30th Anniversary Articles and Interviews

We're All Going To Die Here' Former Marine Recalls
harrowing Escape From Saigon 30 Years Ago
 

By KENTON ROBINSON
Day Staff Columnist, Enterprise Reporter/Columnist
Published on 4/30/2005

They were the last Americans left in Saigon, and the last helicopter had left the roof of the American embassy almost an hour before.  For the 11 men who'd been left behind, that hour was an “eternity,” Steve Schuller says today.  “You can't measure it,” he says. “You can't measure it in minutes.”
It was the dark of the morning of April 30, 1975, and the sun was coming up on Vietnam.   Schuller, the Day paperboy from Oakdale who'd grown up to be a Marine, hunkered down with his fellow soldiers, passed the bottle of Johnny Walker Black and pondered his fate.  James Kean, their commanding officer, had laid it out for them: “We've got one of two options: We can either try to escape over the roof and climb down the side of this building or we can stay here and it'll be the Alamo of 1975.”  The men were unanimous, Schuller remembers. It would be the Alamo.   “The 11 of us said, ‘Screw it. We're all going to die here.' So everybody just got ready, and whenever it happened it would happen,” he says.  They were at the end of four sleepless days of what Kean would describe in his “After Action Report” as “controlled pandemonium.”   North Vietnamese tanks rolled down the streets of Saigon, snipers fired at anything that moved on the roof of the embassy, and an estimated 10,000 refugees in the compound below begged the Marines to help them escape.  In the final days, Schuller, the last man to stand “Post One” at the front door of the embassy, had seen a woman toss her baby over the barbed wire of the fence. He had seen a man offer up a bag of uncut gems for his freedom.   Each time they had to open the gate to let in someone who had the passport or papers qualifying them for a seat on a chopper out of Vietnam, they'd had to push back against a desperate sea of people.  “They were desperate for their lives,” Schuller says. “People do weird things when they know they're going to die that night and the sun's coming up.”   Then, after the evacuation of more than 2,000 people from the embassy, the Marines had pulled back into the building and barred the door. It did not take long for their pursuers to break it down; they drove a fire truck through the door and swarmed into the building.

“Once they breached the building, we were screwed,” Schuller says. “So we brought all the elevators up, secured them, locked them, dropped grenades down them so they couldn't use them, then worked our way up floor by floor to the roof.”   The mob soon followed them up the stairs, and all that stood between the Marines and the mob was one metal door. People pushed at the door and stuck their hands through its small window. The Marines pushed back and struck the hands with their nightsticks.  They had gotten the last of those who had the proper papers onto helicopters. They had gotten the American ambassador, Graham Martin, on one of the last flights. He had not wanted to go.

Schuller remembers that Martin left only when President Ford issued a direct order that he be placed on the last helicopter out. So the Marines, Schuller says, “literally grabbed the ambassador by his shoulders and lifted him up and walked him out. Plunked his ass on the plane.”   Schuller believes it was the ambassador's reluctance to leave that caused the confusion that led to 11 Marines being stranded on that rooftop.  When the ambassador's helicopter left, “in the president's mind, Vietnam was done and over,” he says. “So at 3 o'clock in the morning when the ambassador got out, Ford thought that the last helicopter was back and all the Marines were with him.”   At that point there were 60 Marines left on the roof.
When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger learned of this, Schuller says, two more helicopters came to retrieve them. “They sent two more choppers in, and that was supposed to be for the Marines and we were done. Well, I don't know,” he says. “These two choppers fill up with Marines and they're taking off and you're looking around and thinking, ‘Well, then, next one. Not a big deal.' There was no reason to panic. But then, like a half hour later, it was like, ‘What's going on?' ”   Neither Ford nor Kissinger realized “that we still had thousands of people trying to bust their way up on the roof to get on a helicopter,” he says. “Somebody had to hold these people off while everybody else got on the plane. So they left us.”   Schuller insists today that he really had no idea what to expect, but he held out hope because “in my heart, I know that the Marines won't leave Marines  behind.”    And they did not.    It was almost 8 o'clock in the morning, Schuller says, when “we saw it way off in the distance. We kept staring and staring. Then we saw the number 46” that marked it as a United States CH-46 helicopter.    “Then we had to figure out how to get the hell out of there without killing ourselves and everybody around us and blowing the helicopter up,” he says.   All night long, Marines had had to hold back the mob at that metal door. Now they had to figure out how to leave the door unguarded and yet hold the mob back long enough for them to climb from the roof to the helipad, board the chopper and get away.   They decided they would cover their exit with teargas grenades. They popped so many grenades, Schuller says, that the roof became a cloud.  “That was the only way to get out of there,” he says. “And then this bird's sitting there with these two big blades and it was just a big vacuum. It pulled all the gas right inside the helicopter. We never thought about the helicopter.”   There was so much gas that “you couldn't see, your eyes were watering, there was snot coming out of your nose, you can't breathe, you're hacking, you're gagging,” Schuller says. “The pilots were now blind. You could feel them just hit full power and pull back on the stick.”  But the helicopter climbed, and “when we got in the air, it all cleared out and you finally got your eyesight back.”   Their departure time, according to Kean's report, was 0758.
Their ride took them back to the aircraft carrier USS Blueridge, where they disembarked to learn their pilot had been in such a hurry to come back for them that he had left without refueling. “Chris Woods was the machine gunner on the chopper,” Schuller says. “He says that when they checked the fuel tanks on that thing there weren't even vapors in the gas tank. To this day, Chris Woods swears that they flew on air.” They also found the crew of the Blueridge lined up to welcome them.  “You know what it reminded me of?” Schuller says. “It's weird. You remember in the old days when I was growing up and these astronauts went up in space and they landed in the ocean and they picked them up in a helicopter and put them on a ship and they got off and everybody's out there cheering? That's what happened.”   Schuller went on to a 20-year career in the Marines that included heading up the security unit at the American Embassy in New Delhi and a stint with the Secret Service.   Today, he lives in Somers and runs his own company, Trout Brook Mortgages, out of Newington.  He says that when he was younger he didn't spend a lot of time thinking about what happened to him in Vietnam. It really wasn't until 15 years later, he says, that he began to think about it.   “I'd get sick just sitting there thinking about it, because I think now I know that I value life,” he says. “Back then I was 19, and all these other guys that were 20 and 21, we were invincible. You couldn't hurt me. “It's like we were invincible, and you acted that way. Not in a mean, bad way, but you just ...” He pauses. “It gets to a point where you accept death. And once you accept death and that you're not going home again, you seem to be a better Marine. Because you don't worry about things you can't control; you just worry about the things that you can.”  Schuller adds, “We met Kissinger and Ford and all these knuckleheads later, and that's another whole story.”