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By the time that the last straggling men, women, and children had reached TuyHoa on the coast; 300,000 civilians, 40,000 ARVN, and 6,300 Rangers weremissing, never to be accounted for. The Razor’s EdgeBy noon on March 16, a mass of humanity; troops, dependents, civilians,and deserters; was clogging the old road. Some 400,000 civilians, 60,000 ARVN, and 7,000 Rangers began the attempted escape to the sea.29
The withdrawal from Pleiku was now turning into a major disaster. Colonel Lydescribed the situation as Kim Tuan’s forces began their intense attacks onMarch 18. "The road from Pleiku was terrible. I saw many old people andbabies fall down on the road and tanks and trucks would go over them. Accidentsall the time but everything would keep moving. … Nobody could controlanything. No order. The troops were mixed with the dependents and civilians andwere trying to take care of all the children and wives. You can’t imagine it.It was terrible. No control. And the enemy squeezed them. Refugees were strungout all the way from Cheo Reo back to the point where Route 7B and Route 14fork. [A distance of about 40 kilometers.] I walked under fire."32
Even before the mass of refugees was half way toward their goal of reachingthe coast, any semblance of discipline among the soldiers had disappeared. Foodsupplies ran out and the men began to pillage the villages along Route 7B. Therewere many incidences of murder and rape. By March 18, some 200,000 desperatepeople were trapped in the vicinity of Cheo Reo. And the communists continued tofire at them with small arms and artillery from the hills on both sides of theroad. General Smith has called it a "turkey shoot."
The former Commander of the ARVN Artillery Command, General Thin, describedthe retreat as follows: "We must salute the battalion commanders and lowerofficers for having marched with their units but they were no longer able tocontrol their famished and tired men. The soldiers kept shouting insults atPresident Thieu for this impossible and terrible retreat. Some reached the limitof their despair and killed their officers. An artillery battalion commander whowas marching in the retreating column was shot to death by some Rangers whowanted his beautiful wristwatch. The despair was so great that at one point twoor three guerrillas arriving at the scene could make prisoners of a hundredRangers. Wives and children of retreating soldiers died of hunger and sicknessalong the road. It was a true hell."33
The journalist Nguyen Tu, who was in Cheo Reo on March 18, wrote: "Onthe heels of the refugees evacuating Pleiku and Kontum, the people of Cheo Reowere also leaving their city. Refugees evacuating Pleiku and Kontum who reachedCheo Reo in small groups made the long journey in two days. The majority [were]still far behind, dragging their feet on the dirty road under a scorching sun byday and chilled by night in the forests. It was not possible to say how manychildren fell during the walk, how many helpless old people were standing alongside the road unable to move, how many others were suffering from thirst andhunger during the walk to freedom and democracy. A Ranger officer told me, ‘Thistime, I can never look straight to my people again.’ A private said, ‘Damnit, we got away without any fighting. I prefer to fight and run away if we lose.I will accept that.’ An Air Force captain said, ‘It is sad, very sad,especially when we look back at Pleiku, a deserted city now. We can see onlyfires and fires. I am very sad.’ Another soldier added, ‘I am stunned. …Look at these people, the young ones. Isn’t this miserable?’"
He continued, "Women, children, youngsters, and the elderly – all insmall groups with their belongings either on their backs or in their hands –rushing out of their houses as they saw the convoy approaching. The same scenesof plundering and ransacking of homes by unidentified people reappeared. …Many sections of town were set on fire. … Cheo Reo has capitulated not to theenemy but [to] its own. … After Kontum and Pleiku on Sunday, Cheo Reo became alost town on Tuesday."34
The next day Tu’s dispatch read, "the leading part of our convoy gotthrough the ambush point under a screen of supporting fire. But the tail end hadto leave the road and pass through the jungle. I was in the tail end. Rebelmountain tribesmen armed with our [American] weapons and Communist B-41 rocketsand AK-47 rifles shot into the convoy, while Communist artillery struck from alldirections. Many trucks were hit by shells and burst into flames and exploded.The trucks were crammed with soldiers, children, and old people. They felleverywhere. Those who walked fell to machine gun bullets. Their blood flowed intiny streams. The roaring artillery, crackling small arms, screams of the dyingand crying of the children combined into a single voice from hell.
"The Rangers resisted all night, permitting the tail end of the convoyto flee into the jungle.
"At last, 200 of us succeeded in climbing up Chu Del hill, about sixmiles from Cheo Reo, 210 miles north of Saigon. Helicopters contacted us andmoved in for rescue. The operation was difficult, because Chu Del is a narrowand steep hill. Finally, in an operation that evening and the next morning, 200people were lifted out and rescued."35
The following Sunday, March 23, a photographer for United Press Internationalnamed Lim Thanh Van was able to get a ride on a helicopter piloted by CaptainHuynh My Phuong. The pilot’s mission was supposed to be "to destroycommunists." However, Captain Phuong spotted a group of refugees huddled ontop of the same hill from which Nguyen Tu had been rescued earlier. CaptainPhuong dropped down to pick up as many of them as he could. As he pulled up, anold woman and an old man holding a child lost the grip that they had managed toget on the skids and fell to the ground. The pilot was quickly notified of thefact that the child’s mother had made it on board in the mad scramble, and hestarted to turn back. Lim Than Van later wrote, "Phuong, tears in his eyes,tried to swing his helicopter around and pick up the abandoned child. He couldnot, because he already had so many aboard. We dropped his load of refugees atthe province capital of Tuy Hoa and flew back, Phuong urging his helicopter onin an attempt to pick up the ones left behind. When we got there, they were gone….
