The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2015 29 in tears, asking if they would be taken out of the country when the end came. Even Mrs. Martin appealed to me privately for guidance about what to tell her employees, with the clear impli- cation that her husband was not giving her sufficient direction. While Gen. Weyand and his most senior advisers called on Pres. Thieu and the top military echelon of the South Vietnam- ese government, I went off on my own about the city talking to Vietnamese contacts and assessing the mood. I learned a lot just watching countless men in South Vietnamese military garb get- ting off provincial buses, having made their way back from the battlefields after their units had been broken apart and scattered. For the first time in my life, I truly saw fear in someone’s eyes when I spoke to a female relative of an FSO in Washington who had asked me to check on his Vietnamese family. She asked what was to become of them and who would help them escape. Other Vietnamese begged me to take their babies or small children out of the country. At the embassy, several longtime colleagues asked me if I would carry some of their most precious personal possessions out on our plane. My conversations with two Cabinet ministers and a contact in the prime minister’s office made the situation seem even more desperate. In whispered tones, I was told that Pres. Thieu was paralyzed by fear, unable to make a decision, and that expecta- tions of leadership from Independence Palace were nil. Just a Matter of Time But it was during my visit with the young Defense Depart- ment analysts in the “tank” at the old MACV headquarters that I came to realize that the situation was truly hopeless. There I was able to track on large briefing maps the unobstructed movement of North Vietnamese divisions down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and into the southern battlefields. More than anything else, that stark display of the order of battle showed just how badly outnum- bered the South was in terms of main force divisions—almost two to one. If the North continued its offensive, the inexorable Arriving inMay 1974, I found the White House beset by the issue that would ultimately play a very significant part in the demise of South Vietnam: Watergate. The author acts as interpreter for Ambassador Leonard Woodcock in a meeting with North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong in Hanoi, March 1977. flow of this overwhelming force into the south meant the inevi- table defeat of South Vietnam. One of my most riveting conversations was with Al Francis, who as head of the embassy’s political-military affairs section had often reflected Amb. Martin’s hopeful assessments. He had been consul general in Da Nang when it was overrun just a few days earlier and had escaped on one of the very last flights out. In the chaotic evacuation, he had been controlling the door into the already badly overcrowded U.S. aircraft that was carrying Americans, and some of the Vietnamese most at risk, to safety as the North Vietnamese closed in on the airport. When one renegade soldier threatened to halt the flight so he could board it, Al had pushed him away. The desperate man pulled out a handgun and fired at almost point-blank range toward Al’s face. The bullet left a blackened, curved indentation burned deep into his neck but, miraculously, did not penetrate the skin. He was left with a highly visible scar and a traumatized demeanor. To me, it was a harbinger of what was to come. It was clear that Al now saw the ominous future clearly, even if the ambassador did not. When I returned to the residence that evening, I wanted to convey to Amb. Martin the hopelessness of the situation as I saw it and the need for urgent planning for an evacuation. The challenge, however, was to do this without losing his ear. The ambassador's reputation was that as soon as he determined that an officer or adviser was a naysayer or had negative views of the situation, he immediately tuned them out. As I endeavored to share my observations, he started to drift away. I could not be sure how much of anything I said actually got through to him. Courtesy of Kenneth Quinn