"As we began to contemplate evacuation, the question, the burning question was," ""Who goes, and who gets left behind?"" "I borrowed a truck and I basically sent the signal to my folks, and this meant a group of South Vietnamese majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels and their families to muster at an address in downtown Saigon." "I drove down there, they loaded up onto the truck, and I drove them to the airbase." "And I had told them, "When you hear three thumps," ""that means hold the babies' mouths." ""Don't breathe, don't talk, don't make any noise because we're going through the gatepost."" "I saluted in uniform as a captain of the United States Army." "The guard waved me through, and I drove straight out to the flight line to an aircraft that was awaiting." "One Vietnamese colonel that was putting his family on the plane, he had wanted to stay in Vietnam to defend the country." "And this full colonel had, like, eight kids and a wife." "And he was in tears, the family..." "The family were in tears, and I said to him, "Get on the plane." ""Just... go." "Go."" "It was a terrible, terrible, terrible moral dilemma for everybody." "We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam." "We have adopted a plan for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces." "We are finally bringing American men home." "We who made the agreement thought that it would be the beginning not of peace in the American sense, but the beginning of a period of coexistence which might evolve as it did in Korea into two states." "Reconciliation between North and South Vietnam we knew would be extremely difficult." "But I was hopeful." "Because of the Paris Agreement," "American soldiers were going home." "But I was on my way back to Vietnam." "I was assigned to Saigon in the first week of August 1973, so about six months after the ceasefire." "I would say that between the State Department people and CIA people, the contractors who were there to maintain infrastructure, maintain aircraft, as well as people like me, we had 5,000 to 7,000 Americans in country." "A lot of the guys had Vietnamese girlfriends and wives, in many cases with children." "In general, things were eerily calm and in many ways normal in Saigon." "My sense was that we were gonna be there, you know, pretty much for a long time to come." "I was assigned to the American embassy in Saigon." "I was in charge of the 84 Marine security guards that were there, making sure that they kept up with their physical fitness training." "We were there to protect American lives as well as American property." "It was just a day-to-day job." "The Ambassador there was a guy named Graham Martin, a North Carolinian, just as I was." "He spoke with a slow Southern drawl." "He was a great gentleman." "He was a cold warrior in the old stripe." "He'd lost an adopted son in Vietnam to combat." "And he was not gonna give up South Vietnam to the Communists." "He was determined to keep U.S. aid flowing into Saigon." "When the ceasefire occurred in 1973, everybody toasted it with Bloody Marys in the U.S. embassy." "It was a grand party." "We thought peace was at hand." "But the Paris Peace Accord was a masterpiece of ambiguity." "In order to get President Thieu and the South Vietnamese to go along with the Paris Agreement," "President Nixon pulled out all the stops, and in a letter to President Thieu, he promised that if the North Vietnamese were to substantially violate the terms of the Paris Agreement, the United States would respond with full force." "In other words, reenter the war." "The North Vietnamese viewed Nixon as a madman." "They were terrified of him." "They believed that Nixon, if necessary, would bring back American air power." "But in August 1974, he was gone." "Nixon resigned because of Watergate." "And overnight, everything changed." "Hanoi suddenly saw the road to Saigon as being open." "The South Vietnamese population had ample reason to fear the Vietnamese Communists." "The Communist conduct throughout the course of the war had been violent and unforgiving." "For example, when the city of Hue was taken over by the North Vietnamese, several thousand people on a long blacklist were rounded up..." "Schoolteachers, government civil servants, people who were known anti-Communists..." "And they were executed, in some cases even buried alive." "So panic was but a millimeter away." "Hundreds of thousands of refugees are in a blind rush to flee even further from the rapidly advancing Communists." "Bruce Dunning reports." "President Thieu broadcast a strong appeal to the soldiers and the people of Da Nang, urging them to stay and fight." "As the enemy approaches, the panic has swept from the coastal city's crowded backstreets and pagodas onto runways at the airport." "Our plane is surrounded here." "I don't know how the hell we're gonna get out." "We're racing down the runway, leaving behind hundreds and thousands of people." "Another dozen of them running along, grabbing at the air stair." "We're pulling them on as fast as we can." "There's a sea of humanity jamming on." "Impossible to stop the crowd." "We're pulling away." "We're leaving them behind." "We're pulling up with the..." "People are falling off the air stairs!" "The plane is taking off." "It was every man for himself." "So you saw the World Airways flight being mobbed by South Vietnamese soldiers." "You saw ships with thousands of refugees, including lots of soldiers." "You saw out-of-control panic." "Basically any boats, trucks, airplanes, or anything going south were besieged by people wanting to get onboard." "The Americans were gone, and as a result, the house of cards began to collapse." "The North Vietnamese decided to escalate, escalate, escalate, escalate at every turn to see if the United States would react." "In April of '75, I was with President Gerald Ford, and we were flying across the country on Air Force One when one of the airplane's crew comes and hands me a note, and it says, "Da Nang has fallen."" "Ford was bombarded by questions from the press after he got off Air Force One." "Around 150,000 to 175,000 well-trained North Vietnamese regular forces in violation of the Paris Peace Accords moved into South Vietnam." "We have objected to that violation." "It's a tragedy unbelievable in its ramifications." "We are now in a crisis." "We had a wave of humanity:" "500,000 refugees rolling, rolling south towards Saigon, and 160,000 North Vietnamese troops moving right behind them." "I had become so concerned," "I decided to pull our best Vietnamese agents in out of the woodwork to try to see what they could tell us about Communist planning, which obviously was rapidly evolving." "On the 8th of April," "I met with one of our best agents, who said, "The Communists are gonna drive on Saigon." "They're gonna be in there by Ho Chi Minh's birthday,"" "which was May 19th, literally a month away." "Communist forces in South Vietnam, already solidly in control of 11 provinces, began working on yet another one today:" "Binh Dinh." "I kept a map every day on the progress of the North Vietnamese onslaught." "By the 5th of April, the North Vietnamese had 15, even 16 divisions heading in the direction of Saigon." "They were bringing SA-2 missiles down to