Recollections of the Fall

South Viet Nam's onetime leaders reflect on their defeat

Viet Nam won't go away. The war rages on in an extravaganza of movies (The Deer Hunter), in novels and memoirs (Dispatches), and now in the headlines about Viet Nam's attack on neighboring Cambodia. Until recently, however, there was a major gap in all the public recollections: there was no systematic analysis by senior leaders of South Viet Nam of their country's sudden and crushing defeat in 1975.

Last week that gap was filled. In an impressively restrained but at times moving report entitled The Fall of South Vietnam, published by the Rand Corp., 27 high-ranking former military officers and government officials who managed to escape from Saigon set forth their candid views on the disaster. The 131-page report was compiled and written by three senior Rand staffers, Stephen T. Hosmer, Konrad Kellen and Brian M. Jenkins, who hoped to fill out the record "before memories dimmed and mythology set in." Their interviewees ranged from former Premier Nguyen Cao Ky to former Ambassador to the U.S. Bui Diem to 13 generals. One who refused to participate: former President Nguyen Van Thieu, who now lives quietly in a London suburb.

Thieu was wise to stay away. More than any other person, he emerges as the major scapegoat, a latter-day Marie Antoinette, water-skiing and playing tennis as Hanoi's legions stormed toward Saigon. Instead of providing leadership, the report says, he was "so vague that on many occasions long meetings were held by the ministerial council just for the purpose of interpreting what Thieu might have meant." Though the mistrustful Thieu lived in constant fear of a U.S.-sponsored coup against him and, during the final weeks, changed bedrooms every night, he apparently also believed unwaveringly that the U.S. would somehow rescue Viet Nam at the eleventh hour.

Thieu is especially blamed for the sudden and disastrous decision in mid-March 1975 to abandon the strategic cities of Kontum and Pleiku in the Central Highlands, a move that brought on a rout described by a Vietnamese general as "one of the worst-planned and worst-executed withdrawal operations in the annals of military history." Only 20,000 of the 60,000 troops who had set out on Route 7B from Pleiku made it to the coast, and only 100,000 of the 400,000 civilians. Exhaustion, desertion, capture and death accounted for the rest.

While criticizing Thieu, however, the South Vietnamese officials do not spare themselves. They frankly admit the marsh of corruption surrounding Saigon: the concubines supported by misappropriated funds, the "ghost soldiers" whose paychecks were pocketed by the senior officers. When oil was discovered off the Vietnamese coast, Thieu's first reaction was to talk of increasing an order of limousines for state visitors from two to ten.

Inevitably, though, the Vietnamese blame much of the debacle on the U.S., which gradually took command of the whole war effort and imposed its own training methods, tactics and supplies on South Viet Nam. The Vietnamese became so dependent on the U.S. that when President Nixon threatened a cutoff in U.S. aid if Thieu did not sign the Paris peace accords, Thieu could only give in. Ambassador Bui Diem provides a pathetic vignette of Thieu at San Clemente, where he sought assurance of U.S. help if Hanoi violated the accords. "You can count on us," Nixon said. Thieu was so relieved that he broke out champagne as soon as his plane took off for home.

Even after "Vietnamization"--the gradual replacement of U.S. troops, described by one respondent as the "U.S. Dollar and Vietnamese Blood Sharing Plan"--the repeated pledge of U.S. help seems to have dulled Saigon's comprehension of how perilous its military situation was. Thanks to a congressional reduction in military aid from a requested $1.6 billion to $700 million, Vietnamese troops in early 1975 were down to 200 M-16 rounds per man and ten 105-mm artillery rounds per month, the Rand report says. Fuel shortages in Saigon forced ambulances to be towed around four-in-a-row by trucks.

Abandonment is a word that echoes through the Rand study, and the Vietnamese argue that U.S. withdrawal left them not only short of supplies but psychologically helpless. As Barry Zorthian, former minister-counselor for information of the American embassy in Saigon, said after reading the Rand study: "It pulls together the inherent contradictions in our relationship, that love-hate. There was a Vietnamese way of doing things and an American way of doing things. And we did neither." One of the Vietnamese officials concluded more tersely: "To sum up, the war was lost from its inception."

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