Last Man Out (43 page)

With the fire in the near distance, the star on that man’s helmet looked to Glenn like a reflective bull’s-eye. Apparently MacNamara was seeking some visual inference of rank at that significant point in his life, but “foolish” was the only word that came to Glenn’s mind. Glenn told MacNamara that he was leaving the consulate to see that his Filipino engineer contractors were safe. Seeming to take that as a request, MacNamara was debating the safety factors of someone’s leaving the consulate as Glenn turned and left.

The fire eventually subsided and the crowd in the street in front thinned out. As we found out later, the fire came to the edge of a small river and burned itself out. Shortly before dawn I returned to my apartment for a few hours’ sleep.

When I returned to the consulate at mid-morning, the finance officer told me that he thought my concern about destroying taxpayers’ money was silly. He said it was newly printed currency that could just be written off the books. Since the U.S. government still controlled it, the money was just paper.

“Easy for you to say,” I replied. “You have never been told to shred a million dollars before, or however much was there. To you it might be just paper. Not to me. You don’t burn money.”

“You serious?” asked the finance officer.

“Yep,” I said. “ ’Cause you know what, one of these days I’m going to be low on funds, maybe broke, and I don’t want to feel any worse, knowing I once just burned money. Besides, look at me! Listen! You don’t burn money.”

Later that morning an officer in from Chau Doc who had been unaccounted for the previous night—he had slept through everything—came into the consulate. Still unaware of what had gone on, he told me I looked like hell; life in Can Tho was obviously too hectic for me, and I ought to go back to Vi Thanh.

I continued regular visits to General Hai, commander of the ARVN 7th Division. He rarely smiled. Usually he was sitting in a wooden lawn chair beside his desk, half hidden in cigarette smoke, when I visited his field headquarters near the Cambodian border. Our times together often involved his recollection of what he described as the “USA’s haphazard” military involvement in his country.

His words usually ran something like: “There is enormous difference between our cultures, yet you Americans expect us to think and to act like you. In fact, we do not like you or your policies … you hear me? We don’t like you telling us what to do. But we need your help in order to survive and we know that it is to your advantage to see us survive. That shouldn’t give you a right to meddle in our affairs, our culture. You are here like a visiting three-ring circus. Who asked for the newspeople? And USAID? We were doing okay before. Where did all these ‘civic action’ things come from? What were they? Nation building? The Vietnamese culture goes back to the beginning of time, and you are telling us how to live and work and govern? Does this make sense?

“And why wasn’t your military in Cambodia? The North Vietnamese were, why weren’t you? If you came all this way to stop the spread of Communism, why didn’t you go on into Cambodia, where there are Communist camps, and knock them out? Why aren’t you in Laos? Why don’t you use some of your big equipment to plug up the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos? It’s a simple military situation here. Simple. Why are you acting like such fools?

“We Vietnamese think you are fools. What do you say to that, CIA man? You are a fool, working for a fool organization.”

I sat quietly, although I thought, Where did this word “fools” come from? The poet Tennyson, and now from this South Vietnamese general. Tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen had died trying to keep his corrupt government afloat. They were not fools.

In time, after the general had called me names, after he had ranted about the way the war had been fought, often repeating himself, had blown himself out, we talked about the here and now—the situation in his area of operation.

In those meetings at his headquarters the general and I had become comfortable with one another. Not friendly, but comfortable; we knew our place. Possibly that was the result of my two years in Laos, where I had made many Oriental friends, or maybe it was that the general noticed my sympathy and respect for his sense of duty, honor, and country at a time when others were
thinking only about themselves. Perhaps we were comfortable with each other because I was his most frequent visitor.

Throughout early April the North Vietnamese Army met only occasional resistance and continued to close on Saigon from the west, north, and east. Although some ARVN forces, especially the Hoi Chanh special units and elite regulars, went down fighting, the South Vietnamese could not stop the NVA’s progress.

Sen. Frank Church, speaking for the U.S. Senate on 10 April, said that enough was enough, the South Vietnamese military was on its own. Congress rejected President Gerald R. Ford’s request for $720 million in military support and $250 million in economic support to South Vietnam. It allocated money only to evacuate Americans from South Vietnam.

The next day I flew by Air America helicopter to meet with Hai. He did not rise from his lawn chair to greet me when I walked into his office. Almost out of sight in a smoke cloud, he said slowly that my government stank like leper shit. Senator Church was worse than Hitler. Americans had no honor. Our military violated the universal soldier’s code of conduct by turning its back on a comrade in arms, abandoning him on the battlefield.

He stood up and came up close to me. His eyes were red. His hand rested on the grip of his pistol and he stared at me, loathing and anger visible in his expression. He tensed, reached a point of action, and his fingers tightened around the gun handle. Then the moment passed and he sighed. “I should kill you,” he said, “in the name of all the good men who died in this war. I should kill you because your government did not try to win this war.”

I stood my ground, but I was shaken. Quietly I said, “The war is almost over. The fighting has been done. You have to accept the ways things turned out. You have to accept fate.”

“I heard your Kissinger said the other day that Vietnam was finished. Does he know we’re still here?” Hai asked.

