A Lesson of Vietnam: Getting in Is Easier than Getting Out
On March 8, 1965, at 9 a.m., United States marines landed on a beach ten miles north of the city of Da Nang, South Vietnam. Americans had been providing direct military support in South Vietnam since 1954, the year the country was split in two, and the war, beginning with France’s fight to preserve its colony, had been going on since 1946. But the marines were the first American combat troops to arrive.
The Johnson Administration downplayed the significance of the landing. It explained that the marines were being deployed to secure an airbase used for Operation Rolling Thunder, a bombing campaign against North Vietnam that had begun a week earlier and that would continue, with two brief pauses, for three and a half years.
You can always stop bombing, though. When boots are, as they say, on the ground, your off-ramp options dwindle. Everyone understood that sending in the marines marked a fork in the road that could not be easily unforked. Once Americans started getting killed, it would be hard to leave without winning the war, and the war might prove very hard to win. For this reason, the marines had spent the previous thirty-two days on boats circling in the South China Sea, waiting while the decision to land was being debated in Washington, D.C.
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Most of the marines in the first wave had little idea what to expect. They came in on landing craft, D Day style, and leaped into the surf in full battle dress, carrying M-14s. As they stormed the beach, they were astonished to be greeted not by enemy fire but by photographers, young Vietnamese women handing out garlands of flowers, and a few sightseers. A banner read “Welcome to the Gallant Marines.”
It wasn’t only the marines who were uninformed about what was happening. The South Vietnamese government was, too. The United States had neglected to tell it that the marines were coming. It was a sign, if one were needed, that this would be a war in which nothing would go according to plan.
Ten years later, on April 30, 1975, the United States did get out of Vietnam, an episode that is the setting for Elisa Tamarkin’s unusual and imaginative book “Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon” (Chicago). It could be said that the end did not go according to plan, either, except that there was not much of a plan to begin with. Despite intelligence that Saigon would be overrun by the North Vietnamese Army in a matter of days, the American Ambassador, Graham Martin, refused to prepare for an evacuation.
Martin seemed to have believed, up to the very last minute, that a negotiated settlement was possible, and he worried that it would be demoralizing for the South Vietnamese to see Americans packing up. So he did nothing except reassure Henry Kissinger, who was the national-security adviser and the Secretary of State (under Gerald Ford, now the fourth American President to wish that Vietnam would just go away), that it was “a bit premature” to think about departure.
But everyone else knew the end had come. That winter, the North Vietnamese had launched a major offensive. There was initial resistance from the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN), but, on March 13th, the President of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu, ordered a retreat from the central part of the country. The soldiers had little time to prepare; the retreat turned into a rout. Many ARVN soldiers deserted, and the North Vietnamese advanced without much trouble.
Two major cities north of Saigon, Hue and Da Nang, fell rapidly—Hue on March 25th and Da Nang five days later. And the North Vietnamese were taking no prisoners. Tens of thousands fled by boat from Hue, many drowning in the attempt, and by the end of March a million refugees—soldiers, civilians, whole extended families—were clogging Route 7B, a major highway, trying to get farther south. The caravan along the road came to be known as the Convoy of Tears.
On March 29th, a private contractor flew a 727 jet into the airport at Da Nang on a mission to rescue women and children. The moment the plane landed, a mob poured onto the runway and began chasing it by jeep, by motorbike, and on foot. Three hundred managed to clamber aboard before it took off. People shot others ahead of them in line. Women and children were trampled. As the plane ascended, someone threw a grenade at it, damaging a wing. All but five of the adults who made it on were men, most of them soldiers. Dozens climbed into the cargo bay. Seven people hung on to the outside and fell off during the flight. (A similar scene is rendered in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s “The Sympathizer,” one of a number of things in that amazing novel which, if you did not know the history, you would find unbelievable.)
During the week of April 21st, the United States Air Force transport of evacuees out of Saigon’s airport, Tan Son Nhut, was in full swing. Those with proper paperwork were instructed to wait for a bus at a designated pickup point to be driven to the airport, but sometimes the buses did not show up, and sometimes the paperwork was inadequate or nonexistent.
