Unleashed Memoir #8 / Part II: Evacuation
Onward to chronicle an end of an era in Indochina.…from afar
On October 6, 2024, with my beloved wife of the past quarter century—Pamela—I celebrated the 80th anniversary of my presence on this planet among my fellow citizens of the world. As it happens, it also marked the half century (50 years) since I embarked on my life as a foreign correspondent, observer, and chronicler of more than 90 lands far from my own. To commemorate this, another moment from my own past, frozen in time, you will find here an excerpt from my memoir, "Don't Shoot, I'm an American Reporter,” which is still being written. From time to time, Unleashed Memoir will present excerpts from this work where and when they resonate especially.
In this excerpt, I am now off to the Philippines for The New York Times to welcome refugees and more…..
Finally, after a series of phone calls with Jim Greenfield in New York, the powers that be decided that—despite the long months of intensive language instruction and deep research—it was really quite futile to send me into Saigon at that point. “We’re trying to figure how we’re going to get the people we have in Saigon out at this point,” Greenfield observed.
Instead, I was off to the Philippines and Clark Airbase where waves of refugees from Vietnam were beginning to arrive en masse by a major air bridge that had been opened between Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon and Clark. My Philippines Airline flight left Hong Kong at 1:30 pm on April 12, 1975, bound for Manila where I checked into the Manila Hilton downtown—the hotel I’d use as my base every time I came to the Philippines for the next two years. Entirely unobjectionable is the best way to describe it—clean, neat, centrally located and the phones and telexes seemed quite reliable. For the next several days, I hung around Manila, met American Ambassador William Sullivan for an hour or so, which produced nothing worth filing, and on Thursday I drove up for the day to Clark Airbase in Angeles City, about 50 miles—an hour and a half drive northwest of Manila—to get the lay of land. Sure enough, there were lots of Air Force transports arriving.
So, on Thursday, I packed my bags and moved my base of operations to the Oasis Hotel in Angeles City. The Oasis was definitely some notches below the Hilton, but hardly as far down the food chain as some hostelries where I’d wind up over the next months. Clearly meant for GIs who wanted some off-base locale to take their favorite honeys for a night or two of pleasure, the rooms were quite basic. A bed, a small table and a chair—all reasonably clean. But I’d be doing little there beyond sleeping a few hours a night.
Before I left Manila, I filed one story—that President Ferdinand Marcos would be “considering” the status of all the American bases in the country—particularly Clark and the mammoth Subic Bay naval facility. Sullivan had told me, on background, that he wasn’t terribly concerned, that likely all Marcos really wanted was more cash “rentals” for the facilities. But Philippine officials were telling me that Marcos was becoming increasingly concerned the United States had simply washed its hands of Asia for the moment, and he was worried about his own home-grown communist insurgency. This was building some momentum on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao.
I pointed out that the 14,000 American servicemen and 54,000 Filipino workers employed at both facilities represented $150 million a year in hard currency—about 10 percent of the nation’s entire GDP, so removing the Americans was not something to be contemplated lightly. Still, Sullivan in Manila had called my attention to a statement from Secretary of State Henry Kissinger a few days earlier that “at some appropriate moment this county ought to have a debate on what constitutes an obligation. The unsettling effects on the Philippines and on other countries has to do with our performance.”
And this just as our performance was being found somewhat wanting a thousand miles to the northwest as we bolted, pell-mell from the three Indochinese nations we had once pledged to defend to our dying breath from the communist menace. It would take another fifteen years, but eventually, after much more drama, both American facilities in the Philippines were ultimately closed. Clark Airbase succumbed after a massive eruption of the Mount Pinatubo volcano with eight times the force of Mount St. Helens buried the airbase under a foot or more of volcanic ash. Subic Bay was vaguely restored, but within a year the Philippine government ordered American forces out. It took twenty more years before the first U.S. Naval vessels were able to return on a semi-permanent basis. In the interim, Australia and Hawaii were pressed into service—filling a gap made considerably less urgent with an end to any major security threats or hot war in the region after the end of hostilities in Indochina.
But now, it was up to me to chronicle at least one aspect of this final coda to the horror that was Vietnam. By now, The Times was devoting a large part of its coverage to the flight from Saigon. So, while the front page on April 18 was Malcolm Browne's:
The paper devoted a full inside page to the evacuation. From Saigon, Fox Butterfield wrote how the South Vietnamese government had agreed to speed up the departure of Vietnamese families of Americans—so many GIs, contractors, journalists and other assorted hangers-on having married Vietnamese and produced children who feared horrific reprisals by arriving communist overlords. Fox’s story pointed out:
Given the [American] Embassy’s apparently inadequate planning and the imminence of the Communist threat, some Americans have begun taking things into their own hands.
Late last week 230 to 250 Vietnamese were flown out of Tan Son Nhut to Clark Air Base in the Philippines aboard United States Air Force C-141 transports. According to American officials [in Saigon], the Vietnamese arrived at Clark without official exit permits or passports.
Following the incident, Brig. Gen. Richard M. Baughn of the Air Force—the Deputy Defense Attaché [at the embassy]—was suddenly relieved of his command and hustled out of Vietnam.”
