The Foreign Service Journal, March 2007

districts that were becoming more dangerous by the day. In late June, I drove with Graham Fallon, a Navy doctor, out to Nam Hoa, the westernmost — and least secure — district in the province. My purpose was to inspect a CORDS housing project, while Fallon was going to check on a new health clin- ic. The dirt road to Nam Hoa went north from Hué for a few miles, then followed the Perfume River up- stream as it bent toward the moun- tains. Fallon decided to stop for a cigarette at a viewpoint where the road hairpinned through a set of low hills above the river. He’d barely lit up when we heard three quick shots. One of the bullets ricocheted off the boulder where he was sit- ting, missing him by an inch. I ran for our truck and start- ed the engine. When Fallon threw himself in the other side, I gunned the truck down the small hill in front of us and out of range. The Policy Collapses Things got worse, especially when public pressure for total withdrawal increased and the rest of the American “force protection” troops went home. That left the day- to-day safety of most CORDS teams up to local South Vietnamese militias, a shaky shield at best. In addition, military participants in CORDS, by some inscrutable logic, were being sent home as part of the overall troop withdrawals — so the more dangerous Hué became, the more the CORDS team stationed there became a civilian operation. CORDS advisers became easy targets for assassination or abduction anytime the Viet Cong chose to take us out (FSO Steven Miller had been killed in Hué during the Tet Offensive in 1968). CORDS civilians quickly learned ways to get the weapons our government refused to issue us. I kept a case of grenades and an Army radio under my bed. I slept with an M-16 propped against the bedstead and practiced rolling off the bed and grabbing it without rais- ing my head. My FSO housemate, Howard Lange, and I built sandbag walls against the windows with firing ports in the middle. We had our own dubious army of four Vietnamese houseguards who (we hoped) would at least fire a warning shot before they ran away. (When the State Department sent me to Stanford for a year after Vietnam, for months I walked down the shad- owed sides of the streets in Palo Alto to avoid sniper fire.) In late April 1972, North Viet- namese forces swept south across the DMZ, scattering the ARVN defend- ers in Quang Tri and pushing toward Hué. By May 2, the battle line arced 15 miles to the north and 10 miles west of the city. To the east was the South China Sea and to the south, the road to Danang — Hué’s last ground link to the outside world. 200,000 refugees poured into the city. There was no shelter for them and almost no food. Hungry people fought for scraps of garbage and looted houses and shops. Among the refugees were hundreds of deserters from the ARVN divisions shattered in Quang Tri, still wearing their uniforms and carrying their M-16s. Key city officials abandoned their posts, gathered their families and fled south. Law and order collapsed; gangs of deserters smashed storefronts and looted at will. A mob of drunk- en ARVN soldiers torched the main market at Dong Ba; the city’s firemen had long since fled, and the fire quick- ly threatened to engulf the surrounding acres of shacks and small shops. The black smoke did not rise but hung in a pall over streets now jammed with terrified people and echoing with the sounds of gunshots and shattering glass. With my three civilian CORDS colleagues, I stared at the melee, stunned. We had spent the entire day moving about the panicked city, trying to find enough South Vietnamese officials to form a martial law government to replace the regular city government that had collapsed and fled. At any point we could have been killed by ARVN deserters who wanted our trucks. Now there was nothing more we could do but watch the shouting, shoving mass of people stream past us toward the Danang road. The ground shook as bombs fromU.S. Navy F-4s fell on North Vietnamese Army columns less than 10 miles away. As night fell, the main bridge over the Perfume River was backlit by flames from the burning market. Silhouettes moved slowly across — cars and trucks piled high with people and furniture, and walking figures pushing wheel- barrows or balancing shoulder poles. F O C U S 50 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 7 I quickly learned that the word “noncombatant” didn’t mean much where I was posted, just 50 miles south of the Demilitarized Zone.