CHAPTER TEN

THE WEIGHT OF MEMORY

MARCH 1973–APRIL 1975

A motorcyclist weaves his way among abandoned military boots left behind by ARVN forces as they fled toward Saigon in April 1975.

A HISTORIC DAY

A North Vietnamese observer working for the Four-Party Joint Military Commission, set up under the Paris agreement, counts U.S. soldiers as they board a jet at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, March 29, 1973.

AT TAN SON NHUT AIR BASE on Thursday afternoon, March 29, 1973—the same day the final batch of American POWs flew home from Hanoi—a ceremony was held to bid an official farewell to the last American troops left in South Vietnam—sixty-eight Army, Navy, and Air Force personnel who had been in charge of processing the day’s withdrawal. They were not actually the last U.S. uniformed service personnel on their way home. More than 800 American truce observers were to leave in the next few days, and 159 embassy Marine guards and 50 military attachés and a 14-man graves commission were to stay on, alongside several thousand civilians—diplomats, contractors, and CIA operatives as well as a host of former military personnel who, to get around the provisions of the treaty, were now wearing civvies and working for the Saigon government. But both that government and the departing MACV commanders saw the symbolic importance of an airport ceremony to mark the formal end of American participation in the war.

General Frederick C. Weyand, whose foresight about the enemy’s intentions had helped defend Saigon during the Tet Offensive and who now found himself the last commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, supervised the official closing of MACV headquarters and presided over the furling of the colors. He told the departing men to “hold their heads up high for having been a part of this selfless effort.” Since all the Army band musicians had long since gone home, the American National Anthem had to be played on a phonograph.

As the Americans filed onto the C-141 Air Force jet that was to take them on the first leg of their journey, Lieutenant Colonel Bui Tin, a North Vietnamese member of the Four-Party Joint Military Commission, created under the agreement to observe the ceasefire, stepped forward with a gift for the man he believed would be the last to board, Master Sergeant Max Beilke, from Alexandria, Minnesota. It was a delicately painted scroll and a pack of postcards of Ho Chi Minh.

ARVN soldiers fight for a road near Tay Ninh the day after the signing of the Paris agreement and despite the ceasefire it was supposed to usher in.

“This is a historic day,” Tin said. “It is the first time in one hundred years that there are no foreign troops on the soil of Vietnam.”

But the absence of foreigners did not mean the end of violence. “There’s going to be a full-blown war starting up after we leave,” one two-tour U.S. veteran said. “The fighting has never stopped, anyway.” As if to prove it, just across the tarmac a woman wept over her husband’s coffin, draped in the red and yellow flag of South Vietnam, one of twenty-one coffins fresh from the battlefield.

Over the next two years, the forces of North and South Vietnam would continue to savage one another. And the Vietnamese people would find themselves back where they had been before the Americans came—engulfed in an apparently endless civil war. The South’s future still hung in the balance—would it survive intact and on its own, or would it be subsumed by the North? Between these two positions there continued to be no possibility of compromise.

President Thieu still stood by his “four nos”—no negotiation with the communists, no role for them in South Vietnamese politics, no surrender of territory, and no coalition government. Hanoi was no less adamant that Thieu’s regime was illegitimate and doomed.

Neither North nor South Vietnam had ever had any intention of observing the ceasefire for which the agreement called. Within three weeks there had already been some three thousand violations by both sides.

Thieu, in command of a million-man army, the fifth largest on earth, and confident that Washington would come to his aid with massive airpower should his forces get into serious trouble (“You can count on us,” Nixon would tell him face-to-face that spring), set out to take back areas the NLF had seized in the weeks leading up to the signing of the peace agreement. It was a costly campaign—six thousand dead within three months—but largely successful. “The flag of South Vietnam should be everywhere,” one of his closest advisers said, “even over the remotest outpost of the country.” Every inch of South Vietnam was to be defended—something Thieu had been unable to achieve previously even with the help of more than half a million Americans. The unintended result was that his forces were stretched too thin; every hamlet his men recaptured increased their vulnerability to attack.

No longer subject to U.S. airpower, youth volunteers work to build an all-weather road into South Vietnam, down which they hope weapons and vehicles will soon roll southward.

On a state visit to Cuba’s communist ally, Fidel Castro (left) inspects the new pipeline being constructed to fuel the next North Vietnamese offensive.

The Nixon administration did what it could to bolster him. “The only way we will keep North Vietnam under control is not to say we are out forever,” Kissinger told a White House speechwriter. “We don’t want to dissipate the reputation for fierceness that the president has earned.” Nixon went on bombing Cambodia, in part to remind Hanoi of his willingness to employ American power, turned U.S. bases over to the South Vietnamese rather than dismantle them, and continued, in violation of the treaty, to dispatch military hardware to Saigon labeled “nonmilitary.”

Meanwhile, Hanoi and the NLF bided their time. They continued to send men and supplies into South Vietnam as well as Laos and Cambodia despite their pledge not to do so, and remained determined eventually to destroy the Saigon regime. But they were battered and battle weary after the fierce fighting and still fiercer bombing that had preceded the peace agreement and needed time to rebuild. They also wanted to do nothing so precipitous as to cause U.S. B-52s to return to the sky.

Then, things began to change. The Watergate scandal grew steadily that spring. Blackmail. Enemies lists. Dirty tricks. The vice president forced to resign. Cover-up. Abuse of power. Secret tapes. As the president’s secrets tumbled out, his influence on Capitol Hill steadily dwindled, and with it the likelihood of ever resuming the conflict that had once been Lyndon Johnson’s war but was now intimately identified with Nixon. In May, the House ended air operations over Cambodia. In June, it voted to halt all military operations on or over all of Indochina by August 15—and forbade their resumption without congressional approval. In July, over Nixon’s veto, it passed the War Powers Act, requiring the president to notify Congress within forty-eight hours that U.S. forces were being sent into harm’s way and then to obtain congressional approval if they were to remain there more than sixty days.

Thieu continued to act as though massive American airstrikes remained only a radio call away, as if he could forever call on an infinite inflow of up-to-date American weaponry. In late 1973, he declared the start of “the Third Indochina War” and ordered his forces to attack territories held by the Provisional Revolutionary Government. The ARVN were badly mauled this time, and, instead of gaining ground against the enemy, lost it.

Meanwhile, Hanoi had begun to build a new paved highway within South Vietnam itself, down which convoys of two hundred to three hundred vehicles would soon begin streaming—trucks, tanks, and heavy guns—moving in broad daylight, safe from American air attack. The North Vietnamese also began laying down a giant oil pipeline to fuel their vehicles in the South. Another great offensive was clearly in the cards, but no one, not even in Hanoi, yet knew when it might begin.

INCREDIBLE

THERE WAS NOW a new U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, a convinced cold warrior whose loathing for the enemy had been deepened by the death of a son in Vietnam. Since the ceasefire, he assured Congress, the ARVN had shown “increasingly self-evident self-confidence and up-beat morale….If we remain constant in our support,” the United States has “every right to confidently expect the [Saigon government] can hold on without the necessity of U.S. armed intervention.”

The South Vietnam he described was unrecognizable to many South Vietnamese. The economy was collapsing. With the American military presence gone, one out of five Vietnamese was without work—roughly the same ratio that had defined the Great Depression in the United States. GIs had poured some $400 million into the local economy every year; that was gone now too. “There were many mistakes made by the Americans,” Duong Van Mai Elliott recalled, “but the biggest mistake was creating the sense of dependency.” Prices soared. Wages plummeted. The South Vietnamese piaster would be devalued twelve times in eighteen months.

Corruption, always present, became omnipresent. According to a postwar RAND study of twenty-seven former senior officers and civil servants, every single high-ranking member of the Saigon regime had been on the take. A syndicate with connections that reached into the prime minister’s office somehow smuggled out of the country sixteen thousand tons of brass shell casings worth $17.3 million. Province chiefs sold rice to the enemy, levied personal taxes on vehicles passing through their territories, and siphoned off funds meant for refugee resettlement.

Ambassador Martin made light of the problem: “A little corruption…oils the machinery,” he told Congress, and compared Saigon to turn-of-the-twentieth-century Boston. But corruption was no laughing matter to the poor, who suffered most from its ubiquity. Policemen preyed on them; so did the clerks who issued licenses and identity cards and local officials who connived with wealthy landlords to twist the “Land-to-the-Tiller” law and deprive them of their new holdings.

Corruption continued to undercut the military, as well. Only one of the four corps commanders was said to be clean. In addition to keeping rosters of “ghost soldiers,” some commanders sponsored “ornament soldiers,” men who paid them for safe assignments, and “flower soldiers,” who paid still more not to show up at all. Everything seemed to be for sale—weapons, ammunition, ponchos, tents.

Navy crews sold to local fishermen precious fuel meant for patrolling the Mekong Delta. Artillery support cost between one and two dollars per round. In some areas, medevac helicopters were said to hover above wounded men, bargaining before they would agree to airlift them out. In one area, the going rates were said to be eight dollars for an enlisted man, double that for an NCO, and for an officer, twenty-five dollars and up.

