Forgotten Ship: A Daring Rescue As Saigon Fell
A Lifesaving Mission As Saigon Fell
First of three parts
For Americans, the lasting image of the end of the Vietnam War came from the nightly news. On April 29, 1975, television showed the evacuation of Saigon as U.S. Marine helicopters swooped down to the U.S. Embassy and the roof of a nearby CIA safe house to rescue the last 1,000 Americans in the city and some 6,000 Vietnamese and their families who worked for them.
But there was another evacuation that didn't get as much attention. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese found other ways to escape in those frenzied few days. They left in boats and helicopters and headed to the South China Sea. They didn't know if North Vietnamese jets would sink their boats or shoot the helicopters out of the sky.
They did know that the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet was out there, somewhere, and they headed out to the ocean hoping to be rescued.
One of those U.S. Navy ships was a small destroyer escort, the USS Kirk. As the evacuation began, the Kirk's military mission was to shoot down any North Vietnamese jets that might try to stop the Marine helicopters. The North Vietnamese planes never came.
The approximately 260 officers and men of the USS Kirk weren't prepared for what happened next.
Scores of South Vietnamese military helicopters filled the horizon.
"It looked like bees flying all over the place. And they were just going due east, trying to find someplace to land," said Paul Jacobs, the captain of the Kirk.
Desperate, Looking For A Place To Land
One of the sailors who preserved details of the scene was Hugh Doyle, the Kirk's chief engineer. When he had free time, he would return to his stateroom and sit on his bunk or at a small pull-down desk and dictate cassette tapes of daily events to send home to his wife, Judy, and three children.
His surprise and excitement are evident in the tapes.
"We looked up out on the horizon, and pretty soon all you could see were helicopters. And they came in and it was incredible. I don't think I'll ever see anything like it again," said Doyle, now retired and living in Rhode Island.
The South Vietnamese military helicopters were packed with people -- pilots and their family and friends. And now, as some of the choppers were precariously low on fuel, the pilots were looking for a place to land. Dozens of UH-1 Huey helicopters flew past the Kirk heading for the larger aircraft carriers. The Kirk had only a small flight deck.
Jacobs, the Kirk's captain, wanted in on the action, so he ordered his men to try to make contact with the helicopters and invite one to land.
'Humans More Important Than Hardware'
But the officers and men of the Kirk weren't sure that the South Vietnamese pilots had the skill to land on a moving flight deck.
"Most of the Vietnam pilots had never landed on a ship before. Almost to a man they were army pilots and they typically landed either at fire zones, at little clearings in the brush, or at an airport," recalled Don Cox, an anti-submarine-equipment officer on the Kirk, who is now an engineer for a missile defense company in Arizona.
The sailors stood on the landing deck and directed the first helicopter in. They unloaded its passengers and directed a second helicopter in. There we now several others buzzing overhead waiting to land.
"I believe it was the third aircraft that landed and chopped the tail off the second aircraft that had landed. There was still helicopters circling wanting to land. There was no room on our deck so we just started pushing helicopters overboard. We figured humans were much more important than the hardware," Cox said.
One or two sailors would jump into the helicopter and grab whatever hardware they could find -- batteries, radios -- as other sailors were bouncing and pushing the machine toward the edge of the deck and over into the sea.
These scenes were repeated on other Navy ships. Helicopters would land, refugees would jump off and sailors would quickly push the helicopters overboard to make room for more. That happened on large ships, including the USS Hancock and USS Midway, both aircraft carriers, and the USS Blue Ridge, the headquarters ship for the Navy's 7th Fleet. It also happened on other smaller ships, like the USS Cook, another destroyer escort like the Kirk.
'Catching Babies Like Basketballs'
Amid the chaos, a larger helicopter moved toward the Kirk. It was a Chinook CH-47, with two rotors that would tear the ship apart if it tried to land. The sailors made frantic signals telling the pilot he couldn't land. The pilot got the message but he was determined to unload his passengers.
Doyle described the scene to Judy in his cassette tape recording.
"Picture this, we're steaming along at about 5 knots. And this huge airplane comes in and hovers over, over the fantail, opened up its rear door, and starts dropping people out of it. It's about 15 feet off the fantail! There's American sailors back on the fantail, catching babies like basketballs!" he said at the time.
