Tanks, bombs and bicycles: how America was humbled

**thedrifter** · 04-25-05, 10:58 PM

Tanks, bombs and bicycles: How America was humbled
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Three decades after the North Vietnamese rolled into Saigon, Colin Smith, who was there for The Observer, recalls the tumultuous last days of the war in south east Asia and the chaos of the evacuation

Sunday April 24, 2005
The Observer

Thirty years ago, I arrived at the flattened gates of what was then the presidential palace in Saigon about 10 minutes after one of the North Vietnamese army's Russian T-54 tanks had gone through them without the formality of lifting the latch. Soldiers of the southern Army of the Republic of Vietnam - always referred to as ARVN - were gathered on the lawns tearing off their uniforms like actors doing a fast costume change. Once they had surrendered their weapons, their captors told them they were free to go.

Separated from their men, five worried-looking officers, one a colonel, were sitting on the raised kerb around the gravelled drive. They looked up at me as I walked by, then down at their feet. Remembering all the little acts of kindness shown to me in previous weeks by ARVN soldiers at various fronts around the besieged capital and the patience they displayed at all our questions, I felt ashamed that I dared not offer them as much as a cigarette. A teenage member of the North Vietnamese army (NVA) waved me back towards the broken gates with his new-looking Kalashnikov rifle and I was glad to go, consoling myself with the thought that probably the last thing the defeated troops needed was acknowledgment from a Westerner.

In the park opposite, more NVA infantry in their dark green uniforms were unloading mortars and heavy machine-guns from the back of long-bonneted old Molotova trucks still decked with the camouflage foliage they had worn throughout their long journey south. Some of the more daring Saigonese rode up on their mopeds to stare at their outsized pith helmets and makeshift rubber sandals, carved, it was said, out of old tractor tyres. For most it was their first close look at these other Vietnamese who, as they always promised, had won against all the odds.

Around the corner at the American embassy, already stripped of most of its furniture and air-conditioners, the last looters were fighting over coffee cups and lightbulbs. Eye-smarting traces of CS gas released by the American marines as they made their escape still lingered in the corridors and stairwells leading to the roof. Until eight that morning their rearguard, armed with the pump-action shotguns they carried for riot control, had held off a pleading Vietnamese crowd.

Some in the crowd had produced what appeared to be valid documents indicating that they had been allotted 'one seat' on the helicopters that were leaving the embassy roof every few minutes. 'I work for the CIA,' whispered one anguished man. 'The communists will kill me.' Suddenly he removed the large gold watch on his left wrist and began waving it at the marines, who looked everywhere but at him.

Occasionally, someone deemed to have produced the right piece of paper or mouthed the right password was pulled over the wall. Westerners were almost invariably offered a helping hand. Sometimes I had caught a quizzical glance in my direction. (Most of the thousand or so TV crews and reporters in Saigon were already on the other side of the wall, but 117 of us, nine British, had decided to stay and see out this last chapter.) Then the helmeted heads disappeared from the parapet. A gas grenade had come over the wall and, judging by the smell of them hours later, at least one had clonked down the stairs before the last evacuation helicopter staggered uncertainly into the air and headed out for the South China Sea and the waiting carriers of the Seventh Fleet.

It was the end of a war that had begun after the atomic bombs of August 1945 assured Tokyo's surrender at the close of the Second World War. In French Indo-China (modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), an understrength division of the old British Indian Army under Major-General Douglas Gracey had formally accepted the surrender of the Japanese army of occupation, but spared its troops further humiliation by allowing them to keep their arms. They were needed to help Gracey prevent nationalist insurgents - the Viet Minh - from seizing power before France was able to resume its colonial rule.

It would be almost 10 years before the Viet Minh, led by a high-born Marxist called Ho Chi Minh, undermined France's will to continue by inflicting a major defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Out of the wreckage of the French colony emerged the two Vietnams, divided at the country's 17th parallel: the communist north, with Hanoi as its capital; and the republic in the south, run from Saigon by a series of corrupt francophone soldier Presidents.

Vietnam was tailor-made to become one of the Cold War's hot battlefields. The first casualties among the American military advisers attached to the ARVN occurred in 1959. Peasant guerrillas, sponsored by Hanoi and known as the Vietcong, were beginning to make a nuisance of themselves in both the Mekong delta and the Central Highlands, where US special forces, like the French before them, were recruiting indigenous Montagnard tribesmen who appeased a pantheon of spirits with gruesome animal sacrifices.

Most of the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam died between 1965 and 1972. This was the Nam that developed its own subculture: the psychedelic war of such films as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, of books like Michael Herr's Dispatches, in which mainly conscript soldiers rarely seem to smoke a straight cigarette. Marijuana fumes scented their dugouts and heroin was supplied by Saigon's Chinese mafia, who would sometimes dispose of troublesome officers with fragmentation grenades. 'Fragging' became part of the Nam lexicon, along with napalm, grunts and choppers.

On becoming US President in 1968, Richard Nixon determined to rid himself of the unpopular legacy of war bequeathed him by his Democratic predecessors John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. His solution was simple: step up the bombing, start to withdraw the demoralised, murderous, often near-mutinous US ground troops and let the South Vietnamese do the fighting on the ground. After an 11-day blitz of Hanoi, the North Vietnamese leadership agreed to return to the stalled peace talks, and on 15 January, 1973, a peace agreement was signed in Paris.

By the time of the fall of Saigon, 'the grunts' of the US infantry (so called because they became so disgruntled) had been home for more than two years. With them had departed the much larger number of rear-echelon units which had kept 543,000 US military in the field at their peak (almost four times the number now in Iraq).

In 1975 there was even an official delegation from the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam - otherwise known as the Vietcong - housed in Camp Davis, a former Marine Corps transit camp at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport. They were there as members of the Joint Military Commission set up to administer the Paris agreement by delineating 'zones of control', which had turned the South Vietnamese countryside into a patchwork of heavily armed hamlets flying either the red and blue flag with a yellow star that was the emblem of the Vietcong, or the red and yellow bars of the republic of South Vietnam.

The war had become a series of violations of the ceasefire, and neither side wanted to be caught in the act, so the foreign press was usually kept away. Saigon hotels, once full of press, were half empty, the reporters having migrated to more newsworthy climes. Few of the remaining journalists bothered to attend the communists' weekly press conferences at Camp Davis, where rhetoric, vodka and the Vietnamese spring rolls called cha giac were served by their genial press attaché, Colonel Sinh.

Saigon was safe enough, but shabby. Deprived of the millions of dollars that Uncle Sam's military tourists spent on services ranging from sex to shaving, the city felt like a once popular resort that had somehow slipped out of fashion. In Tu Do Street, unemployed bar girls played endless card games and even pined for the Australians, notorious for their meanness and beating up the clerks and air-conditioning experts of the vast US rear echelon.

There was still a visible US presence of 10,000 or so: the biggest group were contract workers from various aviation companies that kept President Nguyen Van Thieu's air force flying, along with advisers from the Military Assistance Command Vietnam or the Agency for International Development, some of them retired army officers with complicated private lives who were often as devoted to Vietnam as Britain's 'curry colonels' had been to the Raj. The fortress-like, six-storey US embassy still had a huge staff - the CIA alone was said to occupy two entire floors.

Then, with very little warning, the big war came back. It started in the Central Highlands where, three years before, the battlefield debut of Hanoi's T-54s had provoked a terrible display of US air power and brought the last communist offensive to an abrupt halt. This time the crucial towns of Kontum and Pleiku fell within a few days. About 250,000 Vietnamese settlers from the south, many of them government militiamen and their families, began to head for Saigon. It was obvious who was breaking the truce. How long would it be before the B-52s returned?

continued...........

**thedrifter** · 04-25-05, 10:59 PM

But nothing happened. Then Hué fell. South Vietnam's most northerly city, 60 miles south of the 17th parallel, had once been the symbol of American resolve. In 1968 US marines and ARVN troops had fought costly street battles to recapture the old imperial capital.

Still nothing happened. Were the Americans at last washing their hands of Vietnam?

The media circus trickled back to Saigon, but was not as welcome as before. 'They are the enemy within,' declared the ARVN newspaper Tien Tuyen, reflecting a justified belief that, without the burden of a free press in the US, President Gerald Ford - who had replaced Nixon after the Watergate scandal - might have persuaded Congress to maintain Saigon's addiction to money and high explosives. 'Soon we will have many interesting times,' announced Colonel Sinh, whose press conferences had become popular again, if only because everyone expected some awful retribution to befall his delegation.

