The C-5A took off the next day loaded with 230 orphans plus three dozen American women, mostly Defense Attaché Office secretaries and embassy dependents. Over the South China Sea the rear cargo doors blew open at 23,000 feet, damaging the rear control surfaces. Over the South China Sea the rear cargo doors blew open at 23,000 feet, damaging the rear control surfaces. The pilot headed back for Tan Son Nhut, but had to crash-land before he got there. The plane bellied into a rice paddy, then skipped over a river before coming to a stop. The rescue operation was not helped when ARVN troops, who got there first, spent more time looting than assisting. The death toll was put at 206, including the four American secretaries from the Defense Attach Office next door to the Saigon base. I knew all four of them well.

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The next bit of excitement happened on Tuesday, April 8, when a VNAF F-5E fighter-bomber blasted down the street outside our office and dropped two 500-pound bombs in front of the nearby presidential palace. Realizing he had missed, the pilot came around again, which gave me time to get outside for a cautious look at what was going on. He came boring down the street at about 50 feet and dropped his last two 500-pound bombs through the roof of the palace. The pilot’s objective was to kill President Thieu, but his early miss gave Thieu time to reach a bomb shelter.

For 25 years I was under the impression that the pilot was simply fed up with the incompetence of President Thieu. I recently learned that Lieutenant Nguyen Thanh Trung was in fact a North Vietnamese mole who had trained at Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss. His orders from the VC were to drop the first two bombs on the palace and the next two on our embassy. The embassy building was pretty sturdy, but the front building of the Saigon base was a prefab, with the structural integrity of a matchbox. At the time we did not know how lucky we were. Trung subsequently led the April 28 raid on Tan Son Nhut by five captured Cessna A-37 Dragonflys (jet trainers converted to light bombers). As of this writing, Trung is a senior pilot with Vietnamese National Airways.

Old hands used to joke about the time General William Westmoreland issued an unclassified order that civilians were not to carry weapons. They felt as if Westy had painted a bull’s-eye on their backs, and the order was pretty widely ignored. During my time in Saigon, most of us did not carry pistols, though I tucked my .38-caliber snub-nosed Smith & Wesson into a belt holster under my bush shirt when I had an agent meeting in some place like Cholon.

The Tet Offensive of 1968 was always hovering in the back of our minds, reinforced by Radio Hanoi referring to a ‘popular uprising.’ As the NVA surged south, we thought about the possibility of a repeat performance. After my wife left, I started carrying the .38 and extra ammo all the time. I had a .45 in my car, an M-2 carbine at home, and more pistols and submachine guns in a safe drawer in the office. Feeling a little embarrassed about this, on the first morning I walked into Bill J.’s office and lifted my shirttail to display the gun. Bill laughed and stood up, pulling a 9mm Browning Hi-Power from his pocket.

Even stranger: I was the main point of contact with the half-dozen Army, Navy and Air Force attachés who worked out of the office across the courtyard from us. The Army attaché came to see me and asked if I could arrange for them to obtain some .45s. They were moving all over the Saigon–Gia Din district to keep on top of the situation, and were uncomfortable without some personal protection. I found it hard to believe, but their main office out at Tan Son Nhut had no weapons to give them. I passed the request up to the COS, who got the ambassador’s permission. Then I took the attachés down the hall to our office of security, where they signed for the required number of .45s and plenty of ammo.

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