Saigon (87 page)

“Please don’t look so worried, Joseph,” said Naomi quietly. “Perhaps Trinh’s been delayed on the journey. It’s probably chaos on the roads in the Communist areas too.” 

Joseph didn’t answer. He was staring over her shoulder at the crowd of National Assembly delegates milling beneath the great chandeliers, discussing Minh’s speech. 

“What is it?” she asked, turning to follow his gaze. 

“Tran Van Tam! Look there, chatting with the new prime minister. Still the perfect political chameleon! Somehow he must have managed to make the transition from Thieu’s regime to the neutralists.” Joseph hurried over to the Vietnamese, and when Tam turned to find him at his elbow, he offered his hand. 

“So you’ve come to witness the final act of our national tragedy, Joseph, have you?” He spoke quietly so that his voice did not carry to those around him and smiled sadly. “We’ve done all we can but we’ve got no bargaining power left. At most the swearing- in of the new president will win us a little time.” 

Joseph nodded. “But what about your personal plans, Tam? Will you be among those answering the call to stay and accept the fate of God?” 

The Vietnamese giggled nervously and glanced around him again before answering “I’d like to respond patriotically, but like many others I’m afraid of what the Communists will do. I’ve already taken the precaution of sending my wife and family out of the country to Thailand.” 

“Have you managed to export some of your wealth too?”asked Joseph quietly. 

Tam giggled again with embarrassment. “Certain precautions have been taken, yes.” 

“And how do you plan to get out yourself? The crowds are growing at the airport.” 

“Your ambassador has always been a good friend to me.” 

Tam’s face creased into a calculated smile. “I’ve always done my best, you see, to give him my independent view of the affairs of our government. As a token of his gratitude he’s offered to guarantee me a seat on one of his helicopters if a sudden evacuation becomes necessary.” 

“And how did you manage to escape being tarred permanently with President Thieu’s brush?” 

“A judicious resignation from my post at the Ministry of Information a few weeks ago — when it became clear which way the wind was blowing,” Tam allowed himself another smile. “But tell me, are you writing another book? Is that what’s brought you back to Saigon again at this dangerous time?” 

Joseph shook his head. “No, Tam, as a matter of fact I came because of what happened to your brother’, Kim, in Hanoi. I was sorry to hear the news.” 

Tam sighed and shook his head. “The circumstances of his death are very strange, hut I don’t understand how it affects you.” 

“Perhaps you didn’t know, hut Tuyet and her son were killed in the 1972 Christmas bombing. Her daughter Trinh survived. Your brother, Kim, was her only relative in Hanoi, and now that he’s gone she’s alone and frightened. Kim told her beforehand, it seems, how to get a message to me through a French journalist in Hanoi and also arranged papers for her so that she could be quietly infiltrated into Saigon with other northern cadres.” 

Tam’s eyes widened. “And you’ve come here to look for her to take her out of Vietnam?” 

Joseph nodded grimly. “But I can’t find her, Tam. I’ve tried all the contacts I know. There’s no trace of her.” An edge of desperation had entered his voice. “Do you know anybody on the other side who might help?” 

A defensive expression came into the eyes of the Vietnamese. “I don’t think so — I’m very sorry. Like many others I have affairs of my own still to arrange.” 

Tam made as if to move off, but Joseph seized him by the shoulders and swung him around. “Trinh’s your flesh and blood too Tam! A man like you must have private contacts with the Viet Cong.” Joseph paused and his expression hardened suddenly. “Maybe I should mention that to the ambassador and have him cancel your helicopter seat!” 

Tam’s face turned pale and he laughed nervously. For a moment he stared at Joseph in alarm, then his face brightened. 

“Why don’t you consult your friend in the ‘white room’?” 

Joseph stared at Tam, thunderstruck. “What do you know about the man in the white room?” 

“Your brother Guy told me he took you to the cell to try to identify him. He thought you recognized him from the old days in Tongking but refused to reveal what you knew.” 

Joseph shook his head in disbelief; seven years had passed since he had visited that blinding white cell where the shivering skeleton of Dao Van Lat had been incarcerated. “Is he still there?” he asked in an incredulous voice. 

