This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Marine Corps Colonel Anthony Tony Wood. Colonel Wood spent thirty four years in uniform and secretly led an effort to plan for and execute the evacuation of Saigon in nineteen seventy five. April thirtieth, twenty twenty five,
marks fifty years since the fall of Saigon. It's a painful day triggered by the North Vietnamese violating the Paris Peace Accords, invading South Vietnam, and eventually overrunning the South Vietnamese capital. Today, Colonel Wood will walk us through all of the planning, the many obstacles they've faced while planning, and the final frantic days and hours in Saigon. Tony Wood was born in nineteen forty five and grew up
a Marine Corps brat as his dad served in the Corps. Incidentally, a dust up with his father led to Wood's decision to become a Marine as well.
Well. I enlisted in the Marine Corps after a fight with my father in the summer of nineteen sixty four, and I stayed in the reserves and went back to school and then the war heated up Vietnam and I thought I would do my thing, and the Marine Corps decided to commission me. So I went from sergeant to second lieutenant and went off to Vietnam, and one thing led to another after that. Thirty four years later I retired.
Did your father, who was the Marine not want you to join the Corps?
I don't know what his real attitude was on it, but it was a good thing that we had. That we became very close later, but it was time.
To break loose now. When you were deployed to Vietnam. Your first tour began in nineteen sixty eight as a platoon commander.
Interestingly enough, I was an infantry officer, but parachute qualified, and I was assigned an armored platoon tanks and amtraks and some howitzers mounted on amtraks with the Marine Corps, I mean, with the Rock Marine Corps Republic of Korea Marine Corps Blue Dragon Brigade. And it was a very interesting tour and we got in a lot of combat with them, supporting the Rocks against the NVA south of Danang and near Hooyan, Vietnam.
And obviously your deployment nineteen sixty eight. That's a very sensitive time in the warrior, right after the.
Time was after Ted in sixty eight sixty nine.
Right, And so what was the attitude, the mood, the urgency at the time that you deployed.
Well, Ted is vastly misinterpreted. And I arrived in Vietnam basically the US forces had cleaned out the enemy in tent because what happened, of course, was that the North Vietnamese encouraged the Viet Cong to rise. The Viet Cong rose and became very visible, and most of them were killed. It was interpreted very differently back in the United States. It was very hard to understand that when you were
over there or explain it to the young Marines. But so we were still very well engaged all over the country in nineteen sixty nine, and I came back to Hawaii to the first Marine Brigade from there when I finished that tour.
Talk about your interaction both with the Dragon Brigade and as a platoon commander. What type of combat did you see at that point.
Well, we were both mounted and dismounted. Mounted times. I usually broke the platoon into two sections. Let the gunny,
the platoon sergeant take one out. I took the other one out to support at the Korean Marine Corps in their operations, we had six tanks, ten troop carrying amphibious tractors amtraks, and six tractors that really didn't move because we couldn't get any parts for them that had Howitzer's assigned on them, So they were kind of a stationary artillery battery, which of course I had no idea how to employ, so I had to learn that in a hurry too. Nor did I know anything about tanks or amtraks,
so I had to learn a lot there. You got to wonder sometimes how you get assigned to these duties. Anyway, it was it was a very very exciting tour during which I learned a great deal.
How quickly did you learn the things he had?
Probably not quickly enough, but we did well, And I guess I did well largely because of patients on the part of staff NCOs and some very good n CEOs, and I I had some very good training from the Marine Corps before I went over there.
How would you describe the quality of soldiering on? First of all, on our side of the menu, that you led.
They were superb. They were absolutely superb. Despite Jane Fonda and some of the others. They were great. And the casualties were pretty heavy in that war, but yeah, they were great. Taught me how to cook rice, among other skills.
And what did you notice about the enemy?
