to close mission at about 0430 30 April local time due to necessity to destroy commo gear. This is the last message from embassy Saigon.

As Martin and Lehmann left, the young men got to work with their sledge hammers and thermite grenades. Martin went into his office and put a few last-minute things into his briefcase. When he came out, the others were standing. "OK," he said. "Let's go."

The Marines were left, and a few military officers from other branches. And Moorefield and Marvin Garrett, the embassy's security officer, would stay for a while. But now the rest of the remaining American bureaucrats would leave.

At 4:40 A.M., they emerged from the stair well onto the roof.

"Hello, Ken," said Martin.

"Mr. Ambassador."

Two minutes later, a CH-46 with LADY ACE 09 painted on its flank settled onto the roof. The pilot jumped out and approached Moorefield. Strapped to his thigh was a kneepad with the scrawled notation "Ambassador, Presidential order for helo (19) limits, only Americans, plus crews, will be carried. The Ambassador should get on Lady Ace 09, the aircraft that passed this message. LA/09."

Over the roar of the blades, the pilot repeated the message.

Moorefield trotted to Martin. "Mr. Ambassador," he shouted, "they say you have to take this helicopter. Presidential order."

The Ambassador looked at Moorefield quizzically, glanced over his shoulder at Lehmann and Polgar and the rest of them. It occurred to Moorefield that maybe Martin thought he meant they were saying he had to fly out alone. "I mean, you first," he said.

Then Martin gave Moorefield a look that said "Let's go." Moorefield touched his elbow and the two of them bent and walked into the rotor wash.

•

At 5:30 A.M., Moorefield watched the last embassy civilians--all security officers--loading into a CH-46 on the roof. Now, if you didn't count the 420 Asians waiting in the parking lot below, the only people left were Major Kean and the Marines.

"Time to go," Moorefield said to himself. He ran for the chopper lightly, not much caring whether or not he made it.

When they lifted above Saigon, it was still night. Moorefield gazed down at fires at Tan Son Nhut, fires consuming Bien Hoa. Twenty minutes later, they crossed the coast line, near Vung Tau, and it was beginning to be day. Hundreds of boats of all sizes were beating out to sea, to the fleet. In that helicopter, half filled with men who had worked hard through the past few weeks and days and hours, no one spoke. Moorefield relished the silence. He had done what he could. Now it was over. His heart was washed with an unaccustomed peace.

•

As the last Chinook-53 lifted from the parking-lot landing zone, Major Kean shouted, "That's it! Frain! Now!" Sergeant Bobby Frain and the four other embassy Marines left in the parking lot bolted for the back entrance to the embassy, pulled its doors shut behind them and slammed down a steel bar across them. With Kean and a few other Marines, they ran across the lobby to the stair well behind post number two, yanked down the steel barrier rolled into the top of the doorway and started up the stairs.

There were still more than 100 Marines in the building. As the tail end of the column moved to the roof, they drew more barriers to the stair well and locked the elevator doors on the top floor.

The last line of defense was a flimsy door at the top of the short, narrow staircase to the roof. They jammed a wall locker between that door and an airconditioning unit under the helicopter pad.

By the time Kean, Frain and Master Sergeant Juan Valdez--the noncommissioned officer in charge of the embassy Marines--got to the roof, the ground--force Marines were leaving in a steady, quick stream of CH-46s. Frain and some of his buddies pressed Browning automatic rifles and valued handguns on the pilots. "Y' ain't going to forget us, right?" Frain shouted at one of them. The man grinned and gave a thumbs-up signal.

With the last few sorties, men below with M-ls started taking pot shots at the helicopters, and there were mortar pops nearby, though the Marines on the embassy roof couldn't tell what the targets were: the compound below, the building itself or the helicopters.

Then, as the last of the ground-force Marines was loaded and borne away, what sounded like an explosion in the compound or the first floor of the embassy ripped the darkness. Cautiously, some of the remaining Marines leaned over the low wall that encircled the roof and reported that the small fire truck that had stood by all night--in case there was a fire and to provide illumination for the landing zone--had rammed through the back doors of the embassy. Whether the truck was commandeered by looters or driven by the men who stood with it during the night, assured that they would be taken out, no one on the roof knew.

It took only a couple of choppers to get almost all of the embassy Marines out. When the second one left, there were only 11 men on the roof--Major Kean, Master Sergeant Valdez, Sergeant Frain and eight others: Sergeant Philip Babel, Corporal Stephen Bauer, Sergeant Terry Bennington, Corporal Duane Gevers, Corporal David Norman, Gunnery Sergeant Robert Schlager, Sergeant Steven Schuller and Staff Sergeant Michael Sullivan.

Far to the east, out beyond the great U.S. armada offshore, a little light began to mark the horizon. Not quite perceptibly, one of those gradual things one can gauge only by putting it out of consciousness for a few minutes at a time, that quarter of the sky was banded with whitish gray and then the richest navy blue and then pink and then salmon and bronze--ribbons in the sky--and then the molten bulge of gold you couldn't look at; and silence. Nearby, the remaining Marines heard punctuations of violence, the muffled sounds of men beneath them working their way up.

But silence in the sky eastward. It would be broken any moment, of course; but it was not broken this moment, had not been broken for moment upon moment, adding up, when you stopped to think about it, by many minutes.

Toward the end, they had made a real point of making sure that every pilot knew there were still men left.

"They know, they gotta know," Major Kean said. "Didn't any of you give a signal to that last guy?" The ten other men looked at one another. Kean shielded his eyes with his hand and looked off to the east.

Someone had left behind a comset--a radio backpack with a long antenna. They diddled with it, broadcasting in the clear, no radio lingo. But they all knew its range was line of sight, and they didn't have line of sight to the fleet.

An arm smashed through the window of the door under the helipad. Frain got to it fast and pulled it into the broken glass, and it yanked back with a cry and the force of a snapped snake as thick as a man's arm. That is, Frain, who was a big man, meant to arrest the arm and could not.

More arms reached through the broken window. So they kept a man there to grab them and j am them into the glass.

Major Kean was calm. He discussed tactics with Valdez and whoever else was not standing guard at the door. It was hard to believe that the fleet had forgotten them, but maybe it had. It was a big, tricky operation, after all. Kean told them what had to be done next if, in fact, a chopper didn't arrive in the next hour, say, glancing at his watch, straight up seven o'clock in the morning, full daylight: "Obviously, we gotta deploy down the rocket shield and make our way to water," he said. Then he told them how he thought they should do that, inviting suggestions.

Then they waited, jerking arms into shards of glass.

And then, at 7:49, specks appeared in the southeastern sky.

Now he was the target. And if he went, it would be an American bomb that got him."

One of the first rockets was a direct hit on two young Marines manning an isolated position."