Tam nodded. “Yes, and still his will hasn’t been broken — they gave up interrogating him long ago. He’s never divulged anything about the Liberation Front’s organization but now that the end is near perhaps he might make an exception — for an old comrade-in-arms who showed him loyalty in the past.” 

“It’s worth trying!” Joseph grasped Tam by the shoulders. “Arrange with your security people for me to visit him —with the cameras and microphones switched off.” 

Tam nodded quickly. “I’ll make some telephone calls at once. Please wait at your hotel until you hear from me.” 

Twenty-four hours later in the early evening of Tuesday, April 29,Joseph was squatting on his heels beside the white stool in the center of the white room, staring with increasing desperation into the face of the shrunken skeleton that its prisoner had become. The skin on Lat’s face and body seemed to have contracted during the long years in the chilled atmosphere, drawing itself tight across his bones and making his face skull-like. His hair had turned white like everything else in the room, his eyes were unnaturally large and luminous in their hollow sockets, and he leaned forward at the waist, hugging himself with his sticklike arms just as he had done when Joseph had last seen him in 1968. He still wore only a ragged pair of shorts and his wasted body seemed to have barely enough flesh on it to sustain life, but as before he seemed totally oblivious to his suffering and sat unmoving and incurious on his stool, his gaze fixed blankly on the white wall in front of him. 

“Please listen to me, Lat. The war’s almost over,” said Joseph patiently, repeating himself for the second time. “The microphones have already been switched off, and you and all the other political prisoners are going to be set free later this evening by President Minh. Your forces are certain to win total victory within twenty-four hours. They’re approaching the outskirts of Saigon already — but you must help me before they get here!” 

Joseph sat back on his haunches to study Lat’s face again, but the Vietnamese gave no sign that he had heard; instead he continued to stare straight in front of him, his eyes unblinking, and Joseph wondered with a stab of alarm if he had lost his reason entirely. 

“Your nephew Tran Van Kim is dead, Lat.” Joseph leaned closer, straining every nerve in his body to break the trancelike state into which the Vietnamese seemed to have sunk. “He was dismissed in disgrace from the Politburo and died in a car crash a week ago. That’s why I need your help.” He tugged from his pocket again the photographs of Tuyet as a young girl that he’d held up twice already before Lat’s eyes. “I fell in love with Kim’s sister, Lan — your niece — in the ‘thirties. We had a daughter, Tuyet. She grew up to become Tuyet Luong, who served your cause well in the delta. Maybe you never knew she was related to you — but look, here she is, standing with me outside her school in Saigon!” 

Joseph again pushed the photographs in front of Lat’s eyes and waited. He had shown him the pictures of himself with Ho and Vo Nguyen Giap as soon as he arrived and recalled how they themselves had first met in Hue in 1925. He had reminded the Vietnamese how he had poled him downriver on a raft to the Pac Bo caves after his Warhawk had crashed, but Lat had still not betrayed the slightest sign of comprehension. 

“Tuyet Luong was killed in the Christmas bombing of Hanoi three years ago,” continued Joseph, speaking slowly as though to a child, “but she had a daughter, Trinh, who survived — you’re her great-great-uncle. Kim cared for her after her mother was killed, but now Kim’s dead she has nobody in the North. She’s asked me to help her — she wants to leave Vietnam with me but I can’t trace her. Kim arranged for her to be infiltrated into Saigon as a cadre of the Provisional Revolutionary Government but I need the name of the P.R.G. security chief so that I can ask him to find her for me. Can’t you help?” 

Joseph gazed imploringly into Lat’s face as he finished speaking, but the Vietnamese remained motionless on his stool as though he were alone in the cell, and Joseph stood up with a snort of exasperation. Glancing at his watch he saw that it was already after six o’clock, and forgetting for a moment that the cell was sound-proofed, he strained his ears, trying to hear the engines of the American helicopters from the Seventh Fleet that had begun their massive final evacuation operation at midday. As he hurried to the old Süreté Générale headquarters from his hotel, he had seen the Sea Stallions, Chinooks arid Jolly Green Giants lumbering across the rooftops, lifting out load after load of the thousand or so Americans still stranded in Saigon. Two departure areas had been set up one on a tennis court at Tan Son Nhut, the other on the lawn inside the United States Embassy compound — and the helicopters were shuttling back and forth to the forty American ships cruising offshore in the South China Sea. Smaller, silver-painted helicopters of the CIA’s airline, Air America, had been visible darting among the vapor trails of the bigger aircraft, plucking from rooftops little knots of Americans and Vietnamese who feared that they faced death or imprisonment at the hands of the Communists because of their close links with the United States. As it became obvious that many Vietnamese who wanted to leave would be left behind, signs of panic had become visible everywhere in the city, and remembering this, Joseph began pacing agitatedly back and forth across the white cell. 

