10 Years After Vietnam : Marines Vividly Recall Chaos of Last Day in Saigon

U.S. Marine Stephen Bauer remembers standing just inside the huge teak doors of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and lowering his rifle threateningly at South Vietnamese in the courtyard who, horrified by the threat of invading North Vietnamese, were begging to be airlifted to safety from the building’s roof.

Marine Michael Sullivan remembers running up the embassy’s concrete stairwell nine floors to the rooftop helipad--and hearing the crashing sound of South Vietnamese breaking down those very teak doors and chasing him up the stairs, not wanting to be left behind.

And the two men remember sitting atop the embassy as the pre-dawn sky dissolved from black to yellow rose, waiting anxiously--and without radio communication--for American helicopters to pluck them and 100 other embassy guards to safety.

About 5:30 a.m., the first helicopter arrived. Another followed, and another, to ferry the Marines to ships offshore. Finally, just before 8 a.m., the last Chinook helicopter tenderly touched down atop the helipad. Sullivan, Bauer and nine other Marines--literally the last U.S. servicemen in all of South Vietnam--jumped aboard, some of them hesitating, realizing the history of the moment.

As their helicopter crossed the coastline, and 30 years of anguished American involvement in Southeast Asia concluded unceremoniously, the men in the helicopter broke out with applause and cheers.

In the confusion of the next few days, as Marines were transferred from one ship to another, Bauer and Sullivan would lose track of each other.

This past week, as Americans looked back 10 years to relive and reassess the country’s involvement in Southeast Asia, the two men came together for the first time since their rooftop evacuation. Grinning and exchanging hearty handshakes, they sat down for two hours and reminisced, for the benefit of a reporter, about the dramatic last days and hours of Saigon.

Bauer, now a 30-year-old warrant officer, and Sullivan, a 39-year-old master gunnery sergeant, did not even realize they were both assigned to Camp Pendleton until a few days earlier. Their private reunion was in stark contrast to ceremonies Saturday commemorating the 10th anniversary of Camp Pendleton’s remarkable Tent City, a canvass-and-plywood halfway house for 50,000 Southeast Asian refugees who fled their homeland and found themselves at the mercy of a new, strange land.

Presumably, some of the South Vietnamese refugees who gathered on base Saturday for their own reunion were among those who passed by Bauer and Sullivan a decade ago on the lawn of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.

Bauer, who had enlisted in the Marine Corps two years earlier, arrived in Saigon in October, 1974, as a guard assigned to the embassy’s radio communications center, called Dragon. Sullivan enlisted in the Marines in 1966, and served a tour in Vietnam in 1967-68 before returning there in March, 1974, as the assistant noncommissioned officer in charge of the Marine contingent assigned to guard the embassy.

Separated by nine years in age and several grades in rank, Bauer and Sullivan were not especially close while in Vietnam. But, they say, they are bonded by this, their shared story: In April of 1975, the wholesale evacuation of American businessmen, “non-essential” American embassy employees, South Vietnamese employees of the embassy and South Vietnamese friends of the Americans had begun by airlift. Later that month, as the fall of the city became more imminent, officials quickly planned a final flurry of helicopter evacuations. A huge tree on the American embassy’s lawn--a longtime favorite of ambassadors--was cut down to allow helicopters to land if need be.

Several other American-occupied buildings in Saigon would also serve as evacuation centers, and flyers were printed explaining the code that would announce the evacuation. “If the Armed Forces Radio said, ‘The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising,’ followed by 30 seconds of Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas,’ that was the code to begin evacuating,” Bauer said. Unfortunately, the flyers explaining the code were so widely distributed that virtually the whole city knew of it.

Just after midnight on April 29, a rocket attack on Tan Son Nhut airport in Saigon killed two Marine guards, and American officials decided it was time to evacuate. When the overnight curfew lifted shortly after 6 a.m., the evacuation centers were encircled by thousands of South Vietnamese.

“Jolly Green Giant” Sea Stallion helicopters dropped onto the lawn one at a time, and the smaller CH-46 Chinooks landed on the embassy’s rooftop helipad.

After the last American civilians and South Vietnamese employees of the embassy were taken out, the pecking order of who would be evacuated became more informal, somewhat at the whims of the Marine guards.

“The CIA people would point to a Vietnamese who they said was working for us, so we’d let him and his family in,” Bauer said. “Then the friends of the Americans would be allowed into the inner courtyard. After that, it was just pick and choose with no criteria.”

But, Bauer noted, “There was no way we could evacuate all of South Vietnam. We did the best job we could.”

As many as 100 South Vietnamese would be allowed into each of the big choppers; 30 or so went aboard each of the smaller choppers that landed on the rooftop. On the first few flights, they were even allowed to carry suitcases on board. The flights would continue throughout the day and night. There was real concern that the helicopters were being pushed beyond their limits, and exhausted pilots would fall asleep during their two minutes on the ground and would have to be awakened for take-off, Bauer said.