They were also very The North Vietnamese Army, the NVA as we call them, as who we were fighting. The viet Cong had been eliminated basically in tent but the NVA was another story. They were very They were very, very good, and they were artists with tunnels. I remember once one tunnel was eight stories deep to the ground, with meeting rooms in a hospital and all kinds of
other things remarkable. And their sappers were also amazing. Sappers were highly trained, usually very small guys who had slipped through the wire and bullholes and try to penetrate your perimeters. They were very They were a respected enemy. The area had also mines were a problem. The area had been mined in the thirties by the Vietmen in their fight against the French. Then it had been mined again in the in the early fifties, and it was mined a
third time. Of course, when we were fighting, So there were a lot of mines at various locations, and it would we never carried marines inside the armored tractors. We put them on top with three layers of sandbags, and it was a court martial offense to carry them inside because of the mines and those in those days, the Amphibian tractors had gasoline in their bellies, so the mines
had to blow through the gas. And what happened was I would stand, the platoon commander would stand on one in one hat standing on the chair, and the tractor commander would stand in the other one, and the air bubble would shoot us out like large slow murder rounds when we hit a mine, and we hit several mines, got to put a bunch of punctured ear drums. That was the only thing that happened to me in the
entire tour. Ear drums and the typical cellulitis infections from the from the you know, the tropical diseases.
How would you describe the situation compared to when you came on your first tour and to when you left.
Well, when I left, we were beginning to draw down, just beginning to draw down. In sixty nine, and so it wasn't radically different. The Blue Dragons were still there and they were still fighting. The NVA was still there. They were still fighting us, but we were beginning to draw down. There was no question about it. And of course that was the lead up to the Paris Beast Conference, which a year and a half or two later ended up basically abandoning the South Vietnamese.
Then after your first tour, I came back to the US.
The Marine Corps thought I needed to be schooled again, so they they UH, they decided to send me to school again, to the Amphibious Warfare School, And well, I was a platoon commander and then a company commander and UH, first Battalion, third Marines in Hawaii, and we had to to uh. There was quite a bit of training to do there. And then they sent me to school, and then I volunteered and went back to Vietnam.
Then your second tour, I guess the first tour could be described as more conventional. The second tour was much less conventional.
The second tour was less conventional. I went back to Southeast Asia the second time in the late summer of nineteen seventy four, and my job was to as the commander for field operations, I had in the search and the resolution of the MIA cases. We had several thousand MIA cases that hadn't been resolved, Remains hadn't been found, and in some cases there were some sightings of apparently live prisoners, it was not clear. So we were engaged
in that. I had an Army Special Forces team of about fifty guys, terrific, unbelievably terrific guys, some of the finest fighters I've ever seen in my life, a small Navy intelligence dead and an Air Force medical debt. And of course there were no US facilities of any kind, and there were no US forces of any kind in Vietnam.
It was completely different, and it was difficult to hold your head up because despite our pledges that had convinced the South to agree to the Paris Peace Treaty, we were abandoning all support of the South Vietnamese armed forces. And it was so bad that in some cases art the artillery batteries had one round per day for six guns, dozens and dozens and dozens of vehicles as each time
you would arrive at a unit park no parts. Gasoline was scarce, and we were systematically After President Nixon's resignation, Congress decided to abandon Vietnam, and so they cut off aid despite President Ford's requests. So the South Vietnamese regarded us as honorable allies. But it was very hard to hold your head up.
Going to go back to the clandestine work and resolving the MIA cases. We got about a minute left in this segment. How did you actually resolve them?
Well, there had been an ambush. The process was open until December of nineteen seventy four. That is, we tabled where we were going to go and what we were going to do to the Four Power Joint Military Commission, which included the enemy, the North Vietnamese, and so that was agreed to in the Paris Accords. And however, in December of nineteen seventy four, just before I went over there, they ambushed the American team, killed the captain team leader,
and wounded several others. And so from then on we never tabled any more operations, and the skirmishing continued in Vietnam. And what I would do is I had to negotiate with the Hill tribes and others where we would go in for security because the popular forces, which they frequently offered us were really pretty well useless. They were just villagers armed.
You know.
It's not that they didn't care, it's just they weren't trained. So I would negotiate, and I spent a lot of time in the hills and got a lot of parasites out of that. That eventually caught up with me.