I did not respond. The general finally shrugged and, speaking in a voice that displayed no energy, he gave me an update on enemy deployments he had obtained from an aircraft observation of the Cambodian/South Vietnam border.

When there was nothing more to say, I took my leave.

  TWENTY  

Every morning more and more South Vietnamese gathered at the front gate of the consulate in hopes of arranging travel to the United States. As news spread about the NVA’s advances, the crowd became more desperate. Reaching out to show me letters and pictures, many people pleaded with me. Anxious to avoid involvement, I never paused or made eye contact. I worked my way to the front gate and a local guard opened it slightly to let me through.

Glenn R. approached me in the consulate one day and asked if I would consider adopting two kids. He knew that my wife and I had adopted two Thai children. Sarcastically I thanked him for thinking of me, but I had too much work to do to get involved in something that personal and told him no. He insisted and said that the mother of the children was in a small interview room off the lobby of the consulate. It wouldn’t take long to hear her story.

Glenn led me to the room, where I met a beautiful Vietnamese woman in her late twenties wearing a demure
ao dai
, the traditional local dress. Speaking softly in broken English, she said she had two American-Asian children, a daughter age four and a son, two. She loved them very much and was concerned that the North Vietnamese would treat them badly when they took over the country.

“The Communists slaughtered all half-French children when they won in North Vietnam,” she said. “They will do the same in the South with children who are half-American. I do not want my children to die.” She started to speak again, opened her mouth, closed it, and then, still looking at me, started to cry, wide-eyed and sorrowful.

After five years in that war, I knew the only way to keep my sanity was to avoid agonizing over the suffering of others. So I remained detached and told the woman that we did not know for sure that the North Vietnamese were going to occupy the delta. People in Saigon who knew more than either of us had said we were okay down here.

“You do not know,” she said. “I know that in a matter of weeks a North Vietnamese man will be sitting in this room, talking with me, deciding the fate of my children—like you are now. Please take them. Please. Let them live. Send them to your wife.”

I finally said that I would come by to meet them but could not promise anything. My main interest was in getting out of that room and back to my work.

I’m not sure why, but I did stop by her rowhouse that night. She had drawn a map. The house was on the way to the airport and easy to find. The two children were outside. The little girl, with her intelligent, sincere eyes, reminded me of my daughter, Mim. The boy, a toddler, was active, loud, inquisitive, and unafraid. They were grand-looking, healthy, everyday children. The girl escorted me inside, but the mother was sullen and did not move to greet me. Without smiling, she flicked her hand toward the couch, motioning for me to sit. She took a chair across the room and introduced the children. The boy finally broke the awkward silence by climbing up the back of his mother’s chair and falling, with a thud, into her lap.

The woman ruffled the boy’s hair and renewed her efforts to get me to take her children. I told her that I could not do that now—the North Vietnamese were not at our doorsteps; they were to the north. She would not want to send the children away unless she knew the Americans were leaving. Because I was still here, I reasoned, no decision had to be made now. We could wait.

“Okay,” she said, “but, if before you come back, the delta is attacked by the North Vietnamese, I will take my children to you at the U.S. consulate.”

At the consulate that night I got a telephone call through to Brenda in Taipei. Excited to hear about the kids, she started asking questions and making plans at the same time. Then she paused and said that the woman must understand that, if we
adopt her children, she cannot come back later and say, “I got out and I want them back.”

“I will not be used,” Brenda said. “Look after yourself, and tell that woman I understand her terrible anguish and we will give those children a good home.”

I relayed this to the woman the following night when I went back to visit. She whispered, “Thank you.”

The next day, 15 April, I flew back to the 7th Division at first light. As usual, the general harangued me for the conduct of the United States. “Where are South Vietnam’s friends now when she needs them? Who can I call on? The enemy is at our door, my country is on the verge of being occupied by a hostile neighbor. Who will come to our aid?”

On the other side of the Cambodian border, his observation plane had noticed a concentration of North Vietnamese that was beginning to swell in number. He said new heavy equipment was arriving twenty-four hours a day.

“Where are your bombers? We have them in the open. Now is the time to get them. They are marshaling in front of my men. I need help. Help me, CIA man.”

As usual, I left him sitting in one of the wooden lawn chairs in his office, looking at me through his cigarette smoke.

Returning to the base, I was late for a general meeting with the chief of station, Tom Polgar. We were to learn later that Polgar had come to Can Tho specifically to investigate the reason why General Timmies, his principal liaison officer with the ARVN, had changed his assessment of the defensibility of the delta after a recent visit to the base. I had spoken with Timmies and had gone with him when he met with General Nam, ARVN commander for the delta, for a briefing on the military situation. Timmies, a venerable old soldier who had been around the South Vietnamese Army for decades and had known most of its commanders since they were junior officers, had developed a Saigon attitude—elitist, urban, theoretical—about life in the countryside. He did not want me in the room when he met with Nam, but I knew that Nam was giving Timmies a picture of the situation that tracked with what his commanders at Supreme Command in Saigon wanted the U.S. government to hear.