The South Vietnamese republic was shrinking fast. After Hué fell, we flew to Da Nang. A mini-Dunkirk had occurred at the estuary of Hué's Perfume river, though mercifully without any determined attempt to impede flight. Vehicles and artillery had been abandoned and ARVN troops had waded out to a flotilla of small boats and a few landing craft. Some had their families with them, both young and old. Barefoot soldiers came ashore at Da Nang with muddy M-16 rifles under one arm and immaculate small children under the other. 'They don't know what they are running from or how close the enemy is,' complained a bewildered Indian shopkeeper who had been swept up by this tide. 'They just run.' Then Da Nang's resident CIA man, officially its US consul, called a press conference at which he informed us that the North Vietnamese had already cut all roads south from the city and that Da Nang was going to be next. It was difficult to take him seriously - the place was packed with armed troops; all the evacuees from Hué seemed to have brought their rifles with them, and often mortars and heavy machine-guns. But appearances were deceptive. The troops were disorganised, lacked leadership and, above all, pined for American air support.

At the airport, which was beginning to come under occasional rocket fire, Da Nang's more prosperous citizens were fighting to board extra flights to Saigon laid on by an American charter company that once returned homesick GIs to what they usually referred to as 'The World'.

On my flight, almost 200 people were shoehorned into a Boeing 727 designed to carry 125, a squeeze made even tighter by the large electric fans and caged songbirds that were their most popular hand luggage. Many of them were Catholics, often abandoning their homes for the second time in their lives. Twenty years previously, as Vietnam had divided, Catholic bishops had told their flock that the Blessed Virgin had already left a land where God was about to be banished, and that they must follow her south. About 600,000 northern Catholics had done their bidding. Nor was their advice entirely unfounded. Ho Chi Minh's cadres obliged America's Cold War warriors by murdering hundreds of Catholics who chose to stay.

Catholics tended to find their way into the ARVN's better units, such as the parachute battalions stubbornly defending besieged Xuan Loc, a provincial town 50 miles north-east of Saigon along Highway One.

The vanguard of the ARVN relief force was stuck on a slight ridge line about 10 miles away. A forward observation officer was calling in artillery and airstrikes on an enemy by now well dug into the rubber plantations, banana trees and overgrown paddy fields around the village of Hung Loc. Shells from a 155mm battery about three miles behind us exploded in great brown clouds. Blast from the 250lb bombs dropped by the little F-5 fighters tugged at our clothing.

But as the warplanes pulled out of their dives, we heard heavy machine-guns firing back at them, our first indication that their invisible enemy existed. Slow movement towards us through the tall grass on the overgrown paddies caused some weapons to be cocked, but the white blouses and conical straw hats were spotted in time. They turned out to be a mother and her two teenage daughters burdened with everything they could carry, including the inevitable electric fans, in the yokes across their shoulders.

After them came a cyclist, whose erratic progress as he zig-zagged uphill towards us through the bursting shells was watched with bated breath. One of the white smoke markers which every Vietnamese peasant knew were used by American-made artillery dropped 200 yards from him.

'Now lie down, you dumb sonofa*****,' pleaded the Chicago Tribune' s Philip Caputo. Still he came on, apparently oblivious to his imminent extinction. The forward observation officer started yelling into his radio. As the cyclist got closer, we could see that a small boy was sitting on the crossbar steadying two long sticks across the handlebars. Then we realised that he needed the crutches because his right leg had been amputated above the knee.

On the ridge the one-legged cyclist - unable to ride his bike in any normal way - rested with his remaining foot on what appeared to be a sunken roadside kilometre stone as the boy gulped water from a large glass bottle that had somehow survived the journey intact. Their luck held and they had glided downhill for a few minutes before the invisible men of Hung Loc mortared us.

The ARVN troops were almost as well dug in as their counterparts and our only casualty was a French photographer hit in the groin who, two days later, was limping around Saigon waving an X-ray to prove his manhood was intact. But lying in the prone position did give some of us an unexpected opportunity to examine the object that the cyclist had rested his foot on. It was not a kilometre stone. It marked the grave of a Lieutenant Gebelin of the 22nd Colonial Infantry Regiment, shared with four Montagnards who had all fallen at that spot on 22 May, 1948.

The bones of that war were never far below the surface. 'Beaucoup VC' would say ARVN soldiers who hardly knew another word of French, pointing at some innocent-looking greenery down the road. Ragged boys who hung around the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon selling paperbacks never seemed to be without a copy of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, his novel of America's first stumbling steps to replace Indo-China's tired colonials. Greene thought the Americans had come much too late and that the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 marked the end of any hope of further Western rule over south east Asia.

Four million Vietnamese were killed between 1959 and 1975 in what the Vietnamese increasingly regard as a civil war. Most of us who remained in the city whose name had now been changed by the victors from Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City were convinced that we had witnessed a historical watershed that ranked with the fall of Constantinople. Surely 30 April, 1975, would always be remembered as the beginning of the decline of the United States as a great power. The idea that the victor would not get the spoils seemed ludicrous.

Perhaps we should have known better 30 years ago, when the North Vietnamese air force had demanded $100 per head for our short flight out to Laos on an Ilyushin 16 transport plane. The last time I was in Saigon, the hottest place in town was a bar called the B-52.

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-25-05, 11:01 PM

Vietnam War - 30 years later Loved ones grow through grief
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By Rick Farrant
The Journal Gazette

Susan Ducat's husband used to come to her in dreams. She couldn't see him. She just felt his presence, heard his voice.

The love of her life would tell her that his helicopter had been shot down over the jungles of Vietnam, a group of monks had rescued him and he had been carried to a monastery to heal.

"Don't worry about me," Phillip Allen Ducat would tell his wife. "I love it here and I'm just fine."

Perhaps it was just her way of coping, because intellectually Susan knew he couldn't possibly be alive, much less be recuperating at a monastery. There was no question his helicopter had been shot down; witnesses saw burning bodies dropping from the sky and all that was ever found of her husband was a spit-shined boot with the signature parachute cord he used for laces.

But still, she said, his body was never found and "there was all this hope that he might have escaped. It was pretty hard to imagine that he was really gone."

Thirty years it's been since April 30, 1975 - the day the United States plucked 10 Marines from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and called it quits on a lost war. Thirty-nine years since Phillip Allen Ducat of Fort Wayne went missing on a moonlit night Sept. 25, 1966.

It was a war many people tried to forget, but it radically changed the lives of not only those killed and injured but those who knew the young men who sacrificed their lives. Parents, wives, children, extended family.

In the ensuing years, some of the people close to the roughly 160 men from northeast Indiana killed in Vietnam have also passed on.

But for those still alive - for people like Susan Ducat, for families like the Bunns of Fort Wayne - life remains inalterably changed.

Many still don't understand why the United States went to Vietnam, many still have difficulty resolving their losses and many have this message to impart: No war, they say, is ever a good war.

Susan Ducat is 65 now and living in Pueblo, Colo. She's a mother of two, a grandmother to three and a partner to a man she's been with for more than 30 years.

She's happy more often than not, she says, but every once in a while her mind will wander to the brief life she and Phillip Ducat shared.

It's hard for her to forget because she never changed her last name - out of honor and respect. It's hard for her not to wonder what might have been.

Sometimes she thinks about what her late husband might have said in certain situations. Sometimes she thinks about what he would have been like as an older adult.

"I just never got to watch him grow old and grow up," she says wistfully.

She and Phillip met at North Side High School and became high school sweethearts. He went by Phil and was a grounded, good-looking football player who dreamed of flying. She went by Susie Renforth and was a pretty, gregarious, somewhat flighty young woman who loved going to Phil's games.

Austin Brooks, one of Phillip's best friends at North Side, remembers Phillip and Susan's relationship as a troubled one.

"She was an attractive girl and Phil had an eye for good-looking women," said Brooks, now 66. "But their relationship was a stormy one. There was never any abuse, just lots of bickering back and forth."

Susan doesn't deny there were problems, but both she and Brooks say there was something about their love that kept drawing them together - even after the loss of their child, even after a divorce.

The two began their adult lives after graduating from North Side in 1957, the year Pat Boone released the dreamy ballad "Love Letters in the Sand." Phillip enrolled at Wabash College in Crawfordsville and he and Susan married a year later.

Susan got pregnant, the baby was born prematurely and died, and sometime during Phillip's studies at Wabash - Susan can't precisely remember when - the two divorced.

Susan went off to Seattle to become a flight attendant for United Airlines, but the two kept in touch.

"He helped me write my letters to go to stewardess school, and I took care of him when he was sick," she says. "I think we both just needed to grow up a little bit."

A year and a half after they divorced, they remarried and Phillip decided to forgo acceptance into medical school for a stint in the Marines. The couple was living at a base in Irvine, Calif., when Phillip was summoned to Vietnam in February 1966.

Susan didn't agree with the war, didn't want him to go.