Understandably—and despite Ambassador Martin’s assurances—ARVN morale had declined steadily since the Laos incursion. Some of the same problems that had plagued the American Army in its last months in Vietnam also haunted the South Vietnamese—alcohol, thievery, heroin addiction. As many as twenty thousand men deserted each month, most heading home to try to help their families survive in such hard times. The authorized strength of combat battalions fell from eight hundred to five hundred.

“Our leaders continued to believe in U.S. air intervention even after the U.S. Congress had expressly forbidden it,” a member of the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff remembered. “They deluded themselves into thinking this perhaps simply meant that U.S. intervention would take a longer time to come.” Each corps commander was told that if he got into serious difficulty he should radio the U.S. Seventh Air Force base in Thailand and request air support, then hold his ground for a week or two until Congress got around to authorizing it.

Richard Nixon leaves the White House for the last time, August 9, 1974. With him go the guarantees of U.S. support upon which the Saigon regime’s survival depends.

But by the spring of 1974, Congress was in no mood to authorize anything more for South Vietnam. In April, in its foreign aid request for the 1975 fiscal year, the administration asked for $1.45 billion for Saigon. There was intense debate in both houses of Congress. In the end, the United States provided just $700 million.

“This is incredible,” Thieu told an adviser. “First the Americans told me at Midway to agree to the withdrawal of a few thousand troops and I would still have half a million Americans left to fight with me. Then, when they withdrew more troops, they said, ‘Don’t worry, we are strengthening you to make up for the American divisions that are being withdrawn.’ When the pace of withdrawal speeded up in 1972, they told me, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll still have residual forces and we are making up for the withdrawals with an increase in air support for your ground troops.’ Then after there was a total withdrawal and no more air support, they told me, ‘We will give you a substantial increase in military aid to make up for all that. Don’t forget the Seventh Fleet and the air bases in Thailand are there to protect you in case of an eventuality.’ Now you are telling me American aid is cut by sixty percent. Where does that leave us?”

Far worse, from Thieu’s point of view, was to follow. He had largely staked South Vietnam’s survival on Richard Nixon’s personal pledge that North Vietnamese aggression would be met by renewed American airpower. And when, on August 8, rather than face impeachment by the Senate, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign his office, Thieu closed his office door and refused to see anyone.

His claim to leadership in South Vietnam had been largely built upon his supposed closeness to the Americans. Now that had come under grave question. In early September, a coalition of Catholic lay and religious leaders called the People’s Anti-Corruption Movement, led by Father Tran Huu Thanh, published “Indictment No. 1,” a manifesto denouncing the president for tolerating corruption that “robs the people down to their bones.” It accused members of Thieu’s own family, by name, of large-scale profiteering and demanded to know whether he felt ashamed of his clan’s greed and callousness when his soldiers were “lacking rice to eat, clothes to wear and houses to live in—and wives sometimes have to sell their bodies in order to feed their children.” In response, Thieu did not deny that members of his family were corrupt, only that no one had ever presented evidence of bribery against him personally. He tried to defuse the opposition by dismissing four cabinet members and three corps commanders and demoting nearly four hundred field-grade officers. But it was not good enough. Thousands of protesters, Catholic and Buddhist alike, took to the streets. “We want a president who serves the people,” speakers shouted, “not a president who steals from the people.” They were met by riot police and a new set of draconian decrees that centralized still more power in the president’s hands. He now claimed the right to close down any newspapers that printed what he considered “groundless news” or “slander” of the government. Reporters and opposition politicians were beaten. News of fresh repression in Saigon further solidified opposition to Thieu’s regime on Capitol Hill.

Opposition members of the South Vietnamese National Assembly set fire to photographs of President Thieu. In the months following Nixon’s departure, Thieu’s grip on power weakened steadily.

The ARVN, one South Vietnamese officer wrote, like the Americans who had trained and armed it for nearly twenty years, “had acquired the habits of a rich man’s army.” Now, their commanders complained, they were about to be asked to do far more with much less. Precisely how severe shortages would be in the coming months was difficult to gauge. The administration had sent so much military hardware in the weeks before the settlement that no one was able to keep track of it all. Much of it “sat around rusting,” as one U.S. official admitted; still more was reported missing, sold or stolen off the shelves. Maintenance and spare parts were continuing problems, too: at one point, one out of five aircraft, one-third of all medium tanks, and half the armored personnel carriers were out of action.

But fuel really did fall low. So did ammunition. Artillerymen in the Central Highlands who had been required to fire one hundred shells a day would soon be limited to just four. Infantrymen were cut back to eighty-five bullets a month. “With one grenade and eighty-five bullets a month, how can you fight?” asked ARVN General Lam Quang Thi. “After you’ve shot all eighty-five bullets, you can’t fight anymore. Defeat was inevitable.”

THE CONVOY OF TEARS

At a high pass on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, General Vo Nguyen Giap (center, with helmet) congratulates General Dong Sy Nguyen, commander of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. By 1975, Nguyen recalled, with nine divisions of engineers and 120,000 laborers at work along the trail, it took less than a week to move a whole infantry division from Quang Binh, well above the DMZ, to Loc Ninh, just seventy-six miles northwest of Saigon.

IN NOVEMBER 1974, the politburo and Central Military Commission met in Hanoi to discuss strategy. Some members urged continued caution. They worried that if they tried to push Saigon to the point of collapse too quickly, the Americans might yet return. Final victory, they calculated, would come in 1976.

Ever impatient, Party First Secretary Le Duan did not want to wait that long. “Now that the United States has pulled out,” he said, “it will be hard for them to jump back in. And no matter how they may intervene they cannot rescue the Saigon administration from its disastrous collapse.” But all the previous offensives he had set in motion—in 1964, in 1968, in 1972—had ended in failure. This time, he turned to General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of the great victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu, who had been sidelined during the Tet Offensive.

Giap ordered a “test” attack to see if the Americans would bring airpower back to bear as they had during the Easter Offensive two and a half years earlier. In December, North Vietnamese forces attacked Phuoc Long, northeast of Saigon. Within three weeks they had overrun the entire province and had killed or captured thousands of ARVN defenders. General Van Tien Dung, the North Vietnamese chief of staff, expressed his surprise and delight at the ease with which victory had been achieved; the ARVN, he said, now found themselves forced to fight a “poor man’s war.”

The United States did nothing in response. The new president, former Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, was preoccupied with other problems—inflation, unemployment, tensions in the Middle East—and unaware of the secret pledges Nixon had made to Thieu. He held a press conference that offered the South Vietnamese no comfort. He had asked for additional aid for Vietnam shortly after taking office and quickly learned that there was little lingering enthusiasm for it in Congress. A good many legislators now shared Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s weariness at seeing “pictures of Indochinese men, women, and children being slaughtered by American guns with American ammunition in countries in which we have no vital interests.” Now, asked whether he was considering any additional measures to aid the Saigon government, Ford said he was not. During his first State of the Union address he did not utter the word “Vietnam.”

North Vietnamese troops ford a river on the way to attack Ban Me Thuot, in the heart of the Central Highlands, in March 1975.

“To me, with the communist flag planted in a provincial capital just to the north of Saigon, the handwriting was on the wall,” remembered Captain Stuart Herrington, now working for the Defense Attaché Office. “I then communicated with my family and told them that even though my tour was supposed to take me till August I would be home sooner. And then I began quietly—one little box at a time—to mail my possessions out of Vietnam.”

On March 13, General Dung’s forces attacked Ban Me Thuot, in the heart of the Central Highlands, where his forces outnumbered the overextended ARVN nearly six to one. They took it within two days, and then turned toward two other cities, Pleiku and Kon Tum.

For weeks, the ARVN top command had warned Thieu that his already weakened forces were spread too thin, that it was no longer possible to defend the entire country. He had angrily differed with them. But now, suddenly, he changed his mind. He ordered his troops to abandon the Central Highlands, withdraw under fire, and then regroup and retake Ban Me Thuot. It would have been a near-impossible task even with a carefully worked-out plan. Thieu had none. The North Vietnamese had cut the main road leading down to the coastal plain, so the retreating ARVN had no choice but to follow an unpaved disused logging road. Territorial Forces encamped alongside them were meant to provide a screen for the retreating ARVN and their families but were unaccountably never told what was happening. “When everyone saw our troops withdrawing, and heard the communists were coming,” remembered General Pham Duy Tat, a seasoned Ranger commander, “they panicked and ran. Many had their families with them. They had to get out, too. How could we abandon them? How could they leave their families to the communists? So our soldiers, their families, the civilians, everybody ran.”

At the end of their headlong flight, survivors of the exodus from the Central Highlands crowd along the bank of the Da Rang River near the city of Tuy Hoa, March 23, 1975.

North Vietnamese tank crews get a last-minute briefing before moving on Kon Tum.