If too many people were crammed on board, the helicopter would shudder on take-off, come back down, and some of the passengers would be taken off.

About 1,100 Americans--including U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin--and 7,000 to 10,000 South Vietnamese were airlifted out of Saigon that day.

But that would be the end of the mass evacuations. With the Tan Son Nhut airfield ablaze, Washington that evening ordered that no more South Vietnamese be taken out. Instead, after midnight, the Marines began withdrawing their guard lines around the outside of the embassy and moved indoors. The South Vietnamese sensed the end was at hand and stormed the embassy, Bauer said.

As about 100 Marines moved to the rooftop to await their own evacuation, 15 or so remained downstairs to close and secure the embassy’s doors.

“The South Vietnamese could see we were closing up, and they came at us,” Bauer said. “We had to point our weapons at them to hold them back.”

Sullivan remembers how a security door, similar to a garage door, was activated to close in front of the teak doors--and that, as it came down, it hit him on the head while he was fighting with a South Vietnamese. The door jammed, and the Marines finally forced the teak doors closed. Huge iron bars were lowered to lock them.

Four floors up, State Department and Marine Corps communications equipment was being destroyed by shotgun fire and hand grenades. On the rooftop, a small smokestack spewed eerie red smoke into the night air as intelligence documents were shredded and burned.

“I ran around on the ground floor to make sure it was secure,” Sullivan said. “I remember seeing four Americans who said they didn’t want to go. I was stunned. But then they said they were reporters, and I said, ‘Fine.’ So I climbed up the stairs.

“I wasn’t running too fast at first, since I’d been on my feet for 20 hours. Then I heard this huge banging. They had rammed the front door with a fire truck that we had forgotten to drain the gasoline out of, and they broke the doors down.

“Every few floors, there was a metal security gate which I’d stop and lock. But they kept on breaking through them, or maybe climbing over the top. By the time I got to the roof, I heard their voices right behind me.”

Sullivan and others closed the steel door on the roof and rolled a large helipad fire extinguisher in front of it. The South Vietnamese weren’t able to budge the door, but they broke its glass window and shouted their pleas to be evacuated.

“They were in the stairwell like sardines,” Bauer said. “We had to throw tear gas (grenades) at them, but some still wouldn’t leave.”

It was 4 in the morning on April 30, and the Marines sat on the helipad, not knowing when the first helicopter would arrive.

“There were no birds (helicopters), it was dark and the people were pounding at the door,” Sullivan said. “One of the Marines looked at me and whispered, ‘Are they (helicopters) coming?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘You haven’t even talked to them!’ So I keyed (activated) my handset and, with everyone now kind of looking at me, said, ‘Roger, we’re waiting for you.’ I told everyone, ‘They’re on the way.’ Everyone seemed to relax but the one guy, who said, ‘You’re lying, you son of a bitch.’ And I said, ‘Shut up!’ ”

But the bluff worked on the others.

About 5:30 a.m.--after then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had already publicly announced that no more Americans remained in Saigon--the first helicopter was spotted flying in with the sunrise. It landed on the helipad, within a few feet of the crouching Marines. Others followed.

Just before 8 a.m., the final chopper flew in for the last 11 Marines, including Sullivan and Bauer. Until then, Bauer had remained in front of the steel rooftop door to guard against the South Vietnamese breaking through. At the last moment, he broke for the helicopter and climbed aboard. The last one to jump in was Master Sgt. John Valdez, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the security force. (Today, Valdez is in San Antonio, Tex., on leave from Camp Pendleton; he will return next week, only to retire after 30 years in the Marine Corps.)

“Once we got airborne, we were still apprehensive,” Sullivan said. “We just stared down at the buildings, the streets, the harbor. We finally got to the coastline, and everyone relaxed. And we noticed we had an escort--four Cobras (helicopter gunships). We finally knew we were safe.”

The flight to the helicopter ship Okinawa lasted 40 minutes; their tour of duty in Vietnam was over.

“We were hugging and slapping each other’s backs. It felt like we just won the World Series,” Bauer said.

After the war, the two men went their separate ways in the Marine Corps. Bauer spent time at a training center in Alaska, and today is a “nuclear biological and chemical defense officer,” assigned to teach troops how to survive in a nuclear war.

Sullivan, meanwhile, spent time in Okinawa, Washington, D.C., and Camp LeJeune in North Carolina, and now watches over 300 troops and $1.5 million worth of communications equipment at Camp Pendleton.

The two men look back on their common experience 10 years ago somewhat matter-of-factly.

“I never fought the ground war in Vietnam,” Bauer said. “The guys who did the fighting, they didn’t get any attention that I’m getting just because I was one of the last ones out. My wife says I’m able to look back at a particular spot in history and say I was there. But, for me, it was just a ride out of Saigon.”

Sullivan said of the last days in Saigon, “It was just a job.” But he paused, and added, “A few days later, when I was in Manila, I finally realized it was all over. There was no more Vietnam. And, hopefully, we won’t get involved in something like that again.”