Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire by Jerry Pournelle

now and then, for one reason or another, to recall my Saigon address, but desultorily; not to the point, say, of going to a library and finding a map of the city. Life is short, there is always too much to do. And here it was, emitting a faint mnemonic pulse, on the very first page of a book I had opened unwillingly—because who wants to go back to all that?—and finally read with bated breath, passionately, as if I did not know how it was going to come out.
    Of course I knew, in a general way, how it was going to come out, although the concluding chapters of The Palace File provide no end of details I had failed to register at the time, or registered and then forgot: about how South Vietnam's gold reserves fell into Hanoi's hands; the heroic last stand of the ARVN (the Republic of Vietnam's ground troops) at Xuan Loc; the hopeless attempts to persuade the U.S. Congress to authorize emergency aid, if only to slow down the pace of events and extricate the most endangered people, the most valuable equipment; the beginning of the South Vietnamese exodus.
    Hung and Schecter deal briefly and grimly with these incidents, their concern being not so much to wring our hearts as to clinch the argument they have been making, to the effect that in order to get the South Vietnamese to agree to the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon made secret promises (later repeated by Gerald Ford) to President Nguyen Van Thieu that were never kept. This is the central thesis of The Palace File , which is based on a series of hitherto secret communications between the American President and Thieu:
    Both President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger promised Thieu that the Seventh Air Force at Nakorn Phanom would be used to bomb North Vietnamese targets if the Paris Accords were violated. [Seventh Air Force chief] General Vogt's oral history clearly demonstrates that his forces were not only a deterrent, but he expected to mount a full-scale response to North Vietnamese violations. Certainly, the letters from President Nixon to President Thieu were commitments that had not been made public or shared privately with the Congress. . . . [F]or the South Vietnamese, however, they were, in fact, part of the understanding.
     
    On April 23, 1975, while the decimated ARVN 43rd regiment was firing its last munitions east of Xuan Loc, holding its ground and inflicting enormous losses on a vastly superior enemy force, Gerald Ford (who had by then succeeded Nixon as President) raised the white flag. In a speech at Tulane University in New Orleans, he said: "America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned." The Vietnamese who heard these words—Hung, for example, who was in Washington, desperately lobbying Congress—were devastated, of course, but not surprised. Nor was there any outcry in the country, so far as I can remember, our people having long since—long before the signing of the "peace" agreement in January 1973—turned its back on Vietnam.
    A week later, to be sure, Hanoi's tanks breached the gates of Thieu's palace and a new era—the aftermath—began. For several days, like an unshriven ghost, Saigon came back to lead the evening news. Our troops were long gone, but our embassy staff and other civilians had to be extracted. And then all those unbelievable things happened in Southeast Asia: millions murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese "boat people" adrift in the South China Sea, raped and despoiled by pirates. Still, a great power cannot lose itself indefinitely in a situation where "all's to be borne and naught's to be done." So the curtain came down.
    Few Americans are aware that in the autumn of 1987—more than twelve years after the war's end—the boat people are still coming out at the rate of 1,200-1,500 a month, an astounding exodus for a people whose sense of self