provide anti-aircraft cover for their forces." "There were people who were saying," ""Look, we've gotta do some heavy, heavy planning here" ""because depending on how this goes, and it doesn't look good now, we may all have to evacuate."" "And Ambassador Martin wouldn't tolerate or countenance such thought." "That was defeatism." "That was poisonous to the prospects of the people we're here to help." "But people could see what was going on and they started leaving, especially the Americans." "I'm leaving Vietnam." "Why?" "I'm kind of scared, to be honest with you." "To be perfectly honest with you, I'm really scared." "I think the situation's a lot worse than we know about." "There was always a standing evacuation plan in the embassy." "It held that in an emergency, all Americans still in the country, about 6,000 people, would be evacuated and that no South Vietnamese would be evacuated with them." "I was a student." "The school's not closing, but it seemed like nobody's interested in school anymore." "You can't stay here." "You can't live with the Communists, especially if you have a connection with the Americans." "Then you really gotta get out." "If we really made up a list of endangered South Vietnamese, the ones who really worked closely with us during the war, this number could be 150,000, 200,000." "Including their families, many more than that." "But the idea of talking about an evacuation and of planning for an evacuation of Americans, let alone an evacuation of Vietnamese, was still anathema in the embassy." "If you mean, "Is South Vietnam on the imminent verge of collapse?"" "I think the answer is quite definitely no." "We were dealing with an ambassador who was just convinced that somehow, he was going to be able to pull this out and that there wouldn't have to be an evacuation and therefore, there wouldn't have to be a concern" "about evacuating South Vietnamese." "The situation in South Vietnam has reached a critical phase requiring immediate and positive decisions by this government." "There are tens of thousands of South Vietnamese employees of the United States government, of news agencies, of contractors and businesses for many years whose lives, with their dependents, are in very grave peril." "I'm therefore asking the Congress to appropriate without delay $722 million for emergency military assistance for South Vietnam." "If the very worst were to happen, at least allow the orderly evacuation of Americans and endangered South Vietnamese to places of safety." "There was no way in 1975 that the Congress was going to vote any money to go to the aid of South Vietnam." "We had pulled out our troops in 1973 and public opinion at that point shifted." "The people of the United States, having seen Watergate, having seen the deception of the generals, weren't about to give any help in Southeast Asia." "And you know, Kissinger knew this." "We knew we were not going to get the $722 million." "By that time it made no big difference, but President Ford said he owed it to Vietnam to make a request." "We've sent, so to speak, battleship after battleship and bomber after bomber and 500,000 and more men and billions and billions of dollars." "If billions and billions didn't do at a time when we had all our men there, how can $722 million save the day?" "This is the way my map looked in mid-April." "The North Vietnamese just rolled down the coast." "Saigon was clearly threatened." "The situation was urgent." "Urgent understates it." "At this time, Ambassador Martin had been back in Washington trying to persuade Congress to vote additional aid." "Do you have anything to say on your arrival?" "He has no statement to make." "He came back to Saigon, and my boss, the CIA station chief, said," ""Go down and tell the old man what's happening."" "I went and I said, "Mr. Ambassador," ""half of the South Vietnamese Army has disintegrated." ""We're in grave trouble." ""Please, sir, plan for an evacuation." ""At least allow us to begin putting together lists of South Vietnamese we should rescue."" "And he said, "No, Frank." ""It's not so bleak." "And I won't have this negative talk."" "Young officers in the embassy began to mobilize a black operation, meaning a makeshift underground railway evacuation using outgoing cargo aircraft that would be totally below the radar of the Ambassador." "People like myself and others took the bull by the horns and organized an evacuation." "In my case, that meant friends of mine who were senior officers in the South Vietnamese military." "As the North Vietnamese came closer and closer to Saigon, these people were dead men walking." "I had arranged a signal with my intelligence community friends that if I said, "I'm having a barbecue,"" "that meant come to a certain pre-designated place and bring your families and only bring one suitcase because we're going to have a party." "But it was understood the party meant" "I was going to get them out." "Black Ops were essentially violating the rules..." "In this case meaning, you're not allowed to bring out Vietnamese military people who were under obligation to stand and fight." "We were fully expecting if we got caught doing this that we would be run out of country." "End of career, do not pass go." "But sometimes there's an issue not of legal and illegal, but right or wrong." "The deputy defense attaché moved out Vietnamese personnel and their families to Clark Air Base in the Philippines without any approval whatsoever, without any immigration papers, anything..." "Passports, you name it." "And when they began showing up in the Philippines," "Martin hit the roof and fired him!" "But that didn't stop other State Department people who had Vietnamese friends and family members." "They continued to organize these makeshift airlifts." "TERRY McNAMARA:" "That April, I was in Can Tho, which was about 100 miles from Saigon." "And we were getting reports of this town falling and that province falling and so on." "And then we were attacked." "Sergeant Hasty came by to give me a report on the damage." "Can Tho came under pretty intense artillery bombardment." "The North Vietnamese had overrun some South Vietnamese artillery batteries and managed to turn those around and shell the center of Can Tho." "We knew that the situation was bad." "We could see that the South Vietnamese Army was eroding." "Supplies had been cut off and you could see the armaments dwindling." "McNAMARA:" "We were, under the terms of the Paris Agreement, committed to resupplying the South Vietnamese." "They lacked simple things, like barbed wire and bags for sand bags." "They were rationing their artillery shells because they were running out." "The military support, the material support, was not coming." "When President Ford went before the Congress, he had two major concerns." "The first was to save as many people as we could." "He cared for the human beings involved;" "they were not just pawns that once they had lost their military power were abandoned." "The second was the honor of America, that we would not be seen at the final agony of South Vietnam as having stabbed it in the back." "Congress wouldn't pass it." "They said, "No more." "No more troops, no more money, no more aid to the Vietnamese."" "Well, I had to go into President Ford's