Way North, A Novel by Randy Evans

Chapter Twenty-Five

Fall of Saigon

Like folding an American Flag into a proper triangle and signing out in a log book, the Vietnam War was coming to an abrupt end.  On April 29, 1975, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers tightened their circle around Saigon.  The city swarmed in disarray.

“Let’s get this show on the road while the Jarheads still hold the perimeter!”  said Salt.

“No dependents, no girlfriends, no children, no babies, no pets--just agents...no more room.  If you have complaints, put them in the CIA suggestion box,”  Pepper yelled over the gunfire.  “Anyone violating these orders will be shot.”  Salt and Pepper sounded like seamen loading the life boats on The Titanic.  They were both deadened and dull from their years in the field, physically and emotionally flatlined.

If you can’t leave someone behind, don’t get in the pod,” warned Salt.  They both sounded harsh, but neither one had an ounce of caring left.  Getting the agents out was their last assignment, and they were going through the motions.  If they all made it out, fine; if not, it was just one more botched mission along with a thousand others.

Within minutes, he could see some agents trickle away.  “Now I’ve seen everything!” said Pepper.  He looked in disbelief at a unicyclist riding by waving the red flag of Vietnam with a yellow star in the center.  The unicyclist was on his way to join others who would form a massive parade the day after the city was liberated by the Communists.

Most of the field operations agents still wore the floppy jungle hats, rubber sandals, and camo green fatigues of the Viet Cong.  Huddled together, these would-be refugees looked like a large turfed section of dried grass.  The agents in civilian dress had been part of the so-called Rural Pacification Program to “win the hearts and minds” of Vietnam’s peasant population so Vietnam could be a cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, what the planners had called a “rice roots” effort at pacification.  Some of them had been at this for twenty years, part of CIA  “black insertions” into the Vietnam heartland in the sixties.

Salt and Pepper were not deserters.  As CIA operatives, they infiltrated the North Vietnamese Army in 1967.  Their mission had been reconnaissance, and to serve as liaison to Vietnamese agents embedded by the CIA in the NVA.  Even the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence wing of the military, had them down as deserters. 

Salt and Pepper had revealed the VC position where Nick Randall spotted them so many years ago.  When Nick radioed for a rocket attack, the ridge had already been identified through military intelligence provided by Salt and Pepper.  The two men had called in an air strike and napalm attack upon themselves.  

Shortly before the fall of Saigon in 1975, Salt and Pepper received orders to lead twelve busloads of Vietnamese CIA agents to the Mekong River, then transport them downriver on a barge, load them on convoy buses, and drive them to a way station in downtown Saigon.  From Saigon, the agents would fly on fixed wing aircraft to the Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines for debriefing and preparation for entry to the States.  Salt and Pepper successfully completed their part of the mission, but once in Saigon, everything fell apart like the loose end of a string.

The CIA assessment of how long South Vietnam could hold out was dead wrong.  Salt and Pepper knew the North Vietnamese forces were attacking Saigon, and bombarding the airport, but they had no idea how rapidly time was running out.  The South Vietnamese Army was in a disorderly and costly retreat, hoping to set up a defensive position south of the 13th parallel.  Every few days, the North Vietnamese captured another city, first Hue at the end of March, then Da Nang three days later.  The CIA recommended B-52 strikes on Hanoi, but it was too late. By April 29, 100,000 North Vietnamese troops surrounded Saigon.  Half of Salt and Pepper’s agents were either injured or sick, and all of them were weak from hunger and thirst, but most were ready to leave.

It took Salt and Pepper until April 30 to establish an evacuation point, but not until  a VC rocket destroyed a C-130 while it taxied in to pick up evacuees.  Now only one runway was fit for use.  Hours later, a defecting South Vietnamese pilot dumped all his ordnance on the remaining runway.  The Pentagon had based their evacuation plans on fixed wing aircraft.  Now helicopter evacuation was the only option.  Salt and Pepper moved their 250 agents by bus from their pick-up point to the Defense Attache Office compound adjacent to the bombed out Tan Son Nhut Airport. Their particular route was code-named the Santa Fe Trail.  