The result was a catastrophe. As the ARVN and Territorial Forces fled south, 400,000 terrified civilians fled with them. The soldiers cursed Thieu, one officer remembered: “Some reached the limit of their despair and killed the officers. An artillery battalion commander who was marching in the retreating column was shot to death by soldiers who wanted his beautiful watch. The despair was so great that at one point two or three guerrillas arriving at the scene could make prisoners of a hundred Rangers.” Thousands died, killed by North Vietnamese shells and machine gun fire, trampled by fellow refugees, run over by retreating tanks, blown apart by South Vietnamese bombs dropped by pilots who mistook them for the enemy. Reporters called it the “Convoy of Tears.”

Meanwhile, Pleiku and Kon Tum fell to the North Vietnamese as well. In just ten days, six entire provinces, a full infantry division, the equivalent of another division of Rangers, and tens of thousands of territorial and support troops with all their weapons and equipment had fallen to the communists. Bao Ninh, then still serving in the Central Highlands, understood what was happening: “After thirty years of inconclusive war, suddenly we realized, Saigon was going to lose. Even a regular soldier like me could see that.”

Bao Ninh’s prediction of that long-awaited victory would look better, day by day.

MARCH 25

U.S. army chief of staff General Frederick Weyand and U.S. ambassador Graham Martin meet with President Thieu at the Presidential Palace in Saigon. “We will get you the assistance you need,” Weyand told Thieu at the end of his visit, “and will explain your needs to Congress.”

WITH THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE on the run and losing the equivalent of more than a battalion a day and with no sign the Americans would come to their aid, the Politburo cabled new orders to General Dung in the South. He was now to “make a big leap forward” and seize a “once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity to liberate Saigon before the rainy season” that would begin at April’s end. While communist forces moved toward Saigon from the west and south, Dung was to drive his columns south a thousand miles along the coast, rolling up one city after another as he went, and to do it all in less than two months. He would name his operation the “Ho Chi Minh Campaign.”

On the same day, Thieu broadcast a new “order of the day,” exhorting his forces to halt the communist advance “at all costs.” “All of you,” he said, “must be determined and strong like a fortress, which the aggressors, no matter how brutal and fanatical they may be, will be unable to shake….I have led you through many dangerous circumstances in the past. This time, I am again by your side.” He was, in fact, safely ensconced in his palace from where he asked President Ford for what he called “a brief but intensive B-52 strike” to halt the enemy advance. Ford’s hands were tied, and he had never been shown the letters from Nixon pledging to intervene militarily if the Thieu regime got into serious trouble. He would say nothing about bombing in his reply, pledged only his “continuing support” and dispatched General Weyand to survey the situation firsthand. “Ford doesn’t seem to care,” Thieu told an aide. “He is going off on vacation at Palm Springs while we are dying.”

MARCH 27

GENERAL WEYAND arrived in Saigon, called on President Thieu, and assured him again of President Ford’s “steadfast support,” then set off on a six-day tour of the embattled country to see what, if anything, could be done to save it.

MARCH 29

THE NORTH VIETNAMESE entered Danang, South Vietnam’s second largest city. It “was not captured,” an American reporter remembered, “it disintegrated in its own terror. Of the 50,000 South Vietnamese soldiers stationed in and around the city, hardly any raised a rifle in its defense.” People came out of their homes to wave and cheer as the North Vietnamese marched past. Le Minh Khue, who had survived years as a volunteer working on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, was now a war correspondent, riding in a truck in the midst of the advancing North Vietnamese army. The road was littered with boots and uniforms stripped off by retreating ARVN troops. She remembered seeing young men in ill-fitting civilian clothes who had clearly served in the South Vietnamese army. “I saw the fear on their faces,” she remembered. “I just felt badly for them. A defeat like that was terrible. I didn’t feel that this was something that we should rub in anyone’s face.” She was assigned to stay in an ARVN officer’s abandoned home, where she found the family’s belongings still packed in suitcases piled in the front room. They’d clearly fled in a hurry. “I went into a small room, the room of a little girl,” she recalled. “On the ironing board there was still material to make an ao dai. It hadn’t been sewn yet. I was afraid. I didn’t understand what happened to that family. Where were they? The neighbors told me the family had tried to flee by barge. But the barge sank and all of them drowned, an entire family. I felt that the souls of that family would probably come back to their house. I was afraid. I had to ask friends to spend the night with me. After that, I went into some other houses of people who fled and I saw everything from their everyday lives was still there—all of their most precious possessions, albums, pictures of their children, papers, deeds, titles—just scattered around. This was the collapse of a whole system.”

From an LST anchored offshore, South Vietnamese Marines watch fellow Marines struggle to escape from China Beach at Danang, the same beach on which U.S. Marines had first landed ten years earlier. As enemy shells explode behind them, Marines unable to swim take their chances with a chain of inner tubes. Hundreds drowned.

Paul Vogle, a UPI reporter, was aboard the last American plane to leave Danang. It almost didn’t make it. The moment the Boeing 727—flying in from Saigon—touched down, hundreds of desperate people charged across the tarmac toward it, some in jeeps, some on scooters, most simply running for their lives. The moment the tail ramp came down, members of the First ARVN Division’s crack unit, the Hac Boa, or Black Panthers, began clawing their way on board. When an old woman tried to get on with them, a soldier kicked her in the face. As the plane began taxiing for takeoff, ARVN troops who’d been left behind opened fire. Someone threw a grenade, which jammed the wing flaps open. As the plane lumbered into the air, the ramp was still down, and the legs of seven soldiers clinging to the landing gear could be seen dangling in the air. On the way to Saigon at least one soldier fell into the South China Sea. Two hundred and sixty-eight people had crowded into the cabin, which was meant to hold 189. Perhaps 60 more squeezed into the cargo hold. “Only two women and one baby among them,” Vogle wrote. “The rest were soldiers, toughest of the tough, meanest of the mean. They were out. They said nothing. They didn’t talk to each other or to us. They looked at the floor.” Vogle walked up the aisle gathering up their weapons and ammunition. “They didn’t need them anymore….They had gone from humans to animals and now they were vegetables.”

Meanwhile, on the same Danang beach where U.S. Marines had landed nearly ten years earlier, beginning America’s combat involvement in Vietnam, 16,000 South Vietnamese soldiers fought with one another and with 75,000 terrified civilians for space aboard an improvised fleet of freighters, tugs, and fishing boats headed southward for Cam Ranh Bay, Vung Tau, Saigon—anywhere they hoped the northern troops might somehow not follow. Hundreds drowned struggling to reach the boats. Hundreds more were killed by enemy shells raining down on the beach.

The rout continued. “After Danang,” one reporter wrote, “provinces stretching along three hundred miles of coastline fell like a row of porcelain vases sliding off a shelf.”

North Vietnamese colonel Ho Huu Lan, who had survived day after day of battle around Con Thien, in Hue, and on Hamburger Hill, remembered how different this headlong pursuit was, how happy it made him. “We would look at the map every day and see how far the ARVN had retreated. It was amazing. We were making more progress in a day than we made in years. One day was like twenty-five years of progress. There was panic. I felt that I could chase away a company all on my own. Clearly, they had given up. They didn’t have any will to fight. Our slogan was move as fast as possible—and then move faster!”

“Who would have believed the northern part of the country would be lost by the end of March?” the CIA analyst Frank Snepp remembered. “Eighteen North Vietnamese divisions, with five in reserve, were now arrayed against basically six South Vietnamese divisions. The manpower imbalance was about three or four to one in favor of the communists. This was breathtaking. The refugee problem was overwhelming.” “Eight provinces have been lost in the past three weeks,” he cabled Washington that day, “four more are in imminent danger, and over a million people have been left homeless, placing incalculable strains on the economy….Huge stocks of ammunition and hardware have been abandoned. The entire complexion of the Vietnam war has altered and the government is in imminent danger of decisive military defeat.”

It seemed clear to Snepp and to many others that the time had come to begin serious preparations for the evacuation of all the Americans still in Saigon and as many as possible of the 200,000 South Vietnamese and their families who had cooperated with them in one capacity or another. Thomas Polgar, the CIA station chief, sent Snepp to make that case to the ambassador. Martin was not impressed.

Panic in Danang: A cargo net lifts a refugee family onto a freighter, while South Vietnamese Marines fight for places aboard another ship bound for a port further south.

“Basically, Martin said to me, ‘You’re wrong, Mr. Snepp. I have better intelligence.’ And I said, ‘Sir, six divisions have been destroyed in less than a month.’ He said, ‘We will save this situation. You’re being overly alarmist.’ And that moment was terrifying because I knew if Martin failed to realize how serious the military situation was he would never authorize our planning for a rational evacuation of our Vietnamese friends.”

Graham Martin had not been appointed ambassador, he said, to “give Vietnam away to the communists.” He had convinced himself that, rather than face a bloody climactic battle, the South Vietnamese could somehow still create a redoubt around Saigon strong enough to persuade the enemy to agree to a peaceful transfer of power to a coalition government. He was sure that so much as a hint of American flight would panic the population and undercut the possibility of that peaceful solution. Accordingly, that same day, Martin instructed his deputy, Gerhard Lehmann, to assure a group of disbelieving U.S. officers and newspaper reporters that “militarily, the North Vietnamese do not have the capability to launch an offensive against Saigon. No evacuation is under way.”

