Not long ago, someone asked me to write more about my personal childhood memories of living in Saigon just before the end of the war in 1975. Unfortunately, I have very few.
It was one of the things that made it hard to tackle writing about our time in Vietnam. Here’s a video in which I share some of my memories of our move to Saigon from Taiwan.
In the second section of For the Love of Vietnam, I blend the memories I do have with the history of the time, making the best of a difficult situation in more ways than one. This month, 50 years after the fact, I share that chapter as well as a longer video describing, extemporaneously, my experience of the time.
I hope you’ll enjoy both, and please do leave a comment and let me know your thoughts, impressions, or similar experiences.
I hope you’ll enjoy this recording of the full July 1974 chapter or the transcription and photos below.
July 1974
Things started out well enough it seemed. We were given a warm welcome by my father’s people, and my mother, a consummate traveler, was thrilled to be in Saigon, her eyes lit up as we drove through the crowded streets.
“This city is fun,” she said. “The lights and the atmosphere are so nice.”
Upon arrival, she described our assigned house at 90A Ly Quan Tran Street as “quite beautiful” but, because it still needed quite a bit of work including the installation of air conditioners, a telephone, and a washer and dryer, we decided to stay with our father at the midtown Duc Hotel, conveniently located just a few blocks from the American Embassy.
Motorcycle brigade proceeds down Cong Ly Street, Saigon to celebrate the South Vietnamese Army’s victory at Hue. On the left is the fenced-in Duc Hotel where my father lived while we stayed in the safe-haven of Taiwan. (Photo by J. Welch)
The CIA had turned the six-story building into quite the residential complex—heavily fortified with barbed wire and sandbags though it was—complete with pool, restaurant, and movie theater.
On our first night there, I looked out our fourth-floor window to see a Vietnamese man walking along the sidewalk below, just outside the high steel fence, a shadow in the saffron haze of the streetlight. He had a gun propped on his shoulder.
“What’s he doing?” I asked from a cozy pile of pillows on the couch.
“He’s a soldier,” said my 13-year-old brother Chris. “There’s a curfew, if you go outside right now you’ll be shot.”
I stared at the man, just a few stories below me, separated by only glass and my parents’ protection. I wasn’t afraid then. I wasn’t anything. I was just trying to figure out what kind of adventure we were on, after all.
The entrance of the Duc Hotel in 1967. The gun-toting soldier I saw on this sidewalk on my first night there was the first clue that I had moved to a place vastly different from the green fields of our Taiwan home.
We didn’t stay at the Duc Hotel for long, it was just too cramped with the nine of us; the “togetherness” was driving us all up a wall. My father, feeling inundated after two years of living a bachelor’s lifestyle, was more than happy to order up a few Embassy cars to transport us and all our luggage to our new home just a few blocks away.
As I trailed after my siblings through the wide front door into the cool interior of the three-story house, I took note of the high ceilings and the tile floors, which gave the house a spacious feeling. But I couldn’t help but notice that I felt hemmed in by the windows. I could not quite see through them; they weren’t glass but a droopy, opaque plastic.
I opened another set of French doors and was delighted to find a small central courtyard. The house was shaped like a big square doughnut and in the center was a small blue fishpond right under the patch of open sky. It was empty now but maybe it could be filled; that would be fun.
Chris followed me into the courtyard. I pointed to the plastic coverings on the door.
“How come they’re such ugly plastic and not glass?” I said.
“In case of bombs,” he replied. “They won’t shatter.”
I stared at the wilting material. After a moment’s thought, I decided maybe that was okay. At least glass wouldn’t fly everywhere, “in case of bombs.”
Little did I know it then, but I was acquiring a new skill. One that would be tested over and over during our nine months in Vietnam. I was quickly learning how to “normalize” a situation, that is, to conjure up a sense of safety when there was none.
My brother John and I with our black poodle, Duffy, in the foyer of our Saigon home. You can see the plastic safety windows on the right.
* * *
Despite the pressing demands of unpacking, home repairs, and managing a staff of three maids, one driver, and several armed guards for the front gate, my mother managed to get most of us kids enrolled in the Phoenix Study Group which held summer and school-year classes for the 250 elementary and middle-grade Americans in the city at the time.
The CIA Phoenix Program patch
Oddly enough, the school shared a name with the CIA’s most notorious anti-communism crusade, The Phoenix Program. Sparked in 1967 as part of a reorganization of the war effort, the government of South Vietnam reincorporated all of its counterinsurgency activities into this program dubbed Phuong Hoang, a reference to a magical bird. In turn, their American counterparts adopted the name of the West’s magical bird—the Phoenix.
That program’s protocol was to round up, interrogate, and, sometimes, fatally torture regular South Vietnamese citizens—including the elderly—in an attempt to rout out any Viet Cong. In a war in which an enemy soldier could look exactly like a friendly villager, desperate measures were taken in an attempt to protect U.S. soldiers from hidden threats. These efforts, known as rural pacification, cost the lives of countless Vietnamese civilians, and one cannot help but conclude, the peace of mind and self-respect of the American soldiers who were, at times, forced into torture and murder.
At the time the little school in Saigon took its own magical-bird name, The Phoenix Program was probably a still well-kept secret but it’s disconcerting to think that the educational institution I attended for most of my third-grade year shared a name with a systematic government control operation. That coincidence could very well be the reason that the board of directors planned to change the school name in time for the opening of the 1975-76 school year.
But of course, by that time, it no longer existed.
~*~
Thank you for sharing this fifty-year-old walk down memory lane with me. To follow me through until the ultimate end—the Fall of Saigon in April 1975—subscribe to “Stories of Vietnam.”
Until next time,
Kat
Excerpt taken from the 2023 publication of For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard.