I have three pages of four from an
English language newspaper I carried with me on the evacuation and I
have no idea in the world what happened to the fourth, but it is a
heartrending account of a Vietnamese reporter who was in the midst of
this disaster. ( See the journalist Nguyen Tu below for some excerpts) His continual recitations of the Americans, Koreans and
others who had lost their lives in the defense of South Vietnam which
had now been for naught is depressing to say the least. One of the most
powerful pieces I have ever read and it kills me to this day whenever I
think of it.
===================
By the time that the last straggling men, women, and children had reached Tuy
Hoa on the coast; 300,000 civilians, 40,000 ARVN, and 6,300 Rangers were
missing, never to be accounted for.
The Razor’s Edge
By noon on March 16, a mass of humanity; troops, dependents, civilians,
and deserters; was clogging the old road. Some 400,000 civilians, 60,000 ARVN, and 7,000 Rangers began the attempted escape to the sea.29
The withdrawal from Pleiku was now turning into a major disaster. Colonel Ly
described the situation as Kim Tuan’s forces began their intense attacks on
March 18. "The road from Pleiku was terrible. I saw many old people and
babies fall down on the road and tanks and trucks would go over them. Accidents
all the time but everything would keep moving. … Nobody could control
anything. No order. The troops were mixed with the dependents and civilians and
were trying to take care of all the children and wives. You can’t imagine it.
It was terrible. No control. And the enemy squeezed them. Refugees were strung
out all the way from Cheo Reo back to the point where Route 7B and Route 14
fork. [A distance of about 40 kilometers.] I walked under fire."
32
Even before the mass of refugees was half way toward their goal of reaching
the coast, any semblance of discipline among the soldiers had disappeared. Food
supplies ran out and the men began to pillage the villages along Route 7B. There
were many incidences of murder and rape. By March 18, some 200,000 desperate
people were trapped in the vicinity of Cheo Reo. And the communists continued to
fire at them with small arms and artillery from the hills on both sides of the
road. General Smith has called it a "turkey shoot."
The former Commander of the ARVN Artillery Command, General Thin, described
the retreat as follows: "We must salute the battalion commanders and lower
officers for having marched with their units but they were no longer able to
control their famished and tired men. The soldiers kept shouting insults at
President Thieu for this impossible and terrible retreat. Some reached the limit
of their despair and killed their officers. An artillery battalion commander who
was marching in the retreating column was shot to death by some Rangers who
wanted his beautiful wristwatch. The despair was so great that at one point two
or three guerrillas arriving at the scene could make prisoners of a hundred
Rangers. Wives and children of retreating soldiers died of hunger and sickness
along the road. It was a true hell."
33
The journalist Nguyen Tu, who was in Cheo Reo on March 18, wrote: "On
the heels of the refugees evacuating Pleiku and Kontum, the people of Cheo Reo
were also leaving their city. Refugees evacuating Pleiku and Kontum who reached
Cheo Reo in small groups made the long journey in two days. The majority [were]
still far behind, dragging their feet on the dirty road under a scorching sun by
day and chilled by night in the forests. It was not possible to say how many
children fell during the walk, how many helpless old people were standing along
side the road unable to move, how many others were suffering from thirst and
hunger during the walk to freedom and democracy. A Ranger officer told me, ‘This
time, I can never look straight to my people again.’ A private said, ‘Damn
it, we got away without any fighting. I prefer to fight and run away if we lose.
I will accept that.’ An Air Force captain said, ‘It is sad, very sad,
especially when we look back at Pleiku, a deserted city now. We can see only
fires and fires. I am very sad.’ Another soldier added, ‘I am stunned. …
Look at these people, the young ones. Isn’t this miserable?’"
He continued, "Women, children, youngsters, and the elderly – all in
small groups with their belongings either on their backs or in their hands –
rushing out of their houses as they saw the convoy approaching. The same scenes
of plundering and ransacking of homes by unidentified people reappeared. …
Many sections of town were set on fire. … Cheo Reo has capitulated not to the
enemy but [to] its own. … After Kontum and Pleiku on Sunday, Cheo Reo became a
lost town on Tuesday."