A young mother in the helicopter -- the wife of the pilot -- dropped her three young children, including her 10-month-old baby daughter.
Kent Chipman, a 21-year-old Texan, was one of the sailors who ran under the helicopter to catch the people who jumped out. "I remember the baby coming out," he recalled. "You know, there was no way that we were going to let them hit the deck or drop them. We caught them."
A Miraculous Escape
Once the passengers were out of the big Chinook, the co-pilot jumped to the deck. But now the pilot was running out of fuel and surrounded by flat, blue ocean. He flew about 60 yards from the Kirk.
The sailors could see the pilot in the cockpit taking off his clothes as he hovered the aircraft. They watched as he leaned the helicopter to the left and jumped out the right-hand side into the water.
"Soon as the blades hit the water, they exploded -- there were small pieces, but there were also pieces, probably 10, 15 feet long, big pieces go flying out. It sounded like a giant train wreck, you know, in slow motion and it's loud, you know, wind is blowing everywhere," said Chipman, who then worked as a machinist's mate keeping the ship's engine running and who today helps operate a water purification plant in Longview, Texas.
Chipman and the others on deck assumed the pilot had died as the helicopter exploded in the water. But then the man came to the surface and Chipman was thrilled. "To see that kind of destruction, you think this guy just sacrificed his life. But he popped right out of the water and it was amazing."
Excited sailors from the Kirk dove into the water to save the pilot, but others -- already in the water in a small boat -- got to him first and brought him back to the Kirk.
The pilot and his family were among some 200 refugees rescued from 16 helicopters by the Kirk's crew over a day and a half. The sailors looked after their Vietnamese visitors, over half of whom were women, children and babies. They put up tarps on the deck so they would have some shelter from the blazing sun. They distributed food and water and played games with the children. The ship's crew found themselves changing diapers, treating wounds and giving comfort.
On the second day, the refugees were moved to a larger transport ship.
"These people were coming out of there with nothing. Whatever they had in their pockets or hands. Some of them had suitcases; some of them had a bag," Chipman says. "You could tell they'd been in a war. They were still wounded. There were people young, old, army guys with the bandages on their head, arms -- you could tell they'd been in a fight."
Heroism Gives Vietnamese Chance At New Lives
But the Kirk's mission was about to change -- and suddenly. The rescue of the refugees from those helicopters was just a start. The ship and its crew would eventually help save 20,000 to 30,000 Vietnamese refugees fleeing aboard the vessels of the South Vietnamese navy.
It's one of the greatest humanitarian missions in the history of the U.S. Navy, but it's a story that has largely gone untold until recently, lost in the bitterness over the Vietnam War.
Most of the South Vietnamese saved by the Kirk eventually moved to camps in the United States and then resettled in communities across the country.
The officers and men of the Kirk never knew the names -- with a few exceptions -- of the men, women and children they had rescued.
But over the past decade, the crew members started getting together at reunions. They always found themselves marveling at the masterful airmanship of the pilot of the Chinook. The crew started to wonder what happened to that pilot, his family and the others they helped save.
Last year, Jacobs -- along with Jan Herman, a historian with the Navy's Bureau of Medicine who is now documenting the story of the Kirk -- gave an interview to a Vietnamese television show in Virginia. They talked of wanting to find that pilot.
It didn't take long for word of their search to spread in the community of Vietnamese now established across America. And that's how Ba Nguyen and his family were found. Nguyen and his wife, now American citizens, live in Seattle, where both worked for the aerospace giant Boeing.
The Kirk crew held a reunion this summer outside Washington, D.C., and invited Nguyen and his family. The pilot came, pushed in his wheelchair into the ballroom by his wife and children.
The Kirk crew surprised Nguyen by honoring him, and pinning an Air Medal on his sport coat. The medal, presented on behalf of the USS Kirk alumni association, is given by the U.S. military to note heroic feats of airmanship.
"This is our story," said his son Miki Nguyen, who was 6 years old at the time of the rescue. "This is how we started in America."
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The USS Kirk carried out one of the most significant humanitarian missions in U.S. military history. Yet the story went untold for 35 years. Correspondent Joseph Shapiro and producer Sandra Bartlett of NPR's Investigative Unit interviewed more than 20 American and Vietnamese eyewitnesses and participants in the events of late April and early May 1975. They studied hundreds of documents, photographs and other records, many never made public before — including cassette tapes recorded at the time by the ship's chief engineer.
