Participated in the saigon evacuation, flying the last 11 marines off the roof of the American Embassy on the morning of april 30, 1979 which this evening we will hear more about. He is a graduate of the Army War College in carlisle, pennsylvania. He later served as the marine corps chair on the faculty of the Naval War CollegeTeaching National military strategy. He moved to kansas city in 1993 and was assigned as the Commanding Officer and later ps in 1996. M the cor please join me in welcoming colonel Thomas Holden to the stage. [applause] thank you. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be here. To talk to you tonight about some of my experiences and as i start i want first to say that i want to speak on behalf of of all of the marine pilots that were involved in operation evacuatedind when we the marines. 77 helicopters took to the air and accomplish that mission and we had great marine corps pilots making that happen. Unfortunately, like a lot of operations, it did not go without a mishap. Early in the frequent wind saigon evacuation, just before they started with the helicopter extraction, we lost two marines at guard post one. Corporal mcmahon and Lance Corporal judd were both killed instantly when a rocket hit their guard post. We also lost a ch 46 during the evening. I will talk a little bit more about that. Lieutenant shea and captain i istoll were aboard that. We got the crew rescued. I would like to start a little bit about the history of that time. We had an election not long before. President nixon had vowed to end the war in vietnam and he was true to his word. He and dr. Kissinger worked hard at doing that. In 1973, they signed a peace with honor type treaty, similar korea. We had in th the north would stay north, the south would stay south. Prisoners of war would come home. Everything was supposed to stay like that. The north anytime a violation by the north vietnamese would mean a complete reversal. Nixon said he would send the bombers back in and attack again. I think, quite honestly, they believed him. Reports were that the north vietnamese were terrified of nixon and listened to every word he said. The problem was, when he resigned and left the white house, the north vietnamese immediately took action and launched an attack along the main quarters of South Vietnam, coming south. To westpac in okinawa and i was assigned to a ch 46 squadron. However this works. Im not getting it to make. Its not coming forward. Im not real good with technology. [laughter] i had no indications that we would be going back to vietnam. We were very happy with doing our mission. Theres a funny thing on the screen here. There you go. Ok. Thank you. 46 that you see there. We used it on the evacuation. We were happy campers. We were flying all over the pacific. This was taken in the philippines, heading out to a carrier and everything was going well for us. 4, i had been gone for a while, i came back to the United States for a short vacation. When i got back, we were told immediately on april 4 to get everything you have, loaded up, your suits and all the equipment and fly out to the uss midway which was sailing south. About 70 miles at sea. We would land on it and that would take us down to the philippines. From there, we would do some additional work. Every aircraft in group 36, which was stationed in okinawa, 46s thatn had 14 h all flew out to the midway and landed. We spent 2. 5 days doing nothing but eating in the galley and having a great time. It was a great ship. I was very happy to be on the midway and once we got to the philippines, they said, get on your aircraft and fly to the airfield. We did that. The next day, the uss hancock heres another picture of the h 46 doing carrier born operations. 853 was the other aircraft we were with, a heavy hauler. Okinawa sailing hmm 462. Th a we got aboard their in the philippines. We had a complete h 63 squadron. Composited with some cobras and hugies. Hies. The oddity was, our squadron did not have enough pilots back in those days. We were short and pilots. We brought some guys from five or six earlier. They were flying copilot, which is dangerous. Thats the only way we could get every aircraft going onto the ship. The other thing that was odd, we did not have senior leadership, we had three majors. One came from the maintenance squadron. A wonderful man who had been the maintenance officer at the headquarters of the maintenance squadron. We had a cobra pilot, a junior major, and then we had another major who was also with the cobras. He had been their operations officer. We had a Safety Officer from the air group. The question was who is going to be in charge and go to meetings and do everything you have to do on board ship . They got together and we decided we would make the junior officer the Commanding Officer. The way we did that, the reason for that, he had a letter that was very valuable. How many marines or former military do we have tonight . Quite a few. You all know what office hours are, nonjudicial punishment. [laughter] he had a letter that allowed him to do that. For good discipline, we needed to be able to come if we had a trooper that did not do the right in, we had to have the ability to hold him accountable. We made him the Commanding Officer. The maintenance officer took care of the maintenance issues and worked with the ship the best he could because we did not take a lot of maintenance parts with us. We were supposed to be gone 10, 15 days and come back. We did not think we would need a lot of stuff. By that time, the aircraft were running pretty good. The ops officer from the cobra unit became our operations officer. The senior major became the laundry officer. [laughter] he backed off on some of this stuff. He thought we were doomed to failure and was a downer. We did not want to see him a lot. We lived aboard ship. The other thing at that particular time was the h 46 63 community the h of helicopters were not the best of friends. We respected each other. But in vietnam, back in the day, the 53 cost a lot of money. If they got shot up, they had to answer for it. We did not have a lot of them. We needed that aircraft for the heavy lift. H 46, no big deal. We can always replace it and the crew. The 53, you can imagine how we let them know what we thought. [laughter] they kept us out of a lot of the information that we needed. We sailed south and we loitered off the peninsula. We sat there and sat there and sat there waiting for things to slow down. On april 10, they diverted us to cambodia. We went over there. The operation order was set. The 53s were going to run that mission completely because the distance from the ship to the was 139 nautical miles. The 46 would have to refuel when we got there in order to get back to the ship. We ran search and rescue off the coast of cambodia. 