"I wanted to break his leg before he left, but he wouldn't let me," she says.

After he was overseas, though, she did her best to lend support. She sent him care packages. Cases of beer. Sausage sticks. Toilet paper. Green camouflage sheets.

Phillip, a first lieutenant, became a decorated helicopter pilot, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission on June 11, 1966, when he made four trips into heavily armed enemy territory to evacuate 47 wounded soldiers and seven who had died.

Three months later, Phillip's helicopter was obliterated and Susan's life came apart.

Phillip's death, pieced together from statements by his brother-in-law Phil Ginder of Fort Wayne and from eyewitness accounts, occurred in South Vietnam's Quang Tri Province.

Ginder said Phillip, who'd just turned 27, was due to come home the next day but had volunteered for a medical evacuation mission in place of an ill colleague. Eyewitnesses said friendly fire struck Phil's UH-34, killing Phillip and four comrades.

"It was like cutting a string on a kite and letting it go," Susan says. "My anchor was gone. I just felt thrown to the wind."

She moved to the artsy community of Laguna Beach, Calif., and joined the counter-culture revolution, smoking pot, dropping LSD, meeting acid guru Timothy Leary, making pipes out of Mazanita wood and hooking up with an eccentric proprietor of a "head shop." Susan and the business owner never married but they had two children - beach babies, she calls them - and named them Andro and Kamela.

She stopped reading the newspapers, put anti-war stickers on her car, began immersing herself in Eastern spiritualism and, when her son was about to be born, traveled to Mexico so he wouldn't have a United States birth certificate - so the government couldn't send him off to war.

"I dressed in green stockings and pink dresses - like a flower," she says. "I was half nuts, I think."

In time, she began to recover, made her way in 1977 to Colorado where her parents had a business, met new life partner Michael Flanigan, and found comfort in him, the land and the Paso Fino horses they raised.

She has used a degree in art education and museum studies from the University of Southern Colorado to plan workshops and exhibitions, she volunteers at her grandchildren's elementary school, and last summer she traveled to Vietnam to find a measure of closure.

On one wall of her house, she also has Christmas cards sent from the White House - the kind of cards sent to families of soldiers killed or missing in action.

They are reminders of what was taken from her - and of what other families still go through.

No war, she says, is ever a good war.

"It's hideous," she says. "It's so sad. I feel so sorry for the young men over in Iraq now. They're just children, they're just kids, and they won't get another full view of it until another 30 years - if they survive."

'There's an emptiness'

It is a Sunday afternoon in early April, and this is the first time the Bunn family has gathered to talk about their fallen soldier, Donald Wayne Bunn.

Sitting on couches and chairs are three brothers, two sisters, a mother, a nephew and a soldier's daughter who was only 3 when her father died.

Within minutes of starting their story, there are tears from every corner of brother Jeff Bunn's Fort Wayne living room. Big tears. Silent tears. Thirty-six years of unresolved anguish.

Donald Wayne Bunn was a 21-year-old private in the Marine Corps when he died in 1969, the year Credence Clearwater Revival released the anti-war protest "Fortunate Son."

Bunn was shipped to Vietnam on Valentine's Day. He was killed by missile fire four months later - June 7 - when the enemy overran bunker No. 23 in South Vietnam's Quang Nam Province.

continued...............

**thedrifter** · 04-25-05, 11:01 PM

A friend and Marine Corps colleague who was at the bunker would later write that it was a swift death - that Donnie didn't feel much pain.

Donnie's mother, Chris, now 77, shrieked when a Marine major came to her front door on Prairie Grove Drive to announce Donnie's death. Brother Jeff, then 9, was watching "The Flintstones" when he heard his mother's scream. Sister Kathy, then 7, heard it as she played outside with friends three doors down.

It was another cruel blow to the family that had been rocked seven years earlier when Chris' then-35-year-old husband, also named Donald, was left paralyzed from the waist down after a car fell on him when supporting jacks collapsed.

As she had done after her husband's accident, Chris knew she had to project strength for her children, and the children, in turn, worked hard not to show emotion - in deference to their mother and father.

"We were the type of family back in the early '60s, early '70s, we never talked about stuff," says brother Denny, 55, now of Wolcottville. "We just took every day as it was."

"We all got caught up living our lives and trying to survive," says Jeff, 45. "We all dealt with it in our own way."

But on this Sunday in April, the stoic veil they have worn so well for so many years falls quickly. The fact that Chris' husband of 56 years died in 2002 only heightens the grief.

Chris talks about the time 6-year-old Donnie announced that all he wanted in life was to smoke cigars and join the Marines. Later, brother Denny says, Donnie announced that his plans were to own a GTO and join the Marines.

He joined the Marines, Chris says, "he got a GTO, but whether he ever smoked a cigar or not, I don't know."

Such ambitions make it sound as though Donnie was a live-in-the-fast-lane kind of guy, but in many respects he was just the opposite.

Family members talk about how the Elmhurst High graduate was quiet and reserved, except when he was serving as the grand protector for his brothers and sisters.

And they say that despite his desire to join the Marines, he probably wasn't keen on combat. To prove their point, they provide a letter Donnie sent to an aunt shortly before he died.

"So far," Donnie wrote, "I have been in the bush for about a week and haven't fired a shot. I hope I can say that at the end of my tour."

No, family members say, Donnie wasn't a shoot-'em-up Rambo type. Just a young man who believed in serving his country and who departed before some of the Bunns ever got to know him.

Kathy (now Kathy Cook) barely knew her brother. Donnie's now-39-year-old daughter Lisa Sorge can't remember a thing about him. Donnie's 15-year-old nephew Tyler never knew him, but has been praying for Donnie since he was 5.

Brother Larry, 54, talks about how he named his first-born son Donald Wayne and how he and his father had private discussions about Donnie.

Larry's voice catches in the middle of his words and he raises his hands in the air. No more, he's gesturing. No more.

Kathy, 43, now of Ossian, talks about how she frequently visits Donnie's grave at Huntertown Cemetery "to make sure the stone is clean and has flowers, 'cause sometimes I wonder whether he really remembers me."

Her glasses can't hide her loss.

Lisa, married and with three children of her own in Fort Wayne, talks about the letters her father would write to others that would end: "Give Lisa a big hug and kiss from her daddy when you see her, OK?"

Lisa says she tries to err on the side of optimism and figures it's better her father died young because "I don't have the memories to miss."

But there's always a void, she says, tissue in hand, and she has a hard time watching movies that tug on the emotions.

"There are times I get mad at him for not being there," she says. "There are times where it's just a sad thing not being able to share with him. I really think that there are certain parts of your heart that are reserved for certain people and when they're not there, there's an emptiness."

Through all of this spoken sorrow, Chris Bunn - wife, mother, grandmother to 15 - listens intently but never breaks.

"I had to be strong," she explains, "and I still have to be today, 'cause I have to look after myself and protect my kids and grandkids 'cause they're the most important things in my life."

But ask her whether she was ever bitter, ever angry, and she'll say yes. Privately, she was both. About her husband's accident. About her son's death.

No war, she says, is ever a good war."I don't think the Vietnam War should have been," she says. "I don't think this Iraq thing should be. To me, it's wrong. I just think about all these wives and daughters losing their husbands and fathers and it just irritates me."

Hardly a day goes by, she says, that she also doesn't think about her Donnie.

"Something," she says, "always triggers something."

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-26-05, 09:08 PM

Bond between Marines endures decades later
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JIM KINNEY
The Saratogian
04/24/2005

MALTA -- David Wallingford recently traveled to Massachusetts to attend the funeral of a fellow Marine he'd served with in Vietnam.

'There were guys there that I hadn't seen and that hadn't seen me in 35 years,' Wallingford said. 'After a while, it was just like it was yesterday.'

And, Wallingford said the men who gathered never addressed him as 'Dave' during that day just weeks ago.

'It was always 'Sir' or 'Lt. Wally,' ' he said. 'I have a tremendous amount of respect for those guys because of that.'

Wallingford was a second lieutenant, a forward observer calling in artillery fire and air support during the first part of his tour in Vietnam from October 1968 to October 1969. He was 25 years old.

'I knew that the Marine Corps was the best,' he said. 'I wanted to test myself, to prove that I could be one of them.'

Wallingford's mission was to go out with a company-sized unit of about 150 Marines on search-and-destroy missions. The Marines would have intelligence showing where North Vietnamese regulars were congregating or where they were using infiltration routes and trail systems.

'We were to engage the enemy,' Wallingford said.

The company would get helicoptered to within a one-day hike of the suspected enemy location.

Often they came and went from firebases, or outposts built by dropping huge 'daisy cutter' bombs onto mountaintops.

'They would literally blow the top of a mountain off, then engineers would go in with minimal protection and use bulldozers and build a base,' he said.