That was one of the main reasons I was shipped up to Clark—to have a closer look at just who might be arriving. On my first day, I not only confirmed Fox’s story but added a few crucial details.
More than 250 of these undocumented Vietnamese had arrived at Clark on U.S. Air Force transports not only without passports or visas, but with “no place to go.” Moreover, they were being held incommunicado [meaning I couldn’t get to them, at least at first] under State Department orders until, according to one Embassy official ‘we can figure out what to do with them.’
Still, Ambassador Sullivan in Manila had given orders to “detain and process” each of these refugees, at least for the moment. The biggest fear was that the capacity of evacuation might be totally overwhelmed by panicked Vietnamese seeking to flee at any cost—as many as 200,000 or more, completely overwhelming Tan Son Nhut and the ability of the United States to evacuate Americans at the last moment.
Some Air Force officials I happened across did tell me, however, that they’d as yet received no orders for any operation like Eagle Pull, which emptied Phnom Penh of all Americans in several hours on April 12, six days after my own precipitous departure. There, U.S. Marines with fixed bayonets surrounding a barrage of helicopters ferried some 205 Cambodians as well as 84 Americans including embassy personnel, aid workers, and journalists (except the few, like Schanberg, who insisted on staying at all costs) to the aircraft carrier Okinawa waiting offshore.
But I was now working the Saigon evacuation story for all it was worth from my end—and it was worth a lot. On April 21, I shared the front page with Fox, who was reporting from his end the urgent debate sweeping an increasingly panicked Saigon—to stay or flee, while Malcolm Browne led the paper with his dispatch that “Communist divisions [were] maneuvering rapidly near Saigon with the obvious intention of sealing off the capital from all approaches.”
From Clark airbase, I found ample evidence of the panic that refugees had left behind, mixed with relief that they had managed to get at least this far to freedom. “There were small children, babies in arms and slung into backpacks,” I reported. “There were children with olive skins and blond hair and almond-shaped eyes. A few cried, most looked on in silence….”
The next day, I continued to push for access and managed to get closer to some of the arriving flights. There, I noticed something remarkable—Vietnamese military officers, some of quite high rank. Colonels, even a couple of brigadier generals, were landing with suitcases so heavy they could barely manage to heft them off the ground. I finally succeeded in finding an American airman who’d managed to get a look inside a couple of these cases. He was concerned that their weight might keep the plane from getting off the ground or, slipping to one side of the plane, prevent it from navigating properly. What he saw appalled him, which was why he was prepared to unburden himself when I stumbled upon him.
The cases, and there were a not inconsiderable number of them, were filled with gold bullion, jewelry and other precious items. Millions, even tens of millions, of dollars' worth of booty these “refugees” were spiriting out of the country, leaving their countrymen behind as the evacuation flights could take only a certain amount of weight. Each suitcase, the airman explained to me, was worth at least two or three persons in terms of pure lift capacity. I had my story, and that night I filed it to New York.
The next morning, I eagerly awaited the arrival of the frontings. Sure, my piece would have led the paper, or at least made the top of page one, I scanned the telex message eagerly. Nothing. Not even a mention. Not held, shorted, insided or any other suggestion that it had even arrived at the foreign desk. Panicked, since I was confident other hacks who’d been arriving in droves, would stumble on this terrific yarn, I raced to the telex office figuring I’d been a victim of censorship, or worse. Nope, it certainly did go out, and minutes after I’d filed it, the operator assured me. By this time, of course, it was the middle of the night in New York. I had to wait several hours before the first editor would show up and I could get to the bottom of this.
Meanwhile, I prepared my next story, with even more juicy details of just who was on those refugee flights and what they were bringing along with them. But I waited to file. Finally, at 9:30 at night, I placed a call to the foreign desk where I knew deputy foreign editor Gerry Gold would just have arrived from his home out on Long Island. I cut straight to the chase. What happened to my story from yesterday? “You’ll have to talk with Greenfield,” Gerry shot back promptly—clearly prepared for this phone call from half a world away. Something was clearly up. What had I done now? I waited another hour and a half and phoned Greenfield.
We killed the story, Greenfield began. What? What was wrong with it? Nothing, Greenfield continued. It was a great story, one of the best. But the Pentagon called after yesterday’s story. Oh? They said if we ran any more stories about the airlift, who was on it, what they were bringing with them or any other aspect, there would be unhappiness at the highest levels. Greenfield, no neophyte to Washington’s labyrinthine bureaucracy from his days as State Department spokesman and assistant secretary of state for public affairs, knew a veiled threat when he heard it. The Times, he pointed out, had any number of its own people it would rely on the military to ferry out of Saigon when the balloon went up. So, we were being blackmailed, I asked? Even worse, we, the paper who stood up to the power and glory of the President of the United States and published the Pentagon Papers, was now backing down over the publication of one difficult and in factual terms totally unchallenged story? You betcha.
At that point, I guess, I kind of lost it. Finally, Greenfield concluded the call. You file anything more like that and I’ll have no choice but to pull you back to New York. Of course, I had visions of my career as a foreign correspondent ending before it had barely even begun. So, I did what I needed to do. I caved. Not only did I cave, I’ve waited until today to tell this story to anyone.