34
The next day Tu’s dispatch read, "the leading part of our convoy got
through the ambush point under a screen of supporting fire. But the tail end had
to leave the road and pass through the jungle. I was in the tail end. Rebel
mountain tribesmen armed with our [American] weapons and Communist B-41 rockets
and AK-47 rifles shot into the convoy, while Communist artillery struck from all
directions. Many trucks were hit by shells and burst into flames and exploded.
The trucks were crammed with soldiers, children, and old people. They fell
everywhere. Those who walked fell to machine gun bullets. Their blood flowed in
tiny streams. The roaring artillery, crackling small arms, screams of the dying
and crying of the children combined into a single voice from hell.
"The Rangers resisted all night, permitting the tail end of the convoy
to flee into the jungle.
"At last, 200 of us succeeded in climbing up Chu Del hill, about six
miles from Cheo Reo, 210 miles north of Saigon. Helicopters contacted us and
moved in for rescue. The operation was difficult, because Chu Del is a narrow
and steep hill. Finally, in an operation that evening and the next morning, 200
people were lifted out and rescued."35
The following Sunday, March 23, a photographer for United Press International
named Lim Thanh Van was able to get a ride on a helicopter piloted by Captain
Huynh My Phuong. The pilot’s mission was supposed to be "to destroy
communists." However, Captain Phuong spotted a group of refugees huddled on
top of the same hill from which Nguyen Tu had been rescued earlier. Captain
Phuong dropped down to pick up as many of them as he could. As he pulled up, an
old woman and an old man holding a child lost the grip that they had managed to
get on the skids and fell to the ground. The pilot was quickly notified of the
fact that the child’s mother had made it on board in the mad scramble, and he
started to turn back. Lim Than Van later wrote, "Phuong, tears in his eyes,
tried to swing his helicopter around and pick up the abandoned child. He could
not, because he already had so many aboard. We dropped his load of refugees at
the province capital of Tuy Hoa and flew back, Phuong urging his helicopter on
in an attempt to pick up the ones left behind. When we got there, they were gone
….
"Communist artillery, attacks by mountain tribesmen and dissident
troops, the heat, the sheer struggle, the hardships have killed – who knows
how many died?
"Vehicles lie along Highway 7B, route of retreat from the Central
Highlands provinces of Pleiku, Kontum, and Phu Bon. So do the dead children,
women and old men. For miles and miles, people look up to us, falling on their
knees, begging for rescue. Phuong saw a communist mortar team firing at one
group of persons in the convoy. He and his following gunships furiously
attacked. The mortars stopped."
Journalist Lim recorded, "It is against Phuong’s orders to stop and
pick up people, but he said he must. The door gunners ran out to pick up
children, old people. Others, including government Rangers, ran for the
helicopters. I fell down and had ten persons on my back. I didn’t even feel
any pain, worrying only that the children wouldn’t get on the chopper. In the
helicopter, I was pinned down by people. I couldn’t even click my camera.
"No one knows how many people have died in this most incredible convoy
down Highway 7B. No one likely ever will. Babies are born on the route. More
die. The sheer incomprehensible terror is not only on Highway 7B.
"At Pleiku last Sunday, the last planes took off before the town was
abandoned to the communists. Old Mrs. Khien told me the huge crowd trying to get
on the last three C-130 transports looked like a huge dragon dance, pushing,
shoving, up and down, back and forth. People grabbed for the tail, falling off
as the plane taxied. Just as the last one took off, a small baby fell out of the
aircraft, killed instantly as it hit the tarmac, she said.
"And at Tuy Hoa [on the coast] sits major Ly Van Phuc, generally
recognized as the best field information officer in the South Vietnamese Army.