That's retired to US Marine Corps Colonel Tony Wood. When we come back, you'll hear how Wood got the daunting challenge of developing an evacuation plan for Americans in Saigon. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles.
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This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this addition is retired US Marine Corps Colonel Anthony Tony Wood. We now pick up his story as Wood explains the situation leading up to the need for an American evacuation plan in Saigon.
We had left South Vietnam in nineteen seventy two. There were no US forces of any kind in the country. The situation was we had a mission, which is what the US calls its combination of civilians and military, diplomat
and business supportive anywhere in the world. The mission was probably twenty five thousand strong in Saigon of civilians and fifty military officers were allowed by the Paris Peace Accords, and they were all very senior and they were part of the Defense Adiche Office Dao Major General Homer Smith, wonderful man, great leader, and I turned I turned twenty nine in November of nineteen seventy four, and we went forward.
We were operating out of Thailand in the search for the resolution operations for the MIAs, and we went forward to Vietnam to Saigon right after my birthday when I turned twenty nine in November. And we did that because the Jolly Green helicopters that we were using for insertion and extraction left Thailand. At that point, they were the last US military operation capable outfit that would take us
into Vietnam and for insertion and extraction. And from then on, in a development that turned out to be critical, we operated with Air America, the CIA's airline, piloted by terrific for retired army or former army warrant officers, mostly civilians now, and they're small hueys, and we flew with them almost exclusively for insertion and extraction for those operations. So we were operating out of Saigon in Vietnam on Air America helicopters, but there were no US forces in the country, and
the senior staff that was in Saigon was it. And of course they were essentially managing the logistics support of ARVIN, such as it was ARVIN being the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. A lot of skirmishing was going on, and then, of course it didn't take long. A month later in December, the NVA attacked South Vietnam, despite the Paris Piece Accords from their sanctuaries in the west, across
the border and took the provincial capital of Fuklong. And as I'd say when I tell the story occasionally around the country, it was a test and we failed it. It didn't take very long. The second week in March they attacked banned Me two, a key highway intersection in the west, and Kantum and Plaiku were put at risk, and an entire South Vietnamese core collapsed because they were then trapped and one thing led to another, and it
was the beginning of the end. And from March thirteenth until April the twenty ninth was you could count the days until fifty some days were left for South Vietnam.
But you had already essentially been tasked with coming up with an evacuation plan even before those in March.
In the first of March, General Smith, I've to this day don't know how he made the decision to do this, because he had, you know, a whole staff of very senior officers. At any rate, I came in from the field and I was ordered to report to General Smith. I did. I'd never seen a major general before, and wonderful Virginia boy, great, a great officer, just a terrific leader. And he had that soft Virginia accident. And he said, Captain Wood, do you know why you are here? And
I said no, sir. He said you are here because I ordered you here. I said, yes, Sir, I knew that. And anyway, he said you are going to join this Special Planning Group. And I didn't open my mouth anymore. And he went on for a few minutes and said, everything you do will be secret. You will have to clear it with me. And I said, he said, do you have any questions? I had probably two hundred, but I said, sir, where is the Special Planning Group? And
he said, you are the Special Planning Group. It's wherever you put it. That's literally what he said. And so we went down to this bunker, George Petrie, who is an incredible Army Special Forces hero, who was my deputy and my friend, and so it was the two of us and we joined one Marine Major Jim's avatur and we were the Special Planning So we just called ourselves the SPG since he said we were a special Planning group,
you know. And we've found a bunker deep in the depths of the of the former mac V compound they called the Pentagon East, huge complex directly across from the Tonsonote Air Base. Very important fact because it plays later into what happened. So what's the mission. Well, he said, you are going to evacuate urban sigone, or better precisely, more precisely, you are going to develop a plan for the evacuation of the center of the city. And we
went back and sat down. Of course, we had a million questions, but none of us had ever been in an evacuation before. None of us had ever been in a Special Planning Group before, and so we sat down and we said, okay, we have to figure out who we're going to evacuate, how many critically. We have to figure out what's going to happen here in this city, and we have to figure out what the assets.
