MY WORLD HISTORY - PAGE 4

LAST PLANE OUT OF DANANG

JAN WOLLETT  "SUCH A FEELING OF LOVE"

KEN HEALY"- A TERRIBLE SITUATION"

CHARLES PATTERSON" WE WERE A NEWS STORY"

JOE HREZO"- A DAMN WASTE"

JAN WOLLETT  "SUCH A FEELING OF LOVE" - Thanks to Barbara Paresi

            There was the movement to do a baby lift which we had been discussing with the Stateside director for Save the Children.  There were many many orphans in Vietnam who had exit permits and everything else and had been adopted in many countries and they were just waiting to be taken out. And after the flight to Danang, all of us were acutely aware that the days of Saigon were numbered.

            Bruce Dunning and I sat the night after the Danang flight having dinner at the top of the Caravelle Hotel and he told me the latest news dispatches from the states -- that the North Vietnamese were still fifty miles from Saigon and we kind of chuckled because we could sit there and watch the mortars going off right at the edge of the city.  And I said, "Isn't it amazing how we celebrate the Fourth of July here?"  The difference between the reality and what was being told the people was really something.

            So for the next days we worked very hard to line up the first baby lift flight for Wednesday and we were going to be bringing in more planes on Thursday, but we'd start out with  one of the DC8s that was on the rice run to Cambodia.

            And then what happened is we were all set up and the plane we were going to use to take the first group of children stateside was this DC8 and it was due in from Phnom Penh about 8 o'clock in the morning.  The night before Mr. Daly gave me about two thousand dollars and he said, "Jan, I want you out there to meet that plane and I want you to do anything you have to do to make it acceptable to take children."  And I said, "Okay".  And he said, "Take anything you need from any of the other planes.  There will be more supplies coming.  We've got a 747 coming in in a day or so.  We'll bring anything else we need from Yakota [Japan], so just take anything you need."  So I said, "Okay, fine."  And he said, "Anything you can't get, you buy."  I said, "Fine."

            So I got out to Tan Son Nhut that morning and the plane came in.  And Nguyen Thao, one of World's station chiefs, was already working on it.  We tied down the cargo pallets and what we did was attach webbing all across the cargo pallets so that people could sit and put their bodies through the webbing and hold children, because we were not going to put seats on it.  We could hold more children and more supplies keeping the cargo configuration.  But there were four lavatories in the aft and there was one up in front, and we had a coffee maker installed, which is the way they do it on a cargo run when you convert it.  There is just one coffee set up, but there were also ovens so we could warm anything.

            We got as many life rafts as we needed from some other planes because we were supposed to take about two hundred children, most of them under the age of five.  So we had more than enough life rafts and I went and got life preservers from other aircraft.  I got extra fire extinguishers.  I got the three different kinds.  We got more first aid kits than we needed.

            There were several nurses who were coming back with us who were Seventh Day Adventist nurses. I told them, we were going to need baby food, and one of the nurses told me, "The embassy just received two thousand cases the day before yesterday.  I'm sure you can get some from the embassy."

            So Bruce Dunning was out there helping us, and I said "Bruce could you go to the embassy and get them to give us the cases of baby food. If they won't give them to you, buy them even if you have to pay a dollar a bottle."  I gave him five hundred dollars and I said, "Just buy them."  And he said, "Okay, I'll be back."

            Then I was running back and forth to the office and I got a hold of the manager of Foremost Dairy and I said we needed milk and he asked how much?  I told him how many gallons I thought we'd need and I said we had to water it down a great deal with  water and sugar because these children aren't used to whole milk, so bring -- I don't know -- fifty gallons or something like that.  I knew we'd be going to Yakota and be able to get anything else we needed for the long part of the flight home.

