By: David Brown
April 30 marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam. David Brown’s 36-year career in the US Foreign Service began in wartime Vietnam, where he served as political assistant to the legendary John Vann, and where he married Le Thi Bach Tuyet. In retirement, Brown has chronicled Vietnam’s evolution as an actor in the political and economic life of Southeast Asia. In the fall, he was serving as a foreign service officer in Japan. This is the story of his struggle to rescue his wife’s family.
Every evening in early 1975, my wife and I – trainees at the US State Department’s Japanese language school in Yokohama – tuned in to Japan’s public TV network. We were not just doing our homework; NHK’s bulletins from Saigon were our best source of news on my wife’s homeland and my former post.
The nightly news from Vietnam became ominous, then turned absolutely black when, in early March, the North Vietnamese launched a well-coordinated offensive. Within weeks, their divisions were within 60 miles of Saigon.
We’d left many friends behind in Vietnam, and of course, my wife’s family. Our very public marriage five years earlier had branded her parents, sisters, and brothers as American lackeys. If Saigon were to fall to Hanoi’s forces, their livelihoods, if not their lives, would be in imminent danger.
I sent an anxious letter to a friend in the US Embassy’s consular section. He wrote back that “we will put your wife’s family on our list and make sure that if we have to evacuate that they get out.” That reassured us for a while, but the military situation continued to deteriorate.
US Ambassador Graham Martin put a very brave face on it, insisting that with enough targeted assistance, by which he meant the return of US air power and the emergency aid which Congress had refused to grant, the southern part of South Vietnam could be preserved.
I didn’t believe that, nor did my wife. Comparing the reports on NHK to the letters we got from Tuyet’s family in Vietnam, it was clear that we had a much more accurate understanding of the strategic situation than my wife’s parents did. They were sending notes back saying, “Oh, we have seen trouble before. We will survive it,” and so forth.
At Embassy Saigon, Ambassador Martin was dead set against running any kind of evacuation that might erode the confidence of the South Vietnamese regime and hasten its collapse.
By the middle of April, however, friends in Saigon wrote me that a semi-official evacuation operation was kicking into high gear. This operation was run by US staff still in Vietnam, drawn from the military advisory office and from USAID, CIA, and US Embassy officers. They had volunteered to stay on to the end and move as many of America’s friends to the US as possible.
Some weeks earlier, in fact, I had volunteered to travel from Japan to assist with an evacuation. The answer I received ‘through channels’ was an emphatic ‘no’. An anonymous functionary in Washington informed me that the object was to get Americans out of Vietnam, not the other way around. The bottom line: There was no circumstance that would see me returning to Saigon.
That put us in an impossible situation. After much anguished conversation, Tuyet and I decided that I should go back to Vietnam, connect with friends, and persuade her father and mother to leave. If they insisted on staying in Saigon, we agreed, I should urge them to allow my wife’s eight siblings to emigrate.
The next day, April 23, while I flew toward South Vietnam, a friend delivered my letter of apology to Ambassador Jim Hodgson. I was AWOL, “absent without leave.”
Night was falling in Saigon as I tried the phone numbers of friends on the staff of the US embassy there. Most had already been sent home, but on my fifth try, I connected with a friend who had a spare bed. Early the next morning, April 24, he steered me to a ‘safe house’ where Embassy staff were issuing permits for travel to the US.
I explained my mission, and a records check verified that Tuyet’s family was eligible for refugee status. Then came the hard part: I had to contact Tuyet’s parents without arousing the attention of their neighbors. I phoned a Vietnamese friend; he generously agreed to deliver my wife’s letter to her parents!
About midday, Tuyet’s older sister arrived at the safe house. Lien told me that Tuyet’s letter had persuaded her parents that the situation was indeed desperate. The whole family would leave except, she said, she and her two small children must stay behind. Captain Thao, her husband, had not been heard from since his base was overrun several weeks earlier. Meanwhile, his parents and step-siblings had reached Saigon safely. Family obligation required that Lien remain with her husband’s family. She could not leave Vietnam, she said, unless her in-laws could also emigrate.
Again, I consulted the US Embassy team that was issuing entry permits. Yes, I was told; they could provide documents for sister Lien’s in-laws as well! Lien provided a list of names and birthdates. We were told that unmarked vans would pick up both families later that day.