Wallingford was wounded during one of these search-and-destroy missions. The terrain was difficult and Marines had to walk single file. Unknowingly, they were nearing a North Vietnamese Army bunker complex and they tripped an ambush.

'There was a firefight that lasted pretty much all day,' Wallingford said. 'All hell broke loose.'

He said the fight went in weaves, ebbs and flows. The North Vietnamese regulars would attack. Marines would drive them back, then counter-attack. Then the North Vietnamese would drive back the Marine counterattack.

Wallingford said the North Vietnamese regulars are not to be confused with the Viet Cong rebels found in South Vietnam.

'They were well trained and well equipped,' Wallingford said. 'As soldiers, I respected them.'

The North Vietnamese had AK-47 and SKS rifles and a few machine guns the Marines could see as night began to fall. After the engagement, Marines found anti-aircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades in the bunker complex.

The Marines had their M-16s, and one platoon in the company had 60-millimiter mortars and machine guns.

Wallingford's job was to bring heavier American firepower to bear on the fight. And he had to bring it in increasingly closer, down to just 150 feet or so from the American battle lines.

Then he got hit.

'I saw the son of a ***** that shot me,' Wallingford said. 'And I shot him. It's a different kind of experience looking down the barrel of a rifle and seeing someone doing the same back to you.'

He paused when asked if he killed the man: 'I have to think I did.'

Wallingford suffered a wound to his arm.

'It was like being in a dream,' he said. 'I think I was getting a little into shock.'

He was put on one of the last choppers out.

'As a Marine officer, you take care of your men,' he said.

After recovering at hospitals in Vietnam and Japan, Wallingford returned to a different unit, this time commanding two artillery pieces at a firebase. At times, he was able to fire rounds in support of his old unit.

'That was gratifying,' he said.

He still has a little weakness in his arm.

'Over the years, the scars have blended in with the rest of the skin,' he said. 'The psychological effects, that's a different story.'

His friend, the man whose funeral Wallingford recently attended, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, though it had nothing to do with his death.

'Between calls and e-mails, I'd been in contact with him a few times a week,' Wallingford said. 'He was like a little brother to me and I miss him.'

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-27-05, 12:26 PM

Reevaluating the Role of the Dustoff

Vietnam

While it improved the survival rate and confidence level of troops in Vietnam, medevac often distorted the tactical shape of battles.

By Paddy Griffith

Within the general evolution of the art of war, the conflict in Vietnam was notable for several novel and important features that were destined to become irreversible. Among these were such things as the helicopter gunship, the electronic battlefield and even the hush-hush array of satellite-based surveillance assets. All of these are powerful tactical factors that we today seem to take pretty much for granted, to the extent that from our present perspective, a generation later, we may overlook the significance of their original development. We tend to forget that a large number of the key elements of modern warfare were totally new in 1965, and that it was the Vietnam War that first allowed them to be explored and deployed under the stresses of real and mortal combat.

From the viewpoint of troops on the ground in Vietnam, the innovation that made by far the greatest impact was not directly tactical at all, but actually medical in nature. This was the casualty evacuation helicopter, or "dustoff," which could whisk a wounded man to a well-equipped aid station within minutes, and from there to a base hospital within a few hours. One Vietnam infantry veteran told me: "The troops in my own unit always felt that if we were not killed outright if we were hit, the odds of surviving were in our favor. This added greatly to the confidence factor in any situation."

In historical terms, it represented still another advance in the speed of casualty evacuation and in the treatment of shock, which had significantly improved since the Napoleonic Wars. Until then, unless one was a high-ranking officer, wounded soldiers were not removed from the field until after the battle was over.

In 1792, however, French surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey began to develop horse-drawn, two-wheeled "flying ambulances" for the swift removal of casualties—primarily to prevent their being slaughtered by the enemy—and he soon discovered that the earlier they were treated, the better their chances of recovery. Even after that fundamentally critical innovation, some 44 percent of the soldiers wounded during the American Civil War failed to survive, but by 1918 the British died-of-wounds figure was down to around 8 percent. In World War II it was 4.5 percent for U.S. troops, and in Vietnam it was as low as 2.6 percent.

Each successive improvement in medevac procedures brought a concrete tactical advantage in terms of troop morale, and in Vietnam the process was brought to practically the highest level it could possibly attain. There was also a political advantage for the U.S. government to take unprecedented care of its conscripted soldiers and lavish upon them a degree of medical succor that had been unknown in any previous war. Fewer losses meant more support back home.

The dustoff, however, did not come cheap. First, it involved a heavy cost in rear-echelon personnel, as well as some long-term cash payouts. More convalescents in the hospital, surviving for longer, meant that more doctors and nurses were needed to look after them, after which more veterans' pensions had to be found. It is a sad fact that the average wounded soldier costs the taxpayer many more dollars than a soldier killed in action, however differently we may rate the psychic or moral costs. Second, the helicopters themselves represented a particularly significant drain on a precious tactical resource.

We must recall that 1965 came only 11 years after the entire French empire had been able to deploy a grand total of only seven helicopters in the Southeast Asia theater. The United States would eventually deploy something like 4,000. But even then the average time available for flying might be only about 10 percent, since as much as 90 percent of any chopper's time had to be devoted to maintenance tasks. Hence, on average, only something like 400 helicopters were reliably available at any moment to cover all the requirements of the U.S. forces in-country, as well as of the ARVN and of the many political and civilian agencies.

If we break this down still further, it is not difficult to understand that only some 70 to 80 helicopters might be available for military use within each corps area. This might translate into only one or two dozen per division. Lifting a single infantry company might normally require some 16 to 20 helicopters, depending on fuel load. Those choppers were supplemented by the necessary accompaniment of gunships, command ships and associated heavy-lift support—or indeed the continuing routine requirement for logistic backup throughout the Army. So by definition, there can rarely have been very many surplus helicopters available for medevac purposes. As Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (then the lieutenant colonel commanding the lead battalion) later reported on the start of the November 1965 Ia Drang battle, "my main concern focused on the fact that we would have only sixteen Huey slicks to ferry the battalion into the assault area... .What that meant was that fewer than eighty men—not even one full company—would hit the landing zone in the first wave... ." (In the face of three whole enemy battalions!)

Then again, in December 1969, Lieutenant Michael Lee Lanning experienced a nerve-wracking wait when only three helicopters could be made available to lift his company out of the scene of a bloody battle. "We would have to be extracted in three separate lifts," he recalled. "Turnaround time between each sortie would be about thirty minutes. That meant that before the last group could be picked up, any lingering dinks would have an hour to plan an attack on the remaining eighteen men." All in all, we must conclude that despite the apparently plentiful supply of helicopters available to the U.S. forces in Vietnam, they were still always a relatively rare resource that needed to be managed and husbanded very carefully.

The dustoff suffered from a particular difficulty that has been common to all front-line ambulances throughout history. It was designed to rescue wounded soldiers from as near as possible to the time and place they were wounded—which by definition would add up to an especially dangerous situation. The dustoff had to fly right into the heart of the battle zone and pluck out shocked, suffering, bleeding and badly damaged combatants who might still be under heavy fire. Yet the medical crew also had to make sure that they themselves managed to survive such fire, so that their rescued casualty could be removed safely to an aid station in the rear.

continued.........

**thedrifter** · 04-27-05, 12:28 PM

That made for some urgent personal dilemmas. As one crewman recalled in Moore and Joseph C. Galloway's We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: "The NVA were in the wood line shooting at the helicopter. The medevac pilot kind of froze up on us and was having trouble setting the ship down. We never did come to a complete hover. All aboard had to dive out on the ground from about six feet up in the air. We ran in a crouch."

On some occasions the infantry had particularly bad experiences with dustoff crews. William Shucart reported of the Ia Drang battle: "We were trying to get the medevac ships to come in but they would not. A couple of Huey slicks came down but we were taking fire and the medevacs wouldn't come. When you are taking fire is precisely when you need medevac. I don't know where those guys got their great reputations. I was totally dismayed with the medevac guys. The Huey slick crews were terrific."

Obviously, there was always a serious conflict of interest inherent in the whole business of medevac. On one side, the dustoff crews had to ignore the tactical dangers and go in regardless, and in fact many of them were often among the bravest men to be found anywhere in the military. Yet, on the other hand, they had to carefully calculate their risks and make sure that conditions were relatively safe, or at least safe enough. Otherwise, they would be certain to lose the wounded men they were evacuating as well as their own lives.

Lanning's account of a conversation between him and a pilot was perhaps not atypical: "I held [the wounded and delirious Staff Sgt.] Blyman with one arm and reached for the handset to talk to the medevac pilot with the other. 'Listen,' I said, 'I need a hook and a cable.'