 As they arrived, they were surrounded by snipers, ground, rocket, and artillery fire.  Waves of 7th Fleet marines had landed the day before to secure the perimeter defenses with rifle companies and mortar platoons.  Other platoons were deployed to support the evacuation at the Embassy.  The soldiers had a fight both in front of them and behind them.  The North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong wanted in, and South Vietnamese citizens wanted out.  Both targeted the marines.  Now even the marines were pulling out, as North Vietnamese tanks started to roll into the city unopposed.  Salt and Pepper cut down all the trees in the vicinity of the compound parking lot to make sure the one available helicopter had room to land.

At first light on April 30, Salt and Pepper finally began loading the war weary agents into a troop deployment pod underneath the fuselage of  a Sikorsky CH-53 heavy lift helicopter.    The big choppers with two rotors were the same ones the Marines had used when they arrived to protect the evacuation.  With no equipment, they could load one pod with about 85 agents, way above the load maximum for fully-equipped soldiers.  Salt counted heads as the distraught agents clambered into the pod.  It started to rain.  The air smelled of tear gas.

One agent wanted out so bad he panicked, and refused to wait his turn on the second trip.  He tried to claw his way into the first fully-loaded pod as the giant crane-like chopper groaned to lift off with its super heavy load.  Pepper shot him dead between his shoulder blades with his sidearm, then dragged his body through the door of the office building. While Salt and Pepper were preoccupied disposing the body, an old Vietnamese woman hurled a swaddled baby in the air.  The baby landed in the middle of the pod, and disappeared under cover, its cries muffled by the noise.

The single chopper made three two-hour round trips to complete the evacuation, hot refueling on a helipad at the stern of the USS Blue Ridge before the return trips.   The final bird lifted off from the DAO parking lot as the Marines detonated thermite grenades they had placed in the compound buildings to dispose of everything inside.  The body was incinerated along with all the records.  Tear gas billowed in the air, and blinded the chopper pilot’s eyes.  They almost crashed.  Salt and Pepper were on the last flight out.  

In the air, Salt and Pepper could see  F-14 Tomcats protecting the air evacuation routes over the South China Sea.  In the noisy human cargo of the pod, Salt noticed all faces were turned towards the limitless sea.  Not a single man looked back on the land.  There sight limited by the darkness of the jungle and the edges of rice paddies, they gazed at the boundless sea.  Even with all the danger and strife the agents had faced in Vietnam, suspension from a helicopter over water offered a novel way to experience fear and death. They all looked like they were about to take their last gasp.  The wind was picking up, and the pod swayed like the stone end of a slingshot.

“We look like a railcar of cattle on the way to the slaughterhouse.” Salt hollered in Pepper’s ear.

“We’ve been in guerilla war, regular war, and night reconnaissance... we’ve had to stand by and watch the VC beat and kill prisoners...you’d think this little hop would be easy,” said Pepper.

“It would be a damned shame to survive all these years to die now,” Salt said.  “We’ve been in the perishable section of the supermarket for a long time.”

“Human leftovers with no expiration date,” Salt said.

As they approached the Navy ships, the long-distance warrior eyes scanned a surreal disarray on the over-crowded decks.  Sailors were frantically pushing unloaded helicopters overboard; some were ditching in the sea. On its approach to the ship, their Sikorsky Pratt & Whitney engines flamed out from fuel starvation, and pitched into the Gulf of Tonkin.  The cumbersome pod tipped over forty feet above the water.  There were a few agents with life vests on.  They were the most unlucky.  Their necks broke when they hit the water.  Twenty of the eight-five men in the pod drowned or died of other causes in the water.   The rest were recovered by boat, including Salt and Pepper.  Taken out of the first pod by her father, and her mother who had disguised herself as a man, the baby survived.

Of the original 250, about two hundred agents made it to the Seventh Fleet, and eventually were expedited through Clark Air Force Base and back to the States.  Other than the twenty lost at sea, most of the remainder stayed behind because of dependents.  Many of these were later captured, beaten, jailed, sentenced to hard labor, or killed.  A few were re-assigned by the CIA to in-country missions in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Some disappeared in the jungle or faded into the enemy.  The only equipment to make it out that day was Salt’s Remington Pump and the World War ! bayonet; even the magnificent Sikorsky CH-53 was lost at sea along with one hundred other choppers involved in the evacuation.