From reporter Philip Caputo, who most recently wrote about the carnage at Kent State and who — in Means of Escape, the book I hold in my lap — wrote about his emotional return to Saigon to report its fall to the Vietcong, more than a decade after he’d left Vietnam as a soldier:
Impossible to look at all those small bodies, burnt and dismembered in the paddy mud, and not go numb. The only thing I felt was a dull anger. The U.S. Defense Attache’s Office, which was organizing the evacuation of the orphans, had more flights planned. The operation had been dubbed a “mission of mercy” and the aircraft were called “mercy planes,” but the real purpose of the flights was to provide a cover for evacuating Americans. Forty-three of DAO’s female employees had been aboard the C5-A that had unmercifully crashed, and half of them had been killed. After touring the crash site, I went to the DAO compound to gather the necessary statistics. It was in “Pentagon East,” the big brick building — it reminded me of an enormous high school–that had been Westmoreland’s headquarters. I got the numbers and then began to ask a few impertinent questions of a woman with the prickly, defensive manner of a midlevel bureaucrat, a GS-10, say. Where were these kids being flown to? To a processing center in the United States, to wait there for American families to adopt them. Why had we waited until now to evacuate them? She looked at me as if I were mad. The Communists were overrunning the country, orphanages had been abandoned. But, Madame, do we suppose the Communists are incapable of caring for orphans? The fact is, aren’t we using these kids as a way of getting our nonessential personnel out of the country without alarming the South Vietnamese? … more below
I filed a hard-news piece: no anger, no horror, just the straight stuff: SAIGON–At least 199 persons, most of them orphans between eight months and 12 years old, died Friday when…
Profitt had the right take on the mercy mission.
“It’s a goddamned government-sponsored kidnapping..” …