"'What's the situation?' he asked.

"I told him we were receiving sporadic fire, knowing ahead of time what his reaction would be. 'No way,' he answered. 'I can't hover that long under fire.'

"'Listen,' I said again, 'we've got a man hit in the knee. He's gone crazy. I've got to get him out of here now! We'll put down all the supporting fire we can.'

"The pilot must have heard the urgency in my voice, because after a slight pause he said, 'Okay. Pop smoke. Let's give it a try.'"

In that instance, the dustoff chopper did receive some hits. But the extraction was successful and the members of the medevac team were recommended for medals.

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-29-05, 06:34 AM

Search for MIAs in Vietnam remains priority
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HANOI, Vietnam - It's been 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War; 40 years since the first American combat troops, one battalion of Marines, landed at Danang in the northern part of South Vietnam.

It's as good a time as any to take a look at where we stand on the search for the 1,399 Americans who are still listed as missing in action in Vietnam, and no better place to do that than here at the offices of Detachment Two of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

The small detachment permanently stationed in the capital of Vietnam is commanded by Army Lt. Col. Lentfort Mitchell of the Special Forces, who worked in Latin America before he was assigned here eight months ago.

Detachment Two maintains contact with the Vietnamese government and helps plan and conduct the searches that take place after the monsoon rains fade each year. The primary work is done between February and mid-December. Equipment for this summer's operations, which will focus on the central-eastern region of what formerly was South Vietnam, already has begun pouring in.

Col. Mitchell's detachment has a file on every one of those still missing. The files are divided into two groups: 667, including 468 individuals lost over the ocean, on whom there are no leads and little or no information; and 732 considered possibles. This includes 500 individuals for whom there are leads or information, however ephemeral.

The search itself is not without peril. There's a simple monument in the front courtyard of Detachment Two. On it are engraved the names of seven Americans from this detachment and nine of their Vietnamese counterparts who were killed in the crash of a Russian-made helicopter four years ago while on an MIA mission.

Once human remains are recovered - often only a few fragments of bone and a tooth or two - there's still much work to be done by the scientists at JPAC's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to confirm them first as human, then as Western, not Asian, and then to pursue absolute identification through a match of mitochondrial DNA from a specific family.

Because there's a cap on the number of U.S. government employees based permanently in Vietnam, JPAC, which is headquartered in Honolulu, sends 95 military and civilian employees in to conduct investigations and carry out excavations during the four major field activities each year. They're joined by 20 Vietnamese officials and as many as 600 local Vietnamese workers.

Some will pursue leads that can be as soft as the memory of a Vietnamese woodcutter who recalls seeing the wreckage of a downed plane or helicopter on a remote mountain slope 15 years ago, or as hard as the information provided recently by a metal scavenger who was involved with gathering metal from 17 crash sites in the central part of former South Vietnam.

The search for America's missing has remained a priority for successive U.S. administrations since the war ended. Even in times of tight budgets, this effort has remained immune to cuts in funding although it's not inexpensive: The cost of finding, identifying and returning a single American who disappeared in Vietnam is more than $1 million.

But the extraordinary effort is worth it to the families who've waited and hoped for so long that word would finally come that their son, husband, father or brother has been found and is coming home at last.

It's worth it to those who wear the uniform of their country and believe in a simple creed that we are Americans and we will leave no one behind on the battlefield.

That implicit contract is best expressed in the words of a letter that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to his friend Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the end of the Civil War:

"I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if in trouble you would come for me, if alive."

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 12th St. N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005-3994. His column appears most Fridays in the American News.

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-29-05, 06:35 AM

30 years later: Are we still warring over Vietnam?
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By Steven Komarow, USA TODAY

The thump-thump of the last helicopter taking off from a rooftop in Saigon marked the end of America's time in Vietnam in April 1975. The U.S. death toll was about 58,000, almost 40 times the number so far in Iraq. In interviews to mark the anniversary, U.S. servicemembers, civilians and South Vietnamese allies tell about their experiences.

Now it's 30 years since South Vietnam fell to Communist forces, and by coincidence, 60 years since the end of World War II. That means the entire Vietnam War took place closer to WWII than to today, a symbolic threshold that puts the Vietnam War firmly in the province of historians. (Graphic: Fall of Saigon)

Even a generation later, controversy over the war has the power to summon passion and bitterness, as evidenced by last year's disputes over Democratic Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam duty and President Bush's time in the National Guard. (Related story: Search for MIAs continues)

In interviews to mark the anniversary, U.S. servicemembers, civilians and South Vietnamese allies tell USA TODAY that the Vietnam experience is the headwaters for attitudes and the template for decisions that flow through society today.

Richard Holbrooke

Holbrooke, 64, a New York investment banker, was United Nations ambassador in the Clinton administration. He began his foreign service career in Vietnam's Mekong Delta before most Americans had heard of war in Vietnam, and later served as an aide at the Paris peace talks aimed at ending it.

"For those of us who were there as young men, it is the originating event of our political and foreign policy education. (Yet) people of course came out of it with diametrically opposed lessons," he says, as evidenced by today's divisions over Iraq.

"I was in Vietnam the day that (President) Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown and killed. I was 22 years old and a very young foreign service officer. That was Nov. 1, 1963 ... I was trying to (fly) to Saigon to visit my friend Tony Lake (later President Clinton's national security adviser). I called him and he said, 'We're hiding in the closet of our house. The tanks are shooting all around us!' I said, 'I've got to see this. I've never seen a coup before.' "

With flights canceled, Holbrooke drove from the Mekong Delta to Saigon.

"Tanks were everywhere, the girls were putting flowers in the barrels of the guns. Everybody was celebrating. It was very exciting," he says. "What nobody could have known ... is that that would begin (a pattern of) revolving-door governments ... and that we would be dragged deeply in." It's a worry that echoes in Iraq today.

"My roommate in Saigon was John Negroponte (now national intelligence director), and we have talked about this endlessly now for 40 years as friends," he says. "I have this image that 20 years from now the Today show will stage a 50th anniversary debate of the end of the war and they will (roll in) the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the hawks, and they'll start screaming at each other from their wheelchairs."

Catherine Leroy

Photographer Leroy, 60, a French native living in Los Angeles, remembers Vietnam as a magnet pulling her toward her dream.

She was 21 in 1966 when "I went there on a one-way ticket," she says. "I was absolutely obsessed about becoming a photojournalist. My heroes were photojournalists."

She succeeded, covering the war for major publications in the USA and Europe, and her work is the centerpiece for her new book, Under Fire, that matches the best photos and writing on the war. She was there in April 1975 to witness the final Communist victory, then returned two years later. She saw that the spoils of war could be few.

"It was a very bad year," she recalls. "It was a time when there were lots of Russian (Soviet) advisers. The Vietnamese were calling them 'Americans without money.' The Russians would go into the antique shop ... (with) a Russian flag and they would say, 'You give me this ugly porcelain and I'll give you this beautiful Russian flag.' And of course, the Vietnamese had to do it."

Now, she says, "The Vietnamese have moved on, and you have this new generation. And (the war) to them, it's so far away. ... All they want is to have a better life, make money and be like everybody else. Of course, it's OK. Of course."

Nguyen Phong

Phong, 70, was a South Vietnamese diplomat involved in peace talks from 1968 until the end of the war. He returned to Saigon five days before the surrender and was imprisoned. Today, he's a scholar with the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University.

The Vietnamese "still do not understand very well why the calamity of war fell on our heads," he says. "We hoped very much that foreign rule (Vietnam was a French colony) would end, and we would ... have our country back."

Now, he says, "I don't feel that it was a civil war at all. It was a conflict clearly between the so-called free world and the Communist bloc. ... For the first time the United States, a superpower, was forced to deal with a new kind of warfare (where) you don't have any demarcation line between the civilian and the military."

Col. Regina Aune

Col. Aune, 60, an Air Force officer now assigned to Brooks City-Base in San Antonio, was a flight nurse aboard a C-5 cargo jet that would be evacuating orphans from South Vietnam in early April 1975.

Aune, then a 1st lieutenant flying out of Clark Air Base, the Philippines, remembers that when she arrived in Saigon to pick up the children on April 4, there was a sense of desperation as North Vietnamese forces closed in. Her mission was the maiden flight of "Operation Babylift," a humanitarian effort to relocate hundreds of war orphans to the USA. It was to be one of the good things that came out of a divisive and ugly war, she recalls.

But shortly after takeoff, something went horribly wrong. Aune remembers a loud explosion. An investigation later determined that a lock on the cargo doors had failed, leading to a rapid decompression.

"There was a big hole in the back of the plane," Aune says. In a matter of minutes, the aircraft crash-landed near Saigon and broke into pieces.