            We needed more blankets, so -- I can't remember who it was -- I think it was Father Conrad, a priest who was out there helping us -- I asked him,  "Can you get me blankets?"  And he said, "Yeah, I can go on the black market and get them."  I said, "How much do you think it will cost for two hundred blankets?  I've got about a hundred of them and I just want to have extra because the plane could get cold."  And he said, "Oh, I can probably get them for five hundred dollars or less."  I gave him a thousand dollars and said, "Father, get whatever you can get."

            The day went on and the first sign of big trouble was when Bruce Dunning came back and he was practically in tears.  He said, "They wouldn't give me a jar.  When they found out it was for the World plane they wouldn't give me a jar."  And I said, "Oh, God, no!"  And Pamela Kung, who was our flight attendant supervisor based in Yakota was out there and she was going to be on the flight also, and I told her about the food, and she said, "Well, I'll do what I can."  So she was able to go over to the restaurant at Tan Son Nhut and had them make a couple of hundred steak sandwiches or something like that.  That's all they had there, some beef and steak and stuff.  So she had them make about two  hundred sandwiches.  Then all of a sudden along comes the Foremost Dairy truck.  God bless Foremost Dairy!  He must have sent me five hundred gallons of milk and I said, "I don't need this much," but I took what I thought we needed and we battened that down.

            Then Father Conrad returned and he had bought all the blankets and had gotten to the gates at Tan Son Nhut and they heard it was for a World plane and the truck was stopped and they were not allowed to bring the blankets to the aircraft.

            This is what we were told.  Apparently, Ambassador Martin was not ready to admit that Vietnam was falling and he felt America should come back in.  Because Danang had fallen four hours prior to our leaving Saigon- - we did find out later -- he had decided that if a contract carrier of civilians was captured, and the crew were either killed or captured, there would be this big scream back in the States and we'd jump back into the war.

            Now this is what we were told.  It's never been documented.  It's never been discussed.  I've never seen it in print.  When we came back from Danang, we were heroes, and then all of a sudden Martin got so mad that we had survived, we became persona non grata in Saigon.  World Airways was shit.

            So that afternoon the children were supposed to start arriving at 3:30 pm by bus.  And at three o'clock a guy from USAID came out and talked to Rosemary Taylor, the director of Friends for All Children.  She was working directly with us on what we now called Operation Babylift. And he told Rosemary that the World aircraft was "not safe."  And he said he'd been on it, which was a lie, because we'd had our own guards around the plane all day, and no one except World people had been on that aircraft.

            And he told her we didn't have lavatories on board which was ridiculous.  There were six.  And that we didn't have enough life rafts and all of this.  It was all a lie.  A lie.  It was all lies. Then he told her that the U. S. Government would provide a safe aircraft, so she should not send her children on the World plane.

            Well, we were just devastated.  Rosemary was the most devastated, because she was in a terrible position, because here it was, she knew we were okay.  She'd been on board the plane.  She had total faith in World, but here was the U.S. Government saying do not send your children on this aircraft, it is not safe.  So she had to decide not to send the children.        There was an interview out on the ramp.  Bruce was there and all of us were interviewed on how we felt about this and our anger.  And that's on tape somewhere although I've never seen a copy of it, never seen any of that footage.  I don't know what happened to it.  I got mad and told them what I thought.  It was unbelievable that our own government -- here we are Mom, apple pie, the flag, and all -- and they're lying about our own plane.  So we all went up to the restaurant very very depressed.

            We had been told by the Embassy that we had to get out of Saigon by ten o'clock that night.  Mr. Daley had to get out and a great deal of World had to get out.  We could get out the rest of our equipment over the next days, but Mr. Daley and company had to be gone.  So we were sitting there real depressed.