Shapiro first learned of the Kirk from Jan Herman, historian of the U.S. Navy Medical Department, who says the Kirk's heroics got lost because, as the Vietnam War ended, Americans were bitterly divided over the war's course and cost. There was little interest in celebrating a mission that saved the lives of 20,000 to 30,000 refugees. Herman is working on a book documenting the story and a film documentary, which was shown when the Kirk crew met for a reunion in Springfield, Va., in July.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
When the Vietnam War ended and Saigon fell in April 1975, Americans got their enduring impression of the event from television.
(Soundbite of vintage news clip)
Unidentified Man: Good evening. A quarter century of American involvement in South Vietnam is over. At mid-afternoon, Saigon time, an armada of 81 U.S. Marine helicopters descended on the South Vietnamese capital. More than 6,000 persons, as many as 900 of them Americans, the rest Vietnamese and third country nationals were evacuated, plucked from U.S. Embassy grounds, from rooftops throughout the city and from the nearby Tan Son Nhat Airport.
SIEGEL: But there was another evacuation that didn't get news coverage. U.S. Navy ships saved another 20 to 30,000 Vietnamese refugees.
BLOCK: The full scope of this humanitarian rescue has been largely untold, lost in time and in bitterness over the Vietnam War.
But correspondent Joseph Shapiro and producer Sandra Bartlett, from NPR's investigative unit, interviewed more than 20 American and Vietnamese eyewitnesses. And they studied hundreds of documents, photographs and other records, including many never made public before.
Here's Joseph Shapiro with part one of our report and the story of one small U.S. Navy ship.
JOSEPH SHAPIRO: On the morning of April 29, 1975, the USS Kirk and its crew stood off the coast of South Vietnam in the South China Sea.
(Soundbite of a 1975 tape)
Mr. HUGH DOYLE (Then-Chief Engineer, USS Kirk): I'm sure as you know by this time, Vietnam has surrendered and the mass panic - almost panic-stricken retreat has already taken place.
SHAPIRO: Sitting on his bunk, the ship's chief engineer, Hugh Doyle, records a cassette tape to send home to his wife, Judy.
(Soundbite of a 1975 tape)
Mr. DOYLE: I really don't know where to start. It's been such an unusual couple of days. Where we fit in was really interesting. You're probably not going to believe half the things I tell you. But believe me, they are all true.
SHAPIRO: Doyle's cassette tapes, which until now have never been heard publicly, provide one of the best accounts of one of the most extraordinary humanitarian missions in the history of the U.S. Navy.
The Kirk's military mission that day was to shoot down any North Vietnamese jets that might try to stop U.S. Marine helicopters, as they evacuated people from Saigon. The North Vietnamese planes never came. But the Kirk's mission was about to change, and suddenly.
Doyle told Judy what he and his crewmates saw when they looked toward South Vietnam, some 12 miles away.
(Soundbite of a 1975 tape)
Mr. DOYLE: We looked up at the horizon, though, and pretty soon all you could see were helicopters. And they came and just was incredible. I don't think I'll ever see anything like it again.
Mr. PAUL JACOBS (Then-Captain, USS Kirk): It looked like bees flying all over the place. Yeah, trying to find some place to land.
SHAPIRO: Paul Jacobs was captain of the Kirk.
Mr. JACOBS: Every one of those Hueys probably had 15 or 20 on board. But they're all headed east, you know, trying to escape.
SHAPIRO: Kent Chipman, a 21-year-old Texan, worked in the engine room.
Mr. KENT CHIPMAN (Then-Crewman, USS Kirk): What was freaky and it's still - it gives me goose bumps till today, it'd be real quiet and calm and not a sound, and then all of a sudden you could hear the helicopters coming. They just - you can hear the big choop-choop-choo-choop, you know, the Hueys.
SHAPIRO: These were South Vietnamese Huey helicopters. Military pilots had crammed their aircraft with family and friends and flown out to the South China Sea. They were pretty sure that the U.S. Navy 7th Fleet was in that ocean somewhere. Now they were desperately looking for some place to land.
Here's Hugh Doyle speaking today.
