Chapter 28: Chapter 27 – The VC Capture Saigon

We walk on a path across the Evergreen Forest, and the lights at the tops of the lamp posts along the path shimmer in the fog. Through dense clouds of vapor, the VC guerrillas move among the trees, swinging their rifles around. A rifle muzzle is pointed in our direction, and a shot rings out, scattering leaves on a bush above our heads. We get behind tree trunks and wait.

I look around the trunk. "I don't see the guerrillas now, but they may still be around. We better take a different route."

We go through a ravine between a parapet of sandbags on one side and bushes on the other, and come out at the National Military Cemetery.

A tomb is surrounded by walls carved with elaborate Oriental designs. I look at the frangipani trees in full bloom around the tomb. "Frangipani flowers smell sweet in a way that makes you feel gloomy. But this is an impressive tomb."

"Let's move on. It's too eerily quiet around here," Hoa says.

"But first, let's come into the tomb to take a quick look," Tin says.

We put the bags down behind a bush and go into the tomb. There is a picture of a girl on the headstone. There're picture frames on the walls, and each frame contains a picture of the same girl, along with a eulogy poem from her grieving parents.

I bend over to look at a small hole at the base of the headstone. The sounds of talking and of bumping of bodies against wood planking come from inside the grave. "Corpses coming back to life."

"The VCs must be staying inside the coffins," Tin says. "They do this when they are preparing for attacks on the American-Vietnamese allied armies."

 

At the tomb entrance, there are foods set on a wooden table. I say, "The foods were not here before. There are no footsteps on the ground, but look, there are grimy handprints on the surface of the table."

"This cemetery gives me a creep," Hoa says. 

We stare at one another, snatch up our bags and run away.

An alarming new escalation in the Vietnam War is occurring. Most schools will remain closed for the rest of the school year.

When we come around a bend in the road, I smell a sickening stench of dead bodies and see human limb bones slant up out of the fresh dirt on top of a concrete tomb set apart from others.

A woman stands at the fence, which encloses the front yard of a house by the cemetery. She says, "My husband and I have lived here for 30 years. Lately, there are a lot of noises coming from the graves. Our Meals have been disappeared after they were set up on the dining table, while the doors and windows were locked. For over a month, radio and TV networks have been covering the VCs' heightening activities, in preparation for their upcoming attacks on the Allied armies, to wrest power from the Vietnamese government. I suspect that the VCs have removed bodies from the coffins, put ammunition in, and stay in the vacant coffins."

At a rectangular clearing with trampled grass in the cemetery, a group of VCs sits on the ground, with the American officers interrogating them.   

An American Lieutenant Colonel stands over the VC Lieutenant Commander on his knees, whose fingers were stuck in a trap I made when I was in the Cu Chi tunnels. The American Lieutenant Colonel says, "Noi, noi."

The VC Lieutenant Commander remains on his knees.

"Again, I tell you to not," the Lieutenant Colonel says.

The VC stirs but remains on his knees.

The Lieutenant Colonel shoves the VC off his knees, and he falls on his back, his bended knees hanging in the air.

I tap the Lieutenant Colonel on the shoulder. "I know you meant to say 'ngoi,' meaning to sit down, but you pronounced 'noi,' meaning 'cooking pot.'"

The VC says, "You speak English, so you can tell him to pronounce correctly. I thought he called me 'crackpot,' and that's why I didn't respond."

People are trying to flee Vietnam before the VCs take over the Vietnamese government. With so many people crowding the streets, I can make good money selling food on the street. I've asked the old woman, Tin, and Hoa, to join us in our kitchen to make food to sell.

On my way back from ordering food ingredients in Chinatown, I stop by the flea market, to bring the old woman to my house for the first time. The old woman stands at the gate of my house, saying, "Huh, Thu! You, you, you…are my daughter."

Mom sits in the kitchen, cooking. She leaps to her feet and runs to us, crying. "Ma, you're still alive. And you're the old woman at the flea market?" Mom gently pushes the stray hair strands away from the old woman's face. "Only a few gray hairs. Ma, you're doing well. Mai is your granddaughter. And Mai, you've got a Grandma."

I stare at Grandma. "I knew something was not right about the VCs' report of you as having drowned while swimming across a canal to escape. Grandma, you're one tough cookie, and I'm so happy to have you back."