            We already knew we were going to take a few children because a young girl of twenty-one or twenty-two, not much older than that, who ran a very small orphanage came up to me and she said, "I have some children.  I understand you all are leaving to go to the States."  I said, "Yes."  And she said, "I have some children I'd like to send.  They have their exit visas and everything and they've all been adopted."  So I said, "See that man over there--and I pointed out Mr. Daly,  who was now drinking quite a bit,--you go talk to him."  So she went over and asked him if he'd take them -- I think she had fifty-four children--and he said, "Of course we'll take them.  Don't worry.  We'll send a truck for them now."  But he was drunk and I'm sure she didn't believe him.        So she left and we realized we didn't know where she'd gone.  And we kind of realized that maybe she didn't believe it.  But when we asked around somebody knew where her little orphanage was -- and Mr. Daly said to one of our employees, "You go get those children. I'll take care of the final exit visas."  So I'm sure a great deal of money changed hands and we got exit visas for those kids.  One of our guys got a truck and he rounded up some other people and they went and got the kids.

            About eight o'clock that night we went out to the aircraft and waited for the children and we had six or seven nurses and a doctor.

            Finally the truck arrived with the children.  The children came on all wide-eyed and bewildered and didn't know what they were doing.  We were all there to greet them.  There were babies and children up to maybe -- most of the children were five and six and seven and maybe twenty babies under two.  There was one boy who was with his brother and he was about ten.

            Ken Healy had started the engines and the Vietnamese came on and were questioning people.  They grabbed this kid and said that they had to take him off, that he was old enough to be a soldier, and Mr. Daly offered to buy the child from them for a thousand dollars.  The Vietnamese officials took the thousand dollars and Mr. Daly said to them, "Let us keep this child."  And they took the child and the thousand dollars and got off the plane.

            We had a woman hidden up in the forward lavatory.  She had a baby.  Charlie Stewart, the engineer, was able to stop them from going into the lavatory and finding her and taking her off.

            So we buttoned up the plane and started taxiing.  And they told us then that we were not allowed to take off with any children. But we continued to taxi and I guess the tower was talking to Ken, telling him, "You can't take off.  You have no clearance to take off.  DO NOT TAKE OFF!  Stop your aircraft."  But Ken just kept on taxiing.  When We got down to the end of the runway they shut off all the runway lights. So Ken just flipped on every light on that DC8 and we barreled down the runway and were airborne.  It was a wonderful wonderful feeling.  There I was holding three little kids and there we were on our way home.

            The children were really hungry.  Some of them were sick.  And some of them were so starving.  Some were excited.  And most didn't trust us.  There was one little boy who sat with his baby brother, who was a toddler, and the little baby was kind of chubby, but the brother who looked to be about four--it turned out he was seven -- had these huge big eyes, so sad, never smiled through the whole flight.  Anyway, he wouldn't let go of his brother.  So I went over and sat with them.

            We gave the children food--these sandwiches that we had.  We cut them up and we had some juice and milk and we watered it all down.  When the children would eat, they would grab it and hide it under their bodies and lay on top of the food.  So I told the flight attendants -- I think there were eight to twelve flight attendants on board -- take the food away from them when you see them lying on it.  But make sure that within two minutes you bring them new food.  The idea was to let them see they didn't have to hoard and hide their food and stuff it down their clothes.  There would always be more food.

            Then we landed in Yakota and it was my understanding that in Saigon they scrambled the airwaves after we took off and so we didn't have good ground contact until we got close enough to Taipei for Yakota to pick us up.  So we went into Yakota and of course you can't land at a military base unless you have an emergency if you are a civilian carrier carrying civilians, which we were.  But we had our whole World base there and we knew we could get tons of supplies.  So we declared an emergency.  Everybody of course knew it wasn't true.  We landed, and fire trucks raced along next to us with their sirens and everything and the kids were all wide-eyed.  "What is this?  Is this the U.S.?"  "No, this is Japan, but we're going to get some gas for the plane and some other things," We told them.

            The base commander came on and greeted us all. Interestingly they had already contacted the FAA and they had had the FAA representative from Tokyo come out to say that the aircraft was not safe. So he came on board too.  Meantime all the World people there are loading blankets.  They had three hundred blankets for us, food, baby food, you name it they had it.  Marie Miller -- her husband Chet Miller was our station manager in Yakota -- what a wonderful lady.  She had gone and gotten crayons and paper to give to the children.  It was marvelous because we didn't have anything to entertain them, except to sing or hold them or rock them or whatever.  And there were quite a few older children, so she brought them crayons and paper.

