The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

38 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL It soon became clear why: his outposts looked like the Magi- not Line, because the Viet Cong roamed unchallenged right up to their gates; and government militia to man the walls were scarce on the ground. Caught on the road at sunset, we overnighted with a village notable we knew well. We could sleep in his house, but the Viet Cong were “all around,” he warned. The old gentleman kindly left us with a concussion grenade, as he quickly departed to sleep elsewhere. We high-tailed it back at the break of dawn. I got what I wanted: a reality test of security on the ground, 1975 versus 1971. The official security rankings for the district— “average for the country”—had not changed in four years. But the place we once knew to be 80-percent secure was now reduced to a hollow eggshell, waiting to be cracked. Back at the embassy, my trip provoked no criticism. But neither was there a shred of interest in drawing on it for “defeat- ist” reporting to Washington. My disillusionment was tempered by the explicit warning the department’s director of the Vietnam desk had given me before I left Washington: “Don’t stick your neck out to contest sanitized reporting. We all are perfectly aware Embassy Saigon is selling a concocted story, and nobody back here pays much attention to it.” Accelerating Collapse Frommid-January to mid-April the NVA rolled up the country rapidly. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam collapsed due to panicked orders from Saigon and incompetent senior leadership, with a few notable exceptions. The 18th Division bought 10 days by a heroic stand at Xuan Loc, northeast of Saigon, before it was overrun. The imminent fall of South Vietnamwas obvious to all of us, but Ambassador GrahamMartin adamantly clung to the hope that some political compromise could be worked out. Martin had lost a son, a helicopter pilot, in the war. He could not admit that defeat was a foregone conclusion. At most, the embassy was authorized to ship home excess files, though shredding and burning were soon to follow. The political section began discreetly identifying particularly high- risk Vietnamese for possible evacuation. In the end, however, the criteria were too vague and the list too long to be prioritized. For any given Vietnamese, it all came down to who he knew, how lucky he was, and how far his American contact would go to rescue him. Several weeks before the end, two high-flying seventh-floor staffers took unauthorized leave to come rescue Vietnamese contacts for whom they felt personal responsibility. One morn- ing Deputy Chief of Mission Wolfgang Lehmann barged into the political section, “Does anybody know Lionel Rosenblatt and Craig Johnstone? If they show up, have them report to the front office immediately!” When he left, my boss muttered, “Before reporting in, those two better finish anything they came here to do. Because they’ll be slammed into the first plane out of here.” Sure enough, within the hour I ran into Rosenblatt and Johnstone climbing the back staircase to see me. I hurried them back out of the embassy before they were spotted and, later, fixed them up with contacts at the Tan Son Nhut evacuation site. Over the next week, to their great credit, they got 30 contacts and their families out before departing themselves on the last commercial flight from Saigon. A week before the end, the Department of Justice finally authorized “parole status” for the Vietnamese families of the estimated 5,000 private American citizens who refused to leave the country without them. Ken Moorefield, an aide to the ambas- sador, set up a processing center at the airfield to process these roughly 20,000 people. I soon joined him. We were stamping out “parolees” on the afternoon of April 28, when turncoat govern- ment pilots bombed and cratered the airfield. The damage done put an end to any possibility of further fixed-wing evacuation. We were now down to limited helicopter evacuation from the airfield and the embassy, plus a barge route down the Saigon River. The barges were the brainchild of Mel Chatman and Bob Lanigan, USAID field officers, who had distinguished themselves in chaotic evacuations down the coast fromDa Nang and Nha Trang. At the end, the two personally nursed the Alaska Contracting barges down to the sea. But due to the lack of overall embassy planning and execution, these enormous barges went out only half-filled. That night, I fell asleep, exhausted, on an embassy desktop. In the false dawn of April 29, NVA rockets suddenly rained down from all around the city. Hitting the Streets Several weeks earlier I had signed on to drive high-risk contacts down to the Saigon docks for evacuation by sea. “I’m The incongruity stunnedme: partying as usual while the North Vietnamese Army racked up the score, less than 100miles to the north.