We celebrate our reunion with the inhabitants of the DMZ. There are all kinds of dishes, Pad Thai, fried green plantain, spring rolls, and jellyfish salad, just to name a few.

We embark on a new business of making a lot of food to sell on busy streets. The plan is for us to make food together, for Mom to stay home to clean up, stock supplies, and make dinner for us, for Grandma and me to sell food at the American Embassy and Air Force bases, and for Tin and Hoa to sell food at other places.

I get many customers. I've wrapped up two banana crackers, and while I hand them to a girl, a radio announces, "Mother wants American Marines to call home. Temperature is 105 degrees, and snow is melting at the American Embassy."

I say, "Snow's melting in April? Could it mean that snow cones are melting? Maybe they're handing out snow cones at the American embassy. I'll go there and get some."

A man customer wearing tire sandals says, "It's a coded message to command the American Marines to come to the American embassy. The Marines fly helicopters carrying Vietnamese refugees from the embassy's rooftop to the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier, which is moored in the South China Sea."

"How do you know that?" I say.

"Because he's a VC spy," a Vietnamese soldier customer says.

Other customers look down at the VC's feet. One customer says, "No wonder. But why does he smell like a dead body?" 

The VC slips away into a crowd of people.

The soldier customer says, "The VCs drop snow from helicopters. The snow clouds up the air at the embassy's rooftop, hindering the evacuation of the refugees. The American Marines use flame throwers to fire balls of flame to melt the snow."

A woman passerby says, "Right now they're evacuating the refugees at Tan Son Nhat airport. Big airplanes can land and take off from the tarmac there."

I've sold out my food. I find Grandma and hand my tray to her. "Grandma, I'm going to the American embassy, because I think I'll have a good chance of finding Dad there."

On the streets, there are refugees carrying suitcases, farmers wearing tire sandals, with guns tucked into their waistbands, and armed soldiers standing guard along the streets. The American Embassy provides bus service to the refugees so that they can get to the embassy. A double-length bus stops in front of the Majestic Plaza hotel, where refugees stand waiting. I follow them onto the bus. It moves a short distance and stops at a spot where soldiers are filling a pothole, which lies across the lane divider on Saigon Boulevard. A crumpled light pole sticks above the edge of the pothole, and the soldiers remove the light pole and fill the pothole with rocky dirt. The people on the bus shout at the soldiers for them to move out of the way.

"You'll get the bus stuck if you run it over the pothole," a soldier shouts.

The bus backs up and rams into the divider. Now there is a long gap in the divider, and the bus makes a U-turn in the gap and gets onto the opposite traffic on the other side of the divider. A regular bus also carrying refugees gets in front of the double-length bus. Two more buses coming out of the alleys join the bus line. A shiny black car with an official-looking sign on the license plate moves up the exit ramp of a parking garage and stops at a closed steel gate. The gate lifts up slowly, and the car moves out through the gate and gets in front of the caravan of buses.

A Vietnamese soldier standing guard on the street points at the black car. "That's the car carrying the American Ambassador and his entourage to the airport. Follow it and the buses will be allowed to enter the airport."

Suddenly the lead bus swerves and then stops. Its windshield has a hole with spider-web-type cracks around it. A military policewoman says from the street, "The driver of the lead bus has been hit by a sniper's bullet. The driver is found slumped over the steering wheel."

The people in the lead bus get off and scatter on the street. The buses behind our bus back away into alleys. But our bus moves ahead around the lead bus, to keep up with the black car.   

On the TV on our bus, video footages show the VC fighter planes dropping bombs on Tan Son Nhat airport. Debris strews along the runway and piles up on the tarmac. The ruined tarmac and runway prevent airplanes from landing and takeoff at the airport. Now helicopters land and take off from the grass fields and parking lots of the airport, to evacuate refugees. Helicopters also land on the rooftops, lawns, and decks of swimming pools of regular houses, to evacuate refugees.

Suddenly our bus stops on the side of the road. An old man on our bus says, "Get a move on, driver, or we'll be late for the evacuation at the airport."

The driver says, "I won't drive you to the airport now. My family is at home right now waiting for me, so I'll drive by my house to pick them up. Then I'll drive everyone to the airport."

The old man says, "Not enough time for all that you want to do. People on this bus, please give the driver some money."

Money is piled up on the dashboard. The driver sits up straight, smiling. "Now I can take you anywhere you want to go."