Philip Caputo had been among the first Marines to land in Vietnam. Now, he was back as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, assigned to cover what looked to be the final days of the republic he’d been sent to help save from communism. “The ambassador couldn’t believe this was all ending the way it was ending,” he remembered. “They would come out with these statements to the effect that the South Vietnamese are going to pull back and turn Saigon into another Stalingrad or that the North Vietnamese were going to negotiate. I called it the ‘Great American Delusion Machine.’ This was DENIAL in capital letters, in neon.”

Cam Ranh Bay had been a special point of pride for U.S. military engineers, a vast modern deepwater port conjured up in a matter of months on the site of an old fishing village. It had been headquarters for Operation Market Time, the U.S. Navy’s ambitious effort to deny the enemy resupply by sea. Tens of thousands of fresh U.S. troops had first landed there at the sprawling Air Force base from which countless tactical air sorties had been flown when called for from the battlefield.

There were no Americans left there now. Instead, the city was filled with tens of thousands of desperate refugees from Danang and beyond, “starving and gasping from thirst,” according to Le Kim Dinh, reporting for The New York Times. “Money does not matter,” he wrote. “Fortunes are stolen from some, and these are robbed by others. Piasters, gold, diamonds, bits of priceless family treasure—none of it means anything in comparison with the need to survive. At Cam Ranh, the suffering of the civilians was far and away the worst, with babies dying on ships or ashore, with the body of an old man lying ignored all day on the pier.” The retreating ARVN suffered, too. Most of their commanders had already abandoned them and flown to Saigon. Shock troops dispatched from the capital to defend military installations found themselves shooting it out with soldiers who were systematically looting homes and shops. Eleven ships crowded with still more soldiers and civilians from Danang waited offshore. Some passengers had paid as much $1,200 each, hoping to be carried all the way to Saigon, only to be forcibly offloaded here. “It was said that Saigon authorities were not willing to permit a flood of refugees into the capital,” Kim wrote. “But some said it was just a question of money. ‘When they are willing to pay another one million piasters per person, then those ships will set sail for Saigon,’ a military man said. No one has any clear idea how many have died. Bodies eventually just disappear. One wealthy man is said to have been murdered shipboard in front of his wife, and his body was thrown overboard. Four babies were reported trampled to death on another ship….For nearly everyone who traveled so far to get here, this appeared to be the end of the line—waiting and listening for the approaching rumble of North Vietnamese tanks.”

APRIL 2

TAM KY, QUANG NGAI, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, Cam Ranh Bay—the North Vietnamese kept moving closer and closer to Saigon. Joe Galloway was there, covering the retreat. “It was stunning to sit there writing the daily leads on the fall of all these places we’d come to know,” he recalled. “I would look and say, ‘Oh that province. Wait a minute, that’s where My Lai is.’ You just were overwhelmed with ten years’ worth of history and seeing all of it come unglued.”

Thomas Polgar sent a cable to CIA headquarters recommending that President Thieu be removed and replaced by General Duong Van Minh, who might then be able to form a coalition government that could satisfy the North Vietnamese and forestall further bloodshed.

APRIL 4

AT A LITTLE AFTER FOUR in the afternoon, a C-5A Galaxy transport plane took off from Tan Son Nhut bound for the United States. Aboard were 243 infants and children, all said to be orphans or the unwanted offspring of American servicemen. Rumors had spread that Eurasian children would somehow be in special danger from the advancing communists. Ambassador Martin had persuaded President Ford to provide $2 million for an emergency program called Operation Babylift to get as many of the children out of the country as fast as possible. It would, the ambassador told South Vietnam’s deputy prime minister for social welfare, “help reverse the current trend of American public opinion to the advantage of the Republic of Vietnam. Especially when these children land in the United States, they will be subject to television, radio, and press coverage and the effect will be tremendous.” Also aboard were a number of women who worked for the embassy and the CIA who were slipped on in order to get out of Saigon without raising an alarm. Twelve minutes into the flight, the locks of the rear loading ramp failed, the door separated from the plane and sliced through the tail. The plane broke into four parts. Some parts burst into flame. One hundred and thirty-eight passengers were killed, including seventy-eight children. When word of the crash began to spread, Joe Galloway was assigned to go out to the Air Force 7th Field Hospital near Tan Son Nhut and stand by. “I had just gotten there,” he recalled. “And I was back around at the emergency entrance when an ambulance pulled in and backed up. The back doors opened and they brought out a stretcher with the bodies of babies piled on it. I don’t know how many—a dozen, fifteen, eighteen. First, it broke my heart. And second, I thought, even when we try to do something right in this place it goes so horribly wrong. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I turned around and I walked back to the bureau. It took me hours. And I just left. I went home to Singapore. I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Back in Washington that same day, General Weyand reported to the president on what he’d seen in Vietnam. “The current military situation is critical,” he said. “The probability of the survival of South Vietnam as a truncated nation in the southern provinces is marginal at best.” There was no way for the ARVN to recapture all the land they’d had to abandon, but there was a slim chance that with an immediate outlay of $722 million to replace all the weaponry that had been lost during the headlong ARVN flight—744 artillery pieces, 446 tanks and armored personnel carriers, 12,000 trucks, and much more—enough regiments might be armed to mount a defense of Saigon itself. But even if that didn’t work, he continued, the appropriation would help fortify the people’s plunging morale. Many of Ford’s aides thought that requesting such a sum this late in the game was pointless: opposition to further aid was strong on Capitol Hill and growing stronger; it was unlikely that the weaponry could reach the city’s defenders before they were overwhelmed; and if it did reach them, it would merely prolong the inevitable. But Henry Kissinger, now Ford’s secretary of state, favored the request: while “on one level it was preposterous,” he recalled, since “Vietnam was likely to collapse before any equipment could get there,” he argued that it should be honored because it might gain a little time for evacuation and “we would at least have discharged our moral obligation.”

General Weyand made one additional recommendation: “For reasons of prudence, the United States should plan now for a mass evacuation of some six thousand U.S. citizens and tens of thousands of South Vietnamese…Nationals to whom we have incurred an obligation and owe protection.” It should also be made plain to the North Vietnamese that if they tried to interfere with the evacuation once it was under way, the United States would respond with force.

APRIL 5

WHEN THERE WAS no second C-5A transport immediately available to fly the surviving children out of Saigon, an American businessman named Robert Macauley mortgaged his home to charter a Boeing 747 from Pan American Airlines. The uninjured survivors from the crashed plane were carried aboard and flown to San Francisco International Airport. The president and first lady were there to receive them. In the end, some three thousand infants would be lifted out of Saigon before enemy shelling of Tan Son Nhut made further flights impossible. Most were adopted by Americans, some by Canadians and Australians. Later, it would develop that many of the children had not been orphans at all, merely the children of parents so poor they’d had no choice but to leave their offspring temporarily in orphanages, always assuming they would one day return for them. Because everything happened so fast and so little paperwork was completed, subsequent reunions between adopted children and their birth parents would prove virtually impossible.

Philip Caputo now found himself attending daily briefings held by both sides in the struggle. Each struck him as delusional. At five each afternoon, he wrote, ARVN officers held forth in front of a big lighted map. “ ‘The North Vietnamese have been stopped,’ said the briefers, who had been through the Looking Glass so long they couldn’t remember what it looked like on the other side….But when it came to creativity, the North Vietnamese proved themselves as superior to the Southerners as they had on the battlefield.” The 1973 treaty permitted the North to keep a detachment of “ceasefire observers” in a small compound near Tan Son Nhut airport, and so each day a communist colonel offered reporters Hanoi’s version of what was happening. South Vietnam was not witnessing a North Vietnamese offensive, he always insisted; this was a “people’s uprising.” How did “the people” obtain the tanks that were rumbling down Route 1? Where did the heavy guns that rained shells on the retreating ARVN come from? They’d all been commandeered from the puppet army, he said.

President Gerald Ford feeds one of the infants aboard the first successful Babylift flight at San Francisco International Airport.

Nearly two-thirds of South Vietnamese territory had now been lost to the communists. “The one ending no one could have imagined in Vietnam, an outright battlefield victory for one side or the other,” Arnold R. Isaacs, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, wrote after Danang’s fall, “now seems not only possible but perhaps inevitable.”

Hanoi citizens pause to mark the steady progress of the North Vietnamese advance toward Saigon.

APRIL 8

JUST BEFORE eight thirty in the morning, a South Vietnamese fighter bomber swooped low over the Presidential Palace and dropped four bombs, roared on to strafe a fuel storage dump on the far side of the Saigon River, and then landed at a communist-held airport at Phuoc Long. Hearing the bombs, Frank Snepp’s boss ordered him to climb up onto the roof to find out what was happening. “I saw the Presidential Palace down the street with trails of smoke coming from the corners,” he recalled. “It was a shock. It meant that Saigon itself was vulnerable.” That same day, Snepp remembered, the CIA’s best intelligence source supplied what he called “a crucial update of the intelligence already in hand. [COSVN] had just issued a new ‘resolution’ calling for…a move against the capital…with no allowance whatsoever of a negotiated settlement. All the ‘talk’ of negotiations and a possible coalition government was merely a ruse to confuse the South Vietnamese and to sow suspicion between them and the Americans.” The ambassador’s reaction to this news was to reaffirm his faith that an international settlement was still possible. “He was picking up these noises from the French and others,” Snepp recalled. “He desperately wanted to believe there was a chance for South Vietnam to survive.”