Are when we come back. Colonel Wood explains how the evacuation was developed despite overwhelming obstacles, and how the evacuation itself unfolded. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. This is Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in this edition is retired US Marine Corps Colonel Anthony Tony Wood.
As Colonel Wood just explained, he was tasked with creating an evacuation plan for Americans working and living in downtown Saigon as North Vietnamese forces drew closer and closer to the city. Colonel Wood now takes us through the hurdles, the setbacks, the ingenuity, and the execution of the evacuation. But he picks up his story by explaining that he and the other planners not only had to keep their work secret from the North Vietnamese, but also from the top American diplomat in the country.
It's important to understand the unique situation because it's hard to believe the Ambassador Graham Martin had forbidden any overt effort at all to prepare for evacuation. Initially none was permitted, so our ability to plan had to all be done
in absolute secrecy. And we then asked what the assets would be, and over a period of weeks, one decision after another led to the fact that no marines would be put in to help secure the defense Attachet Office compound where we were and where we were building in secret an internment camp for ten thousand for ten days. Why because we weren't sure that the NVA would let
us wait long enough to get a plan together. You know, there was no guarantee in my mind at least that we had thirty days, forty days, whatever we thought we had, and that's all we thought we had. So that was being done in secret. And that was the beginning of the volunteers, which is the whole point of this story,
the real heroes. We recruited about twelve or fifteen American civilian Secretary's accountants, one who was a Lieutenant general equivalent Bill Austin, the Area auditor for Southeast Asia, and they began helping us build Project Alamo, which was the internment camp secret inside the DAO compound and of course, all this is in secret from most of the Dao staff too, And then the ambassador started making one decision after another.
These all didn't occur. First of all, there would be no security provided for the Dao compound beyond the twelve marines that we had. Then the next decision he made was there would be no marines in the city of Saigon during the actual evacuation. And of course the question that hit me immediately was, well, how do we secure the convoy. Our plan included a bus convoy. So we had been developing a plan that essentially worked in two prongs.
We would operate on eight routes named after the famous western trails of the United States Oregon, Texas, California, and so forth. And they would be buses, which we would armor somehow. We weren't sure how we were going to armor the buses, but we were going to armor them, and we were going to armor them in such a fashion that nobody would notice they were armored. Didn't know how to do that either, but we were going to figure it out. This was the plan. Okay, plans are great,
then you have to do them. Then those men and women Vietnamese third country nationals for whom we had legal responsibility the US does all over the world, and of course Americans that we were going to pick up, we would pick them up on eighteen or twenty designated pickup points that were special buildings, and those buildings would have helicopter landing zones prepared on their roofs, which Marine Corps
helicopters would then land on. Then another shoe fell. No Marine Corps helicopters would be allowed to land in the city except at the embassy. So remember that I mentioned to you we had been operating with their America. I went to Air America and I held a long meeting with the volunteers. We now had about one hundred volunteers by the end of March, working on all kinds of things, and including working with Air America to create hlz's on
the roofs of those buildings. All twenty six are America pilots volunteered to stay with the volunteers we had and to evacuate from the rooftops, which in the end they did well. At that point, the North Vietnamese in the end of March attacked from the north simultaneously in Quang Tree, Crang Tree Fell, and in rapid succession wave fell and then d Nang. D Nang falling is like Chicago falling in the United States. That's the impact it had on
the country. Now, tens of thousands of Vietnamese are fleeing south towards Saigon, tens of thousands clogging the roads. Troops can't move, and the NBA is coming in from the west and from the north, and they're attacking. And Arvin is having a terrible time and falling back, mostly because of lousy leadership. So at this point we go into override day at night, and when Dnang falls, the South Vietnamese government Saigon declares martial law. It affects a curfew
and puts barricades up all over the city. Well, this is a huge problem because we are planning convoys on routes. So every night, one of us has to run the barricades, and we have silenced weapons because if we have to shoot, are going to have to shoot National police South Vietnamese National Police at the barricades if we get into a fight.