office to tell him." "I had never heard Ford use a curse word in all the time I'd known him." "But when I showed him this story, he said," ""Those sons of bitches."" "I think there were a total of 50 ships that were there." "I mean, it wasn't just us;" "it was a whole bunch of ships." "We were standing by for the evacuation of Americans." "I was a terrible letter writer." "I would write one letter for my wife's ten letters, and she didn't like that, so she said," ""We're going to exchange tapes."" "So I would run into my stateroom, turn the tape recorder on for a couple of minutes and tell her what's happening." "I really don't know where to start." "It's been such an unusual couple days for us." "We went with the rest of this huge task force of ours up into about, oh, 20 miles off the coast, basically east of Saigon." "As most Navy operations are, it was very carefully planned." "We planned it to death." "The chain of command, as I understood it as a captain of the United States Marine Corps, and I think I got it right, is that for any evacuation, that decision is the Ambassador's decision." "Graham Martin is the responsible guy." "But the military is responsible for giving him all kinds of plans." "And this is how we got into the four options." "The first option was you would take commercial ships right up the Saigon River to a couple blocks from the embassy." "You would load whoever you wanted to bring out on these ships and you'd be done with it." "The second option was, you know," "United and Continental and Flying Tiger Airlines were still using Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base at the time, and you could've brought anybody you wanted out by commercial aviation." "The third option was military fixed-wing aviation..." "The C5As, the C-141s, which carry a lot of people." "You could've brought them out of Tan Son Nhut on those." "The very last option, the very last option, was helicopters off the carriers in the Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base." "We had 75 Marine Corps helicopters out there." "The helicopter option, that was absolutely the last resort." "You know, they don't go very fast, they don't carry that many people." "That was if everything else failed." "I got into Vietnam late on the 24th of April, 1975." "Saigon was full of rumor, of false stories, whether we were going to have a last attempt to draw a line across the country, that Saigon and the south would remain a free republic, all of these things," "and it was all churning all around." "The fighting was close to Saigon but hadn't shown up in the streets of Saigon." "I served as a naval officer in three and a half tours in Vietnam, two of those years as a Special Forces advisor with a 20-boat River Division, all Vietnamese." "I could tell jokes and hear jokes in Vietnamese." "And once you start off like that, you eventually end up being able to dream in Vietnamese." "In 1975, my mission was to remove or destroy as many ships, swift boats, anything that I considered to be a benefit to the enemy." "I met with Captain Do Kiem, who was the operations officer of the Vietnamese Navy." "The plan was to sail all the large ships of the South Vietnamese Navy down the Saigon River to the sea and rendezvous at Con Son Island." "We had to keep this secret." "If word got out, it would have had an effect on the morale of the people in the street." "JOE McBRIDE:" "We knew that there were roughly 5,000 Americans still in the country." "Many of them had Vietnamese wives, mistresses, whatever." "Just hadn't left." "And they were basically letting us know," ""We're not leaving without our families."" "Finally, we were given authority by the Ambassador to bypass the immigration laws and send these Vietnamese out of the country." "So then we started an operation basically to get out the Americans and their Vietnamese dependents." "It was not an official evacuation." "We still had no organized plan for evacuating high-risk South Vietnamese because we had an ambassador who was making up his mind on the wing." "The President also asked Congress for authorization to use American troops here to evacuate Americans and Vietnamese who worked for Americans." "If it were necessary." "Do you have plans for that?" "Well, of course, every embassy in the world has plans for it." "Do you think it will be necessary?" "That again, you see, is a judgment that I can't possibly make at this time." "We have been reducing the population here as measure of prudency and will take measures to reduce it further as a question of prudence." "The Ambassador was extremely skittish, and I guess understandably so, about talking about evacuation, about sending signals that an evacuation was being planned or even executed." "He feared it would trigger a panic." "It time to get out." "And in Saigon at that time, it was like, "Who do you know?"" "The the key word would be "connection."" "There's a lot of people, they try to get their money because if the people have money, maybe they will find a connection to get out." "You know, and so, "You want to go?" "Give me this kind of money."" "One guy said to me," ""Your family, tell them to come to the boat dock." "I'll be waiting for them."" "Of course they took the money, but they never got us." "There was chaos in Saigon at that time." "Everybody was looking for ways to get out as soon as possible." "Of course, the Americans we worked with had a plan in place for us." "They told us to get to the meeting place, which was a safe house near the American embassy, and to wait for buses to come to pick us up." "If we were gonna get people out, we were gonna have to make it happen and deliver the Vietnamese to the big airplanes in some form or fashion." "And the only way we could do that was keeping the airport open as long as we could." "Ambassador Martin still hoped that somehow, this thing would not end with the North Vietnamese humiliating the United States by attacking Saigon." "But it seemed like the North Vietnamese had other ideas." "What may be the final battle of Saigon has begun." "Communist ground forces have started moving in on Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport." "Rockets exploded all over the base, touching off three major fires." "The air base was under continuous artillery fire." "I felt the rounds." "They were so close, the shrapnel was plinking against the fence behind us." "It was abundantly clear that it was a whole new ball game." "We never expected any trouble out there." "And then, of course, fear a little bit set in because now we knew that it really meant business, you know?" "Were they gonna continue shelling Tan Son Nhut?" "They had given us a warning, you know?" ""Get out."" "As the sun came up, General Smith, who was our defense attaché out at Tan Son Nhut, contacted the Ambassador and said," ""The plan to use the fixed-wing" ""to get a few thousand people out today" ""isn't gonna work." ""And we need to consider that this is it." ""Option 4:" "a heavy-lift helicopter evacuation."" "And Ambassador Martin wouldn't hear of it." "He said, "I want to come out there." "I want to see it," and which he did." "He got in a sedan." "He didn't lack for guts." "There were still rounds coming in..." "Sporadic, but there was still artillery