Malcolm W. Browne and the Fall of Saigon

Commissioned by the U.S. Navy on September 20, 1969, the USS Mobile, a Charleston-class amphibious cargo ship, had over its lifetime been deployed several times to aid American forces in South Vietnam. The ship’s more than 600-man crew, however, could not have imagined the hundreds of refugees who frantically sought sanctuary on their ship as part of the last-ditch helicopter evacuation—codenamed Operation Frequent Wind—of Americans and their at-risk Vietnamese allies.

Two of the thirty-three newsmen who eventually found shelter on the Mobile were from the New York Times, Fox Butterfield and Malcolm W. Browne. “It was almost like abandoning a dying friend,” recalled Browne

Browne left Saigon on April 29, 1975, aboard a U.S. helicopter for a rendezvous with the ships of Task Force 76, on station approximately eighteen miles offshore in the South China Sea. “In the end,” he remembered about the evacuation, “it was hard to decide who had behaved worse on balance—Vietnamese or Americans. The savagery and bitterness of the final weeks turned normally enlightened, fine people into mad dogs, robbing corpses, cutting throats to improve their own chances of survival.” But Browne also witnessed “blazing sparks of real nobility, often in people from whom one would have least expected in normal times.”

After years of bloodshed, the end had come for South Vietnam. American combat forces had left the country as the result of a peace accord signed in Paris on January 27, 1973. Taking advantage of the agreement, the North Vietnamese government resupplied its army and launched a major offensive at the beginning of 1975. That March five North Vietnamese divisions, supported by tanks and artillery, struck the Central Highlands.

South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu, made a disastrous decision to withdraw Army of the Republic of Vietnam forces from the northern two-thirds of the country to establish a defensive line to protect the Mekong Delta, Saigon, and the southern coastal cities. As ARVN units withdrew, panic ensued. Traveling on buses, trucks, ox carts, motorcycles, bicycles, and by foot, retreating soldiers and their families clogged the roads. Military sources informed Western newsmen that nearly 400,000 people were using Route 7 to escape from Pleiku, with the column stretching all the way to the coastal city of Tuy Hoa. Hue fell on March 25 and by Easter Da Nang had been taken by the advancing Communist forces, who embarked on an ambitious campaign to capture Saigon before the expected May rains.

When Browne arrived in Saigon in March 1975 to report about the renewed North Vietnamese offensive, he initially breezed through police checks at the airport. His entry had been noticed, however, by the South Vietnamese government’s Information Ministry, which issued an arrest warrant for him. These were dangerous times for foreign newsmen. On March 15 Saigon police had shot and killed Paul Leandri, deputy bureau chief for the French news agency Agence France Presse, after questioning him about the source of one of his stories. Because of Leandri’s death, “arrest warrants were being taken seriously,” Browne noted.

James Markham, the Times’ Saigon bureau chief, met Browne near the newspaper’s office on Tu Do Street and drove him to hide out in the home of a U.S. Embassy official for a couple of days. “It was a ridiculous situation,” Browne recalled. It did give him the time he needed to call in some favors with sympathetic officials in the South Vietnamese government, who squashed the arrest warrant. “Nothing came easy in that country,” he noted.

The help from the U.S. Embassy came despite the hostility Graham Martin, who had been the ambassador in South Vietnam since August 1973, felt for the Times. One of Browne’s predecessors from the newspaper (probably David K. Shipler) had written some articles that had infuriated Martin—so much so that the ambassador refused to ever see Browne. At one point Martin had gone as far as to claim that the Times’ editorial page possessed “a deep emotional involvement in the success of North Viet Nam’s attempt to take over South Viet Nam by force of arms.”

One of the first stories Browne explored upon his return involved rumors he began to hear from sources that Thieu had decided to withdraw troops from most of the northern two-thirds of the country. “The area left to be defended would be the rich and populous southern part of the country, or everything south of a line running roughly from the Cambodian border at Tay Ninh in the west, to Phan Thiet on the South China sea,” he reported. “In addition, the Government would try to hold a narrow coastal strip northward at least to Da Nang, and Hue if possible.”

Browne’s dire report put him at odds with Markham, who had had a source in American intelligence telling him that although the situation seemed serious, ARVN soldiers could hold out against the North Vietnamese, at least for the short term. The two reporters argued but agreed to discuss the matter later. “That was the last I ever saw of Jim,” Browne noted. Markham decided to take his family and leave Vietnam, taking a flight to Hong Kong.

