The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2015 23 How close could hovering helicopters get to the embassy roof (designed as a helipad), and howmuch ground fire were they drawing? At one point I just held up the phone so the caller could hear the rockets crashing into the building. As the siege wore on, we pleaded with the U.S. military command for relief. We were told an armored col- umn was on its way. It never arrived. One helicopter finally managed to land on the roof and evacuate the wounded Marine, whomwe had car- ried up to the helipad. The same chopper also off-loaded two cases of M-16 tracer ammuni- tion, a move I assumed had some purpose I had not divined: there were no M-16s in the building. To my consternation I also discov- ered that two armed American military personnel, including a Marine whose presence on the roof I had not previously detected, took off in the helicopter—leaving the lone Marine on the ground floor and us few civilians to fend for ourselves. Almost six hours after the attack had begun, I went again to the roof and was greeted unexpectedly by a platoon of heav- ily armed paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division. They insisted their orders were to secure the embassy floor by floor, starting at the top, despite my assurances that there were no Viet Cong in the building. By the time they reached the ground floor, the shooting had stopped—18 of the Viet Cong sappers had been killed by military policemen, Marine guards and civilian security personnel firing into the compound, and two were taken pris- oner. Dead bodies littered the compound. The Cleanup The commander of American forces in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, arrived on the scene and advised me to have the embassy cleaned up and the employees back at work by noon. This was quite unrealistic. Fighting was raging all over the city. Around midmorning I finally drove home in my bullet- riddled car, which had been parked behind the embassy. The windshield had been shot away, but I could drive the vehicle— fortunately the rainy season was still a few months away. My superstitious housekeeper immediately insisted on destroying the blue shirt I had been wearing. It was covered with blood from the wounded Marine, and she thought it would bring bad luck. Only late in the day did I receive a call from the embassy informing me that, under the circumstances, I would be relieved of duty obligations for the remainder of the week. The attack on the embassy revealed our lack of military and civilian preparedness. It was also an intelligence failure. We were in the middle of a real war, but the war was supposed to be in the countryside and not in downtown Saigon. Actually, as I was to learn later, there had been ominous signs of impending trouble, but they were misjudged. As civilian duty officer, I was ill-prepared. I was given no useful intelligence. I had no training in the use of weapons or first aid. I was very lucky to have survived; the odds were against it. But a few good decisions saved us. At the first shot, a quick- thinking Marine at an adjoining building had dashed across the compound and closed the embassy’s thick wooden doors. The architecture of the building with its lattice-work concrete outer wall absorbed the rocket rounds fired into it. The Viet Cong sap- pers were not of World War II caliber and, fortunately for us, were hit by American and Vietnamese personnel firing down at them from adjoining rooftops. The embattled Marine on the ground floor, Sgt. Harper, and my colleague in communications, James Griffin, shared all the tasks and never flinched or failed throughout the ordeal. After the attack, the embassy's Marine security detail was increased by 50 percent—from two to three. En route to Dalat, in front of an Air America helicopter circa 1969-70, from left to right: Bill Sharpe, USAID; Dang Co, Credit Commercial du Vietnam; Pham Kim Ngoc, Minister of Economy; wife of Dang Co, and son; Allan Wendt, Embassy Saigon; Showane Thach, USAID; Anne Henshaw, USAID legal adviser; Robert Starr, Embassy Saigon legal adviser. Courtesy of Allan Wendt