fire." "And he could see that the main runway was full of craters from North Vietnamese artillery." "And it was understood that General Smith was not being premature with the recommendation for Option 4." "McBRIDE:" "Ambassador Martin's concern very clearly up to now was that once we started an official evacuation, it's pretty obvious that the game is over." "You've got to remember, this is an ambassador who had lost his only son in combat in Vietnam." "One becomes pretty invested in that country." "He had been holding out hope that some kind of third-party solution could be worked out so that South Vietnam could continue with some form of independence or autonomy." "And he was being encouraged to think that this might be possible." "But the morning of the 29th, he came to accept the fact that that wasn't going to happen." "And I picked up the phone and told Secretary Kissinger to inform the President that I had decided we would have to go to Option 4." "When I tell President Ford the airport is being shelled and that it's now time to pull the plug, he keeps coming back time and again," ""You really think we have to do it?"" "That's how heartbreaking it was for him." "He finally reluctantly gave the go-ahead for the final evacuation." "This is the American Forces Vietnam Network." "The prearranged signal for the evacuation was broadcast on American radio in Saigon." "The message was," ""The temperature is 105 and rising,"" "and then Bing Crosby's "White Christmas."" "And sure enough, about 10:00 in the morning," "I believe, on the 29th, there was Bing Crosby on the airwaves." "♪ I'm dreaming of a white Christmas ♪" "♪ Just like the ones I used to know ♪" "♪ Where the treetops glisten and children listen ♪" "♪ To hear sleigh bells in the snow... ♪" "That morning, Ambassador Martin received a message that said within 24 hours, the U.S. presence in Vietnam had to be closed out, meaning we had to be gone." "It was obvious that there was the need for a hasty plan to be developed for a helicopter airlift out of the embassy to the fleet." "And we had less than 24 hours to pull it off." "McBRIDE:" "That morning, there must have been, I would guess, at least 10,000 people literally ringing the embassy." "The embassy compound was the size of a city block." "It was big." "And all sides of it were filled 200, 300 feet back." "Fortunately, people were by and large very controlled." "They were very patient." "They were just hoping desperately to get in." "It's like the whole of Saigon want to get inside the American embassy." "So you have to know somebody, you know?" "If you're like me, I find my friend and got a little paper to ensure us to get in." "So several of us went to the embassy." "Then my friend, he showed the paper to the guard, and he's just kind of pointing at each one of us, and we, one by one, could go inside of the embassy." "When I first got in, I feel so good." ""I'm in America..." "I'm almost there."" "They have a courtyard and a swimming pool, and we mostly gather around the swimming pool." "And 1,000 people there, and they just keep coming in." "That morning, CIA choppers began picking up evacuees off the roofs of buildings around the city and bringing them to the embassy." "There was an old pilot named O.B. Harnage." "He was blind in one eye and lame in one leg." "And I said, "Harnage, we got people at 6 Gia Long." "You gotta go pick them up."" "It was the deputy CIA station chief's apartment building." "There were a number of very high-risk Vietnamese, including the defense minister of South Vietnam, all waiting to be rescued." "As they climbed up the ladder to the roof, a photographer took that famous photograph." "Many people thought that was the U.S. embassy." "It wasn't." "But it indicated to what extent chaos had descended on this entire operation." "Inside the embassy, everywhere we looked was teeming with Vietnamese." "We counted them, and the total number was about 2,800." "There was no hiding it that somehow, people had to have let these people into the embassy." "Was it, you know," "Marine security guards who kind of looked the other way?" "Was it American employees in the embassy who were doing kind of what we did with black ops and taking care of their own?" "We never got to the bottom of that and frankly, we never pursued it." "One of the Marines said to me," ""You know, we should take out the tailor."" "There was a tailor who made all our civilian clothes." "So I said," ""Why don't we take out the cook too?"" "He said, "Well, you should take out the cook too," ""and all the other cooks." ""They should get out." "They had business with Americans."" "So they took the bread truck and they rounded up the tailor, the cooks and the dishwashers, a few others and their families, and drove them into the embassy compound." "There was in the parking lot of the embassy a great tamarind tree, which the Ambassador had often referred to as "steadfast as the American commitment in Vietnam."" "The CIA station chief that last morning said," ""Mr. Ambassador, we have to cut this tree down."" "You could not land any large helicopters on the parking lot unless the tree and all the shrubbery was all gone." "The Ambassador had resisted us cutting that tree because he did not want anybody to be alerted that we were doing any sort of evacuation or were going to do any sort of evacuation." "He was upset." "But finally he succumbed, you know, to just common sense and gave up his, uh..." "I guess you could call it a dream." "And we cut it down." "He had also, for the past few days, prevented us from burning classified documents for fear that it would panic the South Vietnamese." "So that morning of the 29th, we had thousands of pages of classified documents we had failed to destroy beforehand." "Our next job was just looking at that classified document idea and getting rid of that." "So we went to every office and told them to start pulling stuff, and piles and piles of paper began coming out." "And we began shredding." "There was a small building where we handled the pay for the Vietnamese who worked for the embassy." "And in this building, there was over $1 million in U.S. currency." "So we had to send a message to the Navy, who sent it to the Treasury Department, who came back and said, "Destroy it."" "So I assigned a few Marines to get rid of the money." "And I said, "Oh, by the way, we're gonna lock you in there."" "It took them eight hours to burn a million dollars." "That morning, fear and desperation were the order of the day." "But I had a job to do, and it was an important job to do, I thought, to deny the enemy the South Vietnamese Naval ships." "We had expected, frankly, a longer time period to get ready." "We had been told by people in our intelligence community that we might have as long as the 4th of May, but the North Vietnamese were closing in quite tightly, and clearly it was time to send the signal to leave." "I knew this, but I didn't know how many civilians were gonna be on board." "I had no idea." "I was the first one into the embassy." "And my only mission at this time, this is early in the afternoon, was to bring the Ambassador out." "It was actually a mission that was called "Embassy Snatch."" "I was just supposed to get the Ambassador." "I land and I