The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

28 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL in Saigon was so sanguine that Amb. Martin returned to the United States for dental work and consultations in March 1975. It was therefore stunning when the initial forays by NVA units in Ban Me Thuot province on March 10, 1975, quickly inflicted severe defeats on South Vietnam’s 22nd and 23rd divisions—the latter considered one of the better-led units. Now able to mass their forces without fear of punishing U.S. air strikes, the North rained down overwhelming firepower onto the South Vietnamese positions. By mid-March, having secured control of the entire highland area, their attention turned to Da Nang, the major military headquarters in central Vietnam, where the same process began to unfold. By March 25, the deterioration was so alarming that Pres. Ford held an emergency meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House with a senior emissary from South Vietnam, labor leader Truong Quoc Buu. I had the extraordinary opportunity to be the president’s interpreter as Buu revealed President Nguyen VanThieu’s shocking plan to cede the entire northern half of South Vietnam to the communists. The Weyand Mission: Return to Saigon Immediately thereafter, the White House announced a presi- dential mission to Vietnam, headed by General Fred Weyand, the previous commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, to assess the situation. I was assigned to the trip. Traveling with Weyand and several senior CIA and Pentagon officials on his C-141 cargo plane were Amb. Martin and David Kennerly, Pres. Ford’s personal photographer and a Pulitzer Prize-winning combat journalist, with whom I had developed a friendship. When we arrived at the darkened Tan Son Nhut Airport just after midnight on March 28, 1975, the atmosphere already felt ominous. I had a brief exchange on the tarmac with Station Chief Tom Polgar, who privately expressed his concern that the ambas- sador, who had consistently downplayed field assessments as too negative, would not report on how calamitous the situation had become. Amb. Martin invited me to stay at his residence. During the week we were there, I found a sense of impending doom. Mem- bers of his Vietnamese household staff approached me, almost Kenneth Quinn meets with President Gerald Ford in January 1977. Courtesy of Kenneth Quinn