"We've Got to Get These Kids Out of Here!"
March 1975 chapter excerpt from "For the Love of Vietnam"
This chapter, March 1975, is excerpted from the 2023 publication, For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard.
The book is a blend of the personal experiences of my family and the historical circumstances of the time.
Chapter: March 1975
On his birthday in mid-March, my brother John received a shiny new bowling ball. I stared at it, open-mouthed and incredulous. What luck, I thought, to own such a thing! He picked it up, demonstrating his ownership over it; it was not something to be shared.
He later confessed to me that he didn’t think he was much good at the game, but I’ll never forget the feeling of looking up to him as the one family member who deserved the honor of owning such a treasure.
Looking back, that gift, as much as anything else, depicts the ongoing denial of the time for—as anyone who’s ever packed up household goods knows—you would never buy such a thing if you are anticipating a major move, much less a panicked evacuation, in the near future. As it was, we were just weeks away from my mother having to pack up 6,000 pounds of household goods into 24 boxes with barely any help or packing material.
My mother, Nancy L. Welch, sent a copy of the school newsletter, The Dragon’s Mouth, home in March of 1975, just three weeks before we were to flee. She encouraged her parents to read the publication and “notice super bowler John Welch in one picture. It is his favorite thing to do, and for his birthday on Sunday, we are giving him his own 10-pound gold bowling ball and carrying case.”
On March 10th, six days before my brother’s birthday, the NVA had descended on the idyllic village of Ban Me Thuot, just 150 miles north of Saigon, taking it in less than 30 hours. Initial reactions to the siege were muted. Kissinger, on a diplomatic mission en route from Cairo to Tel Aviv, was briefed by staffers. He looked surprised and puzzled for a moment but then simply shrugged and went back to his work at hand; he did not think the loss signified any real crisis.
In striking contrast, historian George J. Vieth begins his book, Black April, the Fall of South Vietnam, 1973-75, with a description of the battle of Ban Me Thuot and states, “Rarely in the history of nations can one point with such precision to the beginning of the country’s demise.”
The analyses are separated by some 30 years and with the benefit of hindsight. However, even at the time, the news shocked the Saigon community. In response to the reports brought home by my father, James E. Welch, on the 13th, my mother decided there could be no more fantasies of going on sightseeing holidays. She wrote home:
. . . with the war situation as it is we’ll just have to stay around Saigon . . . Jim received a report today from Ban Me Thuot and the province officials were all captured and nine of the 12 were executed—by beheading! No bloodbath, indeed.”
This written exclamation was the first indication that she was no longer falling prey to the official all-is-well line from the Embassy. For better or worse, she hardly had time to think about such things as she spent much of late February and early March at the hospital: Kim had a bad case of tonsillitis, Michelle was recovering from possible hepatitis, Chris’s eyebrow had been split wide open on the basketball court, and Mike had emergency surgery for appendicitis.
Mike’s recovery took place in a special medical ward usually reserved for Americans, but on this occasion, it had been opened up to care for wounded South Vietnamese soldiers, and thus his companions were six remaining members of an ARVN crew of 27 whose ship had been mined in the Mekong Delta. They knew little English but befriended my brother anyway, partly to pass the time and partly to practice their English. Mike let them borrow his comic books, which they were only too happy about. Ironically, they liked the ones depicting battle scenes the best.
Meanwhile, my father took the youngest son, Jimmy, to the Philippines to get a pair of much-needed eyeglasses. They rode in a military jet cargo plane that was not meant for shuttling humans, and the two of them quite nearly froze to death during the flight. While they were gone, my mother discovered that some of her extensive jewelry collection had gone missing, putting her in the awkward position of investigator, jury, and judge.
“I had to confront the three maids,” she wrote, “and so had all kinds of weeping and wailing going on around here. It is their duty to watch the house, so even if they didn’t take it, they let someone else in here that did.”
With the help of Mr. Bi they tried to find out what exactly had happened, but there was no way, with the language gap, to pin down the facts and implications coupled with the extreme fear the maids were feeling about their future.
Ultimately, she gave up trying to prove who had taken the jewelry and was utterly dismayed that the formerly close relationships were now overshadowed by regret and suspicion. Still, in the uncertain times, she did not feel that she could force them onto the street; that time seemed to be coming soon enough.
Such divides in communication and breaches of trust had a long legacy in America’s involvement in Vietnam, and the worst was yet to come. The loss of Ban Me Thuot represented not so much the loss of one town, strategic though it was, but an irreversible rift in the South Vietnamese troops’ trust in their leadership. They were left in the field with no clear direction or support. The corruption and dissolution of military command had reached such a level that the officers’ every-man-for-himself attitude spread like wildfire, fanning rumors of defeat and inciting panic. Combatants’ minds turned from their commitment to an ever-dwindling government ideal toward their own homes and families, many of which were located in the besieged areas. As news of the fall of that town spread, masses of civilians and soldiers alike rushed toward the coast in a desperate attempt to find a safe haven, but there was none.
By late March, the North Vietnamese forces were closing in on the coastal city of Da Nang, where over 100,000 refugees were trying desperately to escape, some even handing family members, including small children, alone onto overloaded ships headed south. A World Airways jumbo jet landed in Da Nang to help with the situation. The plane was mobbed by a panicked crowd, and within ten minutes, three hundred Vietnamese, few of them women or children, had crammed themselves aboard. The plane took off, its rear stairway still lowered and covered with desperate men. As the aircraft gained altitude, those clinging to the edges of the open doorway fell to their deaths. It was this image—of the crush of humanity clamoring for safety—that would put the spurs on my father’s impulse to get his South Vietnamese staff out of Saigon.
As late as March 27, nearly three weeks after the country began truly unraveling, my mother was still unsure if we would be able to get out. Unable to sleep and worried both about her overworked husband and vulnerable children, she was surviving on nerves in the uneasy safety of the city.
“Such a soul-searching and nerve-wracking ordeal,” she wrote to her parents. “We are all totally sick of heart. Saigon seems to be okay at the moment, but the situation is so precarious that we have requested (along with others with children) to be allowed to leave before our scheduled time in the summer.”
Her request to depart became just one more piece of paperwork in the queue of pressing matters at the Embassy. With so many traumatic problems, the staff was overworked and overwhelmed to the point of distraction, my father included. It would not be easy to get permission.
One evening, my mother took a break from taping boxes to slam her hand on the dining room table while my father was going through the motions of fixing his routine martini. My father looked up, startled.
“We’ve got to get these kids out of here,” my mother shrilled, the panic she’d been holding back suddenly bursting forth.
I saw my father smile wanly and regard my mother with red and tired eyes. He shook his head slightly as if to dislodge cobwebs or exhaustion.
“I’ll do what I can, Nance,” he said. “Perhaps it’s time.”
“There had better be time,” my mother snapped, stooping to strap another band of tape across the box at her feet. “There had better be time.”
On the 29th of March, just four days before we would fly out, North Vietnamese forces captured Da Nang, sweeping across the vast air bases where U.S. forces had first been greeted with flowers in 1965.
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.
Karen Kaiser, librarian from the Phoenix Study Group, 1974-75, and I are available to tell more stories like these. Please visit Kat-Fitzpatrick.com for more information.
More about “For the Love of Vietnam:”
Click here if you would like to see a full synopsis of the book and 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 to April 1975, and
the incredible evacuation of 1000 South Vietnamese that my father orchestrated in late April 1975.
I hope you enjoy this glimpse of history—if you do, please leave a comment so I know!
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.
Thanks for restacking, Diana!