Meanwhile, thirty-seven miles northeast of the city, General Dung’s forces were preparing to attack the town of Xuan Loc. If it fell, Highway 1 would be open all the way to Saigon. The Eighteenth ARVN Division, which was defending the town, was outnumbered and outgunned, but its commander, General Le Minh Dao, was determined to resist. “I vow to hold Xuan Loc,” he said. “I don’t care how many divisions the other side sends against me. I will knock them down.” The next day the North Vietnamese would hit Xuan Loc with three thousand artillery and rocket rounds. The ARVN resolved to hold on.

APRIL 10

IN THE INTERNAL DEBATE over the request for additional funds, President Ford sided with Kissinger and appealed before a joint session of Congress for emergency aid to Saigon. “A vast human tragedy has befallen our friends in Vietnam and Cambodia…,” he began. “The situation has reached a critical phase requiring immediate and positive decisions by the government.” The North Vietnamese had consistently violated the 1973 peace agreement, he charged, sending into South Vietnam tens of thousands of fresh troops and tons of modern weapons. “In the face of this situation, the United States—torn as it was by the emotions of a decade of war—was unable to respond. We deprived ourselves by law of the ability to enforce the agreement, thus giving North Vietnamese assurance that it could violate that agreement with impunity. Next we reduced our economic and arms aid to South Vietnam. Finally, we signaled our increasing reluctance to give any support to that nation struggling for its survival.” The military crisis was now acute, and time was very short, he continued; General Weyand had assured him that if there were any chance at all to “stem the onrushing aggression,…stabilize the military situation, and permit the chance of a negotiated settlement,” $722 million “in very specific military supplies” was needed “without delay.” There was no applause. Most legislators—and their constituents—thought military aid at this stage could not possibly make any difference to Saigon’s survival.

There was another crisis as well, Ford told his silent listeners: “I must, of course, as I think each of you would, consider the safety of nearly six thousand Americans who remain in South Vietnam and tens of thousands of South Vietnamese employees of the United States government, of news agencies, of contractors and businesses for many years whose lives, with their dependents, are in very grave peril. If the very worst were to happen, at least allow the orderly evacuation of Americans and endangered South Vietnamese to places of safety.” Accordingly, he asked for an additional sum of $250 million for “economic and humanitarian aid” to cover the cost of rescuing Americans and endangered Vietnamese. Both sums were needed immediately.

A reporter asked Henry Kissinger if requesting all that money wasn’t really just an attempt to lay the blame on Congress for what was about to happen to South Vietnam.

“We are not trying to saddle Congress with anything,” he answered. “We aren’t after a negative vote just to get it over with.”

Another newsman asked if there was to be an “evacuation” of all the Vietnamese who had worked with the Americans.

No, Kissinger answered, “just a thinning out.”

APRIL 12

AT ABOUT NINE O’CLOCK in the morning, a hulking transport helicopter eased down onto a football field not far from the American embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Three hundred and sixty-five Marines with M16 rifles and grenade launchers leaped out and formed a perimeter. The communist Khmer Rouge were poised to seize the city they had besieged for nearly a year now, and American officials and some of the Cambodians who had worked closest with them were fleeing to safety. Within a little over an hour, 82 Americans, 159 Cambodians, and 35 “third-country nationals” had climbed aboard relays of helicopters and lifted off, headed for the USS Okinawa in the Gulf of Thailand. The U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, John Gunther Dean, carried with him a letter from one of the pro-American generals who had helped topple Prince Sihanouk in 1970. At the last minute, Dean had offered him a place on his helicopter. “I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion,” the general wrote. “I never believed for a moment that you [Americans] would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty.” Word that the Americans had fled Phnom Penh did not inspire confidence or calm growing fears in Saigon.

APRIL 13

BRIGADIER GENERAL RICHARD E. CAREY, commander of the Ninth Marine Amphibious Brigade, called on Ambassador Martin to discuss an evacuation plan. It provided four options: airlift by commercial airliner; a military airlift; a sealift by cargo ships anchored in the port of Saigon; and, as a last resort, Operation Frequent Wind, evacuation by flights of helicopters to a flotilla of U.S. Navy ships in the South China Sea. General Carey’s Marines were to supply both the security force and the fleet of helicopters, should they be needed. Martin professed little interest. He would still tolerate no outward sign that the United States intended to abandon South Vietnam, he said. “The visit was cold [and] nonproductive,” Carey remembered, “and appeared to be an irritant to the ambassador.” Martin somehow still clung to the hope that a negotiated settlement could save Saigon.

APRIL 14

FOR THE FIRST TIME since World War I, the entire Senate Foreign Relations Committee called on the president at the White House. There would be no further military funds for Vietnam, they said. “I will give you large sums for evacuation,” New York’s Jacob Javits told the president, “but not one nickel for military aid.” Frank Church feared that the United States risked involvement in a “very large war” if it attempted to evacuate all the South Vietnamese who had been loyal to the United States. Joseph Biden of Delaware went further. “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”

Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States who had helped draft the communiqué welcoming the first American Marines to Danang in 1965, spoke for many South Vietnamese. “The U.S. spent billions and billions in Vietnam. But at the last minute the Congress washed their hands. I didn’t think that was good for a big nation like the U.S. to behave like that. Because by that time we weren’t asking for the blood of American soldiers. It was a kind of supplementary aid that we asked for. I’m very sorry about it. It is not up to a diplomat to use strong words against the Americans, but I felt deeply sorry about it.”

APRIL 16

PANIC SPREAD FURTHER in Saigon as newspapers reported that Defense Secretary James Schlesinger—hoping to win support for the Thieu regime in Congress—had publicly predicted that perhaps 200,000 South Vietnamese would be butchered if the communists took over.

APRIL 17

BECAUSE FRANK SNEPP was determined to persuade both his station chief, Thomas Polgar, and Ambassador Martin that time really was running out, that defeat was very near, he called in the man he believed to be the best-informed agent working for the CIA: “He’d always been right. Everyone believed what he said.” His message was clear: “They’re going to strike Saigon in time for Ho Chi Minh’s birthday on May 19, which is just a month away.” “One of the most terrifying things he told us,” Snepp recalled, “was that the North Vietnamese were going to shell Tan Son Nhut airfield. I briefed American civilians, I briefed American journalists and businessmen, and I briefed Marines who were showing up to assist with the evolving evacuation planning. They were astounded because Ambassador Martin had convinced [many of] them and convinced himself that the communists would allow for a ceasefire, a coalition government, and a peaceful transition. Our intelligence didn’t support that at all. This had reached such a point that Martin’s deputy was editing broadcasts on American radio in Saigon to suppress bad news.”

One of those with whom Snepp spoke was Master Sergeant Juan Valdez, in charge of Marine Corps security guards at the Saigon embassy. He had been one of the first Marines to land in Vietnam in 1965, and, ten years later, it seemed clear that he would be among the last to leave. “The situation didn’t sound good,” Valdez remembered. “We started doing more training, going out to the rifle range and doing more firing. But when you’re on embassy duty you really don’t have much of any support weapons. You have shotguns, revolvers, and tear gas. That’s about the extent of it. You can’t face a big force coming at you with that type of weapons.”

That evening, Henry Kissinger cabled Ambassador Martin. “We have just completed an interagency review of the state of play in South Vietnam. You should know…there was almost no support for the evacuation of Vietnamese and for the use of American force to help protect any evacuation. The sentiment of our military and CIA colleagues was to get out fast and now.” He had already asked the ambassador to see to it that he reduce the U.S. presence to roughly two thousand people by the end of the following week. He now wanted that effort accelerated.

A Khmer Rouge soldier brandishes a pistol and orders Phnom Penh storekeepers to abandon their shops and leave the city.

APRIL 17

PHNOM PENH FELL to the Khmer Rouge. Armed revolutionaries stormed into the city and would drive every single citizen into the countryside at gunpoint, the beginning of a four-year orgy of killing that would account for the loss of some two million lives.

APRIL 18

PRESIDENT THIEU learned that near the town of Phan Rang his own retreating troops, angered at his policies, had bulldozed and defaced his family’s ancestral tomb—an insult with special meaning for any Vietnamese. He had become, one officer remembered, “the most hated man in Vietnam.” Thieu claimed to be unshaken: the ARVN must fight on, he said, “to the last bullet and the last grain of rice.”

Radio Hanoi promised that those South Vietnamese who had cooperated with the Americans would be “kindly treated in the spirit of national reconciliation and concord, free from all hostilities and suspicions.” But tens of thousands of South Vietnamese refused to believe them. Panic continued to spread.

