Thread 513649547

I N NOVEMBER 1974, the politburo and Central Military Commission met in Hanoi to discuss strategy. Some members urged continued caution. They worried that if they tried to push Saigon to the point of collapse too quickly, the Americans might yet return. Final victory, they calculated, would come in 1976. Ever impatient, Party First Secretary Le Duan did not want to wait that long. “Now that the United States has pulled out,” he said, “it will be hard for them to jump back in. And no matter how they may intervene they cannot rescue the Saigon administration from its disastrous collapse.” But all the previous offensives he had set in motion—in 1964, in 1968, in 1972—had ended in failure. This time, he turned to General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of the great victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, who had been sidelined during the Tet Offensive. Giap ordered a “test” attack to see if the Americans would bring airpower back to bear as they had during the Easter Offensive two and a half years earlier. In December, North Vietnamese forces attacked Phuoc Long, northeast of Saigon. Within three weeks they had overrun the entire province and had killed or captured thousands of ARVN defenders. General Van Tien Dung, the North Vietnamese chief of staff, expressed his surprise and delight at the ease with which victory had been achieved; the ARVN, he said, now found themselves forced to fight a “poor man’s war.”

The result was a catastrophe. As the ARVN and Territorial Forces fled south, 400,000 terrified civilians fled with them. The soldiers cursed Thieu, one officer remembered: “Some reached the limit of their despair and killed the officers. An artillery battalion commander who was marching in the retreating column was shot to death by soldiers who wanted his beautiful watch. The despair was so great that at one point two or three guerrillas arriving at the scene could make prisoners of a hundred Rangers.” Thousands died, killed by North Vietnamese shells and machine gun fire, trampled by fellow refugees, run over by retreating tanks, blown apart by South Vietnamese bombs dropped by pilots who mistook them for the enemy. Reporters called it the “Convoy of Tears.” Meanwhile, Pleiku and Kon Tum fell to the North Vietnamese as well. In just ten days, six entire provinces, a full infantry division, the equivalent of another division of Rangers, and tens of thousands of territorial and support troops with all their weapons and equipment had fallen to the communists. Bao Ninh, then still serving in the Central Highlands, understood what was happening: “After thirty years of inconclusive