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This story was published in The Washington Post
Sunday Magazine shortly after the twelve family members fled
Saigon and settled in Bethesda, MD. In the intervening 24 years,
we've grown to include new wives, husbands and children. There
are family branches in Orange County, Oakland, Virginia, Maryland,
London, Berlin, Tahiti, and Marseilles, France
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LAST
EXIT FROM
SAIGON
A Tale of
Rescue
By
Dick Swanson
with Gordon Chaplin
Dick Swanson
spent five years (1966 through 1970) in South
Vietnam and Southeast Asia as a contract photographer for
Life and Black Star. He married Germaine Loc in 1969 and
in 1971 they moved to Washington where he worked in the
Life bureau. He is now a free lance photographer. Gordon
Chaplin is a free lance writer who was a Newsweek
correspondent in South Vietnam during 1968 and 1969
From our house in Bethesda,
Germaine and I watched the headlines. Midwinter here is the time
of offensives in Vietnam, the hot season, when the ground dries
hard enough for war machines. In Saigon, in the Time-Life office
before the great Tet offensive in 1968, 1 remembered, the suspense
had grown as the heat increased. It was growing now, but Germaine,
in the Vietnamese way, remained calm.
Once a month, she'd read
me a letter from her family in Saigon. Very matter of fact, although
we both knew the country couldn't last, that sooner or later
the 12 members of her family who were left, along with thousands
more, would become refugees again.
When Quang Tri fell I watched
her read the news and remembered what I had written three years
earlier: "I sit here in sadness and frustration . Germaine
is torn between her beginnings in North Vietnam and her endings
in South Vietnam and is even more frustrated and sad than I;
frustrated because she cannot articulate her feelings to me and
sad because of the family ties.
Family ties. As province
after province fell, at least one thing became clearer to us:
her family could not stay in Vietnam. Their matter of fact letters
came more often, calm as Germaine herself, almost heartbreaking
in their simplicity. They discussed their fate, their choices,
their plans as if they were discussing the monsoon. They had
fled for their lives 1954 after the fall of Dien Bien Phu from
North Vietnam to Saigon and there was no question they were prepared
to leave again. They would buy logs, if they had to, and float
down the Mekong and ride them out to sea.
It was certain they'd have
to leave. They would not stay, and just as certainly I'd have
to help them. They'd need money. I thought, bribes, connections,
papers, transportation, advice. Even as South Vietnam and their
way of life went under they'd need an American around to help;
America was the problem and I was my family's solution.
I went to Vietnam in January
1966, a hawk, my head clamped in place,looking down that famous
tunnel with the light at the end. We would win overthe Communist
menace. And as a combat photographer I would learn the lessonof
war: how to measure up. Like Hemingway and thousands of others,
I'd learnhow to be a man. Between battles I'd sample the spoils
of the battleground,the women, the wine, lunches, the companions,
the long nights in French
colonial hotels when time came as close as possible to absolutely
stopping.
But what I learned instead
was how to love the country. I moved in with a Vietnamese family.
Sometimes late at night I'd watch them sleeping all in a large
room. They slept in disarray but always touching each other in
their sleep as if to reaffirm their relationship. Watching, I
thought I began to understand Vietnam.
I traveled by helicopter,
motorcycle, taxi and Caribou troop transport north to the Danang
beaches, the mist-shrouded mountains around Khe Sanh and the
A Shau Valley, Hue on the Perfume River, dusty old French rubber
plantations in the Central Highlands, the huge, pancake-flat
Delta country where you could watch the rice grow. I lived in
the jungle, in villages, in hamlets. I stayed in fire bases on
top of knife-edge ridges, in Chinese hotels off back alleys in
Can Tho and Nha Trang, found and lost friends and enemies.
My photographs are the
record: refugees and ambassadors, riots and weddings, war and
the children of war, the human side and the not so human side.
Some nights, still, the
pictures flash in my mind. They appear rhythmically, brighten
and fade, as I remembered them doing many times on the wall of
a Tu Do street apartment; high ceilinged, tile floored, while
a group of my friends smoked and talked.