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"You catch up with the Ambassador's car, and get us to the airport," the old man says.

The Military Police guards at the airport checkpoint do a military salute to the Ambassador's car as it moves into the airport. But they stop our bus.

"They come along with us," a voice yells from the car. 

As our bus follows the car into the airport, the bombing starts again. The car turns into a narrow alley, but our bus gets out of the airport and heads toward the Saigon harbor. At the harbor, people get off the bus and get on the boats, to be taken to the aircraft carrier. The driver takes the people who remain on the bus to the American Embassy. 

American Marine Security Guards are at the front gate of the embassy. One guard says, "The Embassy's Regional Security Office (RSO) has instructed us to allow the refugees with official documents to enter the embassy. Acceptable documents can be a visa or a Refugee Travel Document. People without proper documents must stay outside the gate."

The fifteen-foot wall surrounding the embassy is topped with barbed wire. The people outside the wall climb on one another's shoulders, to get up to the top of the wall. The people inside the wall climb up the wall in the same manner and pull the other people into the embassy.

A woman carrying a baby shows her travel document to a Marine Corps Military Police Officer at the main gate, and he lets her in. Then she turns around and hands the baby and travel document and money to another woman. The first woman inadvertently lifts up her skirt, showing the hairy legs under the boxer shorts for men.

The same officer grabs her by the arm, growling, "You are a man. You have managed to bribe your way into the embassy." The officer pulls the man to the gate and pushes him out. 

Outside the gate, people climb up an electric tower, and get onto the top of the wall, at spots where the barbed wire is cut and bent, and then they jump down onto the embassy's lawn.

The Military Police shoot their guns up into the air. "Get down. Get down."

I'm halfway up the electric tower, but when I hear them shout for people to get down, I jump down because I don't want to be shot at. I stand among the people outside the main gate, my hand clutching its iron bars. Something jangles under my blouse, and I pull it out. It's a dog tag on a bead chain given to me by Hoa. 

The same officer reaches his hand out through the gate and takes hold of the dog tag. "POW/MIA dog tag. A girl with a missing Dad. Go to the back gate and I'll let you in."

He lets me in through the back gate and hands me a chocolate bar and a piece of paper. He says, "I wrote this permission letter for you to board the helicopter on the embassy's rooftop."

People who are to board the helicopters must wear a nametag. I go into an empty office inside the embassy's main building and rummage in a desk drawer for a blank nametag, but I find none. I rip out a blank empty sheet of white paper from a pad. I fold the paper into a rectangle, the size of a nametag, and write MAI DOE on it with a black marker. I put adhesive tape on the back of the nametag, poke a safety pin through the tape, and pin the nametag on my shirt.

The Marines search the people on the embassy's ground for weapons and throw them into the embassy's swimming pool. The pool's bottom is already covered with guns, knives, and barbed wire cutters.

Grandma stands outside the chain-link fence at the back of the embassy, looking in at me.

I say, "Grandma, there's a ditch filled with dry leaves beside you. A guard is coming. Please get in the ditch and cover yourself up with the leaves."

The guard says. "Hey, what's going on here?"

A squirrel dashing out of the ditch, and scurrying up a pine tree, I say, "Sir, I'm playing with the squirrel."

He shakes his head while walking toward the front gate. "No time for playing. Hurry up to the rooftop. The helicopters can stop flying at any time soon."

I say, "Grandma, please get up and go around to the tamarind tree at the front corner of the embassy, and wait for me there."

I climb up the tamarind tree and push a long branch down to a level where Grandma can reach it. "Grandma, please grab the branch and pull yourself up on it and get onto the tree. Then you can climb down the tree and get inside the embassy."

In the chaos, looters take furniture, liquors, and refrigerators, and cart them out of the embassy. Two women are arguing about a king bed. The embassy's lawn is now littered with broken jars of preserved food, tramped-on fruits, and empty carton boxes.

Small helicopters that can carry 20 refugees must land on the embassy's lawn, but bigger helicopters for 50 refugees must land in the parking lot. American Marines are lying on their stomach around the perimeter of the evacuating area where helicopters land and take off, with their machine guns pointing outward and their fingers on the triggers, at the ready to shoot at attacking VCs.

Special status refugees are evacuated on the embassy's rooftop. They must walk up to the rooftop, and from there, they walk up the two rolling staircases standing side by side, and get onto the helipad, a landing and takeoff pad for helicopters. With too many people using the staircases, they're ruined. Two metal ladders are set in place of the staircases.