As the North Vietnamese offensive rolled on, it became harder and harder for the Times bureau to cover the news, as there “were no telephone links to any of the places that we needed to be in touch with,” Browne said. To travel around the country more easily, the Times bureau chartered its own plane, a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron, which came with a daredevil pilot named Rocky. Browne discovered that Rocky was willing to “fly almost anywhere, even inside territory occupied by the North Vietnamese.”

After South Vietnamese troops abandoned Hue on March 25, Browne traveled to Da Nang, located just south of Hue, and discovered that the panic had spread there. Picking up a Honda motorcycle at the airport, Browne gave a ride to an ARVN colonel, dropping him off at his home. “I’ve got to get them out,” the officer told Browne. “That’s all that matters. The Americans have abandoned us and the war’s over.”

As North Vietnamese forces closed in on Saigon, Browne and Butterfield had to abandon using their chartered aircraft in favor of a car owned by the Times’ bureau for short trips to the front lines. “During some of these I came closer to getting killed than at any time during my Indochina combat experience,” said Browne.

On an excursion to a besieged government outpost at Xuan Lo with Newsweek reporter Ron Moreau, Browne became concerned that something seemed wrong. He pulled the car over, stopped, and he and Moreau walked to a nearby shady grove. There, they used binoculars to scan their surroundings. “Seconds later a barrage of well-aimed mortar shells began bursting all around us,” Browne noted. “Flat on our bellies, we endured several minutes of bombardment as steel splinters from the shells whined past our bodies.”

As North Vietnam’s forces continued their advance, Thieu’s government prohibited its citizens from leaving. Browne remembered that an expert on such matters informed him that it was harder for a South Vietnamese to leave the country, even in normal times, than “for an East German to leave the Communist bloc.” U.S. news organizations in South Vietnam, however, worked in secret to evacuate those of its Vietnamese employees who wanted to flee; the Times alone, he noted, had thirty it wanted evacuated. 

They were able to leave thanks in part because of a “black airlift” run by the Central Intelligence Agency, through its airline, Air America. “The news community was just one of many beneficiaries; thousands of others, including Vietnamese military, police and government officials and their families were also taken to safety,” Browne said. Deciding who should stay and who should leave tore some families apart, he noted, with some people sacrificing themselves to save their loved ones, while others, in panicked fear, decided to leave without their wives and children.

Browne relied on his Vietnamese wife, Le Lieu, who joined him in Saigon, to counsel the refugees about the problems they might confront in the United States. He also worked closely with another reporter, H. D. S. “David” Greenway of the Washington Post, which had a neighboring office to the Times’ bureau, on what Greenway described as a “Scarlet Pimpernel operation” to smuggle those Vietnamese employees eligible to escape. 

While the U.S. Embassy turned a blind eye to the operation, the news organizations still had to worry about having police arrest those trying to leave from Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Air Base. “Several times a day he and I would don ties and jackets with airline tickets protruding prominently from our jacket pockets,” Browne remembered. “Using our two cars, we would load up as many refugees as we could carry, drive them to the airport, and explain to the cops at the gate that some of our Vietnamese friends were seeing us off as we departed for America.”

Once they made it past the police, most of whom, he noted, were so downhearted about what was going on that they “weren’t really doing their job very well anyway,” they would go to the passenger terminal and then to the cafeteria for a drink. “Finally, when we had made certain that the airport MPs and civilian police were not watching us,” he said, “we would lead our little flocks outside and sprint the last hundred yards to the entrance of Air America’s sprawling compound.”

Eventually, the police caught on to the scheme and on one trip turned back Browne and Greenway’s attempt to get out two male employees whose families had already been evacuated. “We shamelessly decided to play the colonial card,” Greenway recalled. “We went back, dressed up in suits and ties, and sat in the backseat while one of our Vietnamese drove the car. Seeing a Vietnamese driving two Americans, especially dressed in suits in the backseat, seemed right and proper to the guards so they waved us through, never suspecting that it was the chauffeur who was about to board a plane for Clark Field in the Philippines.” It worked, and they did it again for the second employee.

On April 28 Browne could hear artillery fire less than a mile from his office. He and Butterfield were close to exhaustion. They had been working twenty hours a day “like automata,” Browne remembered, dodging bullets, writing articles, and “trying to act human, all of it more by inertia than any remaining act of will.” Realizing what might happen to Le Lieu even though she was a naturalized American citizen, he encouraged her to leave; two of her brothers and their families had already left, while two of her older brothers and her widowed mother decided to stay. She was able to obtain a seat on an Air Viet Nam 727 aircraft leaving for Hong Kong.

