Thurston Clarke - Honourable Exit: how a few brave Americans risked all to save their Vietnamese allies at the end of the war

JFKs Last Hundred Days

The Last Campaign

Ask Not

Searching for Crusoe

California Fault

Pearl Harbor Ghosts

Equator

Thirteen OClock

Lost Hero

By Blood and Fire

The Last Caravan

Dirty Money

Copyright 2019 by Thurston Clarke

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Map designed by Jeffrey L. Ward

Cover design by Emily Mahon

Cover photograph Dirck Halstead/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Clarke, Thurston, author.

Title: Honorable exit : how a few brave Americans risked all to save our Vietnamese allies at the end of the war / Thurston Clarke.

Other titles: How a few brave Americans risked all to save our Vietnamese allies at the end of the war

Description: First edition. | New York : Doubleday, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018029232 (print) | LCCN 2018042953 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385539654 (ebook) | ISBN 9780385539647 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 19611975Evacuation of civiliansVietnam (Republic) | Vietnam War, 19611975Campaigns. | Vietnam War, 19611975Diplomatic history. | Vietnam (Republic)Foreign relationsUnited States. | United StatesForeign relationsVietnam (Republic)

Classification: LCC DS557.7 (ebook) | LCC DS557.7 .C53 2019 (print) | DDC 959.704/31dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029232

Ebook ISBN9780385539654

v5.4_r1

ep

FOR TOM GILLILAND AND BEN WEIR

South VietnamApril 1975

On the afternoon of April 29, 1975, Dutch photojournalist Hubert Hugh Van Es looked out the window at the United Press International (UPI) office in downtown Saigon and saw a helicopter landing on an elevator shaft rising from the roof of 22 Gia Long Street. Van Es grabbed his camera and a 300 mm lens and hurried onto the balcony. As a man in a white shirt was reaching down to help a person at the top of a staircase board the helicopter, Van Es took the last great iconic photograph of the Vietnam War. A UPI editor in Tokyo misidentified the building as the American embassy, and despite later corrections the mistake has survived in books, in articles, and on the internet, perhaps because placing the helicopter on the roof of the embassy makes the photograph a more potent symbol for Americas first lost war.

Compare the Van Es photograph with the even more iconic one that Associated Press (AP) reporter Joe Rosenthal shot of six U.S. servicemen raising an American flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi during the World War II battle for Iwo Jima. Both were taken near the end of a war, and both show Americans framed against an open skyreaching up to plant a flag or down to grab a refugee. Otherwise, they seem to have nothing in common. One symbolizes victory in a war Americans have spent decades celebrating; the other, defeat in a war they have spent decades trying to forget. One represents courage and sacrifice; the other, catastrophe and disgrace. But the more one learns about the staircase on the roof of 22 Gia Long Street, the people standing on it, the pilots of that helicopter, and the man in the white shirt, the more apparent it becomes that Van Es had also memorialized a moment of stirring heroism.

He later described the 22 Gia Long Street stairway as a makeshift wooden ladder. But zoom in from a different angle and with a stronger lens, as French photojournalist Philippe Buffon did that same afternoon, and it becomes a sturdy staircase wide enough to be climbed by four people abreast. Zoom in some more and the helicopter becomes a Bell Huey 205 painted in the blue and white livery of Air America, one of the CIAs proprietary airlines, and you can see that the man in the white shirt has a seven-day beard, a black patch over his left eye, and a cigar clenched in his teeth and that his shirt is ripped and filthy. Patrons of Saigons rowdier bars would recognize him as Oren Bartholomew O. B. Harnage, the U.S. embassys deputy air operations officer and a middle-aged roustabout described by one friend as a gregarious, macho good old boy, a bull-shitter of the first order[and] suds-sipper of renown. The cigar was one of the seven that Harnage smoked daily, perhaps as an homage to his father, a Tampa cigar roller who had abandoned him at birth, in either 1925 or 1926he was uncertain which. He had volunteered for the navy at seventeen (or eighteen) and been wounded on Okinawa. A sliver of old shrapnel had worked its way into his left eye the previous month, explaining the patch. He had joined the air force after the war, moved to the CIA as a contract employee, and after seven years in Laos and Vietnam had concluded that America had been nave to involve itself in the Vietnam War.