So every night we did that, and then in the morning more than once breakfast, I hate to say it now was a poor example was Scotch and a cigarette, but it was so the volunteers, about one hundred of them by the last part of March, are busily engaged. They're installing flak jackets in the buses and stationing buses and groups in these specially prepared stops. During the day, the buses operate normally and nobody notices these flack jackets
that are bolted underneath the windows as protection. And there's mesh in the windows, but that doesn't show up a lot. The Pacific architects and engineers a great outfit builds all kinds of special barricades that will close off the stairwells in these buildings, because we know from the cities that we fell with. We went up to several cities, George Petrie and I, and we knew how Sygon would fall.
It would be horrible rioting, there would be arson, barricades, shooting, and all of which and more did in fact occur. So we had to be able to close off the route to the helicopter landing zones that were going to get people on the roofs once the convoys couldn't get anymore. And then in the meantime, others volunteers strung wire inside the huge water tower at Dao and made a giant antenna, and we put those small motorola radios you've seen in taxicabs.
Those were in all the buses. That's how we control the evacuation of Saigod was in those little tiny motorola radios. But it worked. The drivers for the buses got to drive the buses one foot forward and one foot back, and to see how to change gears because everything had to be done in secret. On April the third was
about the worst day of my life. Operation the Baby Lift had begun and the US government flew in a giant C five A transport and put three hundred orphaned infants on board, and thirty of the finest women in Dao volunteered to take it out, about twenty of whom were from the volunteers are volunteers. The C five A took off and at twenty five hundred feet it had explosive decompression. It blew its doors open. They went through the tail and the airlines. There was no control to
the bird after that. And this young airman, the captain whoever flying that airplane by an incredible act of airmanship using just the engines was able to get it. He couldn't make Tonsonut, he couldn't get back to Tonsonut. He could see he wasn't going to make it. He put it down in their ice paddies instead of in the city where it would have killed hundreds. And of course almost everybody in the aircraft was killed, I think, except five people, including the volunteers. So when you have a
blow like that, you immediately get everybody together. And I called a meeting, locked the doors because our meetings were secret, because nobody was supposed to know all this was going on. And I said, here's the situation. There won't be any marines in the city. I have a plan to secure the convoys, but will have no armed defense. The roadblocks will be up. It's likely to be mutinying and other things.
And I know after the deaths this morning of twenty of your friends, that you're wondering whether this is worth your life. And I said, anybody that doesn't show up to me tomorrow, we will not hold it against you. We understand. Well. At that point, a little tiny lady in the front row said, Captain, do you think will get out? Well? Now the rubber really met the road here it was there are, and everybody in that room looked up, cause it was the question on everybody's mind.
You know. I just told them that they don't have any security that we're going in anyway, and it was a terrible decision to make. But I don't know what the other I don't know what the alternative was. I answered her. I said, I don't think we will all get out, which is the truth. I just didn't know how much. How many would I but I didn't think we would all get out. It just didn't seem like
the odds were in favor of it. So we went on and a week later, Brigadier General Bond, who is Major General Smith's deputy and is in charge of the final evacuation planning, holds a meeting, right after which he is arrested by marines sent from the embassy by the ambassador and flown out of the country in the middle of evacuation planning in April, less than two and a half weeks before Saigon fell, and the ambassador has found out that General Bond sent a message requesting one company
of marines to guard this huge compound that we've got. We have twelve marines to guard this whole compound. They're throwing babies over the wire. The Marines are running and grabbing and catching the babies because the South Vietnamese women are panicking and they want their kids to get out. It's a very bad situation. And their national police are harassing people going in and out of the Americans going in and out, so we needed some security. So he
sent a message. Well, the ambassador relieved him of duties, arrested him, and flew him out of the country and we never saw General Bond again after that. We not only were secret, we went subterranean, and we went into high gear, and we were working day and night to
get ready for it. And so the plan was that we would fly people using Air America helicopters into the Dao Compound adjacent to Tonsonut Airbase, and we would pick them up in the convoys and bring them in there, and from there they would be taken across to Tonsonut where big Air Force fixed wing transports would take them out. On the twenty eighth, the North Vietnamese rockets landed all
over Tonsonut airborne and on the Dao compound. One of them landed on the gate, killed both of our marine guards that were stationed together and blew the gate up and the rest of the rockets landed on Tonsonut. Most of the aircraft were burning on the runways and Tonsonut
is now closed. The day before the evacuation is going thirteen North Vietnamese divisions have surrounded Saigon, and the fighting you can hear everywhere in the city, and see nobody in Saigon had heard a shot fired in seven years. Well now you could at any rate. So Tonson it's out of the question. General Smith takes the ambassador there and finally convinces him on the twenty ninth that he has to surrender control to the military and it's time
for the evacuation to go down. So he orders white Christmas plate on the radio, which is the signal, and the buses roll. Not a volunteer missed it. They all they got in the buses and our secret plan. I had forty taxicabs painted in a warehouse in National Police colors with revolving blue lights on the top and Venetian
blinds in the windows. So I put National Police cars at each end of each stick of buses, and they had an American guide and a Vietnamese driver in them, and they were in National Police helmets, even with the decals on them. In other words, we had forty fake National Police cars and everybody was scared to death of the National Police and Saigon. And I hoped that by putting by creating these fake National Police cars leading the convoys, that we would buy ourselves some time and get a lot.