Mr. DOYLE: Well, they were flying out to sea. Some of them were very low on fuel and some of them were crashing alongside the larger ships. They would crash in the water, and I don't know how many Vietnamese refugees were lost in all that.
SHAPIRO: But the helicopters flew past the Kirk. They were looking for a larger carrier deck to land.
Jim Bondgard(ph), a radar man, was watching all the traffic dotting the radarscope when Captain Jacobs issued orders.
Mr. JIM BONDGARD (Crewman, USS Kirk): The skipper got real excited. He called down to us and said, you need to try to advertise and see if you can get these guys on the radio. Just announcing where our haul number and we have an open flight deck; if you want to come land on us, we can take you aboard, and that kind of thing. You know, just trying to encourage them to come in.
SHAPIRO: There was one problem: It wasn't clear that the pilots could land on a moving ship.
Don Cox was an anti-submarine equipment officer.
Mr. DON COX (Crewman, USS Kirk): Most of the Vietnam pilots had never landed on board a ship before. Almost to a man they were army pilots and they typically landed either at fire zones, they had little clearings in the brush, or at an airport. And the ship looks very, very small and the deck was very crowded.
SHAPIRO: Cox was one of the sailors who, not sure if those pilots would land or crash, stood on the flight deck to direct the helicopters in.
The first two helicopters landed safely, but then there was no more room. The Kirk was a destroyer escort. It was built to hunt submarines, not land helicopters. It had a landing deck about the size of a tennis court.
Mr. COX: I believe it was the third aircraft landed and chopped the tail off the second aircraft that had landed. There were still helicopters circling wanting to land. There was no room on our deck, so we just started pushing helicopters overboard. We figured humans were much more important than the hardware.
(Soundbite of a 1975 tape)
Mr. DOYLE: So we couldn't think of what else to do. And these other planes were looking for a place to land. And, you know, we would have lost people in the plane so we threw the airplane over the side. Yeah, really.
SHAPIRO: As one helicopter landed and the people scrambling off, dozens of sailors ran over to push the aircraft over the side and into the ocean.
But Kent Chipman says it wasn't easy. Vietnamese helicopters were heavy. And because they were designed to land in fields, they had skids instead of wheels.
Mr. CHIPMAN: The flight deck has non-skid on it. I mean, it's like real rough sandpaper. And the Hueys didn't have tires on. They had like skids. And we had to just work it this way and work it that way, till we got it over to the edge. And then everybody there'd be like 30 people just fighting their way to get over there and try to help, you know.
SHAPIRO: With one final shove, the helicopter would totter over the edge of the ship, with its tail high in the air and then crash to the water below.
(Soundbite of a 1975 tape)
Mr. DOYLE: There were stories, horrible stories that I've heard from these refugees.
SHAPIRO: One Vietnamese pilot landed with bullet holes in his aircraft. Hugh Doyle saw he was in shock.
(Soundbite of a 1975 tape)
Mr. DOYLE: As he was loading his helicopter, had his family killed. They're standing waiting to get on the helicopter, his family was machine-gunned. He was just sitting in the helicopter. He was the pilot. He stood there and looked at them. They were all laying dead.
SHAPIRO: The crew of the Kirk fed the refugees and spread out tarps to protect them from the blazing sun.
Mr. DOYLE: We took the people up on to the 02-Level, it be just behind our stack, and we laid mats and all kinds of blankets and stuff out on the deck for their babies. And there were all kinds of - there were infants and children and women, and the women were crying. And, oh, it was a scene I'll never forget.
SHAPIRO: Kent Chipman.
Mr. CHIPMAN: These people were coming out of there with nothing - whatever they had in their pockets or hands. Some of them had suitcases. Some of them had a bag. You know, and you could tell they'd been in a war. They were still wounded. There were people young, old, army guys with the bandages on their head, arms - you could tell they'd been in a fight.
Some of the pilots and their families came from Vietnam's elite, and some of them carried what was left of their wealth in wafers of gold, sometimes sewn into their clothes. The captain locked the gold in his safe.
Then there was the helicopter that was too big to land.
Mr. CHIPMAN: This is when the big Chinook came out. And you could tell the sound of it was different; more robust, deep.