Phuc was away at training school when Pleiku was evacuated. His wife and eight
children were somewhere between Pleiku and Tuy Hoa on the convoy of death."
Richard Blystone, then working for the Associated Press, reported from Tuy
Hoa, " The helicopters spill out weeping women and children limping on bare
feet and soldiers in blood-caked camouflage fatigues. Some carry satchels and
straw baskets; some have nothing but their lives. An Army major, hoping his
family has made the 150-mile march from Pleiku, watches each incoming helicopter
intently. An old woman drops down on the grass near the helicopter pad. ‘Now I
know I am alive,’ she says. She has been on the road a week.
"‘It was such misery I cannot describe it,’ says a mother after
frantically searching for her ten children and finding that they are all there.
"Two children arrive alone. Their father put them aboard a helicopter
thinking that their pregnant mother was on board. But she was not.
"A school teacher says that his family walked through the jungle to
avoid North Vietnamese shellfire and thought their luck had changed when they
were able to climb aboard a truck. But later they realized that their
five-year-old child was missing in the scramble.
"The refugees are flown to this coastal province headquarters about 240
miles northeast of Saigon from a stalled refugee column that ends 15 miles to
the southwest. Outgoing choppers carry ammunition, rice and bread – some of
which the helicopter pilots pay for out of their own pockets. Flying from Tuy
Hoa toward the column, the reasons why the refugees cannot move soon become
evident. Six miles from the city, a blackened armored truck sits in the road
beside a flattened burned out hamlet. This is as far as relatives of the
refugees hoping to meet their loved ones dare to go. …
"The retreating soldiers at the head of the column have set up several
camps beside the road. Farther on, cars, trucks and busses are clustered in a
bizarre traffic jam in the middle of nowhere. Other vehicles are backed up at a
half-completed bridge across a river. Viet Cong shells have been hitting near
the river crossing, killing and wounding many persons, the refugees say.
"Earlier in the week, they say, more than 100 persons, mostly civilians,
were killed by shellfire near Cong Son, ten miles back.
"The column trails out of sight into the foothills where a cloud of gray
smoke rises; officers say that there are about 35, 000 refugees near [that fire]
and anther 30,000 stretching back to Cong Son, where a Ranger group harassed by
communist fire brings up the rear. How many hundreds are left behind along the
rest of the more than 150 miles to the abandoned Central Highlands capitals of
Pleiku and Kontum no one knows."
36
By the time that the last straggling men, women, and children had reached Tuy
Hoa on the coast; 300,000 civilians, 40,000 ARVN, and 6,300 Rangers were
missing, never to be accounted for. While General Phu had said that the
withdrawal could be completed in three days, some of those who had left Pleiku
on or about the 16
th of March were still staggering down Route 7B
when the North Vietnamese captured Tuy Hoa on April 1.
37
General Cao Van Vien, the last chairman of the South Vietnamese Joint General
Staff, summarized the situation this way; "Psychologically and politically,
the self-inflicted defeat of II Corps in the Highlands amounted to a horrible
nightmare for the people and armed forces of South Vietnam. Confusion, worries,
accusations, guilt, and a general feeling of distress began to weigh on
everybody’s mind. Rumors spread rapidly that territorial concessions were in
the making. The immediate impact of the rumors was to unleash an uncontrollable
surge of refugees seeking by all means and at all costs to leave whatever
provinces remained of Military Region II. To the north, Military Region I also
felt the repercussions. Its population soon joined the refugees and battered
troops streaming south along the coast. First, they rushed into Phan Rang and
Phan Thiet (on the coast south of Nha Trang), and then moved on toward Saigon.
In the national capital itself, the opposition increased its activities and
irreparably widened the government’s credibility gap. Confidence in the armed
forces also swung down to its lowest ebb. Demonstrators angrily demanded the
replacement of President Thieu; they also vigorously voiced anti-American
sentiment. A pervasive hope still lingered, however, for some miraculous thing
to happen that could save Vietnam."
38