At Tan Son Nhut, the terminal was jammed. All sorts of trickery were tried, from claiming to be a family member of someone who had the right paperwork—one man got three “wives” out that way—to naked bribery. People were bandaged or put in casts, then driven onto the tarmac in ambulances with sirens blaring. Flights for orphans were organized. (It was highly unlikely that the North Vietnamese were going to harm orphans.) The first “baby flight” crashed when taking off, killing a hundred and thirty-eight people, including seventy-eight children.
Nevertheless, according to Max Hastings’s stupendous military history “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975” (2018), Air Force planes were able to make three hundred and four sorties out of Tan Son Nhut, successfully evacuating nearly forty-three thousand Americans and Vietnamese. Then, in the early morning of April 29th, the North Vietnamese shelled the airport, rendering the runways useless for fixed-wing aircraft. Two marines, Corporal Charles McMahon and Lance Corporal Darwin Judge, were killed in that strike, the last American soldiers to die in Vietnam.
By the time Ambassador Martin authorized an evacuation, the only way out—since Martin had vetoed a proposal to put refugees on freighters and take them down the Saigon River to the coast (too demoralizing a spectacle)—was by helicopter. The scheme (unfortunate code name: Operation Frequent Wind) was a desperate measure. The rooftop and courtyard of the American Embassy, plus thirteen other buildings in Saigon and Tan Son Nhut, were designated as departure points. People gathered there in the hope that there would be space for them on a helicopter.
Hastings reports that, over a period of eighteen hours, Marine helicopters flew six hundred and eighty-two missions, carrying 1,373 Americans and 5,595 Vietnamese and other nationals to ships in the South China Sea, where the Seventh Fleet was moored. When there was not enough room on the ships’ decks for incoming helicopters to land, empty ones were pushed into the sea. Thirty or forty helicopters were sunk.
On the streets of Saigon, there was widespread looting. ARVN soldiers stripped to their underwear so that the North Vietnamese could not identify them. At the U.S. Embassy, a frantic attempt to destroy papers that could be used to identify collaborators went wrong when backwash created by helicopter propellers scattered shredded files all over the courtyard for the North Vietnamese to reconstruct, which they did. The Embassy was pillaged. Five million American dollars were burned.
Martin flew out in the next-to-last helicopter, at 4:58 A.M. on April 30th. Eventually, every American who wanted to evacuate was evacuated, but thousands of Vietnamese who had worked for or collaborated with the Americans were left to the mercy of the North Vietnamese. Many had been assured that they would be evacuated. They had been lied to. Before Martin left, Ford had ordered that only Americans were to board the remaining helicopters, and Martin and Kissinger feared that, if the Vietnamese realized they were being abandoned, they would begin shooting Americans. When the last helicopter left the Embassy, at 7:53 a.m. on April 30th, four hundred and twenty Vietnamese stood in the courtyard, waiting for the rescue they had been promised. Thousands more were massed outside the gates.
The last people to leave were eleven marines who had been assigned to protect the Embassy. When they got onto the roof, they dropped a tear-gas grenade down the stairwell to prevent Vietnamese from trying to join them. They had to wait two hours for a helicopter to arrive, and one marine slipped while trying to get on board and had to be pulled in as the helicopter was lifting off. He was Juan Jose Valdez, a sergeant from Texas. He had landed in Vietnam ten years earlier, one of the first marines to arrive. Now he was the last American out.
The fall of Saigon is an extremely well-documented event. Hundreds of reporters and photojournalists came to Vietnam to witness the end of a war that had lasted thirty years and in which millions had died, and many recorded their impressions. It was something of a scene. (Hunter S. Thompson was there for Rolling Stone, though he does not seem to have done much reporting.)
The English writer James Fenton came to see the dénouement. More or less by accident, he found himself riding on the first North Vietnamese tank to enter the courtyard of the Presidential palace in Saigon. His article “The Fall of Saigon,” published in Granta in 1985, is a classic account. Philip Caputo, who had landed as a marine in 1965, returned in 1975 as a journalist for the Chicago Tribune and described the evacuation in his best-selling memoir, “A Rumor of War” (1977). He was airlifted out from Tan Son Nhut airport on April 29th.