As it is, they made four full circuits of the convoys before most of the most of the buses were being shot up pretty bad. And I was in the city with my driver until ten o'clock, and at ten o'clock of thereabouts they flipped our jeep over in one of the riots at a bus stop and we had to We made it into the one of the buses, and from then on we controlled whatever we could control from that bus because the rioters had pretty well and
we were the only Marines in the city. Air America now is operating from the rooftops, landing with their hueyes, and that famous shot you see of the people going up,
that's an Air America huey, not a military huie. And the Air America Hueys are landing on the sixteen or seventeen hlz's on the roofs taking off the people that can't make it to the buses, and the buses are picking up Vietnamese are Vietnamese employees, thousands of the well, they picked up about forty five hundred people in the buses and another thirteen hundred or so off the rooftops.
So Air America loses their base of operations because it's at Tonsonut and it's hit by artillery and rocket fire, and they start refueling in the street in front of Tonsonut and they fly out to sea and land on the Navy carriers. You ought to hear the stories about how the Navy greeted them anyway, and we had been flying out to the Navy carriers at night in Air America helicopters Quya at night. We had to do it in secret from the embassy so the ambassador wouldn't find out.
It's true. It's incredible, but it's true, and so that's
how we coordinated with the Marine Brigade at sea. And on the afternoon of the twenty ninth, at fifteen hundred the marine, the largest helicopter operation in history began because Tonson was closed, and five hundred and thirty four sorties later at midnight they finished evacuating the Tonsonate compound that we had prepared in case of internment, and the bus convoys rolled until dark and then Air America rolled until a little after that, but the marine lift continued bringing
the thousands out of the compound until midnight, and that was under General Kerry and later Commandant of the Marine Corps, Al Gray and George Petrie and I flew out and one of their helicopters at about midnight. Now the embassy was not evacuated fully until the next morning, but they were not part of the Ambassador of course wouldn't have
allowed them to be part of the evacuation plan. So that's the story of the incredible number of volunteers, and those volunteers went home never even got a thank you note, despite being nominated by us for everything. And my shame is it never occurred to me when I left, when I was ordered to Hawaii later to write the after action report as part of that team, it never occurred to me that they that our nominations wouldn't go through. So I didn't save the names of the listing or anything.
And years later I found out they hadn't gotten anything and hadn't even been thanked. You know, twenty of them died and the rest of them did an incredible job. And they were fifty five to sixty years old. They were veterans, though mostly mostly veterans. I think a couple of the women were also veterans. And what an astonishing group of people. And that's the evacuation of Saigon.
That's retired to US Marine Corps Colonel Anthony Tony Wood. Colonel Wood served thirty four years in uniform and was a critical planner in developing and executing the evacuation of saigod while facing every imaginable obstacle. Again, April thirtieth, nineteen seventy five, marks fifty years since the fall of Saigon. I'm Greg Corumbus and this is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus, and thanks for listening to Veterans Chronicles,
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