Chapter Reading: October 1974
"We scared the ‘H’ out of them"
Greetings,
You’re invited to enter into what life was like for my family and in Saigon in October 1974, when we were evacuated from school and forced to have Halloween at home, just the nine of us.
For anyone new to my 2023 publication, For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard. click here for a synopsis and a note about how I tell the distinctly different stories of :
how my father ended up in Vietnam running a propaganda radio station beginning in 1972,
our family life blended with historical context from July 1974-April 1975, and
the incredible evacuation of 1000 South Vietnamese that my father orchestrated in late April 1975.
This chapter excerpt—October 1974—is from Part Two, a blend of the personal and the historical. I did my very best to be accurate. If you see any discrepancies, join the conversation and let me know.
Please do let me know what you think of it.
Chapter: October 1974
South Vietnam doesn’t have four seasons, it has two: very hot and rainy, and hot and dry. As the rainy season came to a close in October 1974 and the weather cooled slightly, the intensity of the “war in peace” picked up. Congress had confirmed only $700 million in support for the fiscal year ahead which sentenced the ARVN to desperate half measures in their attempts to defend against the escalation by Northern forces.
Additionally, the Southern army was suffering under the disadvantage of the corruption of its own leadership. The situation under President Thieu’s administration became so dysfunctional that its effects reached right down to the infantrymen. Often the South Vietnamese troops were unable to feed their families and morale was suffering greatly. Due to the exploitation of the ever-dwindling resources by the officers even artillery support sometimes had to be paid for.
“As long as security was good and living standards decent, the people tolerated corruption and inefficiency in government,” South Vietnamese politician Nguyen Ngoc Huy said. “These defects are becoming less and less tolerable as security and living standards decline and numerous large-scale scandals bring into the open the rotten character of the leaders of the regime. If Thieu continues to govern with the support of corrupt and incompetent men while rejecting any true dialogue with other non-Communists, it will be difficult for South Vietnam to win the struggle against the Communists, whether it is fought militarily or politically.”
The political situation did take a sudden and unexpected turn. On October 8, the North announced its refusal to deal with Theiu. They demanded a new leader if there were going to be any further talks about a negotiated settlement in which the North and the South could share a government.
President Thieu responded by firing four members of his cabinet, demoting nearly 400 field-grade officers, and removing three of his four regional commanders. His conciliatory attitude didn’t last long, however, as he quickly did an about-face and slapped new controls on the press and warned opposition groups that they continued to agitate at their peril.
His methods backfired when, on the afternoon of October 10th, thousands of people took to the streets, surging past police lines to join the hundreds of journalists who were demonstrating against the government’s repressive new laws.
Upon observing the sight of so many people agitated enough to protest, one Western journalist commented, “Thieu’s really in trouble, I didn’t believe it before, but I believe it now.”
* * *
The pressure on my father in this situation was rugged, and he came home daily visibly worn by the weight of his task to portray the South as a desirable place to defect to. My mother wished that she could send him away to relax, but there was no safe place to go.
“The situation here is not the best,” she wrote home at the end of the month. “If the VC keeps blowing up the bridges soon we won’t be able to get out of the city at all. There are several cities one could visit in a day and I’d sure like to go….but one always has the fear that the VC might be in the area and they really seem to be.”
While my parents may have tried to keep the unrest in the city at arm’s length—just something they read about in the papers and avoided by never walking on the city streets—it became very real to us in two ways.
The first was that our cook, Hoa, was beside herself about the plight of her teenage son, Amin. He had just finished military school and was due to be deployed any day. Five of Amin’s friends had gone into battle weeks before and only two returned. Hoa had already lost his father, a French man, to the VC nine years earlier.
“He is such a nice 18-year-old boy,” my mother wrote home, “and actually looks just like an American kid. At any rate, Pleiku seems to be certain death and we are all dismayed. Hoa said if she pays the big whips 200,000 Piasters (about $330) he can be assigned to the Saigon area but she would have to sell her house to do it.”
My mother said that they were toying with the idea of loaning her the money, but that Amin could still be killed in the battles around Saigon, though it was less likely. “So, we are going through a crisis of conscience. I don’t really believe in buying people off, but it is a way of life here. If one has the money they don’t have to fight.”
Amin survived the worst of the fighting and was included in my father’s list of those he would escort out of the country. Hoa declined the invitation for her family but later fled the country on a small boat, though we never heard from her again.
* * *
The second way that the unrest affected us was that on October 31, another anti-Thieu protest ruined our Halloween. It started out as a normal Thursday, even if we were a little bit hyper at the thought of going to the Embassy that evening for a party and lots of candy. As we sat in our classrooms in the Phoenix Study Group site at 192-194 Cong Ly Street, we were unaware of the flurry of activity in the school office down the hall.
“We’re shutting down the school,” the secretary said when she got my mother on the phone. “Send your driver to get your kids home.”
She didn’t wait for a reply but clicked right through to another call; there were nearly 100 families to reach and time was short.
Our driver, Mr. Bi, had to argue with the police to get past the barbed wire they had set up to keep the protesters out of the main city streets. After much yelling, the officers finally let him through. He crept along and finally entered the gates of the school in line with the other cars sent to pick up school children. The demonstration would make American headlines; the Oxnard Press-Courier in California proclaiming that “Riot Police Battle Thieu Protesters; Violence Paralyzes Saigon.”
As smoke billows from a burning motorcycle, South Vietnamese riot police face several thousand angry protesters who sought to move their anti-corruption demonstration from suburban Saigon to the center of the city on Oct. 31, 1974. Authorities contained the crowd. (AP Photo—license to pring purchased, August 2023)
I remember the confusion of that morning the way one remembers a bad dream. There had been one day earlier in the year when I had thought I’d been forgotten at the school; I’d mixed up the pickup time, thinking it was noon and not 12:30pm. As I’d watched the minute hand creep along on that day, the worry I’d been left behind seeped through me like a slow poison.
But on the morning of Halloween, there was no time to watch the clock, we were rushed from the classrooms to our cars in a desperate attempt to get us home safely.
As Mr. Bi, our chauffeur, drove out of the school gates and through the throngs of people in the streets, I peered out at a dangerous city. Struck dumb by the incomprehensible roar of discord, I was slowly beginning to realize that my understanding of the world was in shambles.
That night, in an almost comical attempt to rescue the holiday, my parents felt the need to provide a veritable house of horrors, though I am sure I had had enough for one day. My mother sat all of us down in the living room, except for Michelle who was upstairs hiding with my father. Chris, Mike, John, Jimmy, Kim, and myself were sent upstairs one-by-one into sheet-draped bedrooms, veritable caverns of darkness to “trick-or-treat.”
“They had fun as we scared the ‘H’ out of them,” my mother wrote.
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—do take care,
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.
If you already have a copy, consider buying one for a local library or high school teacher! The more people who are thinking about the 50-year anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the better.