I remembered that period
of my life, a period I had sought, a sort of final learning interval
when I met the people and experienced the events that influenced
me permanently. I had hoped it would be happy and successful,
but there were too many tragedies for it to have been happy.
The tragedy of Vietnam
was stupefying. Beside it individual tragedies seem selfish.
But they are dead or missing: Larry Burrows, Kent Potter, Sawata,
Henri Huet, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone. With them I learned the
ugliest of litanies--napalm, defoliation, refugees, search and
destroy, Rolling Thunder, pacification, step-ons and body count.
Their photographs showed combat was not the glorious thing we'd
all been led to believe. It was one human being killing another
indiscriminately. The legacy of theirphotographs is the only
thing that makes their deaths meaningful.
By the end of March this
year there was not much left of South Vietnam. The Central Highlands
were gone, Quang Tri was gone. Hue was threatened. We'd eat breakfast
in Bethesda with the newspaper beside our tea cups. We'd chat
across the table, we'd smile. I'd think: how much time? Ragged
dreams like snapshots filled the nights. We'd make love as if
someone else was about to walk in.
The armies moved south.
Hue fell. Danang fell. Every day, it seemed, the shadows on the
map were longer. I spent my days tapping contacts. I flew home
to Illinois to raise money. A futile trip. Plans materialized,
then fell through. I spent my nights drinking tea and calling
around the globe.
The headlines Tuesday,
April 22, reported Thieu's resignation. Wednesday they reported
the evacuation of 4,000 Americans and Vietnamese to the Philippines
although I knew that massive departures had been going on for
weeks. Undressing that night, things suddenly came together.
Why was I trying to make plans? The evacuation had to be done
in Asian style, I realized. No plans. You don't make plans in
Vietnam. You move from second to second as long as things work
out for you, as we'd done at Khe Sanh, Con Tien, A Shau.
Germaine went to bed and
I made reservations from Dulles to Los Angeles, Honolulu, Guam,
Hong Kong, Saigon; the old route. The old flight numbers rang
in my head like bells. I drank more tea and in the morning, on
the way to the airport, Germaine and I discussed strategies as
matter of factly as if we had been planning the trip for months.
It seemed she'd always known what I decided the night before.
I'd feared that on the
plane I wouldn't be able to handle the time: 26 hours of being
alone with myself and my thoughts, my strategies and my fears.
Incredibly, the flight was a natural high, over almost as soon
as it had begun. In a strange rush of kaleidoscopic images, memories,
shards of thought, I found myself in Los Angeles, then over the
Pacific.
I remembered Germaine when
I met her in the Time-Life office in 1968. She was a Vietnamese
stringer for Life, NBC and Reuter. . .one of the few women working
as such. She was brassy, tough, bright, many faceted, fascinating.
As the oldest child she was supporting her family at that time
(her father being ill and unable to work). She'd worked as a
nurse, parachuted into combat 20 times, taught herself English.
She was considered unapproachable. No dates. She had no time,
with eleven mouths to feed. I had the feeling, too, that she
looked down on me. I was older by two years but she seemed to
think I was a child. Maybe, to her, all men were children involved
in frivolities like war and politics while the women ran the
country. That was a common Vietnamese attitude.
We first came to know each
other during Tet, 1968. We worked together in the shell-ruined
streets of Hue, Danang, Saigon. We worked well together, almost
as equals. After seeing me work in the field she seemed to respect
me. What had it taken to impress a woman like this, to whom fighting
was as natural as going to the office?
Gradually, I came to know
her family, to understand its closeness, its binding concerns.
In a small, cool, dark room in the back of the family house on
Truong Minh Giang street I smoked opium with her father and he
talked about the old days in Hanoi when he was a rich entrepreneur
with a furniture factory, a gold mine, a coffee plantation, when
he worked as a
commissioner of
police for the French colonials.
All that ended in 1954
with the country's fall. Now the family lived in Saigon, at first
on Germaine's wages alone. Eventually Bernard, now 34, (four
years younger than Germaine) would become a teacher, Albert,
now 32, would become an economist, Rene, now 29, would be a teacher
in Can Tho, and Long, now 20 and the youngest, would join the
Navy. Gabrielle, now 36, would marry well, a colonel in the Air
Force. Far better than 1 knew at the time, in fact, for without
the colonel's pull I never would have been able to evacuate the
family.