said to the people," "I said, "I'm here to get the Ambassador."" "Well, not quite." "The Ambassador refused to leave until he could get as many Vietnamese on as many choppers as possible." "The evacuation of Vietnamese happened because Graham Martin wanted it to happen." "So they loaded some Vietnamese onto my helicopter and because I'm supposed to have the Ambassador on board, we go right to the command ship, the USS Blue Ridge." "We land on the Blue Ridge, General Carey comes out, wants to know where the Ambassador is." "I said, "Well, he didn't get on."" "I mean, I don't know who I'm supposed to tell, but I told everybody I was supposed to get the Ambassador but the Ambassador didn't get on." "So that starts the lift." "Like I say, we had 75 Marine Corps helicopters." "You and your wingman would fly into the embassy, get your passengers loaded, and fly back out to the ships." "It was a little over an hour back and forth." "On the USS Kirk, our mission was to protect the helicopters moving from the embassy out to the aircraft carriers and back and forth." "We were very close to the action." "You could stand there on the deck and you could watch it all happening." "We thought that the USS Kirk was just going to be an observer to this whole thing and when all of a sudden on radar we started seeing these little blips coming out from the shore." "I really don't know where to start." "We looked up at the horizon and all you could see were helicopters all heading toward us." "These were not Marine Corps helicopters." "They were small helicopters, the little Hueys, which were never part of the evacuation plan." "But they were flying over top of us." "We were watching them fly over top over and over and over again." "We viewed them as enemy until we could verify who it was." "Then we realized that these were South Vietnamese trying to escape." "I figured if we could save one, at least we'd save 15, 20 people." "They were packed in there like sardines." "So I made the decision." "Land the helicopter." "One of our sailors could speak rudimentary Vietnamese." "So we put him on the radio and he started broadcasting." ""This is ship 1087." "Land here."" "So, we got his attention." "He came flying over and landed on our flight deck." "And it turned out that the pilot, he was the pilot for the deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff." "Real high up." "And he had the general with him, who was a two-star general, and the two-star general's nephew, three women, and about four children." "It was a big deal for us." "When it landed, we got everything off." "And I looked up because there were five, six, seven stacked up ready to land." "Turned out all throughout the southern part of Vietnam there were South Vietnamese Army and Air Force installations with one or two or three or four helicopters." "And those helicopters were flyable." "Their pilots were there." "And when they realized that the evacuation was happening and they weren't going to be part of it, they said," ""Oh yeah, we are."" "These young Vietnamese pilots would go to their homes, land right in their front yards, pick up their families and anybody else, and head out to sea, hoping they can rendezvous with a ship." "Well, we're one of the first ships they saw." "Our flight deck will only take one helicopter at a time landing." "There are no wheels on them." "They just have skids." "We couldn't think of what else to do and these other planes were looking for a place to land so we just physically pushed them." "Of course, this was a big old helicopter, thousands of pounds, so we had to figure out how to get it 15 feet over to the edge of the flight deck." "You don't have time to think about what you did, you just had to do it." "So, we open up our flight deck and they begin to land, one right after the other." "Some of them were shot at, holes in them." "Most of the Vietnamese who came out, I'm talking about the flight crews, they were heavily armed, all with side arms, some with M-16 rifles." "They had no idea what was going to happen so they came out ready for anything, really." "So we had to disarm them." "None of them had ever landed on a ship before." "They were Vietnamese Air Force." "Everybody had a gun and we took all the guns away from them." "Then about five minutes later another one came in and landed." "And we pushed his airplane over the side." "That was the second one." "I helped push that one over, too." "Then the third plane came in." "It landed also." "We pushed it over the side." "So meanwhile, we've thrown three helicopters in the water so far." "This is incredible." "I know you probably don't believe any of this, but it's all true." "By late afternoon, the chopper flow at the embassy really started." "And each time a bird came in, here would go another 40, 50 people." "But did the right mix of people get out?" "You know, who says that these were the people who either deserved or should have gone out?" "At the embassy a lot of the people who got out happened to be good wall jumpers." "The choppers started coming in at ten-minute intervals." "One would land on the roof and one would land on the parking lot." "They would put all the Vietnamese in groups, they would search them, and if they had any weapons all those weapons were thrown into the swimming pool." "And as soon as the chopper would land they would be brought into the restricted area where a couple of the Marines would escort them into the aircraft." "Then they would raise the ramp up and take off." "I remember I talked to my friend and he said, "Oh, it's our turn now." "We're almost there."" "You know, so we're all excited." "And I remember very distinctively that every time the helicopter coming down it just blew us away." "We have to kind of duck down to fight with the wind of the chopper." "Three of the choppers that came in each landed a platoon of 40 Marines from the task force." "And they had to be brought in because we didn't have enough" "Marines in the embassy security guard to secure the walls." "I went with my wife to the embassy." "A lot of people, they clenched to the top of the wall, but they couldn't get in." "Each gate was besieged like that, although the side gate was the principal place where they came." "People holding letters saying, you know, "I worked for the Americans." "Please let me in."" "Journalists were arriving and counting on being recognized to be let in by the Marines." "There was a sea of people wanting to get out by helicopters." "But, well, they looked up at the helicopters leaving and I could see their eyes." "Desperate eyes." "My dad flew a Chinook helicopter in the South Vietnamese Air Force." "He had been waiting for orders but his captain had, you know, basically just left." "So he and some other pilots picked out the best Chinooks and took off." "He said it was the Wild West at this point." "Just you and your horse and you just do what you had to do to survive and take care of your family." "He had given my mom a heads-up that if she did hear a Chinook coming, to get ready." "I was six and a half years old." "I can still hear the rumbling, a very, you know, familiar rumbling of a Chinook." "When you hear the Chinook coming, you know it's coming." "I knew my dad was coming." "In Saigon, during my