In all, more than 150 of the 328 aboard were killed. Most who survived - including Aune - were seated in the passenger compartment of the cavernous C-5, located above the cargo bay. The cargo deck was crushed on impact and all but a handful of passengers there were killed.

"I think of this every five years, when there is an anniversary story about Vietnam," says Aune, who broke her back and every bone in her right foot. Aune and others who survived the crash helped to carry 149 children to safety, under the most difficult of circumstances.

The crash did not stop Babylift. By the end of April, more than 1,700 orphans had been flown out of South Vietnam. "We did a lot of good," Aune says.

Chuck Hagel

Hagel, 58, now a U.S. Republican senator from Nebraska, was an infantryman in Vietnam from December 1967 to December 1968.

"We certainly learned a lot from Vietnam," he says. "One of the lessons ... is that it's easy to get into war. But no matter how noble the purpose, (it's) not always easy to get out. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble pretty quick," says Hagel, whose tour included battle during the chaos of the Tet Offensive.

"We should not ever allow that bad experience in Vietnam to paralyze America," he says.

But those who fought there are mindful that "war is full of unintended consequences. War is a very uncertain process. The only constant of war is that there's a tremendous amount of suffering. "If we can keep this all in a certain balance and perspective as we work ... then we would have gained from that experience."

continued.....

**thedrifter** · 04-29-05, 06:35 AM

James Miles

Miles, 57, of Sioux Falls, S.D., is a chief warrant officer 4serving with the 42nd Infantry Division in Iraq since last August. He flew helicopters in Vietnam for a year starting in February 1969. He e-mailed from Iraq.

"You really can't help but compare your enemies when you get the opportunity to face more than one," he says. "The Vietnamese were much more dedicated and resilient than my current foe. They were all committed to one goal, whereas our current adversary lacks organization and true commitment. While we do see a few (enemies) who would be willing to give their life for their cause, 99% of the citizens over here really want us here and help in any way they can. They can actually see that we are really here to help them, whereas the Vietnamese never did see that."

Most of the soldiers he serves with now have no memory of his first war.

"I really don't get many questions from others over here about Vietnam. In the few conversations I have had with others, I still get the feeling that that is one situation the U.S. Army would just as soon forget about."

Quang X. Pham

Pham, a Southern California businessman, was 10 when South Vietnam collapsed around him. He, his mother and four sisters were evacuated to the USA, but his father was imprisoned for 12½ years. Pham joined the U.S. Marines and piloted helicopters in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in Somalia.

He remembers the kindness of strangers. "I didn't know that outside of the (refugee) camp public sentiment was divided on what to do with the refugees."

Now 40, he's trying to mobilize America's Vietnamese community. Pham has published a memoir, A Sense of Duty, that pleads with America to recognize the efforts of the South Vietnamese soldiers, including his father, a fighter pilot.

"There's no South Vietnamese (military) voice in writing, the movies or anything," he says. "Go ask the South Vietnamese how they felt about being abandoned by the United States. Go ask the South Vietnamese how they feel about being in a prison camps for 15 years.

"It took 20 years for American vets of the Vietnam War to get their due. So I think for the Vietnamese it takes a little longer," he says.

"Just acknowledge that 250,000 of them died in the war, like the 58,000 Americans who died. We're not just rice farmers in the background of Hollywood movies."

Ron Serafinowicz

Serafinowicz, 56, flew Army attack helicopters in Vietnam from June 1970 to June 1971 as a Chief Warrant Officer. Now a National Guardsman, he's been in Iraq since January with the aviation brigade headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division.

"America is stronger from the experience" of Vietnam, he says. "That was proven in the Gulf War, the way things were done to assure a rapid victory."

Now, he says, "being in a combat zone again makes you feel the same way as you felt 35 years ago, and it revives the memories of things you did back then. You remember little details and the missions you flew ... the present situation in Iraq is a lot like the Vietnam War was. There are no front lines. Anyone can be your enemy. You can't roam the countryside without a lot of firepower with you. You can't have a rapid victory because the process of rebuilding Iraq is going to be slow and there are many trying to stop it."

John Miska

The war was winding down when Miska, 51, of Greene County, Va., had a low draft lottery number and enlisted in 1973. "I spoke to my Uncle Joe, who was in the Army in Guadalcanal and Okinawa. He said, 'You'll get an experience in the military that you won't get anywhere else.' "

Because he enlisted for four years instead of waiting for the draft, he was able to choose a job that kept him off the front lines. "And when I was in the Army, it was totally different than a guy who served '67 to '69. It was a different Army. There was not the esprit de corps and all. When we were leaving basic training, they told us not to travel in military uniforms."

He's resolved that returning soldiers will never be mistreated again, and he has plenty of opportunity. Miska how runs a non-profit organization called Adopt a Soldier that collects and distributes clothing and other goods to wounded soldiers returning from Iraq. He visits them in the hospital and sometimes goes to their funerals if they don't make it.

"When I'm with these kids, talking with them, having a beer with them, holding their hands, burying them ... I'm 19 again," he says.

Contributing: Dave Moniz

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-29-05, 09:41 AM

Correspondent recalls final days before end of Vietnam War
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By George Lewis
Correspondent
NBC News
April 29, 2005

Thirty years ago today, I was in the beleaguered South Vietnamese capital, on a telephone hookup with the NBC Nightly News in New York, reporting on how the North Vietnamese had encircled Saigon.

In those days, we didn't have live TV satellite transmissions from war zones and no Internet, so the phone and a clunky old teletype machine were our only ways of relaying the fast-moving developments.

The Vietnam War was about to end. A decade of U.S. involvement in that war had seen the deaths of almost 60,000 Americans, 224,000 South Vietnamese troops, 1.1 million communist fighters and 2 million civilians.

Anchorman John Chancellor introduced me this way on April 29, 1975: "NBC correspondent George Lewis, who has volunteered to stay on in Saigon, has this report."

Actually, I had volunteered to stay on only until the U.S. Marines arrived to pull the remaining Americans out of Saigon, something that would happen a few hours later.

Like a lot of other young white, college-educated men of my generation, I had managed to dance away from the draft via student deferments, marriage and family responsibilities.

But Vietnam was a defining event for my generation and, as a journalist, I was drawn to it because the story of the American role in the conflict there had overshadowed everything else in the late 1960's. It brought me to Vietnam as an NBC News correspondent for the first time in 1970.

In the months after my arrival, soldiers in the field would often ask me if NBC ordered me to go to Vietnam.

"Do you guys have a choice about being here or is it voluntary?" they'd ask.

"I volunteered for this assignment," I'd reply.

"How long are you here for?"

"My deal is for 18 months," I'd answer, "Although it might run longer."

"Are you nuts?" they'd ask incredulously, often inserting a well-placed obscenity or two. After all, draftees served one-year hitches in Vietnam, most men counting down each day until they could return home, to what they called "the World."

And they would never buy my explanations about how, as a journalist, I wanted to be an eyewitness to history. They didn't quite believe me when I'd say, "It's important for the people back home to know what you guys are going through. In order to tell the story for TV, I've got to go where the action is."

And it's that desire to bear witness that drove me back to Vietnam in 1975. I wanted to see how it would come to an end.

When I got to Saigon in early April, the panic had already begun. My late colleague and close friend Arthur Lord had been put in charge of the NBC Saigon bureau and he had to deal with two big assignments at once - cover the story and get our Vietnamese employees out of the country.

Practically all of NBC's Saigon staff were Vietnamese, many of whom had fled the communists previously, in 1954, when the country was divided, north and south. These people knew that life under the North Vietnamese would not be a picnic, especially for former employees of the "imperialist aggressors," as Hanoi referred to Americans.

So, Lord organized something called "Operation Peacock," an airlift out of Vietnam of the NBC employees who wanted to leave, along with their immediate families, a total of 104 people.

Lord faced opposition from the U.S. Embassy because the ambassador at the time didn't want to, in his words, "start a panic." U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin seemed to be utterly oblivious to the fact that the panic had started without his help.

But finally, after all the U.S. TV networks put pressure on Washington, approval came to start evacuating the Vietnamese personnel.

It was a risky proposition getting the people to Tan Son Nhut airport, one vanload at a time. Sometimes, nervous guards at the main gate of the airport would brandish their weapons at them and fire off occasional warning rounds.

Often the guards would shake down Lord, demanding bribes to let the people pass. But he kept making that run until all the Vietnamese got out. He would later say that of all the assignments in his career, "Operation Peacock" was the one that gave him the most pride.

On the day before Saigon fell, North Vietnamese artillery and tanks were beginning to shell the outskirts of the city.

