smokingboot

Everyone still calls it Saigon, though its official name is Ho Chi Minh city. Sophisticated and vibrant, with its French colonial architecture, the opera house, the wonderful Central Post Office with its telegraph booths, the presidential palace, city hall and the neon nights where you can find yourself one of many high tower bars for the sipping of cocktails while gazing at the skyline. But tucked away amongst all this, the old alleys remain early morning markets with vendors sat on the ground between piled baskets of fruit and veg, and bowls with living eels and fish, water constantly being poured over them. Some of the fish has been killed already but that's a dangerous game in the heat. We looked at it all only to hear the sound of some lady shouting genially behind us, a nice voice. Our local guide, beaming because he was home, chuckled and turned to R;

'She says she wants to be introduced to you, because you are a Big Boss Man!' On further questioning he added, 'it is because you are all in white. She thinks you are an Arab.'
For certain R looked the part, with dark sunglasses, loose white shirt and trousers, white fedora, and blue sorta-shemagh to keep the sun off his neck. I'd have told the lady that the big boss man has a big boss wife, but alas I was far less impressive. The hotter it got the more voluminous my outfits became til I looked like I was wandering round South Vietnam in a tent.

But the time was upon us to talk about a very different kind of Big Boss Man; of Ambassador Martin and Nixon and Ford and Kissinger.

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Martin was such a strange choice for ambassador; he couldn't speak Vietnamese though he was fluent in French, he suffered from ill health, and perhaps most damning of all, he lacked that most necessary quality in a diplomat; he had no charm. He didn't go out into the country, spoke little to the people themselves and was a true believer in so much as he wouldn't conceive of a reality in which the communists could win. By the time he understood it was too late and Saigon's fall was assured, effective evacuation had been rendered impossible by Graham's determined delay and utter misreading of the situation. Kissinger wanted him out. Credit to the thinkers, the CIA had put together thousands of laminated free passes for Vietnamese spies, but Martin did not want to evacuate so nothing happened. In the face of disaster he promised to get all the locals who had been working for the Americans out, and some were indeed removed. But he broke that promise at the last, leaving over a thousand and their families waiting in the embassy grounds and beyond as his helicopter took off. It was later learned that Kissinger intended to arrest him if he did not leave, so it could be argued that he had no choice. Martin described his desertion of those people as one of the worst memories of his life. I would love to ask him what he thought their worst memories would be.

And as to those big boss men who put him in place, what were they thinking? If the war was worth fighting, it was worth winning. How do you do that when your intelligence on the ground is so weak? When faith in the cause leaves logistics behind?

Hopefully lessons were learned when it came to the 2021 Kabul Airlift. I certainly learned a thing or two just from listening on a bright afternoon in Saigon.

*A long ago CIA safe house