"Communist artillery, attacks by mountain tribesmen and dissidenttroops, the heat, the sheer struggle, the hardships have killed – who knowshow many died?
"Vehicles lie along Highway 7B, route of retreat from the CentralHighlands provinces of Pleiku, Kontum, and Phu Bon. So do the dead children,women and old men. For miles and miles, people look up to us, falling on theirknees, begging for rescue. Phuong saw a communist mortar team firing at onegroup of persons in the convoy. He and his following gunships furiouslyattacked. The mortars stopped."
Journalist Lim recorded, "It is against Phuong’s orders to stop andpick up people, but he said he must. The door gunners ran out to pick upchildren, old people. Others, including government Rangers, ran for thehelicopters. I fell down and had ten persons on my back. I didn’t even feelany pain, worrying only that the children wouldn’t get on the chopper. In thehelicopter, I was pinned down by people. I couldn’t even click my camera.
"No one knows how many people have died in this most incredible convoydown Highway 7B. No one likely ever will. Babies are born on the route. Moredie. The sheer incomprehensible terror is not only on Highway 7B.
"At Pleiku last Sunday, the last planes took off before the town wasabandoned to the communists. Old Mrs. Khien told me the huge crowd trying to geton the last three C-130 transports looked like a huge dragon dance, pushing,shoving, up and down, back and forth. People grabbed for the tail, falling offas the plane taxied. Just as the last one took off, a small baby fell out of theaircraft, killed instantly as it hit the tarmac, she said.
"And at Tuy Hoa [on the coast] sits major Ly Van Phuc, generallyrecognized as the best field information officer in the South Vietnamese Army.Phuc was away at training school when Pleiku was evacuated. His wife and eightchildren were somewhere between Pleiku and Tuy Hoa on the convoy of death."
Richard Blystone, then working for the Associated Press, reported from TuyHoa, " The helicopters spill out weeping women and children limping on barefeet and soldiers in blood-caked camouflage fatigues. Some carry satchels andstraw baskets; some have nothing but their lives. An Army major, hoping hisfamily has made the 150-mile march from Pleiku, watches each incoming helicopterintently. An old woman drops down on the grass near the helicopter pad. ‘Now Iknow I am alive,’ she says. She has been on the road a week.
"‘It was such misery I cannot describe it,’ says a mother afterfrantically searching for her ten children and finding that they are all there.
"Two children arrive alone. Their father put them aboard a helicopterthinking that their pregnant mother was on board. But she was not.
"A school teacher says that his family walked through the jungle toavoid North Vietnamese shellfire and thought their luck had changed when theywere able to climb aboard a truck. But later they realized that theirfive-year-old child was missing in the scramble.
"The refugees are flown to this coastal province headquarters about 240miles northeast of Saigon from a stalled refugee column that ends 15 miles tothe southwest. Outgoing choppers carry ammunition, rice and bread – some ofwhich the helicopter pilots pay for out of their own pockets. Flying from TuyHoa toward the column, the reasons why the refugees cannot move soon becomeevident. Six miles from the city, a blackened armored truck sits in the roadbeside a flattened burned out hamlet. This is as far as relatives of therefugees hoping to meet their loved ones dare to go. …
"The retreating soldiers at the head of the column have set up severalcamps beside the road. Farther on, cars, trucks and busses are clustered in abizarre traffic jam in the middle of nowhere. Other vehicles are backed up at ahalf-completed bridge across a river. Viet Cong shells have been hitting nearthe river crossing, killing and wounding many persons, the refugees say.
"Earlier in the week, they say, more than 100 persons, mostly civilians,were killed by shellfire near Cong Son, ten miles back.
"The column trails out of sight into the foothills where a cloud of graysmoke rises; officers say that there are about 35, 000 refugees near [that fire]and anther 30,000 stretching back to Cong Son, where a Ranger group harassed bycommunist fire brings up the rear. How many hundreds are left behind along therest of the more than 150 miles to the abandoned Central Highlands capitals ofPleiku and Kontum no one knows."36
By the time that the last straggling men, women, and children had reached TuyHoa on the coast; 300,000 civilians, 40,000 ARVN, and 6,300 Rangers weremissing, never to be accounted for. While General Phu had said that thewithdrawal could be completed in three days, some of those who had left Pleikuon or about the 16th of March were still staggering down Route 7Bwhen the North Vietnamese captured Tuy Hoa on April 1.37
General Cao Van Vien, the last chairman of the South Vietnamese Joint GeneralStaff, summarized the situation this way; "Psychologically and politically,the self-inflicted defeat of II Corps in the Highlands amounted to a horriblenightmare for the people and armed forces of South Vietnam. Confusion, worries,accusations, guilt, and a general feeling of distress began to weigh oneverybody’s mind. Rumors spread rapidly that territorial concessions were inthe making. The immediate impact of the rumors was to unleash an uncontrollablesurge of refugees seeking by all means and at all costs to leave whateverprovinces remained of Military Region II. To the north, Military Region I alsofelt the repercussions. Its population soon joined the refugees and batteredtroops streaming south along the coast. First, they rushed into Phan Rang andPhan Thiet (on the coast south of Nha Trang), and then moved on toward Saigon.In the national capital itself, the opposition increased its activities andirreparably widened the government’s credibility gap. Confidence in the armedforces also swung down to its lowest ebb. Demonstrators angrily demanded thereplacement of President Thieu; they also vigorously voiced anti-Americansentiment. A pervasive hope still lingered, however, for some miraculous thingto happen that could save Vietnam."38
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