In the evening, speaking into a dictaphone, Stuart Herrington summarized the dilemma Ambassador Martin continued to face: “If he orders evacuation and we commence the operation because we are afraid that further delay may make evacuation impossible, the very order itself and the initiation of even a limited evacuation risks triggering the conditions we are afraid of in the first place. But if we wait until things have gotten to where it is essential to evacuate, we may not be able to get away—as Danang and Nha Trang [where South Vietnamese employees of the consulate had been left behind to face the communists] dramatically illustrated.”

APRIL 20

FRIGHTENED DEPOSITORS crowded Saigon banks as people withdrew their savings. The black market rate for dollars jumped from 750 to 3,000 piasters as would-be evacuees accumulated hard cash with which they hoped to bribe their way onto a ship or airplane.

In the evening—and at Henry Kissinger’s personal prompting—Ambassador Martin asked to see President Thieu, “as a friend,” he said. His generals were likely soon to ask him to resign, he told the president, and the North would never negotiate so long as he remained in office. Thieu asked if his resignation would help persuade Congress to provide the assistance South Vietnam needed. Maybe, Martin said, but he suspected that was “a bargain whose day has passed.” Thieu said only that he would do what was best for his country.

APRIL 21

THE SIEGE OF XUAN LOC finally ended just before dawn. The ARVN had held on for twelve days and killed hundreds of enemy troops before being overwhelmed. But Highway 1 was now open all the way to Saigon.

That evening, Thieu addressed the nation on television. He spoke for ninety minutes, by turns angry and tearful. He excoriated the United States: “You Americans with your 500,000 soldiers…were not defeated,” he said, “you ran away.” Americans “have let our combatants die under the hail of shells. This is an inhumane act by an inhumane ally.” To defeat the North without U.S. help was an impossible task—“like filling the ocean with stones.” He continued: “I ask my countrymen…to forgive me my past mistakes….I am resigning, but I am not deserting.”

Thieu’s successor, Vice President Tran Van Huong, was elderly, ailing, nearly blind. He asked that his predecessor be exiled from Vietnam. Otherwise, he said, “I will be accused of running a Thieu government without Thieu.” Meanwhile, he urged the shattered army to fight on. Hanoi professed to see no difference between the new president and the old. The change was just “a puppet show….Now that the U.S. imperialists’ reactionary lackey regime…is moving toward complete collapse, the Ford administration’s attempts to breathe life into this clique are futile and useless.”

APRIL 22

NEWS OF THIEU’S RESIGNATION led Vietnamese to begin gathering in ever-greater numbers at the DAO—the sprawling Defense Attaché’s Office compound, adjacent to Tan Son Nhut airport, that had once been “Pentagon East,” the MACV headquarters from which American commanders had directed their war. Now it served as a collection point, first for hundreds and then for thousands of South Vietnamese, desperate to find a place on one of the steady stream of C-130 and C-141 transports now taking off for Guam and the Philippines.

There was still no coherent plan for evacuating the large number of ordinary Vietnamese who had worked for the Americans. “It looks like if we don’t take care of our people, nothing will be done,” the head of one Defense Department unit said. Individuals and organizations scrambled to get friends onto outbound flights, with or without the necessary papers. “We began going to Vietnamese friends,” Frank Snepp remembered, “and smuggling them out on cargo aircraft that were leaving with their cargo bays empty. We began mounting basically a black airlift around the ambassador’s orders without his knowing it. And these people were showing up at Clark Air Base in the Philippines without any papers. I was very concerned that our best agent be looked after, the one who had reported so often so accurately on communist plans. And we didn’t look after him. He was left behind.” Employees of military agencies fared best because their bosses had access to the airport; those who had worked for civilian outfits like the United States Information Agency would mostly find themselves stranded.

Waving their credentials, Vietnamese clamor to board a U.S. embassy bus bound for Tan Son Nhut airport

Families file onto a C-141 transport plane

Weaponless ARVN troops file down Highway 1 toward Saigon, trying to stay ahead of the enemy.

Better-connected Vietnamese did not have to suffer such indignities. Bui Diem flew back from Washington to get his wife and mother out before it was too late. “I knew already that America will do nothing because the war was over from the American point of view. The last day I was in Saigon I got the good luck of having the help of Ambassador Martin to help my mother and my sister out. But I felt deeply, deeply sorrowful about my life.”

“I knew that the end was approaching and I had to get out,” the sometime politician Phan Quang Tue recalled. “When I and my immediate family and my father and his immediate family went to the airport and we were getting into the C-40, I said to myself, ‘This is crazy. Why do we have to leave under these conditions?’ It was so humiliating. I carried that humiliation with me to the United States. When I got in line to sign up for a job, I reminded Americans of Vietnam, which they hated. You have to lose a nation and a dream to feel that humiliation.”

APRIL 23

STUART HERRINGTON managed to evacuate some two hundred Vietnamese—employees of his department as well as their closest relatives. (Their families averaged ten members each, but there was room for only seven.) They had no passports or visas and had to be smuggled, fifty at a time, in an unmarked truck past South Vietnamese security police, then spirited onto a plane bound for Guam. With them went twenty-seven friends of Herrington’s, intelligence officers from the ARVN Military Security Service. “One officer handed me his pistol as he climbed into the dark recesses of the truck,” Herrington recalled, “telling me in a subdued voice that he would not need it in Guam or America.” ARVN enlisted hoping to get out were largely out of luck.

Gerald Ford was the convocation speaker at Tulane University that day. Like the war in Vietnam, he said, the War of 1812 had not ended as Americans had wished, but General Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British at New Orleans after that war had officially ended soon restored the country’s self-esteem. “Today,” he said, “America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the nation’s wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence.” The students roared their approval. America was moving on.

APRIL 24

THE U.S. NAVAL ATTACHÉ proposed to Ambassador Martin that some thirty thousand evacuees be allowed to board U.S. Sealift Command ships docked on the Saigon River. He refused and insisted that the vessels sail away empty. Later, asked about his decision at a congressional hearing, he offered “no apology whatsoever. Had we attempted to load those ships there was universal agreement, from those who understand Saigon, that we should have had an immediate panic situation.” Agreement had not, in fact, been universal: one captain had defied orders and loaded seven hundred Vietnamese associates and their families aboard his ship before steaming out to sea.

APRIL 25

THE TIME HAD COME for Thieu to leave the country. After dark, Thomas Polgar, the CIA station chief, arranged for three black sedans to ferry him, the former prime minister General Tran Thien Khiem, and a handful of his closest aides, to the airport, where an American DC-6, with its lights off, was waiting on the tarmac.

Frank Snepp drove one of the cars: “We showed up at Prime Minister’s Khiem’s house. Everybody was drinking. Then, suddenly, Nguyen Van Thieu drives up in his limousine. His hair was slicked back and he was very well dressed, looked like he’d stepped out of an Asian edition of Gentleman’s Quarterly. He went in the house. A few minutes later Thieu came out and got in. General [Charles J.] Timmes, who was a CIA operative, got in with him. We started off for Tan Son Nhut, and I could see his face in the mirror. He was sweating slightly. He and Timmes were discussing what it had been like in Military Region I years ago, where they’d served. ‘What a 10.1great time it was,’ Timmes said to Thieu. ‘Pacification is one of your greatest accomplishments.’ Thieu agreed. Timmes asked, ‘Where is your wife?’ ‘Oh, she’s in London buying antiques.’ It was a surreal conversation. And there was a stench of Scotch in the car, I’ll never forget that. We went out onto the blacked-out tarmac at Tan Son Nhut. I switched off my lights. I couldn’t see anything. I nearly ran over my own boss. He was on the tarmac waiting with a blacked-out aircraft to take Thieu out of the country. The door clicked open. Thieu leaned over to me and grasped my hand and said, ‘Thank you. Thank you.’ Later, a reporter asked an ARVN officer why Thieu had fled the country instead of taking command of a combat division and leading the defense of his embattled capital. ‘He would have been killed almost instantly,’ the soldier answered, ‘and not by a communist bullet.’ ”

Thieu was flown to Taiwan, where Anna Chennault, the wealthy Chinese American fundraiser who had acted as the go-between between Thieu and Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidential campaign, brought him a private message from President Ford: it was not a good time for him to visit the United States, it said; antiwar feelings were too strong. “It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States,” Thieu said, “but so difficult to be a friend.”

That same day, in Washington, House and Senate conferees reached formal agreement on legislation authorizing $327 million for evacuating Americans and “friendly Vietnamese”—more than President Ford had asked for. But there were to be no further funds for the military. “The string had run out for the United States,” General Jack Cushman recalled. “The public was just not going to support that. You couldn’t ask them to do that. By that time they had been convinced they were striking a match on a bar of soap.”

APRIL 27

IN THE MORNING, for the first time in five years, rockets landed in the heart of Saigon. Five thousand people lost their homes to the fires they caused. Retreating ARVN troops now filled the streets. It was the signal for the North Vietnamese to begin their main assault on Saigon. They attacked from five sides “like a hurricane,” their commander said.

The docks at the U.S.-built Newport Harbor were now within artillery range of the enemy. The White House ordered all American cargo ships to sail out to sea without waiting to take on passengers. There now could be no organized sealift.

