Last Man Out (49 page)

“Okay,” Mac said, “if they try to get me—shit, look at them, some have AK-47s—if they try to get me, I fall down and you guys blast ’em and then I get up and try to make it back to the helicopter.”

“Right.”

“Okay.”

Mac slowly, awkwardly, got out of the lead helicopter and walked stiffly toward the rack holding the gas nozzles. The flight mechanic from the other helicopter was somewhere behind him. The Vietnamese did not show any expression. Hopefully they were going to ask for a ride out of the country, Mac thought. Please don’t want to capture me. Please don’t want to kill me.

Picking up a nozzle, Mac walked back to the helicopter. He looked one of the kickers in the eye the whole way, as he watched for any sudden movement by the kicker. Anything sudden and Mac was dropping to the ground. But then, he thought, I’ve got to be sure because if I drop, the pilot and Taylor and the kicker are going to start shooting.

The kicker had removed the gas tank cap on the side of the helicopter, and, as Mac walked up, he went back to lean against the helicopter near his gun.

The flight mechanic in the rear helicopter passed him with another hose and nozzle.

Mac starting pumping gas, and he pumped and pumped. Finally he realized that no one in the helicopter was going to tell him when to stop. They were all intent on staring down the Vietnamese in front of them.

The flight mechanic from the rear helicopter had finished pumping and was screwing on the gas cap.

“Hey!” Mac yelled over the noise of the helicopter to the kicker. “Is this enough?” The kicker didn’t hear. Mac stopped pumping and went over and grabbed his arm. The kicker jumped straight up.

“Is this enough?” Mac asked again. When the kicker said that it was, he went back to the nozzle, extracted it from the helicopter, and began to walk back to the nozzle rack. Halfway there, Mac thought to himself, I don’t need to take this all the way over to where those men are standing with their guns. I’ll just drop it here.

And he did.

When he turned to go back to the helicopter, one of the Vietnamese shouted, “Hey you!”

Mac was facing the helicopter and watching Taylor, who was vibrating because of the high torque of the engine. Mac knew that Weitz had an automatic rifle in his lap. The flight mechanic, the gas hose in his hand, stopped, frozen, and looked wide-eyed at Mac.

Should he drop to the ground? Was this it? Mac was rigid, tense. His face was suddenly wet with sweat.

“You. You!” the Vietnamese said loudly behind him.

Mac turned around, ready to drop.

“You have to sign for the gas.” The Vietnamese offered a clipboard. Mac signed it and got back on the helicopter—the last American on the ground in Can Tho, and one of the most thankful to be leaving.

I went up to my stateroom early that night. Captain Flink woke me up around midnight.

“There are planes buzzing my ship,” he said. “Why are there planes buzzing my ship? Do they have bombs? You caused all this. They are North Vietnamese jets and they want to kill you
and your people, and they are buzzing my ship.” Outside, I could hear a jet scream by, low.

“Jets?” was all I could think to ask. A lot had happened during the past few days. I was on a merchant marine ship. A strange beefy man beside me was accusing me of something that had to do with jets. I didn’t have a lot of experience with merchant marine ships or jets, and I had trouble putting things into perspective.

Someone came running up to the cabin and told the captain that boats were coming at us from shore.

Still confused, I thought, Boats?

“Goddammit man!” the captain yelled at me. He wheeled around and left.

I dressed and ran outside to the bridge. Standing by the captain, I watched two boats slowly make their way toward us in the dark. The captain ordered the anchor hauled. Jets continued to buzz the ship and the two approaching boats. It was a friendly sort of nuzzling by the aircraft, I thought, and I suddenly realized that the two boats were the landing craft with MacNamara and his staff. I told Captain Flink that everything was going to be all right.

That was clear when I looked at the boats through the ship’s binoculars. They were flying American flags.

“The consulate is coming,” I said. “You’ve got more guests.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” the captain exclaimed. “I think I would rather be attacked by jets.” After a pause he said, “I’ll tell you this, my friend, I don’t know how you’all did this, but I know if you hadn’t been on this ship, I would have been out of here. Those two boats would not have caught me until I reached Singapore. I don’t like jets and unidentified boats that come out of a country the Communists have just taken over. You people don’t understand. This is a C-A-R-G-O ship.”

Talking through a relay, I tried to get someone at Tugboat Control to pass the word to the Navy that the U.S. Consulate group was arriving at the
Pioneer Contender
. Finally, someone netting with Tugboat Control said they would pass the message.

Sparky tried to raise Sealift Command to get instructions on what to do. In his messages, he said the captain urgently requested permission to get under way.

As the boats approached, the captain threw the rope ladder over the side and ordered his crane in position to take on the luggage.

I contacted Tugboat Control again and asked if they were interested in two landing craft to assist in the evacuation. Otherwise we were going to cast them off. Tugboat Control, usually slow to answer any of my calls, immediately came back and said through the intermediary that landing craft were exactly what they needed. They asked if there was any way we could bring them up to Vung Tau, a coastal town near the mouth of the Saigon River.

I remembered that MacNamara had hired some river pilots to drive the boats down the river, so I figured they could drive the boats to Vung Tau. The captain was busy with instructions to get the two landing boats tied up beside the ship near the rope ladder, so I asked someone in the control room, “How far is Vung Tau? How long to drive one of those landing craft there?”