Thinking about it as the
plane circled Honolulu airport in the dark, I had never really
questioned the family's need to leave. Others were staying, certainly,
including Time's Vietnamese reporter Pham Xuan An, but who was
I to decide what these people should do? I was helping because
they feared for their lives, because in any case it seemed their
right to choose. I was helping because I love Germaine.
Honolulu airport at midnight.
The old familiar layover in the damp night, this time for the
last time. My mission has picked up an odd counterpoint, a Goyaesque
troop of misshapen longhairs who say they too are on their way
to rescue Vietnamese. Wearing backpacks, they flit across my
speeded perceptions like a flock of blackbirds. They are not
quite right. Something seems askew with them. One is wall-eyed,
another is on crutches. They are strangely out of proportion,
awkward, yet terribly earnest. Their concern seems misguided,
misplaced. As I sit on the hard bench in the buzzing, tropical
night, one of them plays a guitar, one chord, over and
over.
Now we're nearing Guam.
They fill the plane with talk, hold lunatic conferences in the
aisles. They clutch the latest papers, talk about the headlines
with their strange misguided concern. They made a lot of friends
in Vietnam, one tells me, when they were there for a few months
in 1967. A few months! So they'd like to help out now.
I thought I was badly off
with only $200 in my pocket and no idea if the family was still
in Saigon, but these people have no money at all and apparently
haven't seen their friends for years.
They rush for the latest newspapers in Guam. In Hong Kong,
as I call a friend in the Time-Life office for news, they cluster
around the phone booth begging for scraps of information. I say
my friend could tell me nothing about conditions in Saigon and
he really couldn't. They hang on my arm. They seem to be trying
to absorb me. Will they dog me this way through the streets of
Saigon?
The China Airlines flight
into Saigon is the last commercial flight, as it turns out. There's
no special feeling as the plane circles. It's 1 p.m.April 26.
It's quiet. When the plane lands and the door unseals, the hot
air feels like my natural element.
But Tan Son Nhut has changed
since I was last here in 1972. Then it was a beehive: helicopters,
C-141s, Caribous, fighters. Today the commercial plane seems
the only visitor. Inside, too, where the cramped rooms used to
brim with GIs, ARVNs, CIA, construction mercenaries, hawkers,
journalists and pickpockets, there are only a few officials.
They are not friendly.
Moving like molasses, they go through my papers and draw away
for a conference. They take me to a small room. Am I being detained?
I think back on friends who have been incarcerated here for days,
people like Tim Page, adept at yelling and screaming and throwing
his weight around. He was finally released. But those were the
old days. What might happen now, with the country crumbling like
stale French bread, is anybody's guess.
An hour later suddenly I'm free to go. Thrusting my passport
at me, th officer asks sharply: "Have you come to take out
your Americans?" I don't answer. Almost by instinct I'm
going through the old motions, walking through the buildings
to where the taxis always gathered. They are still there. Outside
the gates is the usual crowd of Vietnamese. No difference.
But there is a difference,
very subtle. A strange, subtle silence in the middle of the familiar
noise. I move quickly to a taxi and give him the old directions:
11174/42A Yen Do street." We drive through the hot tamarind
lined lanes, past the sandbagged villas where the generals lived.
A girl in a white Ao Dai, riding a Honda, draws level with us
in the shade and looks at me. I find I can't look back. There's
a new feeling between me and the driver, not fear. Guilt is closer.
The American and the Vietnamese; one stays, one goes.
The family house. As I
walk down the lane from the main road I can hear Germaine's mother
shouting "anh (big brother) Dick. Anh Dick." Up the
familiar steps and in the door. Albert seizes me, kisses me on
the cheeks. We embrace.
Through an incredible stroke
of coincidence and luck the family is all together in Saigon.
