When I got back to the Pentagon, I wrote a trip report that included what I had observed. It said, among other things, that the policy of Vietnamization was a sham and wasn’t working, and that we needed to somehow stay engaged in Vietnam. If nothing more, we had to at least threaten to use our airpower if North Vietnam invaded the south. That paper made it two levels above me before it came back down with orders to destroy it and never bring up the subject again.

Even to the end we refused to recognize the facts or tell the truth about Vietnam.

After Saigon fell, I asked the intelligence guys to find Hung. They located him a few days later in a hospital at Wake Island, suffering from exhaustion. I wrote him a letter, but didn’t have any further contact with him until later. During the last few days of the war, he’d flown day and night, winding up in charge of the VNAF when all the generals left the country. Finally, after his last F-5 mission, he taxied into Tan Son Nut, and there was no one left to park his aircraft. Just about then, the North Vietnamese soldiers were coming over the wall, but Nguyen Cao Ky, the flamboyant fighter pilot who headed the South Vietnamese Air Force (and was for a time prime minister), came by and picked him up in a helicopter. For a few hours they tried to rally the country; but when mortars started falling on the Joint General Staff compound, they climbed aboard Ky’s Huey and flew to a carrier. There Hung collapsed.

Later, I tracked him to the United States Indiantown Gap Refugee Center and drove up to see him, which delighted him. He introduced me to Chan, his oldest sister, his mother, and Chan’s four children, one of whom had been born on Guam and was therefore an American citizen. Chan’s husband, Coung, a lieutenant colonel in the Army, had been ordered to stay behind to surrender the Army while his generals booked with the refugees who came out on the C-141s. But Hung had been able to use his Air Force contacts to get Chan and the children out. He’d called Colonel Marty Mahrt, an old F-105 buddy of mine, and Marty had arranged for Chan, the mother, and the three children to be evacuated on the next flight.