Meanwhile, back in Phnom Penh….
….things were clearly going from bad to worse. The same day (April 21) that my only story on the evacuation from Saigon appeared on page one, on page 16 there appeared a 500 word story—absent byline or dateline, bearing the simple headline “Scarcity of Information On Cambodia Continues.”
“Customary news channels have been silenced since the surrender of Phnom Penh to Communist forces,” the report observed, which then continued, alas as we later learned erroneously, “former Premier Long Boret had been captured by the Communists and was still alive.” In fact, quickly after he was captured, he was “tried” by a kangaroo court and sentenced to death— carried out either by a beheading or firing squad, no one has ever determined. The sole, mildly reassuring note:
Communications with Western correspondents in the Cambodian capital continued to be cut…but the Foreign Ministry confirmed in Paris that 26 journalists were safe in the French Embassy in Phnom Penh. The 26 are Sydney H. Schanberg, correspondent of The New York Times in Cambodia, four other Americans, eight French [including my dear friend Patrice de Beer of Le Monde], four Swedes, one Italian, one Japanese, two Britons [including Jon Swain of the London Times], one German and four Cambodians. It was not immediately known whether Mr. Schanberg’s Cambodian assistant, Dith Pran, was among the journalists in the embassy.
There has been no communication between The Times and its correspondents in Phnom Penh since last Thursday, just before the surrender of the Cambodian government.
It was now four days later, and Clark’s facilities had been overwhelmed with more than 5,000 new arrivals, many sleeping end-to-end, side-by-side on mattresses packed into a makeshift shelter in the base gymnasium. So vast was the wave of evacuations from Vietnam—expected to hit 200,000 or more—that the stream had been shifted from Clark to Anderson Air Force Base on Guam, where Andy Malcolm was filling my function of chronicling the exodus. The Philippine government was becoming quite edgy over the potential of tens of thousands of Vietnamese overwhelming their nation.
Special for the Paid !
Andelman Unleashed has unleashed new, (lightly) paid tiers….For new paid subscribers, an inscribed copy of my latest book, A Red Line in the Sand
Along with a weekly portfolio of cartoons … and Friday a weekly live conversation with Andelman.
THIS FRIDAY, WE'LL HAVE A SPECIAL GUEST….LIVE from Brussels!
Founder and chairman of the Friends of Europe and its policy journal Europe’s World, veteran Financial Times correspondent, and the author of Slippery Slope: Europe's Troubled Future, plus his latest, TIMEBOMB: When Ageing Explodes.
By Friday, I was back in Bangkok and in close touch with the American, French and Australian embassies there and officials of the United Nations and its UNICEF unit. Ambassador John Gunther Dean had pitched up in Bangkok, so he was my first stop in my effort to gather some intelligence on goings-on in Phnom Penh and the fate of our reporters Sydney and Pran. But he had little beyond what the French had managed to glean from their embassy where foreigners of all nationalities had been herded. And the news of Schanberg and the others trapped there was increasingly unsettling.
The crowd in the French embassy in the Cambodian capital had swelled to more than 600 persons. Food, water and medical supplies were running low. Two French military planes, I learned, had been waiting in Vientiane, Laos for permission to fly in replenishments. But while the Khmer Rouge mission in Paris (the same folks I’d met a couple of months earlier) had given permission, the French wouldn’t put the planes in the air until they’d received assurances from the government in Phnom Penh that they’d be allowed to land and return unmolested. Indeed, the Khmer Rouge authorities had gone so far as to repudiate all Cambodian diplomatic missions abroad. In one stroke, Cambodia seemed to have been swallowed into a dark hole of silence.
Instantly, the Khmer Rouge had achieved precisely what they’d been promising—and which no one had believed. They’d propelled an entire nation from the twentieth century back to the fourteenth in a single stroke. At the French embassy in Phnom Penh, the only tiny thread of contact with the world was a single Morse code telegraph key—communications confined to whether individuals were alive or dead.
Even worse was the question of how the Cambodian people were making out. International Red Cross and UNICEF representatives in Bangkok told me they had respectively sixteen and two members of their organizations among those inside the French embassy and each had two planes ready to import medical supplies and food when permission was granted. But feeding programs—on which one million or more internal refugees had depended to stay alive had ended with the conclusion of hostilities.
“Our only hope is that the Khmer Rouge forced many of these people to return immediately to their farms, their home villages and begin putting in crops,” said one former relief official who’d left Cambodia for Thailand. “This is what we have heard has been happening. It is the only way they could prevent mass starvation.”
Of course, we still had not heard of the Final Solution imposed by the Khmer Rouge. There was no need to feed the one million or more people they would quickly wind up exterminating—shot, clubbed or simply starved to death.
Finally, on April 30, South Vietnam formally surrendered to the North. Vietnam was once again unified for the first time in two decades. In the ensuing 50 years, I've never made it there.
Through no absence of adventures in the interim. As we shall explore in our ensuing, at times chilling, often thrilling episodes of our Unleashed Memoir. First, of course, the fall of the third and final domino—Laos.