Turning Off the Last Lights

The black bus, its windows wire-meshed to ward off rocks and grenades, rolled through the gate into Tan Son Nhut Air base on the edge of Saigon. Special police and South Vietnamese air force guards--ordinarily sticklers for formality--barely glanced up as they waved the vehicle on. Among the mixed load of American and Vietnamese passengers was Howard Hagen, an aircraft technician from Odessa, Texas, and more recently from Danang, South Viet Nam. "I just wish it hadn't turned out this way," said Hagen. "I'm leaving with a sad heart."

Day and night last week the black buses rolled into Tan Son Nhut. Every half-hour the silver C-141 Starlifters and C-130 Hercules transports of the U.S. Air Force flew out another 100 or so Americans, their Vietnamese dependents and other Vietnamese whose lives might be endangered by the imminent Communist takeover of South Viet Nam. Before the week was out, some 30,000 refugees had been deposited in diverse havens (see following story). These included a tent city at U.S.-controlled Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines; a tin city of corrugated-roof barracks in Guam, once used by the crews of the B-52 bombers that devastated much of Indochina before Congress grounded them in August 1973; barracks at huge Travis Air Force Base in Northern California; an Evangelical church in the sere hills of Los Gatos, 50 miles south of San Francisco; a beer hall in Mount Angel, Ore., where Benedictine sisters from a nearby priory were attending the confused, weary children, many of them polio victims.

Most U.S. immigration requirements were waived for the emergency. Vietnamese passengers carried a certificate addressed to the immigration officer at the U.S. port of entry: "The below-listed alien dependents have been granted parole status by the Attorney General for entry into the United States without immigrant visa."

The word dependents was defined more and more loosely as the airlift progressed--partly because, as one American businessman put it, the Vietnamese extended family is "like a chain letter," stretching to include a virtually endless stream of cousins, nephews, grandmothers and in-laws. One American departed from Tan Son Nhut with 39 "dependents." A U.S. businessman recognized a couple of prostitutes he had seen at the Palace Hotel bar in Saigon and discovered that they were leaving under a new "no-marriage clause"--which meant, in effect, that in the crisis, a departing American can take his girl friend along. They, and thousands of other "endangered Vietnamese," as President Ford had referred to them, were being whisked through the lines with a wink and a free can of Fanta to drink as they waited in the blazing sun.

The hastily organized processing center was set up in the old U.S. command headquarters where General William Westmoreland once ran the Viet Nam War. The first step--filing a simple affidavit of dependency--took place in the base movie theater, whose seats had been ripped out and replaced with desks. Men, women and children lugged their belongings in suitcases, backpacks and paper bags past the box office to the popcorn counter, where they filled out the forms. Muted and bewildered by the hundreds of desks around them, the Vietnamese wandered through the moviehouse trying to figure out what they were expected to do. "Find out where we get our shots and let's get out of here!" shouted an American husband caught in the sweating crowd.

In the base gymnasium, where G.I.s once played basketball, alien dependents were approved for airlifting. Then came the long wait--often as much as 24 hours. Clusters of people hunkered down under parachutes whose canopies were spread above the tennis courts for shade. The bowling alley became a nursery, and babies swarmed over all twelve lanes, sucking oranges, nibbling loaves of bread and urinating in the gutters as if the gutters had been built for precisely that purpose.

The evacuation got under way on an emergency basis when, in the wake of Nguyen Van Thieu's resignation as President, the U.S. Government belatedly accepted what had long been obvious: Saigon was in danger of an overwhelming attack and a complete military collapse. For weeks the Defense Department had wanted to step up the pace of the evacuation. The Pentagon, however, had been stymied by U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, who--along with his boss, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--feared that such an operation might ignite widespread panic and possible retaliation against those who were getting out. "We were sending planes," a Defense official fumed, "and they were coming back half and two-thirds empty."

Over the weekend, the Washington Special Action Group (known as WASAG and including ranking officials from the State and Defense departments and the CIA) convened for an urgent meeting and decided to order Martin to accelerate the sluggish pace of the evacuation. That decision was echoed by members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who demanded a speedup. At the beginning of the week, Admiral Noel Gayler, the U.S. commander for the Pacific, paid a secret visit to Martin in Saigon to deliver the same message. Finally, Martin caved in. The day after his meeting with Gayler, the airlift went on a round-the-clock schedule. The day before Martin was jogged, only 444 people got out. The next day, 3,400 got out; the day after that, 4,300; and finally the figure 6,000.

By week's end the American population in Saigon had been reduced to about 1,500, from more than 7,500 at the beginning of April. But the Pentagon was urging that the number be reduced to 800 or 900--the maximum number it figured could be handled by a quick emergency helicopter-lift if all other escape routes were clamped shut. About 24,000 Vietnamese and "third country nationals" had been evacuated during the same period, but there were another 140,000 Vietnamese on the U.S. Government's "endangered" list still waiting for rides--and untold thousands more who would desperately like to leave but were not likely to get the chance (see story page 26).