            At that point Mr. Daly and his entourage got off and some of the flight attendants got off and some stayed on.  I chose to stay on and Val Witherspoon and quite a few others did, too.

            The FAA inspector had talked to the doctor and nurses and stuff and as he was getting off I asked, "Well, what do you think of our plane?"  He said, "Looks safe to me.  And I think it's one of the happiest flights I've ever seen."  So he didn't follow what his superiors said, because they wanted the plane grounded.

            So we took off and now we were going to be flying into daylight so the children were more alert.  We gave them crayons and they made wonderful drawings for us.  They were terribly excited.  But you could still tell that some were very scared.  And there was this sweet little baby boy and his brother, and I kept trying to reassure them, and holding the baby.

            We were airborne and flew I guess ten hours to Oakland.  We arrived coming in over San Francisco.  It was night and we could see all the glitter and lights of the city.  It was a crystal clear night, no fog, and the kids were real excited and we were trying to hold them down when we landed.  But they all wanted to look out the windows.  And we all wanted to look out, too.

            We landed at Oakland and taxied up to our hangar, and I remember looking out and there were all these klieg lights and stuff.  They opened the door and Mr. Daly's daughter came on and welcomed us all back and said the Red Cross was there and people to take the children and everything had been arranged.  And she said, "I'd like the working crew to get off."  And none of the flight attendants moved.  We weren't willing to let go of our children.  Here there were doctors rushing on and tending to the children instantly anyway, and so finally she said, "You must get off the aircraft.  Gather your things and get off.  You have to go through immigration and customs."

            I remember walking out onto the ramp and standing at the top of the stairs.  There were bleachers set up and there were tons of people -- I guess a couple hundred people there in the bleachers, and at the base of the stair was a whole group of World Airways flight attendants-- maybe fifty or sixty of them.  And as each flight attendant came out onto the chair they started cheering and screaming wildly.   It was such a feeling of love.  It was wonderful.

            So we walked down and they said that they wanted us all in a news conference.  But first we had to go through immigration and customs and then we'd be taken to the Hilton Hotel to speak to the press.  So we went into the hangar and they had immigration and customs and the guys welcomed us back and gave us a cursory look and stamped our passports.  I saw the Hilton bus parked a ways away in the hangar and I thought I would go put my suitcase over there and go to the news conference that was going to be in the cafeteria.

            Then we went and had a news conference and I was interviewed.  I watched myself the next night on one of the local San Francisco stations.

            Then the next day the government sent Rosemary Taylor's orphans out on their "safe" C5A and it crashed and killed them.

            It was interesting.  I called the next day from my sister's home after hearing about it.  I called the State Department.  I called the White House.  I called everybody.  I couldn't get through to anybody at all to lodge my total anger and disbelief that they had done this, and the lies that the government had told.  All those lies and all those dead children.

KEN HEALY"- A TERRIBLE SITUATION"- Thanks to Barbara Paresi

            I flew that first orphan flight out on April 2nd, which was supposed to have orphans that got killed on the C5A crash a few days later.  Graham Martin and his people ruled that --we were offering to take them out on a DC8, a cargo airplane which, is not orthodox, I must admit-- but Graham Martin and his people ruled that it was an unsafe cargo airplane and therefore they couldn't put these orphans on it. They subsequently put the orphans on the C5A that killed most of them.  We in turn got in round numbers, about eighty from the Adventist hospital who ran and orphanage out there also.  We brought those out and they all got back to the States in great shape.

            After that I tried to get into Saigon with a 747 but they didn't want the 747 coming in there.  They thought it was too big an attraction for shelling.  We stayed for about five days at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines while they brought orphans over in other airplanes.  The military brought most of them, in C5s, C130s and so on, and we brought some in 727s to the U.S. I came out of Clark and brought five hundred and twenty orphans to Los Angeles.