(Soundbite of a 1975 tape)
Mr. DOYLE: This huge helicopter called a Chinook. It's a Boeing. You know, remember them from my mother's house on Berthold Place? So you know those huge helicopters they made down there - those great big ones?
SHAPIRO: Doyle had grown up in Pennsylvania, near the factory that made those helicopters.
(Soundbite of a 1975 tape)
Mr. DOYLE: They came out and tried to land on the ship. Oh, we almost - the thing almost crashed on board our ship. So we finally got them to realize to wave them off, it was too big. You know, he just could not have landed. Well, he flew around us a couple of times and he was running low on fuel. Picture this: we're steaming along at about five knots and this huge airplane comes in and hovers over the fantail, opened up its rear door and started dropping people out of it. And this is about 15 feet off the fantail.
There's American sailors back on the fantail catching babies like basketballs.
Mr. CHIPMAN: The helicopter, it wasn't stationary. It'd come in and hover and, you know, trying to get close as they could. And I remember, at least twice, that he went back up - not real high, you know, 60 feet or so - and he'd slowly come back down.
The helicopter was probably eight to 10 foot in the air as - off the deck, as we were catching the people jumping out. Then we kind of scooch out to the door and just kind of drop down, you know, as easily as they could. This - I mean, juts the noise is tremendous. It's the biggest Chinook they make with the four sets wheels. The wind off this thing, it's like being in a hurricane.
SHAPIRO: One mother dropped her baby and her two young children toward the outstretched arms of the sailors below.
Mr. CHIPMAN: I remember the baby coming out. You know, there was no way we were going to let them hit the deck or drop them. We caught them. I was pretty small myself back then - weighed 130 pounds. Even as small as I am, you know, they come flying out and we caught them.
SHAPIRO: These were the Vietnamese army pilots' children. He'd saved the lives of his passengers, but now he was out of fuel and surrounded by flat, blue ocean. Hugh Doyle saw him fly the huge helicopter about 60 yards from the Kirk. Doyle uses slang and calls it an airplane.
Mr. DOYLE: He took the airplane, hovered it very close to the water, took all his clothes off with the exception of his skivvies, all by himself, no co-pilot, took all his clothes off, threw it out the window. And then he got up on the edge of the window, still holding onto the two sticks that a helicopter has to fly with. He tilted it over on its side, still flying in the air, and dove into the water. The airplane just fell into the water. It hit the water on its right-hand side. The rotors just exploded.
Mr. CHIPMAN: There were small pieces, but there were also pieces, probably 10, 15 foot long, big pieces go flying out - it sounded like a giant train wreck, you know, in slow motion, and it's loud, it's, you know, wind blowing everywhere.
The Chinook ended upside down. He dove out the side of it, the thing flipped upside down, and then it was calm and quiet again like you turned off a light switch.
I'm thinking, man, this guy just died. I said this is crazy. And his little head popped out of the water. I said, he's alive. It was pretty cool.
SHAPIRO: The pilot's name was Ba Nguyen. He and his family were among some 200 refugees rescued from 16 helicopters. On the second day those refugees, more than half were women, children and babies, would be moved to a larger transport ship.
But the heroics of the Kirk would continue. Shortly before midnight, at the end of the second day, the Kirk's captain, Paul Jacobs, got a call.
Mr. PAUL JACOBS: And that's when I got a (knocking sound) on the shoulder from the XO. He says, hey, Seventh Fleet wants to speak to you now. It's urgent.
SHAPIRO: It was the admiral in charge of the entire rescue.
Mr. JACOBS: He says we're going to have to send you back to rescue the Vietnamese navy. We forgot them, and if we don't get them or any part of them, they're all probably going to be killed.
SHAPIRO: The Kirk was being sent back to Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government had fallen; the Communists were in control now. The Kirk would be headed into hostile territory by itself.
Mr. JACOBS: So I said: Am I going to get any support? No. Am I going to get any air cover? No. You're on your own. I said: What's the rules of engagement? He said, there are none.
SHAPIRO: The Kirk set out to save the South Vietnamese Navy, and it ended up rescuing tens of thousands of desperate Vietnamese refugees. We'll tell you that story tomorrow on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
Joseph Shapiro, NPR News.
BLOCK: And you can experience the Kirk's dramatic story in photographs at our website, npr.org. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.