American officials provided their accounts, too, most monumentally the C.I.A. analyst Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval,” published in 1977 at almost six hundred pages—a book that exposed the American failure to organize an efficient evacuation. (The C.I.A. sued Snepp for breach of the secrecy agreement he had signed when he joined the agency, and the case went to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the C.I.A. Snepp had to hand his royalties over to the government.) Larry Engelmann’s oral history, “Tears Before the Rain” (1990), published vivid firsthand stories by American and Vietnamese survivors.
Footage of those final days can be seen in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s ten-part PBS docuseries “The Vietnam War” (2017), and in a previous PBS series, the thirteen-part “Vietnam: A Television History” (1983), a first-rate documentary with less of the voice-of-God gravitas that sometimes afflicts Burns’s productions. And, of course, there are photographs, the best known by a Dutch photojournalist, Hubert van Es: a line of people trying to get up a ladder to a helicopter perched on a rooftop. (The photo was incorrectly captioned: the building in the picture is not the U.S. Embassy, and that helicopter was not the last helicopter. It is an Air America aircraft, which means it belonged to the C.I.A. The agency had its own airline.)
One reason the ending came as a shock was that Vietnam was the original forever war. Daniel Ellsberg, the man who liberated the Pentagon Papers, called it a “stalemate machine.” And yet, as Tamarkin says in “Done in a Day,” the outcome should not have surprised anyone, since there was never any intelligence suggesting that the war could end in anything other than a defeat for the U.S.
Heads of state—Charles de Gaulle, Jawaharlal Nehru—warned American Presidents to stay out of Southeast Asia. When Kissinger visited Saigon in October, 1965, as an adviser to the American Ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, he wrote in his diary that “no one could really explain to me how even on the most favorable assumptions . . . the war was going to end.”
What the Pentagon Papers revealed is that the American government had reason to know all along that the venture was ill-fated. After 1968, the goal was to somehow abandon the war but avoid defeat. Richard Nixon’s euphemism for this was “peace with honor.” Nixon had run for President in 1968 on a promise to end the war, but, by the time the troops were finally removed, in March, 1973, twenty thousand more U.S. soldiers had died. Those lives were sacrificed on the altar of national honor. The United States got nothing in 1973 that it could not have gotten in 1969.
Tamarkin has a fresh angle on the fall of Saigon, a personal one: her stepfather, Bob Tamarkin, flew out on the last civilian helicopter on the morning of April 30th. Bob was not an American official. He was a reporter, the Saigon bureau chief for the Chicago Daily News. He managed to get over the wall and onto the Embassy grounds, and then to the rooftop and out. He was the last correspondent to leave.
He was flown to the U.S.S. Blue Ridge, an amphibious-command ship, and from there to the carrier U.S.S. Okinawa, where he wrote a diary of his last hours in Saigon, published in the Chicago Daily News on May 6th. He concludes the piece:
“Done in a Day” is an unclassifiable book. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography. Elisa Tamarkin was four years old when Saigon fell. She and her mother were there, but only for a couple of weeks. (In April, they had been shipped off to Hong Kong.) So the author has no stories of the evacuation to tell us. And Bob Tamarkin—who died when Elisa, now an English professor, was in graduate school—is a rather remote figure in the book.
It’s hard to know whether this was advertent or inadvertent. But, whatever her feelings for him as a parent, Elisa clearly devoted herself to excavating this episode in Bob’s life. He proved an elusive subject. When, in her research, she finally comes across a partial image of him—just the back of his head, really—in a photograph of the crowd trying to get over the Embassy wall, it is as though he has been brought back, fleetingly, to life. Maybe the correct genre for “Done in a Day” is elegy. Tamarkin’s book is a kind of time capsule of the late sixties and early seventies. A lot makes its way into her pages, from Frank Kermode’s “The Sense of an Ending” to Thomas Harris’s self-help best-seller “I’m OK—You’re OK.”
But it eventually emerges that Tamarkin’s main topic is not Vietnam. It’s the press—more specifically, the newspaper business. For the end of the war was also, it turns out, the beginning of the end of the American daily, and, in the book, she casts Bob in the role of the last hardboiled foreign correspondent, a guy in a trenchcoat who never uses the first person. The Chicago Daily News had been one of the first to assign correspondents to permanent posts abroad in peacetime, back in 1898. It closed its foreign service in 1976, a year after Bob was helicoptered out of Saigon. The paper folded in 1978.