            I can't speak for all of World Airways, but Ed Daley and myself, we were happy with what we were able to do and disgusted with what we saw.  It was just a terrible situation over there.

CHARLES PATTERSON" WE WERE A NEWS STORY" -  Thanks to Barbara Paresi

            I remember one day in Vietnam when Ed Daly got a telex from his daughter, Charlotte. She had been working with a lady named Maria Eitz in two organizations.  One was the Friends of Vietnamese Children, and one was Save the Children, I think.

            Charlotte sent a telex to her dad saying essentially that "Our organization has identified a number of orphans in Vietnam   -- we run a big operation there--  and we have families for them to be adopted into, papers and everything.  All they need is transportation.  Is there anything you can do?"

            That is exactly how it started.  These people had been working and getting Vietnamese orphans out.  This organization had been around a long time during the war.

            At which point, as I say I was a Jack of all trades at world, and particularly on humanitarian things as, Daly liked to say.  He essentially handed the telex to me and said, go down and see what you can do about this.   I think the day they were on the last flight to Danang I was probably visiting or working with this organization about getting orphans out.

            This was all new to me.  We had no conversation about this before we left the U.S.  The next step was that I went down and talked to the people who ran the organization and introduced myself and said, "Okay, what do you need?"  and so forth.  And I came back, at some point and talked to Daley and said we have this stretch DC8 that had been flying the rice to Phnom Penh with.  It was in cargo configuration and it had to be flown back to the U.S. for an FAA required maintenance check.

            So, you see, these things were all beginning to come together.  Get the kids out, you got an empty airplane that's flying back to the U.S. anyway, can't you put them on it?  So at this point Daly has a great stroke of vision.  "Hell yes, we'll turn this thing into a flying crib.  We'll get doctors and nurses and take all the kids!"

             Of course he was talking at that point about as many as a thousand kids.

            Right after we started getting organized with this group to take the kids out, he also spoke to another organization, which I don't remember today, about taking their kids out.  And they essentially said no, they'd do it themselves and chartered Pan American or something like that to take the kids out.  So by this time I've met all the people, they've been up, talked to Daly, and we're all pursuing getting this orphan flight off the ground.  Daly and I met with the Vietnamese minister who was in charge of those kinds of things, and he assured us that there would be no problem there, that the kids were already spoken for and authorized to leave Vietnam.  That was the critical question.

            Then what happened we were getting ready to go.  Everything had all been worked out, buses had been supplied and a medical team from the Seventh Day Adventist Hospital and some other doctors and nurses and we had these cardboard cribs and cargo nets to tie down the kids in the plane, and we were all ready to go.

            I supervised all of this. It wasn't easy because I was dealing with volunteers who wanted to get the kids out.  I was interfacing with them and providing the buses and transportation and anything needed to get the kids out that they didn't have.  So I got medical supplies, made arrangements for the doctors, and the transportation and the food and everything and then we were all set to go.

            On April 2nd I got up and got ready to go to the airport, thinking we were all ready to take off. We anticipated the kids would be coming in.  Before I went to the airport I visited some of the various staging areas to see the kids, and they were making decisions about what kids could go and which were too weak, and some of it was pretty heartbreaking.  Some of them were with IVs and things like that.  But the ones that were being chosen were ones that could survive a trip like that.

            So then I went on out to the airport, having seen the kids on the buses and ready to go.  This was early in the morning,  close to 8 o'clock.

