The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JULY-AUGUST 2023 57 Housed in a former gymnasium on the air base, the ECC was packed with former GIs looking to marry their Vietnamese girlfriends and adopt their children so they could get them out on Pacific Air Command military transports. “The ECC was the brainchild of idealist Harvard Law School graduate Shep Lowman,” says White. “It was a massive undertaking, brilliantly located, efficiently executed, and despite its veneer of propri- ety, its document requirements were ‘flexible.’ It was on the air base where there was nothing but an abandoned pool, aban- doned bowling alley, and abandoned gym. When Ambassador Martin heard about it, I’m sure he heard control , and assumed its purpose was to prevent unauthorized evacuation, that exit visas were required. God bless Shep Lowman.” Not finding Moorefield at the ECC, White went outside to explore. At Tiger Air, a commercial airline operat- ing in Asia, he entered an unlocked DC-3 and consid- ered “borrowing” the plane to fly himself and the top Chase banking officers and their families to Thailand. “I don’t know why I thought that was viable,” says White. “I had a pilot’s license to fly single engines and had only flown two-seat Cessnas and Pipers. I was young and quite confident that I could fly the cargo plane from Tan Son Nhat with Chase staff and families. But that would have killed us all.” Later that evening, White went to the Chase Saigon offices to make sure the account settlement calcu- lations were done. This is when he made an irrespon- sible promise. “Mr. Cuong, the deputy bank manager, was supervising a group of clerical workers,” White relates. “I knew they viewed me as David Rockefeller’s man who was going to get them out. Otherwise they’d have joined the refugee trails. They feared a retributive bloodbath for working for Americans.” One of the young women clerical work- ers asked White what would happen to them. Will he take them with him, or will they end up in a pile of dead bodies? The words fell from White’s mouth. He said, “I’m not leaving without you,” then directed Cuong to make a list of all employees as well as the names of their spouses and children. The next day he went to the U.S. mission warden’s office at the embassy to find out what short wave frequency they’d be using in an emergency. There he found the deputy warden typing Vietnamese names into a flight manifest. “That’s the first evidence I had that there was a clandestine pro- gram to evacuate undocu- mented Vietnamese. When I saw the flight manifest, I was stunned. It was totally by chance that I found out,” says White. The Way Out So began White’s frantic effort to get the Chase White knew that evacuating employees was impossible, so he told the vice consul they were his family. U.S. Army Captain Kenneth Moorefield (left) and his Vietnamese counterpart Captain Ngan. Moorefield was an Army captain in Vietnam when he was badly wounded. White says the Chase Manhattan Bank can be grateful that he then joined the U.S. Foreign Service. COURTESYOFRALPHWHITE