"IS THIS WHAT AMERICA HAS LEFT?"

Only a few years ago, it pulsed with a kind of frontier vigor.

It was still the site of a sprawling, bustling, seemingly impregnable American military compound, filled with thousands of free-spending U.S. Marines and G.I.s. By the time it fell to the Communist attackers last week, Danang had become demoralized and swollen beyond recognition with refugees. TIME Correspondent William Me Whirter spent several days there until he was ordered to depart on an emergency evacuation flight to Saigon. His report:

At first there seemed to be no sense of impending disaster, no awareness of the mortal enemy gathering strength in the dark outside the city. Restaurants, cinemas and pool halls remained open and crowded; the seedy waterfront bars, lit with garish neon, and the French-style cafes were packed with people, especially the young. A 19-year-old university student from Hue typified the air of unreality. He was not in uniform, he said, because he had to complete his studies. But what if there was to be no more university? he was asked. "The government could not let that happen," he said, shocked. "The Americans would not let them." Soldiers seemed to be everywhere but at the front. They strolled in casual groups of two or three throughout the town. Jeeps were filled with courting couples or officers cruising from bar to bar.

Even the refugees who flowed unendingly into the city showed few tears and little panic. From the old imperial capital of Hue, 50 miles to the north, the lines moved in silence, sometimes edging forward down the packed roads at the frustrating rate of only 20 miles a day. In all, 500,000 people swarmed into the city, doubling Danang's population in a matter of days. Amazingly, most of them were swiftly absorbed, off the streets, out of the makeshift sidewalk shelters and shanties. They moved into all of Danang's 100 schools (8,000 packed into a single high school) and, with no direction from government authorities, quickly organized leadership committees, nominating a senior person in every classroom. Though some emergency rice arrived from volunteer relief groups, the refugees' survival was largely in their own hands. Somehow it worked -- for a while.

But soon, as the word spread that not only were district towns giving way but also capital cities and whole provinces, a desperate unease gripped Danang. With it came a growing hatred and confusion that are new even to this war. Gradually the city realized that it might not be safe after all, that the war was going much worse than anyone had feared. The news of the fall of Hue, which everybody expected the government to defend, came as a severe shock. Equally frightening, the dusty buses pathetically crowded with refugees were no longer coming in only from the northern provinces; they were arriving from the south as well, bringing with them the terrible news that the escape route down the coast was cut. Danang was sealed off. There was no way out except by sea or by air.

Quickly the mood of the city turned frightened and ugly.

Banks simply ran out of cash as people rushed to withdraw their money. More and more disbanded soldiers, their guns slung carelessly over their shoulders, crowded the streets; some of them were raucously drunk. One came up and put his hand against my chest and started to push, looking into my eyes without saying a word until his friends led him off. At the harbor, the troops withdrawn from Hue disembarked in mixed units, arriving in the confused state of a total rout. Enlisted men and officers alike dispensed with the niceties of rank or discipline. No one saluted, no one marched or regrouped. They just got off and wandered into town with their friends.

On the city's outskirts, new refugees grouped, once again in orderly fashion, by hamlets and villages. They occupied every available structure and open space outside the center of town: stretches of beach, the peeling hulks of former U.S. Army officers' clubs, a series of garages the size of airplane hangars that was once the property of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. There was no evidence of help from the government anywhere. Not a single Vietnamese official appeared, not a single bag of rice was delivered. Not even the police, who are usually concerned about Viet Cong infiltration into refugee caravans, bothered to show up. The National Assemblymen and local elected leaders, worried by stories that the North Vietnamese were killing civil servants in the towns they occupied, were busy saving themselves and their families. The mayor of Danang, an ARVN colonel, one night declared to a friend his passionate intention of remaining with his people; the next day he put his wife and entire family on a plane to Saigon, a luxury that not even the rich can afford without the right connections.

But it was not the government the people blamed. It was the Americans. No longer did those benevolent trucks show up loaded with bags of rice stamped "U.S.A.," nor were there the blankets or all those well-armed G.I.s waving and smiling to the children. Two of us got out of a Jeep with a camera and a note pad, looked around and asked a few questions. The Vietnamese used to tolerate the attention of these little inspection trips because they anticipated that, invariably, it would bring them something better. Now they know it will bring them nothing but a few muttered apologies, and they reveal a palpable sense of abandonment. "Look at this! Look at this!" one father began to scream, his voice shaking with rage and emotion. "The water is filthy, the children have diarrhea, we have no food. Is this what America has left us?"As our Jeep pulled away from one group of people, a rock hit the windshield.

The Vietnamese here were showing an emotional side that few Americans have ever seen. They were full of hatred. "Vietnamese soldiers and Vietnamese people hate the Americans so much," said Cao Van Tarn, 24, a private who arrived from Hue with his legs and one arm riddled with shrapnel. "The Americans have left us without notice, without aid."

By midweek the unease, the anger and the frustration had all boiled over into undisguised panic. One morning several rockets aimed at the airport fell short, striking the adjoining hamlet; six were killed and 36 wounded. With company-level engagements taking place just a few kilometers away, it was all too evident that the city was desperately vulnerable. Food was running low, and nobody knew how many more shipments would come in before it ran out altogether.

Many began frantically trying to find some way out of Danang by air. In one day, the price of a single one-way air ticket to Saigon on the black market jumped from $51 to $140. The traffic halted only when the military took control of the Air Viet Nam flights to provide for their own families. Then came the welcome promise that the U.S. would begin an airlift to take 10,000 people a day to Cam Ranh, a half-hour's trip by air some 200 miles to the south. But still there was panic. Even the so-called priority evacuation flight, limited to Americans and Vietnamese with proven U.S. connections, brought hundreds of people stampeding to the gleaming white U.S. consulate. Mimeographed consulate passes were photocopied and the forgeries passed on or sold to close friends or relatives. Even access through the guarded entrance to the airport became subject to bribes. By the morning of the priority flight, thousands of Vietnamese were besieging planes on the landing strip. The airport was described as "insecure," and not because of the enemy. Under these conditions it was hard to imagine a single Vietnamese civil servant willing to stay on the ground and organize the promised U.S. evacuation, much less how it could possibly be organized.

The first plane out of the city, the priority flight, was reserved for Americans -- the consular staff, reporters and other civilians -- along with a few favored Vietnamese families. As the plane lifted off the runway in a steep, powerful climb, there was a strange sense of irreversible change. These evacuees were among the last Americans to leave Danang, finally ending a presence that had once symbolized America's involvement in Indochina. There was a powerful sense of tragedy too: they were leaving behind not a people grateful for the years of American sacrifice in Viet Nam but a people feeling bitterly betrayed. Now, for better or worse, Danang will be left to the will of the South Vietnamese and the mercy of the invading armies. None of the Americans can be certain that they will ever see Danang again. And if they do, even though sooner than now seems possible, this city will never be the same, for the Vietnamese or for us.

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