53 go down engo route or get shot down, we could rescue the crew and rescue the aircraft if we could. Once cambodia was done, it was done really efficiently wheres my numbers here . I think there was 289 americans and nationals that came out and that was it. We did not bring any cambodians out. Interesting in the fact they wanted to stay. They did not believe that they should leave their country. It was theirs and they were going to stay and see what they can do. Most of them unfortunately were killed and they did not survive the takeover. We went ahead on the ship, went back around and it was 289 people that came out of that evacuation. We moved back to South Vietnam and the ship circled an area. We had two battalions with us. Second battalion, fourth marines, and a battalion from the ninth marines. There was a big discussion whether we should have an amphibious landing. Whitmire, a wonderful senior officer who was the commander of the seventh fleet, said he would have nothing to do with putting more americans back into vietnam. Our mission was to get everybody out. That came to an end real quick like. We kept sailing around and every day, we would get up around 4 00 in the morning. Expecting, today is the day and nothing would happen. We would stay ready to go until 2 00 in the afternoon. We would go back to our bunks and wait and wait until the next day would come along. The same thing over and over. On april 29, they started taking rockets at the air base. The heavy lift air force aircraft could no longer do evacuations of the vietnamese and americans out of that site. They decided at 0700 to stop all fixed wing evacuation and activate the frequent wind operation order and do everything by helicopter. This is the American Embassy seen here. Every pilot had a picture of it. This is the other thing. There is the landing zone on top of the embassy for our 46 is. s. The big aircraft had to land down here. This tree had to be removed. We got it down within about 12 hours. The marines that were onsite , they were ready to go. I can tell you right now, the street out here, and other streets around here was walltowall people. Everybody was trying to get in. Everybody wanted a right to freedom. It was a mess. The other problem we had was communication. My son, who some of you know corps,rved in the marine used to call me and he read a few books about vietnam. He would say, thats all fiction, isnt it . I say, it depends on what youre reading. He said how did you fly at , night . I said, it was easy. In the moonlit night, it was easy. We would use our navigation aids to get to where we wanted to go. He said, how did you do that without night vision goggles . [laughter] he was astounded by that. He would say, you went into the medevac, get amand a how did you know where they were . Did you have gps . [laughter] i said, we had distance on the attack and radio that would give us summary miles out. We figured we were within a five mile area. We would look for a strobe light on the ground. If it picked up the strobe, thats where we had to be. He marines on the ground to take the strobe and put it in a helmet. As we went around, once we saw it, we knew we were on a flight path to pick up the wounded individual. You did not have to worry about seeing a lot. Generally speaking, the marines would try not to put a tree in your glide path. That would ruin your whole day. [laughter] they wanted to get out as badly as we wanted to get in. It worked out pretty good. To this day, my son has a problem with that. Hes always had night vision goggles on his helmet. Hes always had gps. We started flying oh, the other issue is Committee Case should. We had no cell phones. We had a uhf radio. The uhf was primary. We would leave the ship and we have the Helicopter Direction Center give us a steer towards vietnam. We would pick up the air force direction center. They would tell us where to go and all this good stuff. We started the operation. We were supposed to start at 12 10. The confusion was, what is l hour . The navy and army have different definitions for l hour. It was screwed up to begin with. By the time we got there, it was 3 00 in the afternoon. One thing happened that was really unforgivable, a message came in to say, we are going to start this operation right around noon. The guy was going off shift. Another guy was coming aboard. This guy took the messages, file them away. The next guy went through stuff. He did not go through the flash message basket until an hour or two later. There was the message that said, the operation starts at 12 10. Right now, it is 3 00. You can imagine how we had to scramble. Everybody on the ground was ticked off nobody showed up when they were supposed to and that is because we did not get the word correctly. We thought it would go like phnom penh. The 53s started out beautifully. They would go two aircraft at a time. They went in where they were going to pick up some vietnamese and americans to start bringing them out to the ship. We had 44 naval vessels in about a 10 nautical mile area. It was really packed out there. It was a beautiful sight to see. I dont know if we will ever have that many navy ships in one location again. We had the uss midway, of course. The uss hancock, the uss coral sea, and the oddity about the midway it had 10 air force , helicopters aboard. The air force flew these aircraft down from thailand all the way down and around the peninsula, refueled, and came aboard the navy ship. This had not been done before. Its a terrible time to practice it right when you need everybody working. [laughter] they did a marvelous job. The navy, after about a day, learned how to work with them. They do have peculiarities. Good, some