Chapter 6. Buzzards Circling (April 30, 1975, the Fall of Saigon)

The whirlpool took me back to April 30^th, 1975… Anna’s quasi-birthday… she would’ve been five or so. I was in Saigon that morning when Bing Crosby sang "I'm dreaming of a White Christmas" over the air, the air whose temperature was 105 degrees, and that airing was our not so secret signal to get the fuck out of Dodge. Not so secret because there was mass hysteria and panic at the American Embassy gates. Ambassador Martin held off as long as he could. He must have gotten a thousand Vietnamese Civilians and several of my own people out. God bless his soul. The Lady Ace 09 Chinook snatched up the reluctant Ambassador around 0500. His Deputy Station Chief at the Pittman Apartments did the same. I’d never seen anyone in suits with their balls… ever! And I’d been in Vietnam on and off since August of ‘65… earned some rank to Staff Sergeant first tour before transferring to the Criminal Investigation Division two years later. Then in ’71 and I found myself running back and forth between Saigon and the rice paddies working with Counter Intelligence until the whole shithouse came down.

I loved the people of the countryside but every time I returned to Saigon my heart sank. I hated answering to politicos and contractors on Congressional junkets to Saigon. They might have had a desire to win the war at first but, after seeing it as a cash cow, their ambitions didn’t go much further beyond securing the next fat military contract… meeting only with soldiers who’d been at desks so long they’d forgotten what soldiers do best; break things and kill people.

I’d been occupied since the beginning of April in Saigon ushering my people through to the temporary safety of the embassy and safe houses. They were the forgotten people… promised to be air-lifted… who had been my eyes and ears… unraveling and reporting crimes… petty crimes to crimes against humanity… who was with Charlie or not… just so that once exposed the government could bury it all with piles of paper. I suppose it had always been this way since the stone age when the first hutch had been burnt to the ground.

I’d gotten through the gate; my military ID was enough even though I was in civvies. I was in a daze. I hardly knew I had a girl tucked under my arms. She was about five… handed to me by her mother who maybe couldn’t squeeze through the gate as a Marine had to force it shut behind me.

Eyes, I remember their eyes.

CPO Ryan greeted me halfway to the Embassy doors, “Where you been! At a goddamned skivvy house!”

I knew it was his way of saying, “Glad to see you made it!”

I felt the child’s small hand patting my cheek. Oh, yeah, the girl. Looking up at a Huey hovering next to the swimming pool, I shouted over the racket, “I have a package to deliver.”

The chaos of an impending hell are words that fit it best. Once at the pool, where four or five hundred others were waiting for the circling loud buzzards and eagles, where Chinooks and Hueys hovered to pluck up the lucky ones… the assigned. Ryan grabbed and yanked my free arm, “Get your ass on that fuckin’ Huey Kraszhinski!”

There was no more room for an adult. She clung to me, our eyes locked on each other’s as I broke her grip and handed her up… an offering to the sky gods. Against the roaring whine of the Lycoming turbos and the chopping of rotors, I shouted, “Take her! Fuckin’ take her dammit!” The Marine grabbed her… he didn’t need convincing. Her eyes still fixed on mine as though pleading. She was pulled inside and the chopper lifted off.

It wasn’t likely most of us left were going to get out. Ryan cussed, “Mother fucker! That’s one of the last one’s Kraszhinski!” I rarely heard him cuss.

“We’d better get out before the Jar Heads lock it down!”

This was The Pittman Apts , the
residence of the Deputy CIA Chief,
and not the US Embassy

I stood in a daze watching a decade of a futile endeavor ending as those abandoned still waited for the rescue until the mob began ransacking the embassy grounds. Ryan grabbed my arm and yanked me away shouting, “Was that worth it!”

It was too late anyway, “Was what worth it?” I yelled but, within the maelstrom of sound from the sky above and the mob, I didn’t think he heard me.

“I know…” he shouted, “You’ve got blood running out your ears. Let’s save our asses now!”

“How. The grunts are leaving!”

“There’s always a way, follow me. We'll try the Pittman Apartments” The Pittman apartments were where the deputy CIA chief lived. "There might be a way out there." The next two hours Marines were systematically evacuating, locking the elevators at sixth floor and locking the gates between floors on the civilians who were sure to be sent to re-education concentration camps or executed by the North Vietnam Army. By 0700 tanks with the red star had already been rolling down the broad boulevard from the Presidential Palace as the last of the Marines retreated to a hovering Huey.

We were off the grounds by then. I had been a robot up to that time and felt nothing. The blood from my ears, my head feeling like a balloon that would explode, meant something was terribly wrong. The memory was fresh in some instances… every detail of frantic faces… we passed several groups of ARVN’s stripping off their uniforms standing with nowhere to hide vulnerable in their skivvies… mostly conscripts though some had fought courageously. But they had been hoodwinked by corrupt officers most of whom had already fled… and some of my memory was completely blank … We got past the mob to empty eerie streets crossing canals to the Pittman Apartment. It was impossible. The last Huey was evacuating from the rooftop. The picture was immortalized by the press ascribing it to the Embassy roof. We turned away at the site and ended up a couple miles away at a safe house and stayed there until dark.

Ryan was good. I once wanted to be just like him. I’d fallen into a semi-coma state. In and out… walking… carried. He radioed ahead. I don’t remember much. Some kind of barge down the river and a group of Navy SEALs got us to a Submarine Tender waiting off the coast and packed to the bulwarks with refugees.

I saw him looking over me while I lay on the cot in the medical dispensary, “Was what worth it?”

The Nurses in Okinawa told me I’d asked over and over, “Was what worth it?”

 What? Ten years of my life in the service of a country that abandoned us just like it abandoned the people of Saigon? We were there to save Vietnam from Communism while the Catholic regimes in Saigon from the beginning were using us to suppress the country-side… the hamlets… mostly Buddhists. Or, was he asking if it was worth it to save the girl? I believe he meant the latter.

If that was the case, the answer was a resounding, yes.