            We got out to the airport and we were waiting.  Daly's holding court with the reporters up at the Tan Son Nhut restaurant, all drinking beer and he's in his glory.  All of us were pleased that we were about to do this good thing.  We'd gotten clearance from the government at that point for this particular group.  So we're waiting and waiting.  Daly calls to find out what the problem is.  So I go -- and at that time  the people who were primarily running the program were Australian, but there was an American who was sort of the regional -- she had come out from Denver specifically to take charge of the group that was coming to America.  So I talked to this Australian woman who had brought a lot of kids out and said we were all ready to take off.  She essentially said to me that the embassy at this point now rears its head--and this is where these stories get confused -- the embassy has advised her that our plane was unsafe, it was not pressurized, no toilets, and so forth.

            But the Embassy didn't know that.  They never looked at our plane. They never even  looked at it.

            And she said that instead of taking World Airways' plane, the embassy would provide a plane to take this group of kids out.  Essentially the Embassy interfered and our guess was that at this point they didn't want to be embarrassed by Ed Daly flying all of these orphans.  Anyway they wanted to make it a government project.

            So I said, "Rosemary, that's not true."  The kids are still sitting on the buses in some places, and by this time it's about one o'clock in the afternoon.  I asked her to let me show her the plane.

            I showed this American woman who was there making the decisions, and she had overruled the Australians who had wanted to go on World Airways.  She overruled them and said no.   We showed her the airplane, tried to convince her that it was safe, that it obviously was pressurized and had johns and all the preparations and  hundreds of blankets and all types of things that had been set up to insure the safety of the kids.  And she shook her head, and I still remember her saying no, she was going to go with the government offer to fly these kids out.  She thought that would be safer for the kids.  That was a legitimate decision.

            But the point is that the government had now reacted to Daly--that's the important thing.  The government had no plans to fly anybody out, but they reacted to Daly.  And the thing that I perceived and I think others will probably confirm is that Graham Martin was very concerned  that nothing go out or happen that would give him further problems of convincing Americans that the damn place was about to fall.

            You recall during those days he was still trying to project the image that we were going to stand there and that things were going to work out.  It was my impression that the idea of somebody as flamboyant as Daly who had also been to Da Nang, now flying a load of orphans into California was going to pull the stopper on any effort that they might have to convince the American people and the government in Washington that this was still a viable situation.  So I think that had a lot to do with it.

            I told Daly what was happening. But then someone else came up to me and said they had some children they'd like to fly out.  And this was an organization, as I understand it, that had actually split off from the other organizations.   And Daly said to round them up.  So this spinoff organization went hurrying off, and this was in the middle of the afternoon, to round up children, orphans, that could go on the plane.  They started coming dribbling in, and finally it was getting dark, and I think they had about fifty or sixty and the Vietnamese had been checking out the kids to make sure they were entitled to go.  And then also I think there were about fifty-five youngsters of all ages of this group, and then a Seventh Day Adventist group-- doctors and nurses -- had five babies in their arms and they personally carried those.  Those kids were well taken care of.

            So there were about sixty people finally and we were ready to take off.  And some place during that time Daly had struck up a good friendship with a fellow who was director of Vietnamese civil aviation, who called Daly and said there had been reports of Viet Cong in and around the vicinity of the airport and if we were going to go we had better go soon.  At that point we all jumped on the airplane.  The Vietnamese cops had taken off one youngster because they figured he was military age, I guess.  He was the adopted son of one of the Seventh Day Adventist people, but they took him off anyway.

            One of the young women who had a Eurasian child, who had been involved with one of the American officers, was trying to get her child to California and somebody had introduced her to Daley, so we slipped her on the plane.  That was the only illegal one.  We had her in the john and locked the john until we took off.  We really brought her into the country without any papers or anything.  A lot of them came without papers.

            That's about the time that Ken Healy sort of took over and ignored some things.

            You see they shut the lights down at the airport.  It might have been because of the threat of a Viet Cong attack.  That could have been the reason.  My own feeling was that there were two possibilities. It could have been a hoax by the Americans or somebody else to slow down this baby lift, that they didn't want to go.  I'm not much on conspiracies, but there really were very strong feelings to prevent Daly from taking this flight off.  And the other thing is there actually may have been some Viet Cong out there.  You know no one had seen Viet Cong around Saigon airport for quite some time, but the damn place was falling apart, so it was quite conceivable that they might have been there.