The communists began shelling the seaside town of Vung Tau, just south of the city. Thousands of terrified people clambered into any vessels they could find—rowboats, fishing craft, an unseaworthy Saigon ferry—and sailed out to sea in hope of rescue by the Americans. The USNS Greenville Victory eventually took aboard more than ten thousand frightened people. Before the exodus ended, over sixty thousand refugees from Vung Tau would be picked up by carrier ships. But thousands more were left behind, floating helplessly at sea.

Saigon residents flee the shelling of Saigon’s center that began on April 27.

Refugees crowd aboard a vessel at Vung Tau while Americans hustle toward a helicopter at Tan Son Nhut.

General Duong Van Minh, newly sworn in as South Vietnam’s president in the Independence Palace, Saigon. The figure in the mural behind him is Tran Hung Dao, a thirteenth-century ruler whose forces resisted three Mongol invasions.

Despite all the evidence, Ambassador Martin cabled Kissinger that “it is the unanimous opinion of the senior personnel here that there will be no direct or serious attack on Saigon.” “A lot of us,” Frank Snepp recalled, “began to wonder whether the ambassador had lost his grip on reality. He had come down with pneumonia in the final days. He was terribly enfeebled. And it’s possible this affected his judgment.”

APRIL 28

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN, North Vietnamese commandos cut off the last road out of the city. One hundred and forty thousand enemy troops were now within an hour of downtown Saigon. “I got a call that morning,” Frank Snepp recalled, “from a Vietnamese-Chinese woman named Mai Ly with whom I had had a relationship off and on over the years. She said, ‘You’ve got to get me out of the country. You’ve got to get me and my child out of the country.’ I had seen her recently, and she indeed had a child, and I had been led to believe it might be mine. She said, ‘You must get us out of the country.’ I said, ‘I can’t. The ambassador has got me slotted in for a briefing. Call me back in an hour.’ And she said, ‘If you don’t get us out I’ll kill myself and this child.’ I said, ‘Just call me back.’ I briefed the ambassador. And I later discovered that she had killed herself and the child. I don’t know if it was mine. But something happened to me in that moment. I realized I had done what the Americans had often done in Vietnam. They had forgotten that we were dealing with human beings. My experience in Vietnam had often been like a B-52 strike from on high. I never had to confront the consequences of my action. I could just let the bomb doors open and still remain detached. This experience changed all that. I realized I was no better than many of the other Americans who had been in Vietnam and had not paid attention to the fact that these were people we were working with.”

Evacuation planners had quietly designated two spots within the U.S. embassy as potential helicopter landing zones—a courtyard that could accommodate large choppers and the helipad on the embassy roof, meant for smaller ones. A handsome old tamarind tree stood in the center of the courtyard. The Marines had repeatedly asked Martin for permission to cut it down so it wouldn’t interfere with the lift-offs and landings they were certain would soon have to begin. He refused. That tree was a symbol of American resolve, he said; cutting it down “would send the wrong message.”

A little after five o’clock, General Duong Van “Big” Minh was sworn in as the new president of South Vietnam. Over the years, Minh had boasted of his contacts with the communists, and so after just six days in office, Tran Van Huong had been prevailed upon to resign so the National Assembly could choose Minh, a president better suited to negotiate with the enemy. The new president called for an immediate ceasefire and pledged to assemble a government drawn from all parts of the neutralist “Third Force.” He then asked that all American employees of the Military Attaché Office leave Vietnam within twenty-four hours.

Ten minutes later, five American-made A-37 aircraft captured from the South Vietnamese and piloted by North Vietnamese airmen dropped bombs on South Vietnamese air force planes parked on a runway at Tan Son Nhut. Seven planes were destroyed. It was the only North Vietnamese air raid of the war. Ambassador Martin ordered that the airlift from the airport should be stepped up to sixty C-130 flights the following day so nine thousand evacuees could get out before further damage could be done to the airport.

The beginning of the end: North Vietnamese rockets make further flights from Tan Son Nhut impossible

APRIL 29

AT 3:58 A.M., North Vietnamese rockets began falling on Tan Son Nhut. Two Marine guards, Lance Corporal Darwin Judge of Marshalltown, Iowa, and Corporal Charles McMahon Jr. of Woburn, Massachusetts, were killed instantly—the last American servicemen to die from enemy fire in the Vietnam War. “It was a direct hit,” Juan Valdez recalled. “I was very upset and very mad. I still blame the ambassador for that. This shouldn’t have happened. If the ambassador had taken action and gotten people out of there instead of trying to think that he was going to negotiate with the North Vietnamese, this would have never happened.”

Rockets and artillery shells tore at parked planes and cratered the runways. Civilians and airmen and ARVN troops battled one another to get on any aircraft that still seemed likely to try to take off. By first light it was clear that it would no longer be safe to use fixed-wing aircraft. The battered runways were blocked by wrecked planes and littered with jettisoned bombs and fuel tanks. General Homer Smith, the defense attaché, told Ambassador Martin that they had run out of evacuation options. It was time to call in the helicopters from the offshore fleet and launch Operation Frequent Wind, he said. Martin, exhausted and ill, still refused to do it. Instead, he ordered the cargo flights to continue. The White House backed the ambassador—and issued a statement saying no orders to evacuate had been given. A Defense Department official then drove the ambassador to the airport so he could see things for himself: the runways were clearly unusable, and rioting South Vietnamese soldiers had overrun one loading area.

Reluctantly, Martin called Henry Kissinger and asked for the helicopter evacuation to begin. The tamarind tree was hacked down so choppers could land safely within the compound. “We had to get chain saws,” Valdez recalled. “It was Sea Bees, mostly, with a couple of Marines, and they had to chop this big tree down, cut it in pieces, tow it away. And then they had to get the fire department to wash off all the debris and everything so when the choppers landed they wouldn’t suck up all that debris into the engines.”

From the White House family quarters, President Ford gives the order to begin the helicopter flights that will end America’s adventure in Vietnam. It is 10:33 p.m., Washington time, April 28, 1975.

At 10:48 that morning, Saigon time, President Ford’s order to execute Operation Frequent Wind—rescue by squads of helicopters flying back and forth from a flotilla of thirty American warships forty miles offshore—reached U.S. officials in the South Vietnames capital. Within half an hour, a prearranged signal to evacuate was broadcast over the American radio station in Saigon: it was meant to begin with Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas,” but at the last minute a copy of that record could not be found, so Tennessee Ernie Ford’s version signaled the exodus. A cryptic message followed: “The temperature in Saigon is one hundred and five degrees and rising.”

Americans and “high-risk” Vietnamese gathered at prearranged collection points and boarded convoys of buses to the DAO compound at Tan Son Nhut. As the buses moved through the crowded streets, angry Vietnamese beat on their sides.

Philip Caputo was aboard one of the buses. “The airfield was under rocket and heavy artillery fire. The North Vietnamese were just walking these shells—these big 130mm. artillery shells—all over the airfield, destroying the runway. The building they took us to was shaking from the impact of the shells.” The evacuees were divided into helicopter teams of fifty each and led, one group at a time, out of the DAO compound. They moved down one hallway and rounded a corner into another. “Gentlemen!” a reporter said. “We have turned the corner in Vietnam!” “Yeah,” another answered, “and if you look down this hall, you’ll see”—a dozen voices completed his sentence—“the light at the end of the tunnel!” When the signal was given to run to their helicopter, shells were still exploding, Caputo remembered, “close enough that you could hear the incoming go overhead. There was room for people but not for luggage on the helicopter and some guy yelled, ‘Drop everything! Drop everything!’ And I dropped everything I had except some notes and some maps. All my clothes—everything. There were a lot of Vietnamese on board, Vietnamese who had worked for us. One woman managed, small as she was, to run on there with a good-sized carry bag of gold bars. The chopper took off, and we’re flying toward the coast. And you could look down and all you could see all around Saigon, all around the airfield, were plumes of smoke from burning buildings and exploding artillery shells. And then, finally, we crossed over the coastline. And I’ll never forget seeing the entire Seventh Fleet and all of these merchant ships that had been press-ganged into naval service, dozens and dozens of them. I said to myself, ‘This fourth-rate peasant army has whipped us.’ I just remember this sense of disbelief—disbelief and relief at the same time.”

A U.S. Marine struggles to keep desperate Vietnamese from climbing over the embassy wall.

Members of Duong Van Mai Elliott’s family were among the last Vietnamese to be helicoptered out of Tan Son Nhut. “My mother didn’t want to leave,” she recalled. “She said she didn’t want to be a refugee again. She’d been a refugee too many times.” And there was another reason: her daughter Thanh had joined the Viet Minh decades earlier, and with the war’s ending there was now a chance that they might be reunited. “She said she wanted to stay and see Thanh. My father was determined to leave because he was afraid that if he stayed or if we stayed we’d be killed. They argued, but in the end my mother yielded. Commercial flights were very hard to get on. They didn’t have the money to buy tickets for all of them. And which country to go to? No country would take them in. By trial and error, by pure chance or by miracle, they somehow ended up on an American list of people who had to be evacuated. And it was so sudden that they couldn’t take anything with them. South Vietnamese soldiers guarding the airport let them through, but they said if the Americans don’t come and get you we’ll come in and kill you, because they were being left behind to face the communists and my family was fleeing.”

