‘Damned if I know,’ he replied.

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‘But what am I supposed to do?’ I said.

‘Do the best you can,’ was his answer.

If I had revealed those ad hoc instructions to the North Vietnamese, they would have thought I was trying to trick them, for everything they did, including specifying where we parked the C-130 at Gia Lam airport in Hanoi, had a political purpose. The C-130 had to be parked so that the passengers on the Chinese commercial flight to and from Canton had to walk under the wing of the U.S. aircraft to get in and out of the air terminal, evidently as a form of humiliation.

Hanoi, as might be imagined, was jubilant, with crowds thronging the streets. After years of struggle they had won on the battlefield what they had failed to win at the negotiating table.

‘You know you never beat us on the battlefield,’ I said to Colonel Tu, my NVA counterpart.

‘That may be so,’ he said, ‘but it is also irrelevant.’

As expected, the North Vietnamese gave me the terms of the U.S. withdrawal. The DAO, which North Vietnam’s propagandists falsely claimed numbered in the thousands, had to go in its entirety, they said. The FPJMT (whom they had been trying to involve in negotiations over reparations for war damage in return for information about POW/MIAs) had to stay, and the U.S. embassy could work out its own future.

Returning to Saigon, I was met by Eric von Marbod, then Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger’s personal representative. ‘That was the most screwed up situation in which I had ever been involved,’ I reported. ‘I could have given them a nuclear ultimatum and they would have believed me!’

‘Why didn’t you?’ he said, only half in jest. I have since often wondered what would have happened if President Ford, then reportedly busy playing golf in a tournament in California, had done just that. But, like Pontius Pilate, both he and the Congress had washed their hands of Vietnam.

In the meantime, the NVA had continued to close the ring on Saigon. Sixteen NVA divisions were now poised for a three-pronged attack on the southern capital. The bitter end was at hand.

Earlier, anticipating that we might stay after the fall of Saigon, the U.S. FPJMT delegation had been drastically scaled back. Most of our military personnel had relocated to Thailand to form a rear detachment. And on April 20, 1975, the Pentagon authorized a special flight to evacuate all of our Vietnamese civilian employees and their families to Guam.

Remaining were Army Colonel John H. Madison, Jr., the delegation’s chief; myself; my deputy, Army Captain (now Colonel) Stuart A. Herrington; Army Master Sgt. William B. Herron; Marine Gunnery Sgt. Ernest Pace; and Bill Bell.

For the past several weeks we had been busy assisting General Smith and the DAO staff with the fixed-wing evacuation of U.S. civilians, their families and selected Vietnamese personnel. We were constantly receiving priority messages from Washington directing us to pick up and evacuate senior Vietnamese officials and their families whose lives were in jeopardy because of the assistance they had rendered to the United States during the course of the war. Complicating this process was the fact that the South Vietnamese government had forbidden such an exodus, and South Vietnamese security police barred the gates at Tan Son Nhut. But thanks to the ingenuity of Captain Herrington, a superb officer and fluent Vietnamese linguist, these difficulties were overcome.

One of the most poignant moments came during the evacuation of the families of counterparts in the South Vietnamese FPJMT Delegation. One ARVN colonel was tearfully saying what he thought were his final goodbyes to his wife and children at the ramp of the aircraft carrying them to safety.

Suddenly, Herrington said to him, ‘Get on the plane!’

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