“Eight, ten hours,” the man at the wheel suggested.

I went back on the bridge and stood beside the captain. Borrowing his loudspeaker, I called down to MacNamara and asked if his river pilots were up to taking the landing craft to Vung Tau. He answered through his loudspeaker that he didn’t think so.

Two of the first people up the ladder were Filipino engineers who had maintained the generators at the consulate. I asked them what was wrong with the pilots, and they said the Vietnamese crew had disappeared before the boats left Can Tho. There were no river pilots on board; they had learned how to drive the boats themselves.

“Good,” I said. “We’re going to take those boats to Vung Tau. You guys and me.”

Most of the Vietnamese who had arrived with me were on the upper deck as they watched the on-loading of the consulate crowd. I yelled for Ros, and he walked quietly out of the crowd. When I told him to get his stuff together because we were going for a ride, he turned without a question and went down a ladder to get his gear from the hold.

I went back to the portable radio, called Tugboat Control, and asked them to confirm that they seriously wanted these landing craft. Was it important or just something that would be sort of nice? Tugboat Control responded immediately and said the boats
would make a difference in whether some people got out or not. It was important to those people.

I had left Loi and the kids, but perhaps I could help others. Maybe it was a trade-off. Putting the radio down, I told the captain that a Cambodian, a couple of Filipinos, and I were going to drive the landing boats to Vung Tau.

Flink said Sparky had just gotten word that the
Pioneer Contender
was also to relocate to Vung Tau to help in the evacuation. He suggested that I go in front of him with the two boats. He would hold a straight reading north and pull back to match my speed. All I had to do was keep looking over my shoulder and guide on him.

Ros and the Filipino engineers were on the deck. When everyone had cleared the landing craft except for a couple of men, we went over the side and down the ladders.

The Filipinos got into the rear boat. MacNamara was still in the other boat when Ros and I climbed into it. He put the last items into the net and then motioned the crane operator to lift it. He had the consulate’s American flag with him and was wearing his helmet with the word
Congen
and a big white star on the front. I welcomed him to the
Pioneer Contender
and told him of the arrangements to get the landing craft to Vung Tau, but he was exhausted and didn’t care what happened to the boats. He was just glad to get to the ship. Coming down the Bassac River, they had been fired on, he said, but everyone was safely out.

“Good,” I said. “Go up, take my stateroom, take a shower, go to sleep. See you in the morning.”

Ros and I were then alone in the boat, and we didn’t have the faintest idea how to drive it.

The captain yelled through the loudspeaker to untie our lines. While Ros did this, I went into the small pilot area and tried to figure out the controls. Gauges on the console indicated that we had plenty of fuel. The throttles and gearshifts for the two engines were prominent in the light from the gauges. With the steering wheel in front of me, that was all I needed, I thought.

The Filipinos threw off the ropes holding the two boats together at about the same time that Ros untied the ropes holding us to the
Pioneer Contender
, and we were free.

I moved the throttles and rammed back into the other landing
craft. After I changed gears and gave the boat more gas, I looked up to see that we were heading straight for the ship’s anchor chain. It was a long way up to the deck. The captain came on the loudspeaker and told us to stand clear of the anchor, which was coming out of the water.

Easy for him to say, I thought. I finally got control of the boat by putting it into reverse again and backing out some distance away from both the ship and the other landing craft. Ros came around behind me and watched as I played with the controls.

I finally stopped backing up, but couldn’t see directly in front of the boat when we were going forward. The controls were in the stern, where all the weight was, and the bow stuck out of the water like a shield. To see straight ahead I had to walk over to the side of the boat while Ros held the wheel, or turn the boat to one side or another. Also, because it was empty and the bow was high, the boat was difficult to drive. Wind and waves turned it from one side to the other. One second I was going due north, then a wave hit the front and I was going due west. I finally moved the boat off the port bow to the front of the
Pioneer Contender
, which had just gotten under way. The other landing craft fell in behind us.

  TWENTY-FOUR  

We were a small parade heading north that early morning—my landing craft in front, bouncing from one side to the other, then the less erratic landing craft, and finally the monstrously large cargo ship. I tried to find a good medium speed. The faster we went, the more our bow stuck out of the water and the more affected we were by the wind and waves. The slower we went, the more we fell under the bow of the large ship behind us. I had to turn every minute to make sure we were staying on line.

When I got tired, Ros took the wheel. He struggled with it, and veered off to one side, followed by the landing craft behind us. As we got on line again, I thought that the crew of the
Pioneer Contender
surely must be cussing us as unfit sailors.

The wind picked up around 0400, and we were violently tossed from side to side. Every time I turned around, my neck hurt. I tried to motion to the Filipinos to take the lead, but either they did not understand or did not want the point. Doggedly they stayed behind me.

When the sun came up I had a chance to look around the pilot station after being in the dark all night. I found some lights. Why weren’t they on when I got in?

And then I looked at the gear levers. I had only one engine engaged! When I had both engines in gear the boat settled down to the more steady motion I had admired in the Filipinos’ boat.