            The report was that they were there, and that's what Daly acted on and we took off.

            Daly got off the plane in Yokota and said he was going back.  By this time he was all caught up in this situation and he sees what's happening that it's falling apart and he's determined to go back and help.  So I wound up on the plane with the orphans coming into Oakland.

            We were quite surprised when we got to Oakland.  I had been sending telexes to Charlotte Daly telling her how many kids were coming -- unfortunately we had all these big numbers and finally arrived with about sixty.  So they had really laid it on.  They had the buses and arranged to take the youngsters over to the Sixth Army at the Presidio.  Lots of doctors.  My wife was there and other people taking the kids.

              It was only then when we arrived in Oakland and I saw these people that I realized that we were a news story in the U.S.  I think if Daly had realized that he might have come all the way home.

            At that point I stayed in Oakland and then the refugees started coming in.  But there is a footnote to the orphan story, which is really bitter.  The American government did arrange to fly those orphans out and they flew them on that C5A that crashed.  So a lot of the kids we were supposed to have taken were killed.

JOE HREZO"- A DAMN WASTE" - Thanks to Barbara Paresi

            As soon as we got back from the Danang flight, Daly had us working on the babylift. That's the way Daley was.  Some people say he did it for publicity, some people said he did it for tax writeoffs.  Some people said he did it for -- I don't know.

            Daly had a suite of rooms at the Caravelle and this lady came to Daley and asked him if he could help get some orphans out. I think that's how the babylift thing started.  I  know that she was there the night before, and she ultimately was on the C5 that crashed, and she got killed.

            Daly gave away Bulova watches.  To anybody.  He gave me one, one time.  That's the kind of guy he was.  And he gave her one that night.

            Well, what happened, we had this DC8, in fact it was one that had been ferrying rice up to Phnom Penh.  What Daly said we were going to do -- I think it had eighteen pallet positions --was lock those in, get blankets, and get the cargo nets, the top nets and use them as restraining and seat belts for the kids.  And so all these people were coming to Daly and he had two hundred or two hundred and fifty kids that were supposed to go out.  Then all of a sudden, the Embassy got involved and said "no".  And that's I guess when they started putting pressure on some of these orphan organizations.  So what he did, he said, "I want you to go to these orphanages and see how many kids you can get.  Tell them to be at the airport at five o'clock. We're leaving."

            I got a car, driver and two motorcycle policemen -- the white mice we called them -- and we went to three different orphanages and finally rounded up as much as we could and said "We're leaving. If you want to get your kids out, just be there."

            So they start showing up and we got them all on the airplane.  Now where the milk and blankets and everything came from, I don't know, but there was plenty there.  We get everybody on board and it's time to go and there's no god damn lights on the field, because supposedly they had spotted some Viet Cong or somebody around the perimeter of the airfield.  So Ken Healy took off with no runway lights.

            Daly got off the plane in Japan but I stayed with it all the way to California.

            We were up in Tokyo on day and we got a phone call that somebody in Saigon wanted a 727 to take out about thirty thousand pounds of gold.  Daly wanted me to find out who the charterer was and either where it was going to or who it belonged to, or something, because he needed the information for the CAB.  But it ended up that he couldn't take the charter because the way they wanted to do it was in violation of the CAB regulations. We never knew who the charterer was.

            I was in California at the end of April when Saigon finally fell.  You know what I thought when I saw that on television?  I thought the same thing I thought all the time I was over there.  "It's a god-damn waste."  That whole thing was a waste and a joke, except for the kids that got killed because the god-damn politicians didn't want to win it.

            My feelings were they should have left all the men there and brought all the Vietnamese girls out.  And Kissinger. They should have left him over there, too.

WOA Boeing 747C Normal Checklist - Thanks to F/E Charlie Stewart