In April 1975, the Vietnam War was as good as over, and the communists had won.
The American military was gone, save for a tiny contingent of 50 Marines, with the South Vietnam capital of Saigon surrounded by both encroaching Viet Cong rebels and the North Vietnamese Army.
The South Vietnamese in Saigon who had “collaborated” with the enemy — such as workers at the capitalist institution Chase Bank — would be executed, or at the very least, sent to reeducation camps, which had happened in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took power.
The 53 employees of the Saigon branch of Chase Bank hoped the American company would bring them to new lives in the US, but it was not clear how this might happen.
The only passport-bearing American left was a 27-year-old clerk who had only been in the country for only days.
But Ralph White was a guy who got things done.
He was blind in one eye, but he hadn’t let his damaged vision keep him from the pilot license he wanted. (He did make sure it disqualified him from the military draft he was hoping to avoid.)
At the end of the Korean War, Chase Bank had closed its Hong Kong office, believing the Chinese military would invade.
Other financial institutions, including most British banks, remained open.
When China failed to attack, Chase looked like a fair-weather friend that fled in tough times.
It was a mistake they wouldn’t repeat at the end of the Vietnam War, with the company planning on keeping its Saigon branch open indefinitely.
Still, no American wanted to be in Saigon except Ralph White, a Bangkok clerk who had once worked there.
“I had a primitive affection for Saigon. I’d be following in the footsteps of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad. The café in the courtyard of the Continental Hotel served delicious, buttery croissants,” he writes in “Getting Out of Saigon: How a 27-Year-Old American Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians” (Simon & Schuster).
“I bobbed my head and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ ”
White’s Thai compatriots thought he was crazy for going when everyone in Saigon was leaving.
“You’re plumb loco, amigo,” commented one.
Armed with a Smith & Wesson Chief pistol and $25,000 in US bills, White flew to Vietnam.
It was the US government’s position — and especially that of Ambassador Graham Martin — that Saigon would never fall. Business should go on as usual.
White knew differently.
North Vietnamese forces were winning everywhere and Saigon was clearly about to be overrun.
The Australian embassy had closed, South Vietnam’s prime minister had fled to Paris, and South Vietnam’s military was executing as deserters any draft-age men who weren’t still fighting.
White’s bank was covered with metal, rocket-proof shutters.
An American Embassy employee wondered why the branch was still operating.
“Saigon could flip from tropical paradise to Dante’s Inferno very quickly,” he warned.
Every day, there were mobs at Chase.
The Vietnamese depositors all wanted their money, even though it was a South Vietnamese currency about to become obsolete.
Many had M-16s slung over their shoulders, but they remained polite.
“As bank runs go, it was remarkably civilized,” White writes.
Chase had instructed White to rescue the branch’s “key” employees, but White intended to save them all. He asked a U.S. embassy officer for assistance.
A week later, the same man came back asking the banker for aid.
“The guy who was supposed to be helping me … was asking my help in getting embassy employees out.”
On what he figured was a last day to enjoy Saigon, White took a stroll around the city.
He saw a pretty, young girl dancing as innocently as a puppy dog, but then the ingenue approached him and asked, “You f–k Miss Nga? Five dollars.”
White paid Nga $60 to not have sex with anyone for the next few days.
When he visited her house for a family meal, the flowers White brought were placed in a vase of “a spent 155-millimeter artillery shell.”
White met Nga’s brother Tranh, who gave the American a gift of “black pajamas,” indicating not just his allegiance to the Viet Cong but the fact he was one of them.
Alone at that moment on the dark outskirts of Saigon, White realized his very existence was in Tranh’s hand.
He needn’t have worried.
When Ralph was later jailed by Saigon police in what was little more than a shake-down — they probably wanted $20 each from the American even though he had 25,000 US greenbacks in his satchel — he was released when AK-47 wielding Viet Cong rebels kicked down the door of the police precinct.
The rescue was Tranh’s doing, and he wanted White’s help secreting his little sister to a new life in America.
(Ultimately, White would send the girl to live with his mother in Connecticut.)
With time running out in Saigon and no one willing to help get his employees to safety — the US government was evacuating Americans but not Vietnamese without exit visas — White took on the job himself.
He tried to bribe a local fisherman to float the Chase people to safety down the Saigon River, but the man’s vessel wasn’t big enough.
Then he enlisted the help of a USAID worker who was commandeering abandoned barges with the intent of filling them up with fleeing, undocumented Vietnamese, but the trip would be dangerously unsanitary. With hundreds of passengers, there would be no food or water, or bathrooms. Every person on board would have to do their business off the side of the ship.
Then White, an experienced pilot of two-seater planes, figured he could commandeer a large military aircraft and fly his charges to safety in neighboring Thailand.
He even snuck into an empty DC-3, checked that its fuel tanks were full, studied its instruments — 4 times more than the planes he usually flew — and started its engines.
Ralph thought he could probably fly everyone to safety in the massive jet. Probably.
When one Chase employee asked White how he was getting them out, he said it would be either with the US Embassy’s help, on a filthy barge, or on a big plane that White — who had no experience with big planes — would pilot.
He admitted the last option involved a “higher order of risk.”
“You can do a lot of harm here or a lot of good.”
Ralph White’s appeal to the US Vice Consul as he filled out forms for the 100+ Vietnamese
citizens he claimed to be “adopting.”
On April 24, with the NVA almost in sight of the city, Ralph White closed the Saigon branch of Chase Bank.
His employees destroyed keys and equipment and shredded money orders and checks before departing, never even telling the South Vietnamese government what they were up to.
The next day Saigon had fallen, but not before White and his people — every single one of them, plus their families — were miraculously delivered by US embassy busses to the Tan Son Nhut airport.
There, White filled out forms for the more than 100 Vietnamese citizens he claimed to be “adopting.”
“You can do a lot of harm here or a lot of good,” White said to the US vice consul as he made his appeal.
He spent a hot night sleeping on the airport’s dusty tarmac.
The next morning they boarded a US Pacific Command’s C-141 Starlifter.
Neither White nor his employees knew exactly where the plane was heading, but they didn’t care.
The Vietnamese wept with joy for escaping execution — and for the possibility of new lives in America.
Ralph White had been in Saigon only 11 days, but managed to keep its Chase branch open and save every single one of its most “key” employees — all of them, and their families.