childhood, it was like, say, living in the middle of busy L.A." "So, there's really not a big area to land the Chinook." "So he came in and landed in a play field." "Caused a lot of wind, caused a lot of commotion." "My mom grabbed my little sister, who was about six months at that time, and I have a little brother who was about three or four years old, and myself." "We quickly ran into the Chinook and we all flew off out into the Pacific Ocean." "My dad was afraid for not having enough fuel, afraid for a lot of things." "He was just flying blind." "And then he saw a ship out there." "In the middle of the day, after we had taken those first helicopters aboard, this huge helicopter called a Chinook, it came out and tried to land on the ship." "And oh, we almost... the thing almost crashed onboard our ship." "This big Chinook showed up." "There's no way he could land on Kirk without impacting the ship." "He would have killed everybody on this helicopter plus my crew." "It was way too big to land." "We thought that the helicopter would just fly away." "But as the ship was moving forward probably four, five, six knots, something like that, the pilot communicated that he was running low on fuel." "He opened up the port side of the helicopter and he hovered across the stern of the Kirk." "Then, all of a sudden, here comes a human." "One by one, we jump out." "I jumped out, my brother jumped out." "My mom was holding my sister, obviously very scared." "And she just, you know, just trustingly, just with one hand, with her right hand, holding on with her left to brace herself, you know, just dropped my baby sister." "One fella is standing there and he said he looked up and he saw this big bundle of stuff come flying out and it was a baby." "It was the one-year-old baby." "And then the mother jumped out and he caught her, too." "Then the pilot flew out on our starboard, right side." "He hovered with his wheels in and out of the water." "He hovered there for like ten minutes and we couldn't figure out what he was doing and it turned out what he was doing was taking his flight suit off." "Here's a man flying a twin rotor helicopter by himself, and at the same time he's taking off a flight suit." "How you do it, I've talked to helicopter pilots and they can't figure out how he did that, you know, how... like a Houdini, trying to get out of this thing." "And finally, he made the helicopter roll to the right as he stepped out the door on the left." "Just thunderous loud noise." "The shrapnel is just blowing up." "And suddenly just quiet." "And he pops up." "And he's alive." "And he swam away." "And the helicopter was only about 20 feet from him when it hit the water;" "it was amazing." "We went out and picked him up." "He was none, no worse for the wear." "He was a little bit wet." "Only one unfortunate thing is he had some small bars of gold, which was all his worldly possessions, that were in his shirt pocket and it sank." "So he lost everything." "He didn't own a thing but his underwear when he finally came aboard the ship." "He was a tremendous pilot." "The guy was just so cool and calm." "We've so far taken a total of 17 helicopters." "We ended up with 157 people aboard this ship." "And that crew was very special." "They went, they took their money, went to the Navy exchange and commissary, bought all the clothes and food they could get, took it up and gave it to the refugees they had befriended." "They were unbelievable." "We laid mats and all kinds of blankets and stuff out on the deck for the babies." "And there were all kinds of..." "there were infants and children and women, and oh, it was a scene I'll never forget." "We were happy." "My mom was just, you know, wow." "Symbolically, it was like, you know, the first step onto not American soil, but American freedom." "When we started the evacuation we were very, very excited about it." "Then your next emotion probably was just determined to get this job done and get these people out." "And then, later as it went on you became fatigued and frustrated that you could never make a dent in the amount of people that were coming out of the embassy." "You'd ask questions like, was the crowd getting any smaller?" ""When are we going to finish this?" you know." "And they'd say," ""You know, we're under orders from the Ambassador." "We're doing the best we can."" "Carrier pilots were saying, look, it's an uncontrollable sea of people and Ambassador Martin has lost his objectivity, that Ambassador Martin is trying to evacuate all of Saigon through the U.S. embassy." "But he was doing his best under terrible circumstances." "JOSEPH McBRIDE:" "Ambassador Martin was dragging out the evacuation as long as he could to get as many South Vietnamese out as possible." "Each helicopter took about 40 people." "He knew that once the Americans were gone, the evacuation would be over." "So they just put one or two Americans on each one." "You're very tired and you're not seeing an end to this thing." "So I got the word out," ""You know, we could use some help out here." "We only have 75 helicopters."" "And the word comes back, "No." "No, Marine pilots don't get tired."" "Back at the embassy under the Ambassador's direction, we, of course, were taking advantage of the presence of the aircraft to evacuate threatened folks." "But there were other independent efforts to get people out." "McBRIDE:" "Several of us at the embassy agreed that we would drive vans down to the docks on the Saigon River." "I had an assigned assembly point in the middle of Saigon, and I crammed about 15 people into a nine-person van and then drove through the streets of Saigon through various checkpoints down to the docks." "People would get out and go running for these commercial boats and get on." "I made a number of runs and there'd just be more and more and more people." "Finally, as the sun was going down, we were running out of light." "Man came up to me." "I turned to him and said, "This is my last load." "I, you know, I can't take anymore."" "I said, "Well, get your family."" "And he said, "Can't do it." ""My family's too big." "My family's too big."" "And he just shook my hand and said, "Thanks for trying,"" "and walked away." "So I came back to the embassy and parked the van." "It was already getting well into twilight." "Got my way through the crowd." "It was a big crowd." "I had nothing more I could do." "So I went to get on the helicopter and Ambassador Martin pulled me out of line and he said," ""I know what you've been doing." ""I know you've been out there." ""We've been talking." "I want to thank you."" "I thought that was a kind gesture." "By that time it was definitely dark." "The lights of the..." "of the helicopter inside radiated very clearly." "I sat down, looked around." "I was one of maybe two or three Americans." "The rest were all Vietnamese." "And we flew out." "It was very dark." "I remember that." "And people started to elbow each other and try to get in the front line." "And that's when the Captain Herrington started speaking to us in Vietnamese." ""Nobody is going to be left behind."" "And then he said, "When you are in American embassy," ""you are in American soil." ""I promise, me and my soldier will be the last one leave the embassy."" "So after that