At around noon Browne received a telephone call at his office from Le Lieu telling him that her flight had been delayed due to mechanical problems. He advised her to grab a taxi and return “before it was too late, since North Vietnamese tanks, I knew, were already moving into a former GI recreation compound on the outskirts of the city.” Le Lieu passed the information to the airliner’s crew; five minutes later, the flight was in the air. “The Vietnamese flight crew never even had time to say goodbye to the families they were leaving, some of them forever,” Browne said.

Le Lieu had escaped from the chaos just in time. The next morning, Butterfield reported that Saigon underwent one of the heaviest rocket attacks of the war. By 6:00 a.m. he had counted approximately 150 rockets hitting Tan Son Nhut and the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters adjoining the air base, he recalled. The attack killed two U.S. Marines, Corporals Charles McMahon Jr. and Darwin Lee Judge, who became the last American ground casualties of the war.

From his downtown office, Butterfield could see the rockets “bright red flashes,” as well as “long streams of tracer bullets” fired by the government’s helicopter gunships. He tried to use the bureau’s car to travel to the zoo to grab pictures of Vietnamese selling provisions—steak, beer, frozen orange juice, and Sara Lee cakes—supposedly looted from an American commissary. Unfortunately, Butterfield could not get the car to start.

Waking in his room at the Caravelle Hotel, Browne could see that large parts of the city were aflame. Days before, U.S. correspondents had been warned by embassy officials to listen to the radio for a weather report with a forecast of “One hundred five degrees and rising,” followed, remembered Greenway, by a Bing Crosby recording of “White Christmas.” The newsmen were then supposed to report to designated assembly points scattered throughout the city. At about 11:00 a.m. a CBS employee informed Butterfield that the embassy was “pulling the plug” and the evacuation was on.

Browne and Butterfield wanted to stay in Saigon to report on the North Vietnamese takeover and the beginning of a new era in the country. Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, however, had ordered them to get out. “There was no ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,’ but the word was getting around anyway,” Browne remembered. Earlier that morning he had called to check on members of the North Vietnamese delegation, who had survived a shelling by their own side. “I cannot tell you how grateful we are for you asking, especially considering the circumstances,” a Communist representative told the reporter. “We hope you all get through this somehow.”

The next few hours were a whirlwind for the Times reporters, including gathering what belongings they could carry. Bowne only had time to stuff into his backpack a few shirts, a suit, a tie, twelve pairs of red socks, and a souvenir penguin tie clip he had picked up while on a trip to McMurdo Station in the Antarctic. For protection, he donned a vintage World War II–era German helmet he had purchased at a New York war-surplus store and a flak jacket. The outfit reminded Butterfield what an iconoclast his colleague could sometimes be.

The two Times reporters hustled from the hotel to their designated evacuation point to wait for a seat on a U.S. Army bus. “The first, near the Saigon navy base, was empty,” Butterfield remembered. “A second one on Gia Long Street was jammed with other correspondents. The door to the building and embassy housing complex was locked, so the anxious evacuees had to wait outside, attracting a huge crowd of Vietnamese, some of whom joined the Americans.” The bus ride proved to be an adventure. Normally a fifteen- to twenty-minute trip, it took more than an hour for the driver, a private contractor who did not know his way around Saigon, to arrive at their destination, the Defense Attaché Office at Tan Son Nhut, Butterfield noted.

As the evacuees got off their bus, they saw a South Vietnamese C-119 gunship take off from the base to hit targets near the city. “Just after we had taken our eyes off it there had been a loud explosion,” he recalled. “Only a cloud of black smoke remained.” An enemy missile had struck the aircraft, and it crashed near Cholon, the Chinese section of Saigon.

With rockets continuing to hit the base, marine guards armed with M-16 rifles and mortars exchanged small-arms fire with the North Vietnamese. Guards moved the evacuees into the large DAO building, which, fortunately, had a reinforced roof. Several thousand people jammed into the building’s long and winding corridors, including “nervous looking Vietnamese men, women and children, Vietnamese generals and their families, and embassy secretaries,” wrote Butterfied. “Everywhere there were suitcases that their owners had abandoned when told that there would be no room for them aboard the helicopters.”

Divided into groups of fifty, the evacuees had to run about seventy-five-yards (“it sure seemed longer,” noted Butterfield) to the waiting Sikorsky CH-53 helicopters, their rotors whirling as they awaited their passengers. “The evacuees would leave the bunker and, to avoid the shelling and firing, they would run in sort of serpentine pattern out to where the helicopter was standing, run up the ramp on the rear deck and the helicopter would take off immediately, in some cases with firing from the rear machine gun and climb as fast as possible,” Browne noted.