Three days before an underground friend had told them he would
try to help. Gabrielle and Rene were in Can Tho at the time and
would still have been there if he hadn't called them. There would
have been nothing I could do.
So we make plans. Suddenly
it seems terribly urgent, almost the last possible moment. As
we talk, the family tells me that the General Assembly is debating
whether or not to ask Huong, the president of less than a week,
to resign. The huge Bien Hoa military base 15 miles from the
city has fallen. All highways to the city have been cut. Enemy
troops have been reported in the suburbs.
There will be 12 of the
family going: Germaine's 62-year old mother, her brothers Bernard
(but not Bernard's wife, a South Vietnamese by birth, who has
decided to stay), Albert, Rene, his wife and two children, Long
and her sister Gabrielle and her three children. Gabrielle's
husband, Colonel Ba, has elected to stay at his base in the delta.
The most serious problem
will be to get on the air base. The family tells me that security
guards at the various gates have been unpredictable and ill-tempered,
reluctant to admit any Vietnamese, even with the necessary clearance
papers. But Gabrielle suggests she call the base as the colonel's
wife and demand an official air force truck to take them out
at five the next morning before the curfew lifts. The truck should
have no problem getting through, and if it does, Gabrielle always
has her airbase pass to flash.
For the first time, I feel
it's going to work. Early evening now and I leave the family
to their last minute preparations . I will make my own wayto
the base in a battered Time-Life Mini-Moke auto, itself a veteran
of years of war, several shootings, theft by helicopter and countless
Thunder Road rides.
With the refugee paperwork
system apparently breaking down and the base being mobbed, daily
by desperate Vietnamese, things are too unpredictable to chance
being seen in the truck with them. At least to begin with, they
could be more unobtrusive without an American.
Six of us who add up to
more than 30 years of war coverage in Vietnam have dinner at
Ramuncho's in front of the misshapen statue of two Vietnamese
soldiers that has come to be known as the National Buggery Monument:
Time bureau chief Roy Rowan, who was at the fall of Shanghai,
Cathy Leroy, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese in 1968, Dave
Greenway of the Washington Post, Mark Godfrey of Magnum and Dirck
Halstead of Time. We talk about the fall, how far away it is.
The end. And we watch each other.
After dinner I drank wine
with Greenway in the garden of the Hotel Continental, then I
drift upstairs and have Cambodian Red in Godfrey's room. Walking
past the louvered doors the numbers ring in my head the names
of friends who'd stayed there: 11--Keith Kay, CBS, 5--Zalin Grant,
Time and New Republic, 39--Bob Shaplen, New Yorker, 7--Siestas
with Germaine. Inside, the ceiling fans, the patterned tile,
the taped window panes. Outside, the curfew--as if it were ten
years ago.
No sleep for 52 hours.
I go to the Time office and sit with a long time friend, Pham
Xuan An and talk about the war. An works for Time Magazine and
we always suspected he worked for the Viet Cong also. I ask him
in the elliptical way of the Vietnamese: "Will my family
and I be safe if we stay behind"? His answer is , "probably"
(years later our suspicions were confirmed. He was a Colonel
in the Viet Cong). At 3a.m. I lie down in the dark and switch
on the radio...Armed Forces Radio, who knows where from?...
3a.m. had always been the time of rockets in Saigon, although
there hadn't been any in years. I waited, wide awake.
A rocket makes an unmistakable
soft explosion, a swish followed by a fragile, thin-shelled crump.
My watch reads 4 a.m. Is the noise in my head? Or are there really
rockets in Saigon? And no doubt panic as in Hue, Danang and Nha
Trang. My mouth tastes like metal and I think: what if I have
to choose? In the end, I knew, I could get on the last helicopter
and fly like some immortal comic-book figure out of the collapsing
city. The family could not. They were only Vietnamese. Of course
I could choose to stay: the honorable course. I wouldn't
have to bug out. But even as the rockets fall I can't imagine
the actual moment, how I'd act. Would they be watching
me if I left? Would we be able to see each other's faces, each
other's eyes?