Those of us left in the Saigon bureau huddled and worked out a plan: Lord would fly out in one of the few remaining charter planes to get our film transmitted from Bangkok, Thailand. Most of the rest of us would leave via the Marine evacuation helicopters. And a few people volunteered to stay behind.

One of them was the late Neil Davis, an Australian cameraman who would later capture exclusive scenes of North Vietnamese tanks smashing through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon and raising the communist flag there.

When the decision was made to start the evacuation, the American radio station was supposed to broadcast a coded message to the remaining U.S. citizens: "It's 105 degrees in Saigon and rising," followed by the playing of Bing Crosby's rendition of "White Christmas."

But the helicopters began arriving before the warning was sent. A worker at the radio station later told me, "In the confusion, we never got the word."

As the evacuation got under way, the U.S. Embassy was mobbed with Vietnamese civilians trying to push through the gates and catch one of the helicopters landing on the roof. Marines, wielding their rifle butts, kept shoving the crowds away.

By the time a bus arrived for us at one of the designated pickup points, the young Marine driver had orders to go to the airport instead of the embassy. The only problem was that North Vietnamese artillery was shelling the airport intermittently, and we ducked low as we ran for one of the buildings at the U.S. compound there, as those artillery shells exploded nearby.

Finally, the barrage lifted, and our U.S. Marine Sea Knight helicopter took off, with 64 of us aboard, heading for the flotilla of U.S. Navy ships offshore.

As we crossed over the coastline at Vung Tau, we knew we were finally safe, leaving Vietnam behind. But those of us who were there 30 years ago will never leave those memories behind as long as we live.

>George Lewis is an NBC News Correspondent based out of Burbank. He was a combat correspondent for NBC News during the Vietnam War.

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-29-05, 09:02 PM

30 years later, Vietnam vets remember fall of Saigon

BY KIRSTEN SCHARNBERG

Chicago Tribune

SAN DIEGO - (KRT) - Outside the window of the general's conference room, a new class of young Marines is going through training exercises - shouting, marching, dropping to do 20 when the drill instructor sees fit.

Inside, two retired Marines can hear the racket but are distracted by the past, by a painful episode of military history that none of these new recruits was even alive to witness.

One of the men is John Valdez, 67, a career Marine whose life for three decades has been defined by one overarching distinction: On April 30, 1975, he was the last man to climb on board the last helicopter out of Saigon, an act that marked the end of America's official military presence in Vietnam, though combat had been turned over to the South Vietnamese two years earlier.

The other man, Colin Broussard, 54, is one of a handful of Marines who once was assigned to the personal security detail of Graham Martin, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam.

On that final day in Saigon, Broussard risked his life to keep the ambassador safe in a bizarre mad dash out of the city that involved a secret tunnel, a pact with the French and direct orders from the president of the United States.

Valdez and Broussard saw and did things on that historic day that haunt them still:

They left behind loyal Vietnamese employees they feel certain were killed by the communists shortly after the hurried U.S. evacuation.

They left behind the bodies of two fallen comrades, an omission of unspeakable regret because there is nothing a Marine holds more dear than the vow to never leave another killed or wounded Marine on the battlefield.

And, maybe worst of all, they left behind an advancing enemy they believed the American military could have defeated if only the political forces of the day had not influenced things.

"It was horrific to watch," Valdez said. "We came damn close to becoming the new American Alamo - and we would have been the guys to die defending it."

Valdez and Broussard, Californians and founding members of the Fall of Saigon Marine Association, remain close friends.

But as they sit side by side inside the conference room at Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego on a recent spring morning, it is clear in an instant how differently the events of April 30, 1975, affected them.

Broussard, who retired as a master sergeant, cannot make it through the telling of his story without weeping, taking long breaks, holding his face in his hands and whispering again and again, "What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me?"

Valdez, who retired as a master gunnery sergeant, has no trouble talking about that day or even the decisions he made as the top enlisted man on the ground that put people in battle positions where they eventually would die.

In those final 24 hours before the United States at long last abandoned its effort to stem the spread of communism in Vietnam, just 52 Marines remained to guard the soon-to-be-overrun American Embassy and the Defense Attache Office near the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon.

How close they came to not making it out alive has become a story for the history books, for the military documentarians, even for the Broadway musical "Miss Saigon."

But these men's story is not confined to that one day.

The story of the Vietnam War - its battles and its conclusion - continues, in men like Valdez and Broussard. Their mixed feelings over the decades-old conflict mirror a nation still so divided that Vietnam became an issue in a tight presidential race last year.

Their struggles to recover from combat mirror the struggle so many troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are experiencing today.

"If you talked to all of us who remained on that day, everyone's reactions would run the gamut. Some guys are great. Some are messes. Some have killed themselves because they couldn't get over what happened there," said Valdez, ever the direct talker after more than 30 years in the Marines. "People could probably learn something from us, using us as a case study."

Many of the Marines from that final day, including Broussard and Valdez, planned to reunite again this weekend. They planned to gather in front of the Vietnam Memorial Wall on Saturday to award a Purple Heart to a comrade wounded on that last day but never honored.

"The guys from that day really have slipped through the cracks," Valdez said. "None of the paperwork made it out so if they were wounded in those final weeks, the Army doesn't have proof of it."

Tourists who see Valdez and Broussard and their buddies there will almost certainly realize they are veterans of that decades-old war. But few will know the role those now-graying men played the day they made it out of Saigon, or that it marked America's final gasp in the still-controversial war.

Broussard thinks President Ford summed it up best in his letter to the Fall of Saigon Marines.

"We did the best we could," the former president wrote. "History will judge whether we could have done better. One thing, however, is beyond question - the heroism of the Marines who guarded the embassy during its darkest hours."

The Fall of Saigon Marine Association is an exclusive group; only the several dozen Marines who were still in Saigon on April 29 and 30 of 1975 are eligible for membership.

Almost without exception, these men are pro-military Marines, and they feel a bond with anyone who served in that conflict.

But they also feel as though their experience - the attempt to evacuate an embassy and its American and Vietnamese staff in less than 24 hours - is unique, and that few outsiders could fully fathom it.

On the association's Web site is a letter from Ford that seems to recognize that sentiment. His opening lines say it all: "April 1975 was indeed the cruelest month. The passage of time has not dulled the ache of those days, the saddest of my public life." Ford wrote the letter after the 25th anniversary of the evacuation.

When the association was founded, it established an Internet site, and soon the Marines who were in Saigon at the end of April 1975 were reuniting online. They sent messages about the memories they had, the nightmares that sometimes still came.

Valdez, the association's president, opened up early, setting an example that many men would follow and thus establishing a collection of written firsthand accounts of that day.

On the association's Web site, Valdez wrote of the last letter he mailed from Vietnam. It was to the family of Cpl. Charles McMahon, of Woburn, Mass., to tell them their son had made it safely into Vietnam and would now be serving at the embassy.

But within days, as the North Vietnamese began to target the Saigon airport, Valdez, who was in charge of all work assignments as the highest-ranking enlisted man, tasked young McMahon with heading there to pull security.

That assignment lasted just days. Along with 19-year-old Lance Cpl. Darwin Judge, of Marshalltown, Iowa, McMahon, 23, was killed on April 29, becoming the final two U.S. troops to be officially killed in the war.

Valdez spent April 29 and 30 orchestrating the final chaotic exodus from the embassy. Thousands of Vietnamese, many of whom had been promised safe passage to the United States, swarmed around the gates.

When it became clear that the small 20-person helicopters landing on the embassy's lawn and roof couldn't get all these people out, Valdez ordered his Marines to retreat inside the compound.

continued.......

**thedrifter** · 04-29-05, 09:02 PM

Only 11 Marines, including Valdez, remained by 3 a.m. on April 30. They climbed to the roof of the embassy, locking the doors to each floor behind them, with no means to call for help.

Four hours later, many of the men assumed they would either be killed by the communist troops surrounding the city or by the frenzied crowds that by then had broken through the embassy's gate and were breaking their way through each locked door between the floor and the roof.

"I thought, `This is where it ends. This is what it feels like to be cornered,'" Valdez says today.

But, then, off in the distance, Valdez spotted that final helicopter. One by one, he got his young Marines on board and then climbed in himself.

As the helicopter flew off, bound for a U.S. Navy carrier offshore, Valdez barely looked back at the embassy. Today, as a man nearing 70, he recognizes the drama of that moment and wishes he had appreciated what he was witnessing.

"If I had known the historical significance of that moment, I would have taken notes to document it," he said.

Broussard, who says he still "deals with the memories every day," wrote one of the more dramatic accounts of that final day in Saigon.

On April 29, after the airport was heavily bombed in the attack that killed Judge and McMahon, Ambassador Martin demanded to go there to assess the damage and see if an evacuation using fixed-wing aircraft, which had been the longstanding plan, was still possible.

