The last two weeks I was there are a bit of a blur, so I will not attempt to put exact dates on what took place. The only battle the ARVN won in the whole wretched affair was 40 miles up the road from Saigon at Xuan Loc. It was a hollow and short-lived victory, as the troops would have been better employed in defending the outskirts of Saigon. They held off the NVA and VC for 10 days, and then the NVA simply bypassed them. Cut off, the ARVN 18th Division plus 3,000 rangers and paratroopers — one-half the strategic reserve for Saigon — were slowly destroyed.

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Back at the base, with the approval of the COB, I put out an order that all files were to be either destroyed (shredded and burned) or immediately shipped out to Langley. Every case officer could keep one file folder no more than 1 inch thick for the most essential documents he needed to keep doing his job. There were howls of protest, but I knew most case officers were pack rats, and there were a couple of instances of African stations or bases being overrun during civil wars and the safes left full of classified material. Back in the 1950s, we had thermite grenades on hand in case of such an emergency, but that seemed to have gone out of style. I was determined that if the NVA overran Saigon, they would not find any Saigon base files.

Most of the case officers complied, but on Sunday, April 13, one of them squealed on another one. The guilty party was a police intelligence liaison officer. I opened his safe, and the entire top drawer was full. His files were as well organized as any I had ever seen, but they had to go. I got the man on the phone and told him that if he had not destroyed or shipped them by the next morning I would burn them myself. He did.

When the time came to leave, the Saigon base was swept clean. Unfortunately, the same was not true of other repositories, particularly the embassy. The ambassador would not let his staff clean out their safes, since he was still living in a dream world, hoping that some accommodation could be reached with the Communists. Even more important, the South Vietnamese government’s police and intelligence files were abandoned for the North Vietnamese to find. But that’s another story.

The Saigon base had more than 50 people, and in early April we began to thin out the ranks. Every evening, Bill J., his deputy Monty L. and I would have a meeting and decide who should be sent home next. It was then my job to call them into my office the next day and tell them it was time to go. Of course, most of the secretaries were among the first.

I had a problem with some of the case officers, who came up with all sorts of excuses as to why they could not leave right away. My answer was always pretty much the same: I said I had no faith in the embassy evacuation plan, which called for civilian chartered airplanes out of Tan Son Nhut. I had been at Tan Son Nhut the day an NVA missile shot down a VNAF Douglas AC-47 gunship minutes after it took off, so it seemed to me likely that we would be going out in helicopters, and I did not want one of the case officers to be sitting in my seat. Very few of them could argue with that reasoning, since they felt the same way. They went.

At about the same time, all base and station personnel living in outlying areas were asked to move closer to the embassy. There were a number of small apartments now available that had previously been occupied by secretaries. Another officer and I moved into a two-bedroom, one-bath unit directly across the street from the back gate of the embassy.

I drove my car across the street the next morning and was greeted at the gate by a Marine clad in fatigues and toting an M-16. He stopped me, came to port arms and asked, very formally, ‘Sir, are you carrying any photographic or recording equipment, or any firearms?’ He looked about 15 years old, and I thought if I mentioned my mini-arsenal he might flip out, so I lied. I then asked where he had come from, since I knew all the regulars, at least by sight. It turned out that a full platoon of Marines had flown in the night before from Okinawa. Better late than never.

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