At the same time, the Pentagon made contingency plans for an all too conceivable eventuality: the closing of Tan Son Nhut by Communist troops or the lethal SA-2 and SA-7 missiles that were being positioned near the airfield. This operation--known as Phase Two--would be carried out by more than 60 giant CH-46 and CH-53 helicopters. The choppers would whirl in from the decks of the U.S. aircraft carriers Hancock, Okinawa and Midway, now standing off South Viet Nam as part of a veritable armada of more than 40 vessels, including two other carriers.

All Americans in Saigon were advised last week that the Mayday signal for Phase Two would be a weather report for Saigon of "105DEG and rising" broadcast over the American Radio Service, followed by the playing of several bars of White Christmas at 15-minute intervals. That message would send the last Americans still in Saigon streaming toward 13 "LZs," or landing zones, situated throughout the downtown district, all atop U.S.-owned or -operated buildings. U.S. fighter planes would be called in from bases in Thailand and home ships of the Seventh Fleet for a dual mission: to knock out the SA-2s and SA-7s before the missiles could be launched against the helicopters, and, perhaps more ominously, bomb and strafe any South Vietnamese soldiers who tried to shoot their way aboard the choppers. "A lot of ARVN are going to want to come along," said one embassy official. "That could make the evacuation a messy scene." But U.S. officials still hoped that this final horror could be avoided.

In the meantime, practically everybody in Saigon seemed to be involved in the scramble to get aboard the airlift. Americans accustomed to being hounded by beggars, prostitutes and money changers suddenly found that they were also being buttonholed by members of the intelligentsia and upper class frantically looking for a way out of the country. Businessmen, scholars and retired officers waved letters postmarked from America, missionary-school diplomas and U.S. Army discharges--any document proving some slender connection with the States. "I know Colonel Hub-bard," announced a well-dressed woman outside the American embassy as she handed a letter to TIME Correspondent Roy Rowan. "Are you Colonel Hub-bard?"

At Saigon's Central Post Office, crowds clawed their way toward the telegram counter from 8 a.m. until the curfew at 8 p.m. Cable traffic quadrupled to 20,000 messages as the cries for help went out round the world. One man in West Virginia got a typical plea couched in garbled but earnest English: "Please send Red Cross to U.S. embassy in Saigon to help me process paper as a fiancee."

Bullhorns echoed on Unity Boulevard as gray-uniformed cops tried to control the crowds seeking exit visas. Every American firm, bank and news organization was besieged by strangers seeking help to get out of Saigon. "My daughter worked here during Tet," one old woman told the manager of a news bureau as she held up a snapshot of the girl. "Can you help me?" A CBS correspondent trying to reach Hong Kong by telex kept typing: "Can you get me Hong Kong?" The Vietnamese operator down the street kept tapping back: "Can you get me out?"

The diplomats were getting out. From a row of houses behind the British embassy, residents watched the top-secret files going up in smoke. "The ashes were flying all over," reported a Vietnamese professor. "We knew that the British were not burning incense for their ancestors." Soon afterward, Ambassador John Christopher Wydowe Bushell, spiffy in a well-pressed safari suit, headed for Tan Son Nhut in his silver Jaguar. The West Germans, the Dutch, the Canadians, the Thais, the Japanese and the Australians departed too, leaving only the French and the Belgians--who maintain diplomatic relations with the North Vietnamese--and, for the time being, the Americans.

Foreigners and frantic Saigonese could see their salvation in the skies as giant U.S. Air Force C-130 and C-141 cargo planes and sleek commercial jets flew endless circles over the city. Among those asking for assistance at the U.S. embassy was none other than the nephew and namesake of Pham Van Dong, the Premier of North Viet Nam. Dong was a university professor in the city. "Don't you trust your uncle? " he was asked. "No," he replied. A group of Indian haberdashers who had made a killing in the lucrative money-changing business made plans to escape by chartering their own Air India flight--in the hope that the plane could still make it to Saigon. Most airlines had already closed down all of their regular operations.

In a sense, the lucky ones were the Vietnamese who qualified for the U.S.'s endangered list. But with time running out, there was no guarantee that the U.S. would be able to remove all of the remaining 140,000 on the list by air. At week's end U.S. planners were reported ready to risk sending the first bargeload of evacuees 70 miles down the snaking Saigon River past the muzzles of enemy guns to Vung Tau. For obvious reasons, details of the plan were a closely kept secret. The sight of 5,000 Vietnamese being hauled away in a single barge could set off exactly the kind of panic in Saigon that Ambassador Martin feared. Worse yet, as one evacuation planner fretted, "we might see 5,000 Vietnamese blown right out of the water."

The whole process of evacuation was beset by such disturbing uncertainty. TAT TAT CA DEN, MAY LANH VA QUAT KHI RA VE, instructed the sign on the bowling-alley wall at evacuation headquarters: "Turn off the lights, air conditioners and fans when leaving." It was an eerie notion that here, in an abandoned American bowling alley that had become a makeshift waiting room for thousands of desperate South Vietnamese, the light at the end of the tunnel was about to be extinguished at last.

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