Waiting, I walked the nearby streets. For the great majority of Saigonese, life seemed not much changed. They continued to zoom around on their motorcycles and in their cars, bent on urgent errands.
Toward 3 pm, two black vans arrived at the ‘safe house.’ In one, behind dark windows, was Tuyet’s family; each had a small bag containing a single change of clothes and a few treasured items, in particular family photos. Lien and her in-laws were in another. There were 18 individuals in all, identified on US Embassy documents.
I joined the group in the first van, and we headed for the airport. Half an hour later, we pulled up to the gate of the huge US advisory compound, now mostly empty. We held our collective breath while Vietnamese guards checked the van’s papers. They did not look inside the vans, which was surely part of a bargain between US officials and whoever, for the South Vietnamese army was responsible for comings and goings at Camp Alpha, the MACV compound.
We were delivered to a 12-lane, US-standard bowling alley, where we squatted near the midpoint of Lane #4 for the next 24 hours. Tuyet’s father and I made friends with the leaders of the groups behind and ahead of us. We were fed. We slept in place. Someone was kind enough to dim the lights.
The next morning, April 25, all the toilets were clogged up. I recruited a group of young men who helped me unclog them. I persuaded one of the American enlisted staff to rig up a few fans.
Possibly, we were again fed. I don’t recall what or how. We weren’t moving; we were just more than a thousand would-be refugees waiting on bowling alleys for something to happen. Someone told me that the Philippine dictator, Marcos, had forbidden further disembarkation at US bases there. The airlift was halted until new destinations could be arranged.
Toward evening, the queue started moving again. An hour later, our group was checked against a list and escorted outside. There were no lights and neither moon nor stars. We were guided to buses and driven out to the flight line, where several US transports were loading passengers in near-total darkness.
Two hundred yards to the left, a brightly lit Air France 747 was boarding passengers and, I heard later, the remaining gold reserves of the RVN central bank.
Helped by US airmen, we clambered up the wide-open cargo doors and into the belly of a C-141. The seats had been removed. Rip cords were stretched across the width of the plane. It filled up with refugees, about 12 to a row, each with a small suitcase. We were seated cross-legged, facing backward, 22 rows in all. Our contingent was among the last to board, so we were only 20 feet or so from the open cargo door.
No one spoke, no child cried as the huge plane taxied out onto the runway, revved its four jet engines and in near-total darkness took off in the steepest possible climb. Tuyet’s youngest brother and sister clung to my arms.
Perhaps 15 minutes later, the plane leveled as we crossed the Vietnamese coast. My legs ached. Taking pity on me, an airman posted at the cargo door waved me to join him. I explained how I happened to be on this flight, its sole round-eyed passenger. He told me we were headed for Guam and would land there in six hours. I begged for some paper to write a letter to Tuyet.
The sun was just rising when, at last, we disembarked at Anderson Air Force Base. It was April 26.
Anderson was the base from which B-52 bombers had dropped countless bombs on Indochina. There was no sign of them now. We were taken to a huge hangar, fed, and told to wait. I found my way to an office where I was permitted to use the US Forces telephone system.
Tuyet answered the phone at our house in a suburb of Yokohama. She says that when she heard my voice, with our baby girl on her hip, she began crying and shaking. Tuyet told me that I was not in trouble; the Embassy, she said, only wanted to know what help it could give us!
Things got sorted in the next few days. On May 1st, there was great sadness as news of the Saigon regime’s surrender spread through the refugee camp. Two days later, Tuyet’s parents, her youngest siblings, and I boarded a plane for Japan. (Lien and her babies, her 21-year-old sister Hanh, and her husband’s family were airlifted directly to a processing camp in the US.)
That summer, just before Tuyet and I returned to Tokyo for two more years, we were able to resettle Tuyet’s family in a San Francisco home we could just barely afford.
Then, in the summer of 1977, Lien’s husband Thao and trusted friends escaped Vietnam in a fishing boat. Within sight of a Philippine island, it ran out of gas, but again fortune smiled on our family: Filipino fishermen towed them to safety.
In the years that followed, our “refugee family” would build a new life in America. The rest of the story would be theirs to write.