announcement everybody feel relaxed." "Literally, we totally relaxed." "We have nothing to worry about." "Yeah." "We were told that the North Vietnamese tanks were coming very close." "So we asked, we in the White House, asked the Defense Department how many South Vietnamese were left." ""Left" meant inside the embassy compound." "And then we calculated how many helicopters it would take to get them out." "We told Martin that he had to be on the last helicopter." "All I know is that in Washington there was confusion about the numbers on the ground." "At 1:00 a.m. there were 1,100 people left to evacuate." "After we'd had a flurry of choppers and cleaned out more than half of them and there were 420 people left, we received an order from Washington that the lift was over other than the extraction of the remaining Americans." "About 4:00 in the morning, 4:30," "I land on the USS Blue Ridge again." "So, General Carey comes out, gives me an apple and a cup of coffee or something and says," ""We're under orders from the President." "You got to get the Ambassador out."" "So we fly in." "I land on the roof exactly at 4:50 in the morning and I said," ""I'm not leaving until the Ambassador's onboard."" "One of the Marines lowered the flag, folded it up and escorted the Ambassador up to the landing zone up on top of the embassy and he gave him the flag and, uh, that was it." "Major Kean came to Colonel Madison, said, "No more." "Only Americans from this point on."" "And Madison said, "The hell you say." "We've got these people over here."" "And Kean said, "Sir, not going to happen." "It's a presidential order."" "And Madison said, "I'll take this up with the Ambassador."" "He was very hot under the collar." "And Kean said, "You can't, that's him,"" "and pointed to the CH-46 that was just flying away." "So the Ambassador's on board." "And out we go." "We land on the Blue Ridge." "15 or 20, maybe 25 people get off with the Ambassador and that was the end of it." "I flew 18.3 hours straight through." "Graham Martin looked very tired, extremely haggard." "I mean, he looked like..." "I'm sure the pressure was immense." "And at what time were you to cease evacuation?" "Cease evacuation?" "We could still be flying if we hadn't gotten the Ambassador out because he refused to stop the lift." "I think about 3:00." "3:00 in the morning?" "No, 3:45." "Colonel Madison says to me, "We're screwed." ""Stu, you stay down here in the parking lot and keep these 420 people warm"..." "Meaning if they see us all leave at the same time they'll panic... "and then make your way to the roof." "We gotta go."" "And he was very angry and very disappointed." "So they disappeared into the embassy." "And I went to where the remaining Vietnamese who were waiting and told them..." ""Big helicopters about to come," and waited a few minutes." "Then I saw a chopper take off and I thought," ""Shit, was I supposed to be on that one?"" "So, I looked at the Vietnamese and I said..." ""I got to take a leak."" "And I left into the shadows." "I made my way around in a circuitous route and went into the embassy." "I thought about how this really, really was wrong." "I thought maybe I should just say, "I'm not leaving till they go, because I promised them."" "And then I said, "Don't be a fool." ""Maybe they've started shooting down helicopters" ""for all you know." ""You're not going to get anybody else out." ""It's a presidential order." "This decision has been made."" "So, I got to the roof and a CH-46 alighted on the rooftop, put its ramp down and we got on board." "As it took off, the door was open." "And down in the parking lot" "I could see the group of 420 of them." "They were right were we had left them marshaled on this little patch of grass." "I felt absolutely awful." "It was just so..." "serious and deep a betrayal." "Later that night I was quite surprised that I got a call to "Come alongside the flagship." "The Admiral wants to speak to you."" "My first reaction, as any CO, is, "What did we do?"" "not realizing we had been picked for a special mission." "We were supposed to pick up this person." "He was 30 years old, came aboard, civilian clothes." "And the Captain was just told to take his direction from this guy." "I went aboard the Kirk and met with Captain Paul Jacobs." "And the first thing he said to me is," ""Young man, I'm not accustomed" ""to strange civilians coming aboard my ship armed in the middle of the night."" "And I said, "Captain, I assure you, neither am I."" "He smelled like a Naval officer, you know." "You know, one officer can smell another one." "So, I looked him up in the blue book." "He's a graduate of the Naval Academy." "So from that point on we were fine." ""What do you want to do?"" "And we worked together as a team." "We steamed down to Con Son Island and we could see on the radar display that there were a lot of blips." "And I remember dawn breaking and the sun coming up, and seeing what I had seen as a radar display in person." "There were dozens of ships." "And not just Vietnamese naval ships, but also civilian ships." "And they were all totally crammed with people." "There are no words to describe what a ship looks like that holds 200 and it's got 2,000 on it." "I don't think anybody really understood the magnitude of it until we looked at what we got in front of us." "It looked like something out of Exodus." "Our mission was to help the ships into international waters." "But now they had all these people." "My reaction is, "How the hell are we going to do this?"" "Most of the Vietnamese Navy ships were dead in the water, some were anchored, some were just adrift." "So, we sent over our engineering, technical people to see what we could do to help them and get them underway." "We had worked a plan out to sail the ships to the Philippines." "And the Kirk was going to escort them." "But the fact that they're going to be crammed with an unknown number of civilians was somewhat problematic." "The U.S. government already had a refugee problem with the U.S. Naval ships." "This was another 30,000 or more people to deal with." "We were up all night talking about it." "And I'm convinced that if we sent them back or took them back they would have killed them all." "And Armitage decided to bring them." "And he didn't get permission from Washington to do that." "I thought it was a lot easier to beg forgiveness than to get permission." "So the decision was made." "And they all went with us." "We had finally got out the last of the refugees that we could get out." "Now we had to evacuate the Marines." "They were all inside the embassy building except for us." "I was still on the embassy grounds with two of my sergeants and I said, "You two stay right with me." "Don't leave my side."" "We slowly walked backwards to the embassy door and a couple of Vietnamese came towards me." "I said, "We have no more helicopters." ""That's it." ""I'm sorry." "We cannot take you."" "And they began to argue with me." "They spoke good English, too." ""We can ride in your helicopter."" "I said, "I'm sorry, no more."" "So we spun around and slammed these huge doors, and we locked it from behind." "I kind of fall asleep off and on, but what gets me woke up is the noise." "It's a different noise." "So I kind of look up." "And