To Saigon And Back

In March, 1975, South Vietnam started coming unglued.

ARVN (Army of South Vietnam) troops abandoned their bases in the northern provinces of South Vietnam -- mostly without a fight -- as the North Vietnamese Army advanced.

The pictures were dramatic: soldiers and civilians, clutching whatever possessions they could carry, fleeing south by vehicle and on foot, clogging the two-lane main highway -- Route 1.

At the Vietnamese/U.S. airbase in Danang, on the central coast, people crowded onto anything, military or civilian, flying south. In one of the most dramatic and wrenching moments of the final days, a chartered Boeing 727 from World Airways took off with desperate people hanging from the landing gear and open rear stairs.

In Chicago, I watched Bruce Dunning's report on what turned out to be the last flight out of Danang and immediately called the CBS Foreign Desk to volunteer. After three tours of duty in Vietnam, I wanted to be there at the end.

Returning to Saigon in early April, I found a city gripped by barely controlled panic. Everyone assumed that it was only a matter of time before the capital fell. Thousands of South Vietnamese who had worked for and with Americans tried to flee the country. Daily, they queued up at the U.S. Embassy in a largely vain attempt to get visas. People implored any passing American for help, pouring out stories of their American connections and friends.

Any Vietnamese with the American connections to make it past the South Vietnamese guards at the gate of Tan Son Nhut Airport was able to fly to Guam, courtesy of the U.S. CBS Saigon Bureau Chief Brian Ellis personally drove a U.S. Embassy bs filled with CBS News' Vietnamese employees and their families who wanted to leave the country. It was a wrenching passage.

My colleagues and I spent our days chasing the story of fearful people and an angry and resentful government, often under dangerous circumstances. A furious South Vietnamese soldier confronted CBS cameraman Mike Marriott and put a pistol to this head. He pulled the trigger. The gun misfired.

In the evenings we speculated about how and when the city would fall, and how the U.S. military planned to evacuate Americans. One plan called for chopping down the trees that lined the broad boulevard in front of the U.S. Embassy and landing giant C-130 transport planes. Even at that crazy time, that one seemed farfetched.

As the North Vietnamese came nearer to Saigon, one ARVN unit made a last stand just outside the capital at a place called Anloc, but it was clear that the game was just about up.

All of us who were there wanted to document the end. So, needless to say, I was less than thrilled when I was ordered to leave on a charter flight that the networks and wire services had booked to take equipment out of the country.

The plane was an ancient DC-3, operated by one of the contract civilian carriers that had flown for years in Southeast Asia for outfits like the CIA. Mortars were landing at the far reaches of Tan Son Nhut as we loaded. The pilot had the shakes and the co-pilot smelled like a bar at closing time. But we made it to Bangkok, Thailand and put a piece on The CBS Evening News.

Twenty-four hours later, the foreign desk called with instructions to head for Hong Kong, where it was easier to do a live broadcast.

Later that morning, as I boarded the Singapore Airlines flight at Bangkok with Harry Griggs of NBC, the flight deck crew explained that there was a small problem -- Saigon air traffic control was down, which meant they'd have to fly around the peninsula rather than overhead.

We knew that must be it -- the end. So we drank a champagne toast at 30,000 feet to our colleagues being evacuated to U.S. Navy ships in the South China Sea. And I did get on the air from Hong Kong. My colleagues were stuck shipboard for the next five days.