To prevent the unqualified people from getting onto the rooftop, the American Marines bolt and lock all the unrestricted doors to the rooftop. They put large fire extinguishers on wheels, wall lockers ripped from the walls and heavy desks against the doors. They also lock the elevators and the grill gates to the stairwells leading to the rooftop.

Rumors are flying that the VCs are riding into the embassy on tanks, and would run over the people standing in their way. The panicky people outside the main gate ram a fire truck through the gate and surge into the embassy. They break all barriers, swarm into the staircases, and move up onto the rooftop.

Rooftop evacuation is now reserved for the embassy's VIPs. Major Steve Long radios to ask for the 101st Airborne Division troops to come and boost security at the helipad while evacuating the VIPs.

The CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter lands on the helipad. The American Marines jump out of the helicopter and surge through the embassy building and out to the American Ambassador Martine Bailey hugging the tamarind tree.

The Commandant of the Marine Corps (CMC) raises his hand to his face in a salute. "Sir, President Truman has given us the order to carry you up the ladders and put you in the helicopter, if you refuse to go on your own two feet."

The Ambassador clings to the tamarind tree with his arms around the trunk. "Oh, no. I won't walk up the wobbly tall ladder to get to the high helipad. I'm a diplomat, so I want to stay here, and when the VCs come in the embassy on tanks, I'll use my tact to talk them into moving back into the tunnels."

The Marines tackle him to the ground and stretch out his arms and legs. One Marine grabs him by his hand, and another Marine clutches his foot. Together they carry him up to the rooftop, and then climb up the two ladders, with the ambassador's face turning outward and eyes shut tight. The Marines get onto the helipad and swing the ambassador into the landed helicopter. 

"Let's go home," Grandma says.

I say, "Grandma, I think I'll hang around here for a while. Maybe I can find Dad here."

Grandma and I are pulled into the helicopter, and we join the other refugees crouching on the floor. The American Ambassador crouches down beside Grandma, chatting with her.

The last Marine jumps in, carrying with him the American flag that has flown over the American embassy. The flag is folded and put inside a brown paper grocery bag.

I grip the ridges of the metal floor and pull myself to the back of the helicopter. I look out of the open gangplank and toward the Gold Nuggets River and the Skyscraper Tree, then across the ocean to the horizon, then down to the embassy's ground. Tin and Hoa stand, looking up and waving. I shout, "Tin and Hoa, tell my mom that Grandma and I got in the helicopter by mistake. We're about to be flown to the United States. We'll find a way to come home soon. Please give this money bag to my mom." I throw the bag down to them.

Tin picks up the bag. Tin and Hoa nod and wave again, then walk away.

The Commandant of the Marine Corps announces on loudspeaker, "Panther is on his way to the John F. Kennedy aircraft carrier."

"Panther is my codename," the ambassador says to Grandma.

The gangplank at the back of the helicopter is drawn up to close. The plane lifts off, slanting up high in the air and straightening into a horizontal position. The helicopter lands on the aircraft carrier's flight deck. The Governor of Guam Island and the Commanding Officer of the aircraft carrier come into the helicopter.

The Marine puts down the bag with the American flag in it, leaps to his feet, and stands, raising his hand to his face in a salute. "The American Ambassador's onboard, too."

The Governor looks around. "Where is he?"

The ambassador raises his hand, grinning. A lady sitting with her arm around a poodle dog raises her hand, too. "I'm his wife."

People part to let her and the Poodle move and get beside him.

The Commanding Officer of the aircraft carrier and the Ambassador are standing on the flight deck. The Commanding Officer hands a phone to the Ambassador, and says, "50 American Marines are left behind on the American embassy's roof by mistake."

The Ambassador says, "Give me the loudspeaker."

The ambassador dials a mobile phone number, and speaks into the loudspeaker, "American Marines, I salute your courage in tackling me to the ground, carrying me through the American Embassy building and up to the rooftop, and then from there, deftly climbing up the wobbling ladders to the helipad, and lastly, throwing me into the helicopter. I've sent back the same helicopter to fly you out."

The aircraft carrier is crowded with refugees. The U.S. Navy personnel push the ruined helicopters off the flight deck and into the ocean, in order to make room on the flight deck for other helicopters to bring in more refugees.

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