When our son visited in the summer of 1974, we flew to Nha Trang to go snorkeling. Just as we drove up to the consulate guest house, a half-dozen VC B-40 rockets landed in the town. One of them came down in the street about 50 yards away, leaving a hole a foot deep and 2 feet across. Our son commented mildly that he thought the war was supposed to be over. A friend was stationed at one of the subbases in the Central Highlands, together with a young case officer. One morning the young man went out to fuel up their jeep. The jerrycan he picked up had been booby-trapped with a grenade. There were frequent incidents of that sort.

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In December 1974, the NVA made their first serious probe, invading Phuoc Loc province from Cambodia, and by January 7, 1975, they had captured the provincial capital of Phuoc Binh, 100 miles from Saigon. Everyone on our side protested, but nothing else happened.

At about the same time, something occurred that astonished us completely. The embassy had been guarded by a platoon of Marines, under a captain. Now that guard force was reduced to a squad, under a gunnery sergeant.

Next to go, on March 10, was Ban Me Thuot, the capital of Darlac province, in the middle of MR II. The NVA were thus in a position to cut the South in two. Now the NVA tanks came surging down Highway 1, heading for Hue. The 1st Infantry Division, South Vietnam’s best, was well dug in around Hue. President Nguyen Van Thieu panicked and ordered it to retreat to Da Nang. Before the ARVN troops got there, Thieu changed his mind and ordered them back to Hue, but it was too late. They were caught in the open and torn to pieces.

Thieu next ordered a withdrawal from the key Central Highlands city of Pleiku, the headquarters of MR II. The commander was General Pham Van Phu, an incompetent, corrupt and cowardly man who held his position because of his support of President Thieu. Phu withdrew, all right: He loaded his family, even his household furniture, onto helicopters and took off for Nha Trang.

His senior subordinates followed suit. The now-leaderless troops fled in panic down bad roads toward the coast, submerged in a flood of refugees, and were cut to pieces by NVA artillery. There were half a million troops and refugees on this route, and only one in four made it to the coast. General Phu then decamped for Saigon. Just before the fall of the country, he committed suicide.

Since this is my story, I will interrupt this sad tale to explain what I was doing. I was having a really bad feeling about the situation. It seemed to me that the top brass in the embassy were far too sanguine about it. I started to arrange early departure orders for my wife, using the excuse that she wished to rejoin our children in northern Virginia.

Hue fell on March 25, and Da Nang, Vietnam’s second largest city, fell on April 2. The South Vietnamese who escaped always claimed they could have held out if the United States had provided them with more equipment. I have a copy of Stars and Stripes dated April 1, 1975, that lists the equipment abandoned just at Hue and Da Nang: 60 M-48 tanks, 255 armored personnel carriers, 150 105mm howitzers, 60 155mm howitzers, 600 trucks and hundreds of M-16s, machine guns and submachine guns. The total cost of equipment abandoned in MR I and MR II was put at $1 billion and included half the Northrop F-5s, other aircraft and helicopters available to South Vietnam.

In the meantime, my wife’s travel orders had been approved, but by then the embassy was encouraging dependents to leave and was issuing tickets on the spot. She left, protesting, on a Pan American Airways flight on April 3. That evening I received a telephone query: The Air Force was providing a Lockheed C-5A to evacuate as many Vietnamese orphans as possible, and would my wife be willing to act as one of the escorts? Fortunately, she was gone already.

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