Broussard, assigned to the ambassador's personal security detail, led the trip.

"It was an absolute mess," he says today. "We knew immediately when we saw the airfield that the fixed-wing operation was done. We knew we couldn't get out any more Vietnamese. Now we could only get out a few people at a time on small helicopters that could land at the embassy."

At the embassy, Broussard saw images he has never been able to shake: a mother throwing her child over the tall outside wall in the hope that the Marines inside would fly him to a better life in the United States, a family who had worked for years for the embassy who made it to the gate, their bags packed, only to be told their flight was no longer going.

Soon the ambassador got a "flash top secret" notice from the president: Evacuate everyone still in Saigon immediately.

Martin said before he could do that he had to go to his residence several blocks away to destroy confidential documents. The crowds, Broussard told the ambassador, would kill them if they left out the gates.

So, using a secret passageway between the U.S. Embassy and the adjacent French Embassy, the ambassador sneaked out with Broussard and Staff Sgt. Jim Daisy. The three made it to the residence, burned the materials and made it back to the French Embassy even as gunfire raged in the streets around them.

Daisy remained one of Broussard's friends long after they evacuated with the ambassador on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon. The two saw each other at an association reunion several years ago where many men saw one another and relived for the first time those final events.

Not long after, Daisy committed suicide.

One of the principal missions of the Fall of Saigon Association revolves around the memories of Judge and McMahon, whose bodies were not recovered for nearly a year after the chaos of the exit.

The association has helped establish memorial parks in the hometowns of each man and each year gives high school students from those local high schools college scholarships in McMahon and Judge's name.

It lobbied to get the two fallen Marines, who had never gotten posthumous medals, Purple Hearts, which were awarded on April 30, 2000, the 25th anniversary of the evacuation of Saigon.

All these years later, Broussard weeps the hardest when he talks of these young men.

"I should have been killed, not Judge or McMahon. They were so young, new and innocent," Broussard said.

Today Broussard goes every chance he can to Camp Pendleton north of San Diego. Marines there have been through some of the diciest days of Iraq - hand-to-hand combat in Najaf, the battle for control of always-restive Fallujah.

Over the past two years, he said he has informally counseled hundreds of them.

"I just approach them and tell them a little about my experience and the way it has stayed with me all these years," he said. "And they start to open up pretty quickly."

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-30-05, 06:24 AM

An inspiration and a lesson
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In our opinion
The Anniston Star
04-30-2005

Today, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, we pause to recall the lives lost and the immense sacrifices made during the Vietnam War. And we pause to remind ourselves of the ongoing struggles in Iraq.

This week, New York Times writer Michael Moss told of the brave exploits of one company of Marines serving for six months in a treacherous part of Iraq. (The Star's Insight section this Sunday will reprint his account on Page 1E.)

Company E, based in Pendleton, Calif., is part of a battalion that has a storied history. The Magnificent Bastards, as they are affectionately known, are famous for their fighting spirit and resourcefulness during trying times.

The six months of 2004 Company E spent trying to quell the insurgency in Ramadi certainly qualifies as a trying time. The company's casualty rate is the highest in Iraq. One-third of its 185 soldiers were either killed or wounded.

The Marines in Moss' account tell of being lethally short on armor, manpower and even accurate maps. One Pentagon observer who studied conditions for Marines in Iraq says, "It was pitiful. Everything was just slapped on armor, just homemade, not armor that was given to us through the normal logistical system."

Still, these brave Marines soldiered on, engaging in 26 firefights and defending against almost 100 mortar attacks.

Capt. Kelly D. Royer commanded Company E during its time in Ramadi. Speaking of the sacrifices of his Marines, he said, "I'm thinking we have our most precious resource engaged in combat, and certainly the wealth of our nation can provide young, selfless men with what they need to accomplish their mission. That's an erudite way of putting it. I have a much more guttural response that I won't give you."

We can just imagine some of the colorful language this captain might use in describing the careless treatment of "our most precious resource."

We would no more blame him for feeling abandoned by America's civilian leadership than we would troops in Vietnam who felt the same way 30 years ago.

While the exploits in Iraq of Company E are famous among the armed services, we should remember those Marines are not alone. Thousands of other GIs in Iraq face the same tough odds with inadequate armor and short supplies. We are inspired by the bravery, by their service to the United States. They are owed our respect and our gratitude.

All the while, the military's civilian leadership, including the Defense Department and the White House PR agents, have done their best to play down flaws and shortcomings in their Iraq plans. That is both a shame and sad proof that there are still lessons to be learned from Vietnam.

Ellie

**thedrifter** · 04-30-05, 06:31 AM

Marine can't shake haunting memory of his last mission
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Alex Fryer
Seattle Times staff reporter

On this day three decades ago, Earl Burks was a 21-year-old Marine crew chief in a helicopter flying over Saigon, a "balcony seat," he said, to the chaos of the Vietnam War's last hours.

Although his chopper wasn't the last to evacuate the U.S. Embassy, Burks claims it was the last to leave South Vietnam. And he marked the occasion that day with a simple gesture.

As the Vietnamese coastline receded, Burks looked out his CH-46 Sea Knight, raised his hand, and waved goodbye to the 58,000 American dead and missing.

"Somebody should have said a prayer or something. All I did was wave," said Burks, 50, now a Tacoma longshoreman. "It was just a thing I had to do. It was for all the ma's and pa's. Nobody could wave that much."

Burks grows anxious each April, thinking about his Vietnam experiences. Others in his unit are proud of what they accomplished that day. Some don't think about it at all.

For the men involved in Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of Saigon ranges from a war story worth telling to a source of guilt to simply something to forget.

In that sense, the last day of April 1975 was much like the rest of the Vietnam War for thousands of combat veterans.

When Burks joined the Marines in 1972, Vietnam already seemed like ancient history.

As a boy, he had watched the fighting on the news. A year after he enlisted, the last American combat soldier left Vietnam. Nobody thought the Marines would go back in.

But when the South Vietnamese Army began to crumble in the spring of 1975, the Navy assembled five carrier battle groups near Saigon.

In late April 1975, U.S. planes evacuated 40,000 Americans and South Vietnamese refugees until mortars and rocket fire closed Tan Son Nhut airbase between April 28 and 29.

To rescue the last Americans at the U.S. Embassy, the military turned to helicopters, and initiated Operation Frequent Wind. It began with a command to the pilots aboard the carrier U.S.S. Hancock: "Gentlemen, start your engines." More than 80 helicopters took part.

On April 29, two pilots went missing after their Sea Knight crashed into the sea, but the mission was considered a huge success, as nearly 7,000 refugees and military personnel were removed to safety.

Braving rifle fire and mortar shots, the last 11 Marines were evacuated at 7:58 a.m. April 30.

Burks said his chopper was airborne when his crew heard over the radio that everyone was out of the embassy.

His aircraft was then ordered to search for the two missing Sea Knight pilots before returning to the carrier, Burks said.

Although they never found the men, Burks remembers seeing thousands of refugee boats fleeing the communists. And he realized then this may be the last combat mission of the war.

In his diary, Burks wrote:

"From deep inside me, I knew the only thing that I could do for my country and the souls that we were leaving behind and their families was to wave goodbye ... we are the most powerful country in the world and all I can do is wave goodbye."

After he left the Marines, Burks became a stand-up comic, touring the country and earning mentions in Rolling Stone and People magazines.

But he never forgot about Vietnam. He said he suffers from guilt, thinking about those who didn't make it, particularly the two dead pilots he searched for.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," he said. "Every April gets kind of weird."

Across the country, another helicopter vet remembers that day, too.

Chris Woods of Havelock, N.C., was crew chief on the helicopter credited with evacuating the last Marines from the embassy roof.

As the aircraft took off, "I remember having a conscious thought: 'This could be a historic moment,' " Woods said. "And then I didn't think about it for years."

In the 1990s, Woods, 53, began researching the mission and attending Marine reunions, sometimes pointing out that his chopper rightfully earned the distinction of being the last to leave the embassy.

"As the older we get, we're aware of our 15 minutes of fame," he said. "Like Earl Burks, this is my 15 minutes."

But for some helicopter crew members, there was neither fame nor shame in flying the last missions of the Vietnam War.

In an e-mail to Burks, a former comrade wrote: "It is amazing to me that you still are so interested in the Saigon thing. To me it was just what we needed to do at the time, and doesn't require any recognition beyond that."

Burks agreed that his participation in Operation Frequent Wind was "no big badge of honor."

But that day 30 years ago left him with an ache that hasn't diminished much over time.

"All I could do was wave. That's the thing that haunts me."

Alex Fryer: 206-464-8124 or afryer@seattletimes.com

Ellie

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