In anguish the colonel said, ‘I can’t. I can’t desert my country at this desperate moment.’

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‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ said Herrington. ‘It’s all over. President Thieu has left. The others are leaving. Get on the plane and take care of your family.’ The colonel reluctantly complied.

At first I was furious. ‘You know damn well Thieu hasn’t left,’ I said. ‘And you know we’re forbidden to evacuate any members of the armed forces. How dare you put a fellow officer in conflict between his duty and his family.’

But Herrington was right. It was only a matter of time before Thieu left and the country collapsed. Nothing that officer could have done would have changed anything. If he had stayed he would just have added to the numbers of fellow RVNAF officers in Socialist Republic of Vietnam concentration camps where, if he had not died, he would have languished for the next 17 years, for the last imprisoned ARVN officer was not released until 1992.

But, as General Smith has described, this fixed-wing evacuation came to an end with the NVA rocket attack on Tan Son Nhut that killed two Marine security guards, Lance Cpl. Darwin Judge and Corporal Charles McMahon.

On April 29, 1975, we moved from our headquarters at the DAO compound to the U.S. Embassy in downtown Saigon, fully prepared to remain in-country. No sooner had we arrived there, however, than it was found that Secretary of State Kissinger, reportedly in a fit of pique, had ordered all U.S. personnel out of Vietnam, including the FPJMT and the embassy staff.

While the evacuation at the DAO compound had already begun, the only evacuation from the embassy had been by a few Air America UH-1 helicopters from the roof, shuttling key people to the DAO evacuation point. The plan had called for the evacuation of the 100 or so U.S. personnel from the embassy in this manner. All other evacuees were to be bused or helilifted by Air America helicopters to the main evacuation point at the DAO. But that plan had broken down, and already some 3,000 people, about half of them Vietnamese, had crowded within the embassy walls. With the streets of Saigon becoming impassable, there was no way they could be bused to the Tan Son Nhut evacuation point.

There was a large tamarind tree in the embassy courtyard that made it unusable as a landing zone, and Ambassador Martin, evidently seeing the tree as a symbol of his determination not to abandon his post, had refused to have it cut down. But now the end was inevitable, and the tree was finally felled. The landing zone was still blocked, however, by the mass of civilian evacuees. To alleviate the chaos, Colonel Madison volunteered our services to Wolfgang Lehmann, the deputy chief of mission (DCM).

While Marine Major James Kean and his embassy security detail, augmented by some 130 U.S. Marines from the Ground Security Force at the DAO compound, manned the walls to prevent more people from entering the compound, we set about clearing a landing zone in the embassy courtyard and organizing the evacuees for departure. Uneasiness had begun to spread, as the crowd saw the Air America helicopters lifting off the embassy roof. Our worst fear throughout the evacuation was a repeat of the experience at Da Nang earlier in the month, where panic had taken over and it had become impossible even to land, lest the aircraft become mobbed and be unable to take off.

But that never happened at the embassy. For one thing, the Marine security guards were able to secure the walls and prevent the thousands in the streets outside from overrunning the compound. For another, Captain Herrington, Sergeants Herron and Pace and Specialist Bell (all of whom spoke Vietnamese) were able to assure the crowd that they were not going to be abandoned.

The first task was to clear the embassy courtyard. Under the control of Gunnery Sgt. Pace (our ‘inside man’), most of those in the courtyard area were sent into the embassy itself, later to be evacuated from the roof as CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters began arriving from the fleet offshore. The rest were herded into the CRA (Combined Recreation Association) compound next door. Site of the embassy club and swimming pool, it was separated from the embassy itself by the firehouse and a chain-link fence.

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