the first thing in my sight was" "I didn't see that soldier there anymore on that wall." "There were people throwing blankets or jackets and materials over the barbed wire so they can climb over the wire to come in." "It was like, "Where are the soldiers?"" "We were going up the stairs." "Below me I could hear feet running on the stairway." "When we got to the roof, Master Sergeant Valdez was there." "He says, "We got everybody?"" ""Yeah."" "I said, "Man, there's somebody chasing me up those stairs."" "There were wall lockers up on the roof and those big fire extinguishers with wheels so we tilted all those wall lockers and the fire extinguishers, put them against the door." "There was a little window there that we could see them in there, al the Vietnamese trying to get to the roof." "The Marines started going out as choppers came in." "Then all of a sudden choppers all cease." "There was 11 of us still left there." "The briefing was delayed until the evacuation was completed and the last helicopters are now in the air." "The President commends the personnel of the armed forces who accomplished it, as well as Ambassador Graham Martin and the staff of his mission who served so well under difficult conditions." "We were told that Martin had left on the last helicopter and that the evacuation had ended." "I'm confident that every American who wanted to come out is out." "So we held a briefing." "Well, turned out not to be the last helicopter because there was another horrendous screw-up." "There were no helicopters." "You know, we were just kind of sitting down around looking at each other, wondering, you know, what's going to happen here, you know, whether they truly had forgotten about us." "So I got on my radio and I began saying, "U.S. Navy, U.S. Navy," "American embassy, request extraction immediate."" "And I repeated this over and over and over." "The only option we had was sit on the stupid roof like a sitting duck." "And I kept thinking, "Where are the North Vietnamese?"" "About 7:45 in the morning you could start seeing" "North Vietnamese coming down the road." "My thoughts were, "What's to keep them from bombing the top of the embassy roof and blowing us off," you know?" "A tank is going to take one shot." "If it hits the building, you're gone." "So I didn't like the idea of being up there, but where else are you going to go?" "Finally I looked out and I saw a black dot." "When that chopper landed, I told the Marines," ""Go." "Get in."" "I was the last one out." "And as I was putting my foot on the ramp, I fell down, and I'm just hanging on and the ramp's going up." "The ramp is closing and I did what I was trained in my first tour... count." "So I went, "One, two, three, four, five, six... ten." ""Ten?" ""One, two, three, four, five, six... ten." "Ten."" "And I looked at the crew chief and I said, "Put it down."" "I knew I was missing one man." "I remember looking at the ramp and two hands were over the top of it." "So the Marines just kind of grabbed me and then just pulled me in." "We left, by my watch, at 7:58 Saigon time." "And we were the last 11." "My cameraman, Neil Davis, and I decided to stay." "We saw the last helicopter leave from the roof." "We then tried to scramble into the embassy ourselves." "Neil got to the roof." "I did not." "And he saw dozens of Vietnamese just sitting on the helicopter pad on the roof of the embassy, waiting, wanting to get out." "And of course no more helicopters were going to come." "I didn't join them." "I actually... scared." "If the Communists come in, the last thing we want them to see us is in the American embassy." "So we get out." "People were coming in and out of the buildings." "Literally, anything that could not be fastened down or was not fastened down was being taken away." "Any souvenirs from the Ambassador's office were taken away." "Almost brick by brick the embassy was being dismantled." "It was ordinary looting." "But more than that, I think it was just frustration and anger and an opportunity to get back, perhaps, at the Americans because in the view of many in that crowd that day, we had deserted them." "NBC news correspondent Jim Laurie is one of the few Americans still left in Saigon, in the city when President Duong Van Minh went on the radio and told the Viet Cong that his country would surrender unconditionally and that he had told its army to lay down its arms." "Here from Saigon radio hookup is Laurie's report on the surrender." "In the words of General Minh, "We are here to hand over the power of government to you in order to avoid bloodshed."" "It is a unilateral ceasefire and an unconditional surrender." "The 30-year war in South Vietnam is at last over." "The first thing I did was to destroy my documents, my badges, just keeping the civilian ID." "And then I went around Saigon to see what happened." "I saw a lot of South Vietnamese soldiers in underwear." "They took off all their military clothes, boots, and they threw them away." "And I thought, well, what would happen to them?" "And to me, to myself." "Right." "I thought of my friends who were killed in action and I thought," ""Well, is this what we fought for?"" ""Is this what the Americans came for?"" "And I didn't have the answer." "I have wrestled with this ever since." "I realized that I had become the quintessential American in Vietnam." "I had all these causes, all these big things I was doing." "I was trying to get the truth back to Washington." "I was talking to agents, trying to persuade the Ambassador, and I forgot that what was at stake were human lives." "For years after that, I hear that sound in my head, that sound like, "Tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk-tchk."" "In the middle of the night I just jump up." "I thought the helicopter come pick me up." "I called it "dream in the wind."" "Later we found out the big fleet is out there." "You can just take a boat and go there." "They take everybody." "If you can get out there, you're on board." "And I just didn't know that." "You know, so..." "As we approached the Philippines with our refugees, there was a big problem." "They wouldn't let us in." "And the reason they wouldn't let us in is because the government there had recognized the new regime in Vietnam and these Navy ships we were escorting, they were all flying South Vietnamese flags." "And the solution was to reflag all these ships as American ships." "They lowered their Vietnamese flag, people crying." "It was very emotional for them to lose their country, their flag, their ship." "Everything was gone." "And then we raised the American flag." "We tried to do that with as much dignity as we could." "There were thousands and thousands of Americans who served in Vietnam who were sitting at home heartbroken at watching this whole thing come to naught." "The end of April of 1975 was... the whole Vietnam involvement in microcosm..." "Promises made in good faith, promises broken;" "people being hurt because we didn't get our act together." "You know, the whole Vietnam War is a story that kind of sounds like that." "But on the other hand, sometimes there are moments when good people have to rise to the occasion and do the things that need to be done." "And in Saigon, there was no shortage of people like that."