Tamarkin’s title, “Done in a Day,” refers, of course, to the fall of Saigon. But “Done in a Day” was also the newsroom motto at the Chicago Daily News. The phrase was meant to capture the special ethos of daily journalism. Each issue has to be written in a day (no old news) and to represent a day, the day just past. And then it had to be done all over again tomorrow.
There is a bit of romanticizing here, but it’s a personal story; she’s entitled. The world of the daily reporter is lovingly close-read (which is what English professors do), from the telex machine that was standard technology for getting copy from the field to the editor’s desk, to the use of “-30-” to mark the end of copy and the idea that an article in a daily paper should be literature, written, she says, “like steel” (which is not the way English professors write).
The newspaper theme works with the Vietnam theme because Vietnam was possibly the most covered war in history. At its height, there were nearly seven hundred credentialled journalists in Vietnam. Thirty-three were killed there. And the press was given virtually unlimited access (a big mistake, as American officials realized, and one that has not been repeated). Reporters were allowed to ride on military transports, to eat and sleep with the troops, to tag along on search-and-destroy missions (Michael Herr’s 1977 book “Dispatches” is a harrowing description of what that was like), and to photograph everything (pictures by the French photojournalist Catherine Leroy, recently collected as “One-Way Ticket to Vietnam, 1966-1968,” show how close photographers came to the action).
Television was then the most powerful journalistic medium. Something like thirty million people watched the “CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” every night. Tamarkin cites The New Yorker’s television critic Michael Arlen’s term “the living-room war.” The phrase, which Arlen first used in 1966, is taken to mean that Vietnam was a war people experienced nightly on TV. Arlen did mean that, but, as Tamarkin says, he meant more. He meant that the war was the air Americans breathed after 1965, that Vietnam was everywhere. “Vietnam wasn’t the only thing that mattered in American life in those years,” Arlen wrote, “but operatively it mattered most; as long as it was on, it mattered most.”
But why was that? It is a little mysterious how quickly the war became the defining issue in American politics. It was as though everyone was waiting for this shoe to drop. Within three days of the Da Nang landing in 1965, a group of professors at the University of Michigan met to discuss a response. They called for a work moratorium (i.e., a strike, as such campus demonstrations would later more frankly be called), and a meeting was organized for March 24th. Three thousand students showed up. The teach-in began at 8 P.M. and continued all night, though it was interrupted by bomb threats.
Two days later, there was a teach-in at Columbia University. On April 17th, barely a month after the marines landed, twenty thousand people marched against the war in Washington, D.C., in a demonstration organized by Students for a Democratic Society. On May 21st, an antiwar teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley, attracted thirty-thousand people and lasted thirty-six hours. And for four years, the temperature kept rising. Everyone seemed to know from the start that Vietnam was bound to happen and that it would not go well.
Yet between 1950 and 1953, 38,574 Americans had died in Korea, a much higher casualty rate than in Vietnam. That war was not popular, but there were no major “U.S. Out of Korea” demonstrations. Comparatively speaking, sending a few marines to Da Nang was just a spark. Still, it started a conflagration that took years to extinguish and that fractured the American left.
If we wanted to indulge in what historians call “retrospective determinism,” it is easy enough to line up the dots that lead to the last helicopter. On January 27, 1973, the United States and the governments of North and South Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords, negotiated by Kissinger, in his capacity as Nixon’s national-security adviser, and the North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho. Though Kissinger and Tho received the Nobel Peace Prize later that year, Kissinger knew that the accord meant the end of South Vietnam. He did not think that the North would just quit. He was bargaining for what he deemed “a decent interval” between the withdrawal of American troops and the collapse of the South. That way, the United States could abandon the war without losing it.