Within minutes of the swearing-in of President Minh the previous afternoon, it had become evident that this last humiliating political concession had been made in vain. Before the politicians had even dispersed from Doc Lap Palace, captured aircraft flown by North Vietnamese pilots had begun dive-bombing the Tan Son Nhut airbase, destroying within a few minutes South Vietnam’s last vestige of air power. The same planes had then swooped on the center of Saigon and the deafening roar of aircraft rushing low across the rooftops with their wing cannons pumping had plunged the capital into chaos. Antiaircraft guns had opened up from the palace grounds and anyone in possession of an automatic rifle had begun shooting indiscriminately in the streets, convinced that the Viet Cong had launched their final assault by stealth. With the bewildering noise of warfare filling the tree-lined boulevards, Joseph and Naomi had taken shelter with hundreds of others on the stone floor of the cathedral. A twenty-four-hour curfew had been declared, trapping them there until the late evening, and when they emerged they discovered that through their spokesmen at Camp Davis, the Communists had again made fresh political demands which quite clearly sounded the death knell for Saigon. President Minh’s government must “declare its support for the revolution,” they had said, and all Americans must withdraw immediately from Vietnam. They had indicated contemptuously that the final attack on Saigon would begin at midnight on Tuesday, April 29, and any American not evacuated by then would have to suffer the consequences. 

A few hours later the North Vietnamese forces had launched their heaviest rocket barrage of the war against Tan Son Nhut. One of the fleet of giant C-13o aircraft of the United States Air Force that had been ferrying out refugees to Guam was destroyed on the runway, there were many casualties among the thousands of Vietnamese still waiting in the processing center, and two young American Marines of the evacuation security force were killed by the rockets. It was these American combat deaths coming two years after the United States’ withdrawal from Vietnam that had caused an anxious President Ford in Washington to abandon the airlift with fixed-wing planes from Tan Son Nhut and order the immediate launching of the helicopter evacuation, code-named “Operation Frequent Wind.” 

As a result the sound of axes and saws attacking the gnarled bole of the ancient tamarind tree on the front lawn of the American Embassy at midmorning had symbolized the United States’ final admission that its efforts to save South Vietnam from Communism had failed. The lawn was the only area within the embassy where the great helicopters could put down with safety, and Joseph had watched the tamarind fall as he left the Chancery building at about ten-thirty that morning. Inside the embassy he had contacted people he knew manning the CIA station on the upper floors to secure a promise of a place in one of the last helicopters for himself and Trinh, and soon afterwards the prearranged secret signal for the start of the evacuation had been broadcast over the American Armed Forces radio. Every fifteen minutes the announcer intoned: “The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising,” and the announcement was followed immediately by Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.” 

Immediately all those foreigners who had been pre-warned by the evacuation organizers at the U.S. Embassy — journalists, businessmen, civilian engineers, contractors — had hurried to their appointed assembly areas around the city; some boarded buses for the airport, others climbed to the flat roofs of apartment buildings where the Air America helicopters could land. Shortly before eleven AM. the exodus of the international press corps had begun and doors had started banging like gunfire suddenly in the corridors of the Continental Palace, the Caravelle, the Majestic and other hotels as Americans representing the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the television networks rushed out lugging portable typewriters and camera equipment. Other newspapers and television reporters from a dozen other Western countries — “TCNs” or “Third Country Nationals” in the jargon of the airlift organizers —— went too, trooping to their assembly points through streets and squares left eerily deserted by the twenty-four-hour curfew. 

