Troubled Trips to Safety

The temporary refuge for most of the Americans and Vietnamese evacuated from Saigon was the U.S.-administered island of Guam in the Western Pacific--"where America's day begins," as tourist brochures endlessly remind visitors. For thousands of Saigon evacuees, a curious mixture of delicate old Vietnamese ladies, Cholon Chinese, middle-aged American contractors and former Saigon bar girls, their days began last week at some extraordinary sites, among them: "Tin City," a neat compound of one-story barracks at Andersen Air Force Base, and Asan, a rusting, long-abandoned Seabee camp.

Guam was not the U.S. Government's first choice. A far more convenient location was Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where the first 10,000 evacuees from South Viet Nam were processed. But a day after the big influx began, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos let it be known that the refugees were not altogether welcome; with Manila seeking an accommodation with both Peking and Hanoi, Marcos worried about offending these potential friends. Almost immediately, those who had begun to settle into Clark's "Tent City" were hustled aboard Air Force C-141s and a chartered American Airlines 747 for the 1,600-mile flight to Guam. Soon C-141s were arriving directly from Saigon almost every half-hour with as many as 190 passengers aboard.

The situation at Andersen was difficult from the beginning, reports TIME Correspondent David Aikman. Base personnel were obviously unprepared for the arrival of such large numbers of refugees. But despite the confusion and complaints (mostly from Americans) about the two-hour mess lines and the quality of the food, the operation got off to a reasonably good start. The British Commonwealth Wives' Club and the Catholic Ladies Sodality pitched in to serve rice, act as interpreters and deliver messages. Other volunteers served as cooks and baby sitters, changing diapers and burping infants. One of the few offers the military refused was one from McDonald's to provide each of the arriving evacuees with a burger and a Coke as they set foot on American soil in order to introduce them as quickly as possible to what the hamburger chain's publicity men call "the American way"; to Air Force officials the idea seemed a bit like a publicity gimmick.

Accommodations at Tin City were adequate. But those at Asan were squalid and run-down--and in fact had been condemned a short time before the refugees arrived. At first, four people were forced to share a single blanket on a cold stone floor; few, if any, were issued mattresses or pillows. The grass outside was littered with filth, and water dripped through many of the hallway ceilings. Toilet facilities were primitive and overcrowded.

Relieved to have escaped from Saigon and amused at the oddities of American barracks life, the Vietnamese stood patiently in line to receive rice, meat stew and bread served on paper plates, and milk. In the separate huts, men and women, the elderly and the very young, Americans and Vietnamese were thrown together with no privacy. Most preferred to be outside, chatting with friends, watching children play on the swings, or strolling among the huts. "I don't feel good about leaving Viet Nam," said Mrs. Gene Till, the pretty Vietnamese wife of an American computer programmer, "but now I am here, I feel good."

Not everybody did. Pending immigration clearance, the State Department ordered that evacuees be confined to the compound, and barbed wire was strung in some areas--an unpleasant precaution that not only protected the security of the base but, as it turned out, shielded the refugees from hordes of gawkers, hucksters and newsmen. Forbidden to go as far as the base noncommissioned-officers' club for a glass of beer, American citizens quickly protested that they were being treated like prisoners. "They won't let me out!" one American complained by telephone to a stateside relative. Said Jacques Carbonel, waving a red official U.S. passport at Aikman: "If I don't show up at my job in Washington on Monday, my boss simply won't believe that I have been held here." Joseph O'Neill, a construction superintendent with a Vietnamese wife and two children, said in disgust: "I helped liberate this place during the war, and I am worse off now than I was then." Roared another American: "You tell the immigration people that if they don't come here soon, there'll be a riot!"

Even with the addition of up to 50 officials from the mainland, Guam's eight-man immigration corps was simply unable to cope with the crowds. To ease the pressure, U.S. officials finally halted refugee flights to Guam for 24 hours and diverted evacuees to Wake Island, 1,500 miles farther east.

By week's end several planeloads of evacuees had reached the U.S. mainland. The Christian Church in Los Gates, south of San Francisco, suddenly found itself providing food and shelter for some 150 Vietnamese. In Mount Angel, Ore. (pop. 2,200), townspeople had expected to take care of 40 crippled Vietnamese children. But five yellow school buses disgorged an additional 133 refugees, including some adults. Cots were quickly installed in the Oktoberfest beer hall.

California officials--including the Governor and both U.S. Senators --voiced alarm at the influx. California's health and welfare secretary, Mario Obledo, cabled Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to warn that the state could ill afford to absorb large numbers of homeless refugees since it already has "952,000 unemployed; 2.4 million receiving some form of medical or welfare aid; 4 million near the poverty levels; and 20 million paying taxes as close to the maximum tax as is acceptable in free enterprise." Plans are already afoot to isolate some 64,000 refugees in two aging Army outposts in the Mojave Desert and the San Joaquin Valley.

Such worries were not unique to California. "Charity begins at home," grumped Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley. The head of the Administration's evacuation task force, retired Ambassador L. Dean Brown, emphasized that "no localities will be inundated with refugees." Guam's Governor Ricardo Bordallo has endorsed a resolution passed by the island's legislature to give 25,000 refugees homes there, and at least one foreign country, Australia, has expressed a willingness to help. As for the U.S., which admitted tens of thousands of Hungarian refugees in the 1950s and Cuban refugees in the 1960s, Brown emphasized that the nation was prepared to do at least as much for the Vietnamese.

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