The terrible question remains
moot, for now. At 6 a.m. the curfew is lifted and a rush of adrenaline
washes me absolutely clean. Godfrey cranks up the Mini-Moke and
we putter out to Tan Son Nhut and through the main gate with
no problem. How easy it is for an American to save his own life.
We spot eight of the family
nervously waiting about a half mile inside the base gate, the
easiest to get through. The two other gates, like the steps of
purgatory, become progressively harder. The family had come out
in two shifts with an M-16-toting friend of Colonel Ba's, also
a colonel. Where are the four others? Somehow, Rene, his wife
and two children missed the ride and won't be out until 8. It's
now 7. 1 have an hour to worry about them.
The colonel takes half
the family to the second gate, at the Defense Attache Office
compound, which we must get inside to have the papers processed.
Godfrey and I take the other half. As the Vietnamese police at
the gate hesitate ominously, we simply barge on through. The
U.S. Marine guard grins and says "Good luck," as we
go by.
But the colonel's car is
stopped. I run back through the gate waving my White House press
pass at the guard. It has the U.S. seal on the back and looks
very official. I wave it in his face and yell "Chinh phu,
chinh phu (government, government). That and the M-16 on the
Colonel's passenger seat seem to convince him. He waves the car
through.
I have been told the police
sweep this compound regularly of the Vietnamese that seep in
constantly in spite of the guards so I settle the family under
a banana tree in a far corner where hopefully they'll be unobtrusive.
By this time Rene and his family are probably outside the main
gate. Godfrey takes Gabrielle with her special base pass to findthem.
The processing center does
not open at 9, when it is supposed to, and about a thousand people,
Americans and Vietnamese, mill in the compound. Some Vietnamese
have been waiting for days, infiltrating the gate, getting swept
out and infiltrating again. In the past few days, as pressure
increased and people became more desperate, infiltration has
become an art form.
At 10:30 when the U.S.
embassy people finally appear and unlock the center door, the
pack of people behind them on the wooden stairs is so tight I
can hardly breathe. A second flight of stairs, at the other end
of the second floor walkway, collapsed the day before from the
weight of the pack.
Inside the room, the only
clear spaces are around the desks. They hand us forms, we fill
them out. We wait. I have a strong feeling, suddenly, that this
is it. If we don't make it today, if somehow our momentum is
blunted, we will never make it at all. Old survival instinct.
Already, I seem to be bogging down, slowing, stopping. The officials
say they have forgotten theirstamps.
Time passes, who knows
how much. I notice a door with a no-admittance sign. Official-looking
Americans are going in and out. I barge in, show the man at the
desk my press pass and say I want to interview him. We look at
each other: a vignette from Fellini, insubstantial, unreal. He
nods. Fine, he says, but only on background.
Only on background. The
vignette, amazingly, does not dissolve. As I sit down I see the
magic stamp on his desk. My God. The room whirls. I play my role,
asking questions as if I know what I am doing, nodding wisely.
He plays his. Abruptly 1 stand and tell him I have to get back
in line or I will never be able to get my family out. Unless
he can help. The vignette freezes. We watch each other. He looks
at my completed form and then at me. Am I sure all these people
are my dependents? Slowly, slowly his hand moves toward the stamp.
I am caught in the tableau. Bam!...he uses the stamp.
Incredibly, after stamping
the excape papers, our interview continues of its own accord.
Im back out under the banana
tree with the precious papers. I wave them. Germaine's mother,
smiling calmly, takes a cold face towel from somewhere and pours
a little Old Spice on it. Calmly, she hands it to me.
Meanwhile, Rene and his
family have made it inside. Gabrielle's ingenuity had worked
again. She called the base motor pool and ordered a truck sent
to the main gate for them. She went off in it while Godfrey waited
with the Mini-Moke inside the gate but outside the processing
compound. He watched the truck leave, stop, pick up Rene, turn,
start back and then BLOW UP.
Geysers of water spouted
from the radiator, floods of oil from the crankcase. Inside the
cab he could see Gabrielle's hands moving, waving. The truck
came on through the gate like a Texas dust devil. Nobody wanted
to get close enough to stop it. They all jumped into the Mini-Moke
and once more negotiated the gate into the processing
compound.