Because the evacuation helicopter’s rear loading ramp remained open to provide a good field of fire for its machine gun, Browne had an excellent view of the city below as the craft turned to the southeast. Although he often hated what he described as “the evils of the place,” he discovered that his “roots were deeper in Indochina than any other place in the world, and I was crying like a school boy when I said my last goodbyes.”

At about 4:15 p.m. the helicopter carrying Browne and Butterfield touched down on the Mobile’s stern flight deck; they were two of the approximately one thousand Americans and six thousand Vietnamese evacuated as part of Operation Frequent Wind. Upon exiting the helicopter, the newsmen were confronted by gun-toting marines and sailors, who seemed surprised to see the bedraggled journalists; they had expected to be confronting “mutinous South Vietnamese soldiers,” Butterfield remembered.

All those who boarded the ship, whether American or Vietnamese, he added, had to submit to “a rigorous screening process—two searches, a medical check-up and registration.” Navy and marine corpsmen provided aid to those who had been injured in the evacuation, including children, hundreds of whom, Butterfield reported, suffered from boils, fevers, and seasickness. “A few soldiers and civilians had lacerations from rocket wounds at Tan Son Nhut,” he said. “Some elderly Vietnamese collapsed from nervous exhaustion.” To Butterfield, those refugees seeking medical attention for themselves or their family members represented, to him, another example of the “unreasoning faith that many Vietnamese still have in America. Despite the hatred and contempt that some Vietnamese have displayed toward all foreigners . . . many others have never lost faith in America’s power to save them.”

Looking out to sea as the sun set, Browne described what he saw stretched out before him as looking like a “version of hell.” As far as the eye could see, the ocean was filled with burning fishing boats. Vietnamese living along the coast had begged, borrowed, or stolen any vessel they could get their hands on to sail out to the American fleet. They burned their boats for two reasons, said Browne, including denying their use by the North Vietnamese and “as a gesture of faith” that they would be rescued by the Americans. “These fine wooden junks had cost a fortune, in some cases the savings of poor fishing families, now destitute, their life savings going up in flames,” he noted.

Browne also remembered that helicopters flown by South Vietnam Air Force pilots were appearing over the fleet at the rate of about one every minute. Butterfield remembered that the choppers “appeared on the horizon flying in like a flock of fireflies.” He observed more than a dozen land on the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier, while others looked for a spot on any ship they could find to land on.

Three choppers landed on the Mobile, with all eventually heaved overboard because of a lack of space. “Each time one of these machines landed, a few seconds would elapse while its crew and passengers got out, and then the American sailors would heave the Huey overboard to make room for the next one,” Browne noted. “We watched hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of choppers thrown into the South China Sea that evening, but we refugees were thinking mostly of the people we had left behind.”

Navy and marine cooks in white aprons fed rice and noodles mixed with chicken to the 800 Americans and Vietnamese who took shelter on the transport. “Some Navy men carried Vietnamese children around the decks on their shoulders, and the children played with the sailors’ beards,” added Butterfield. Chief Maurice Ring, who stayed up for two days to cook for the refugees, told the reporter he did not mind having to do the extra work. “What makes us angry is when the United States stands by and does nothing to keep our word,” Ring said. “After Vietnam, who is going to believe us any more. First Vietnam, then it will be Israel, then the United States itself.”

After almost four days on the Mobile, Browne and Butterfield were among the journalists to climb aboard another helicopter to be transferred to the USS Blue Ridge, the command ship for the evacuation. One evening on the Blue Ridge they heard over the ship’s loudspeakers the daily prayer: “Dear Father, you have safely brought us through another trying and frustrating week. Forgive us when we complain about our troubles.”

Browne missed witnessing North Vietnamese tanks crashing through the gates of Saigon’s Independence Palace on April 30. Walking down a Saigon Street that morning, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press came across a convoy of Russian-made Molotova trucks crammed with North Vietnamese soldiers. “A few local Vietnamese are standing near me,” Arnett recalled. “They are staring, speechless.”  

Arnett ran to his office, burst through the door, and shouted to bureau chief George Esper: “George. Saigon has fallen. Call New York.” Checking his watch, Arnett marked the time as 11:43 a.m. As for Browne, he did not learn that the war had finally ended in a Communist victory until arriving with some other evacuees in Manila. It took him years, he admitted, to “come to terms with the trauma those last days of the war left me,” and he preferred to forget what had happened during that “cruel April.”