MY LAST FLIGHT FROM BIEN HOA

By LTC Dick Darcy

I have written elsewhere that C-130 flights between Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Uda Pao AB, Thailand, in early 1975 were routine and that I was a routine, albeit unwilling, passenger.

I recall, on one of these flights to Thailand from Cambodia, in February 1975, the C-130 doglegged to Bien Hoa Air Base outside Saigon where we had about an hour layover.  I had been to Bien Hoa before, more times than I care to remember, during my first Vietnam tour from August 1967 until July 1968.  In those early days of the Vietnam Conflict, those who were there, and remember, would testify that the Air Base was a firestorm of activity.  On this evening, in the late winter of 1975 (it was winter in Washington, DC, where I had last served), Bien Hoa was, as they say, a ghost town.  For a while, I was literally the only Occidental in the passenger terminal and, perhaps one of five human beings.  I was stunned into silence as memories of other times (from both my Vietnam tours) flooded my psyche.  I particularly remembered an event that I had witnessed which was hardly unique but certainly emblematic of that costly and, at times, peculiar military exercise.  A freedom bird was arriving from Travis AFB in California, delivering a fresh planeload of “newbies.”  As they passed through the arrival point they were welcomed alternately by applause and by shouted pejoratives by the tour survivors lucky enough to be waiting to board the soon to be refueled CONUS-bound bird.  Why it had not occurred to the local commander to build a wall, between the sad faced and sometimes scared arrivals and the overjoyed departees, escaped me.  Another puzzle in a deeply enigmatic war.  My musings were interrupted by the loadmaster’s call and I was quickly gone from Vietnam again—this time for good.  I have since reflected at how much treasure—human and material—had been expended in that noble but, ultimately, hopeless cause and that I was that evening—although I hadn’t a clue at the time—a silent witness at the beginning of the end.  Within two months of my departure, the conflict was over.