The family's intact at
last, on paper, signed, stamped and ready to be delivered. Godfrey
leaves: a heartfelt goodbye The thirteen of us walk from the
shade of the banana tree through the final gate to the inner
compound where we are manifested on U.S. Air Force evacuation
flight 202 to Guam, one of' 30-40 leaving through the day. We
are the last ones to be evacuated, although we do not know it.
In a few short hours the airport will be rocketed, killing two
U.S. Marines, and shut down for good.
There is a deserted bowling
alley up against the wire separating the final compound from
the base and I park the family here in the dusty gloom to wait
for our flight. Outside, pressed against the wire, Vietnamese,
four deep, watch silently. They will be staying. They have no
money for bribes, no connections, no comic-book Captain Marvel
American to help. What do they see? I can't look back. For the
first time in my life I can take no pictures even though my equipment
is ready. Their fingers push at me through the wire.
At dark., finally, our
flight is called. The 150 passengers board buses and we drive
out through that dense and silent crowd. No one talks. We drive
in convoy to the waiting airplane.
We are the last bus. As
we arrive on the tarmac I see Vietnamese military police lined
up on each side of the loading ramp, arbitrarily pulling draft
age men out of the line, draft age men like my brothers in law.
Falling through a cold, quiet second of space, I remember what
I'd almost forgotten: this is Vietnam, right up to the bitter
end.
All right. Germaine's mother
will play sick and 20-year-old Long will help her on the plane.
The other three brothers will grab children and hold them in
front of their faces as they run to the plane. The bus pulls
up. I'm out first, standing in the corridor of police, trying
to block their view. Long's off now, sauntering, sightseeing,
completely out of role. Behind him my mother in law, in tragicomic
pantomime, plays hers to the hilt, limps, moans, clutches her
head. They're in. Now the three brothers running with the babies.
And, marching down the
long corridor as if to my wedding, I'm in last.
EPILOGUE
The family decorates our
house in Bethesda now like potted trees, uprooted, fragile. They
exist officially only on the 1-94 forms I pilfered on the way
through Guam. In the bureaucratic vernacular, they're "temporary
alien residents." They don't even have alien registration
numbers, much less Social Security numbers. The morning after
their arrival Bernard, the oldest son, handed me a small, leather
bag. In it was the entire family fortune, $1,400 in U.S. dollars
and $400 in gold they'd carried out sewn into underwear. I was
head of the family now, he said, and this was mine to do with
as I pleased.
Only by sheer luck are
they even out of the long, drab refugee pipelinethat starts with
Tent City in Guam where the paper shuffle has buried entire families
for weeks. The magic 1-94 forms just happened to be handy. So
was a sympathetic immigration official. Journalist friends saved
them from up to three months of orientation classes, security
clearance investigations, various kinds of briefings and debriefings
in Camp Pendleton, California. We arrived at Dulles 5 p.m. Wednesday,
April 30, 1975, 12 hours after the fall of Saigon and 144 hours
after I'd left Washington. Our reunion with Germaine was as calm
as my departure.
From Bethesda they wander
downtown. So few police. Such order: people stop when the light's
red and go when it's green. They've rubbernecked around the White
House, the Capitol Building, the National Gallery of Art, like
any old lady from Dubuque. They've made some small beginnings.
Bernard and Albert have volunteered to help the D.C. public school
system with refugee children. With their training in French they
have applied for teachin positions with the Archdiocese of Washington.
Rene, his wife and two children have applied for resident status
in France. And there is a corner station down
the street where they might work pumping gas.
There are sixteen people
in our house now, but Germaine's cooking keeps the food costs
to $25 a day. Travel for the evacuation cost $4,000. The great
Immigration and Naturalization paper chase was going to cost
about $2,000 in lawyer fees until that service was offered free
by a very involved man. Meanwhile other gifts came pouring in:
clothes, food, money and housing. And to complete the parley,
Colonel Ba flew to safety at the lastminute and is here with
us now.
When the morning paper
comes the family doesn't look at headlines first.
They search the pictures out of Saigon for the faces of their
friends.
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