Most of the American journalists had visited Joseph’s room before they left, shaking their heads apologetically; as soon as he arrived in Saigon he had asked them all to let him know if they were contacted by a young Vietnamese girl asking for him, and as they prepared to leave, one after the other they came to shake hands and wish him well. After a lot of heated argument Joseph had insisted that Naomi leave with the members of her camera crew, and he had watched from a window of the Continental as the little procession of correspondents hurried away across the burning asphalt of Lam Son Square. Naomi turned one or twice, casting anxious eyes up at the window, but Joseph, unable to bear the thought of waving goodbye to her, had stepped quickly back out of sight. Feeling waves of tiredness sweep over him, he had stretched out on the bed then and fallen immediately into an exhausted sleep. 

As they marched through empty streets, Naomi and the rest of the journalists warily eyed the South Vietnamese police and the holstered weapons on their belts; they had begun stringing barbed-wire barricades across the baking pavements and the journalists knew that their own raggle-taggle departure with all their equipment was providing undeniable confirmation that the United States was finally pulling out. Every Westerner in Saigon knew that Brigadier Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the Saigon chief of security who had shot a Viet Cong suspect in the head before television cameras in 1968, had issued a warning that if the Americans tried to leave alone, they wouldn’t reach the airport alive. None of them knew then that Brigadier Loan was too busy arranging his own escape to carry out his bloody threat, but the expressions of resentment on the faces of the policemen as they passed were enough to make the journalists feel ashamed and uneasy. At some helicopter departure points they found South Vietnamese soldiers had set up machine gun nests on adjoining rooftops and the little groups of press refugees immediately began searching for safer takeoff zones. 

Because discipline among the police and the army was crumbling, the curfew was only patchily enforced, and around the ten-foot-high walls of the United States Embassy, a crowd of about two thousand Vietnamese had gathered by early afternoon. Yelling and screaming hysterically, many of them scrambled up the high steel gates, pleading with the Marine guards that they faced slaughter at the hands of the Communists if they did not get on the evacuation helicopters— but none were allowed in without proper authorization. While the Marines held the frightened crowd at bay at the front gates, high-ranking Vietnamese ministers and army officers waving special passes slipped through a rear door of the compound to take their places quietly among the crowd of privileged evacuees waiting inside. From there they could see plumes of black smoke rising above Tan Son Nhut, which was still coming under intermittent rocket and mortar attack, and sounds of firing began to echo through the streets as order broke down all over Saigon. The giant Sikorsky Sea Stallions and Chinooks started fluttering in and Out of the embassy compound in mid-afternoon, collecting loads of sixty and seventy people at a time, and it was not long before scattered shots were being directed at them from among the crowd outside. Cobra gunships bristling with weapons were called in to protect the landing zone, and Joseph, from his hotel window, had been able to watch them hovering ominously above the Chancery as the afternoon wore on. 

When Tam’s call finally came about five-thirty, Joseph had dashed straight to the security headquarters at the top of the Rue Catinat. The chief of police was already on his way out to the Seventh Fleet, Tam had explained, and a subordinate had been ordered to release all of the three hundred political prisoners still in custody at seven o’clock that evening. Tam had called the duty officer and arranged for Joseph to see the man in the white room alone — that was as much as he could do. Perhaps they would meet again in the United States, Tam had said with another characteristic giggle. He was leaving that moment for the embassy compound to catch his own flight, and he wished Joseph luck in his search. 

Joseph had hung up without replying and run out of the room. In the streets he could hear that the rocket bombardment of Tan Son Nhut was being stepped up; little jeeploads of South Vietnamese troops were rushing back and forth, the radios in the open vehicles crackling with angry fretful exchanges, and although Saigon had been cordoned off against refugees for more than two weeks to prevent a repetition of the chaos that had occurred farther north, crowds of peasants, with frightened children at their heels, were beginning to appear in the city center. Pushing mattresses on handcarts, clutching suitcases or carrying poles hung with pots and pans, they were running blindly, not caring where they were going as long as they were getting away from the firestorms ignited by the Communist rockets around their old homes. 

At the former French Süreté headquarters Joseph had been conducted into the cellars by a hawk-faced security officer who was still in uniform. When he opened the door to the white cell for him, Joseph had waited before entering to see that he didn’t stay to observe or reactivate the spy cameras and microphones which had been turned off. Once inside, it had taken Joseph a few seconds to get over the shock of Lat’s appearance, and lie had spent a quarter of an hour crouched beside him going over his story, first in French, then in Vietnamese and finally in English.