are bad, but we made it happen. Everything was going well. They went in and did their part of the mission. My mission that day, we had doctors and everything. I was going to orbit. There was an aircraft that went down and needed extraction. As we sat there, it was time to come back to the ship. We only carry one hour and 40 minutes of fuel. We had to come back and get gasoline. We landed on the hancock, back, it became clear at that point that this line of people needing evacuation was endless. It looked like it would never stop. They were lined up for miles. It was like going to a trump rally. [laughter] it was one of those things where we said to ourselves, this is crazy. What we started to do, we made a command decision. We will not use the searchandrescue mode anymore. We will start going into the embassy, picking up people. We went back and forth. You came in, picked up people, refueled, and went back in which is called daisy chaining. You try to keep the two aircraft together the best you could. We always landed on the roof. It was neat the first couple times. The Security Guard came into the aircraft, he asked me, do you want some pistols . I said, no. Ive got one. He said, do you want pistols . He showed me this box full of pistols. Everybody getting on aircraft were first and they were taking the weapons off these guys. Bag,d, here is my helmet fill it up. He did. Everybody came out of that operation with a full bag of brownings, some of them, very nice. [laughter] that was one of the benefits. We kept flying. The weather was really bad. It started out ok, the ceiling kept coming down. Foroperation plan called flying above 3000 feet and if you have ever been in a helicopter, anything above 3000 feet is a little bit nerveracking. Thats a long way to fall if things come apart. We tried to go down early, down to 3000 feet. We stayed there below what the other traffic was. We finally talked to the 53s and said you are wasting a lot , of time climbing up all the way to that altitude. Get your people look to 3000 feet. Go out over the water. Eventually, they did. The other problem was, the air force cricket who was trying to keep track of everything, the loads of people coming out, who is where, what is going on, their communication wasnt too good. They werent ready to handle 77 helicopters. It just wasnt possible. A couple of the cobra pilots who were down low, circling around the city, literally took over. They said, we know which landing zones are open. We will guide you in. Contact us. They took over. Then the operation really took off. We were able to be more efficient. It worked really well at that point. Another thing that was operational concern my squadron did not get all the 53s got. That the was, howe questions many people are we going to be picking up . No one had a clue. It could go on forever. That was a big problem. The other big issue was, is anybody going to shoot at us . No one knew. One reason we went to 6500 feet inbound was because we thought, if they are going to use a missile, we could see it coming at us early enough to take defensive measures against it. They were not much. We did not have a lot of antimissile capability. Those were issues that would really get to us as we were flying along, especially when it got dark. That was the other are we going one. To fly at night . We had asked to fly at night to train because most of us have not had a night flight for 65 days. Especially off of a carrier at night, its really difficult to see sometimes. You want to be ready. We were not allowed to do that. The ships did not want to operate at night. That was turned down. The weather really got bad. That was starting to force everybody down lower. The other issue that became a real problem that night, as we came out, was finding fuel. You got 77 aircraft out there, flying out to these ships, and they have to get gas each time they land. We did not have enough refueling points. One of my friends went to a landing ship dock which has two spaces in the back for helicopters. He was ready to flame out and lose his aircraft. He landed right next to the ship in the water and sat there bobbing up and down in the waves until an aircraft would leave so we could jump on the deck and get fuel. There was a cobra that night who literally could not find a place to land. They crashed into the sea. Both pilots got out and were rescued by a boat. Refueling was a big issue. The embassy here was going to be a secondary point of departure for evacuation. It was supposed to be americans only. We figured there might be about 200 americans coming out of there. It turned out there were 2000 vietnamese there. Not just americans, they were all mixed in. The ambassador was an interesting fellow, ambassador graham. I dont know what he was thinking or what he intended. I know he was conflicted. He had lost his son in vietnam who was killed a couple years earlier, i think he had a real passion for vietnam, and all these vietnamese had worked for him and the United States. He felt he had to take care of these folks. They were his responsibility. He figured rightly that if they get captured by the north vietnamese, they would be killed or sent off to education camps. He just kept delaying his departure. 65 went in with hmm twice to get the ambassador. The ambassador refused to go up to the top deck to get into the aircraft. Jerry got back to the command ship, the admiral was out there to greet the ambassador. All these vietnamese get off. The admiral asked jerry, wheres the ambassador . Hes refusing to leave. He literally would not come out of the embassy. He was really upset when the rockets hit and we had to switch to helicopters. He drove all the way out there, had a staff car driving all the way out there, to make sure that he was being told the truth. Finally, at 4 58 in the morning, 09 was flying with jerry barry and he flew 18 straight hours. He came in and landed. Ambassador, you better get on board now. This is the last aircraft. He will get a couple more for the rest of your security detail. Thats it. Finally, the ambassador took the flag and everything you needed. He departed. The problem we ran into, no one knew this, is that when he got back to the command ship, he first called the tigers out. That w