A key provision of the accords was an agreement for the United States to withdraw its troops in exchange for the release of close to six hundred American P.O.W.s in the North, held in places like the notorious “Hanoi Hilton.” (South Vietnam held thirty thousand P.O.W.s, who were also released. These received less attention.) One of the oldest American P.O.W.s in Hanoi had been shot down in August, 1964, and was incarcerated for eight and a half years. By 1973, the American public had ceased to care about the fate of South Vietnam. But they cared about the P.O.W.s. It was the era of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.” In terms of domestic politics, whatever deal the American government cut, it had to get the P.O.W.s back. (Later on, the emotional issue was the M.I.A.s.)
The most important parts of the accords, though, were not in the accords. They were in private letters, drafted by Kissinger, that Nixon sent to Nguyen Van Thieu to persuade him to sign the treaty. In the letters, Nixon conveyed “my absolute assurance that if Hanoi refuses to abide by the terms of the agreement it is my intention to take swift and retaliatory action.” The United States, he said, “will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.” Thieu would not have signed the treaty without that assurance. He is supposed to have said of Nixon, “He is an honest man. I am going to trust him.” Famous last words.
The ceasefire was broken by both sides almost immediately, but in minor ways. The North Vietnamese surely knew of Nixon’s secret promise (they had double agents everywhere), and although they had weathered years of bombardment—the United States dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs than the Allies dropped during the entire Second World War—they did fear the B-52s. They were careful not to push too hard. They also needed time to rebuild their forces.
The initial attack of the 1975 offensive was therefore a test. The North took the provincial capital of Buôn Ma Thuô.t, and then they crossed their fingers and waited. Nothing happened. The Americans did not send the Marines. They did not launch a bomber. The United States was saying, “You guys are Thieu’s problem now,” and the North got the message. They knew that Saigon would not be defended by American ground forces or air power, and that it was ripe for the taking. A campaign they had expected would last two years was over in two months.
As the North bore down on Saigon, Thieu begged for American financial support, but Congress was in no mood to pour more millions into the black hole of Southeast Asia. In a speech at Tulane University, on April 23rd, President Ford announced that the Vietnam War “is finished as far as America is concerned.” The line received a standing ovation. Thieu heard him. On April 26th, Thieu, having stepped down as President, fled to Taiwan.
By April 30th, the South Vietnamese had nothing left. When their new President, Duong Van Minh, offered a transfer of power, the North Vietnamese just laughed at him. “All power has passed into the hands of the revolution,” one of them told him. “You cannot hand over what you don’t have.”
The North Vietnamese had done nothing to interfere with Operation Frequent Wind. Their goal was to get all Americans out of Vietnam, and they were pleased to see the Americans deporting themselves. Afterward, there was no bloodbath. There were executions, mostly of the revenge variety, and not ordered by the politburo in Hanoi. Yet the North Vietnamese were not the ideological comrades of American college students and Jane Fonda. They were genuine totalitarians. Perhaps a million South Vietnamese were arrested, and many of them were sent to concentration camps for “reëducation.” Their families were told that they would be gone for a few days, but some remained there for as many as seventeen years. Meanwhile, between 1975 and 1995, more than three million people from Indochina continued to flee, this time without American assistance, and many on boats launched into the South China Sea. At least two hundred thousand Vietnamese are estimated to have died on the water.
What was the United States fighting for in Vietnam? “Humiliation” is a word that recurs continually in memorandums circulated in the Administration when the decision was being made to send the marines, back in 1965. In March, shortly after the Da Nang landing, an Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, wrote a memo assigning relative weights to American objectives in Vietnam. In his view, the principal aim was “to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.” He assigned this a weight of seventy per cent. Second, at twenty per cent, was to keep Southeast Asia out of Chinese hands. And the third, at ten per cent, was to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
Another State Department official, George Ball, told Lyndon B. Johnson in late June, “Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well-nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot—without national humiliation—stop short of achieving our complete objectives. Of the two possibilities, I think humiliation would be more likely than the achievement of our objectives—even after we had paid terrible costs.”
From the beginning, in other words, a paramount American interest in Vietnam was “face.” The important thing was not to lose. “I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved,” Johnson told Doris Kearns Goodwin. “If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. . . . If I left that war and let the communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.”
Johnson had to do it to show that he could do it. Much like Vietnam, only a lot faster, the American war in Iran has reduced itself to saving face. Within two weeks, the United States was trying to figure out how to end the war without losing it. Meanwhile, people were being killed. ♦