Duong Van Mai Elliott’s father and her niece Jeanette Le aboard the USS Hancock, two of twelve members of her family to be airlifted out that day, April 30, 1975

The situation at Tan Son Nhut was now too dangerous even for helicopters, and buses full of potential evacuees were being turned away and forced to find their way back through the chaotic city streets in search of some other means of escape. Keyes Beech, a veteran war correspondent with The Chicago Daily News, was one of a number of newspapermen aboard one of them. Its driver had run away the night before, so an embassy auditor who had never driven a bus found himself behind the wheel. “We careened through the streets,” Beech recalled, “knocking over sidewalk vendors, sideswiping passing vehicles, and sending Vietnamese scattering like leaves in the wind….[They] beat on the doors, pleading to be let inside.” Young men on motorcycles wove through the crowds shouting, “Yankee Go Home” at every foreigner they saw. ARVN wandered aimlessly, sometimes firing their weapons into the air. The bus finally reached the embassy. “Several hundred Vietnamese were pounding on the gate or trying to scale the wall,” Beech remembered. “There was only one way inside: through the crowd and over the [fourteen-] foot wall.”

Vietnamese line the swimming pool within the embassy compound, hoping to board one of the helicopters that come and go all day.

Guarding the wall were Juan Valdez and his marines. “We were supposed to get Americans out of there and other nationals like the British and the South Koreans—as well as the South Vietnamese that worked for us in the embassy. But we started getting people who said they were part of the embassy but had different papers altogether. It just went to chaos. It got to a point where we sealed the gates and we could no longer open those gates to let in vehicles or even embassy employees. So a number of Marines stood on the gate. The CIA was behind us, and they were pointing at the people who were supposed to get out. When they found their way to the front, we would reach over with our arms, pull them up, and bring them in.”

“Once we moved into that seething mass,” Keyes Beech remembered, “we ceased to be correspondents. We were only men fighting for their lives, scratching, clawing, pushing ever closer to that wall. We were like animals. Now, I thought, I know what it’s like to be a Vietnamese. I am one of them. But if I could get over that wall I would be an American. My attaché case accidentally struck a baby in its mother’s arms and its father beat at me with his fists. I tried to apologize as he kept on beating me while his wife pleaded with me to take the baby. Somebody grabbed my sleeve and wouldn’t let go. I turned my head and looked into the face of a Vietnamese youth. ‘You adopt me and take me with you and I’ll help you,’ he screamed. ‘If you don’t, you don’t go.’ I said I’d adopt him. I’d have said anything….There were a pair of Marines on the wall. They were trying to help us kick the Vietnamese down….One of them looked down at me. ‘Help me,’ I pleaded. ‘Please help me.’ ” The Marine pulled Beech to safety.

Somehow, Frank Snepp had managed to make his way inside. “It was chaos in my operations room. We were getting calls on our radio, the diamond radio network—the exclusive CIA communication system—from agents and from some of our own people, screaming for help. Some Americans had left their billets so rapidly that morning they’d left their radios behind. So their Vietnamese friends were on the radios begging to be rescued. ‘I’m Han the driver.’ ‘I’m Mr. Ngoc, your translator.’ And I stood there wondering how in the world we could reach them. It’s one of the most horrible memories of that day, because I could hear them on the radio and I knew that we couldn’t get to them.”

Elsewhere in the embassy, officials dumped bags of currency into an oil drum and set it on fire—millions of dollars in embassy contingency funds went up in smoke—while Marines feverishly shredded armloads of classified files, then stuffed the trash into bags and heaped them in the courtyard. “When the choppers finally began coming in,” Snepp remembered, “the downdraft ripped open those bags and there was classified confetti all over the parking lot.”

Snepp dropped by the ambassador’s office several times that day. Martin hadn’t sent any of his own personal classified documents to be destroyed. “Finally,” he recalled, “I found him sitting on the floor shredding them by hand. And I said to him, ‘Mr. Ambassador, can I help you?’ And he said no. He was lost.”

“Before too long,” the British journalist James Fenton wrote, “the large helicopters, the Jolly Green Giants, began to appear, and as they did so the mood of the city suffered a terrible change.” More than fifty U.S. helicopters now crisscrossed the sky over Saigon, picking up evacuees from designated rooftops as well as the embassy and the DAO compound, ferrying them to the fleet far out at sea, then returning for more. “There was no way of disguising this evacuation by sleight-of-hand, or, it appeared, of getting it over quickly,” Fenton continued. “The noise of the vast helicopters, as they corkscrewed out of the sky, was a fearful incentive to panic. The weather turned bad. It began to rain. And as the evening grew darker, it seemed as if the helicopters themselves were blotting out the light. It seemed as if the light had gone forever. All the conditions conspired against calm. All over Saigon there were people who had been promised an escape….Always the beating of the helicopter blades reminded them of what was happening. The accumulated weight of the years of propaganda came crashing down upon a terrified city.”

As evening fell, Ambassador Martin feared both that the pace of the helicopters’ coming and going was too slow and that the president was now about to call for an end to the evacuation of anyone who was not an American citizen. In a cable to Deputy National Security Advisor General Brent Scowcroft at the White House, his anger and bitterness were undisguised. “Perhaps you can tell me how to make some of these Americans abandon their half-Vietnamese children, or how the president would look if he ordered this….Commander seventh fleet messaged me about hour and half ago, saying he would like to stand down about 2300 hours and resume [helicopter flights] tomorrow morning. I replied that I damn well didn’t want to spend another night here….I am well aware of the danger here tomorrow and I want to get out tonight. But I damn well need at least 30 CH-53 [transport helicopters] or the equivalent to do that….I repeat I need 30 CH-53s and I need them now!”

The helicopters continued to come and go. “About nine fifteen that night,” Frank Snepp remembered, “Polgar went to the ambassador and told him all CIA personnel had been ordered by their headquarters to leave immediately. He said to us, ‘Let’s go,’ and we walked down the hallway. There were Vietnamese waiting there and the Marine guards pushed them out of the way. I could not bear to look at their faces because we were being saved and they weren’t. From the chopper I could see out towards Bien Hoa—the old storage place for materiel—where explosions were going up as the North Vietnamese began to torch the place. And out beyond that on the highway leading into the city North Vietnamese vehicles and tanks with their lights on were moving toward the city from every direction. Finally, we made it out to the South China Sea and the chopper settled onto the deck of the USS Denver. And that was the end. I was devastated. I think about that day all the time. It’s as vivid now as it was then, and the question that keeps running like a loop is what could we have done differently to forestall that day? And the answer is always the same, we should have remembered we were dealing with these people. This wasn’t just about American policy or prestige or anything of the sort. And we forgot that. We forgot it.”

That same evening, in the Saigon prison where the North Vietnamese agent Nguyen Tai had been confined in his white, windowless cell for months, no guard appeared after dinner to pick up his dinner plate. The electricity and water had already been cut. Tai could hear rockets exploding in the distance. Clearly, something serious was happening.

APRIL 30

THE HELICOPTERS flew in and out of the embassy compound into the early hours of the morning. Ambassador Martin had wanted to be the last man to leave. But at about four o’clock, a C-46 touched down on the roof. The commander—code name “Lady Ace 09”—carried orders from the president himself. Martin was to leave—now. “I guess this is it,” Martin said. The ambassador and his immediate staff were to be escorted up through the building to the roof so as not to call undue attention to what was taking place: “Do not let (the South Viets) follow too closely. Use Mace if necessary but do not fire on them.” As Martin was helped aboard the helicopter, he was handed the furled American flag that had flown from the flagstaff that day. He lifted off at 5:57 and headed out to sea.

As the ambassador had feared he would, the president had also ordered that from then on only Americans were to be evacuated. There were still some 420 South Vietnamese crouched in the courtyard, carefully separated into eight groups so that when the time came to board there would be no pushing and shoving. Time and again they had been assured that helicopters were on the way to pick them up. They watched as two more helicopters came and went, lifting out the last few members of the embassy staff. Stuart Herrington was one of two officers who had been helping to keep the exodus orderly. Now, he recalled, “I was directed to stay with the Vietnamese and keep them ‘warm,’ meaning don’t give them any hint that all these promises we made to them are for naught. I couldn’t believe we could be so close—six large helicopters would have cleaned those folks out—and that what was happening was happening. I felt sick at heart. It was dark out so I didn’t have to worry about looking these folks in the eye. Instead, I made my excuses and said I had to go to the bathroom. And then I took a circuitous route to the back door of the chancery building and made my way to the roof. I felt awful, naturally. You couldn’t possibly be in that set of circumstances and not be just shattered.” When the helicopter carrying him and his fellow officer lifted off, Herrington remembered, “We sat silently,” and flew out above the upturned faces of the patient Vietnamese, who were still convinced they were to be rescued. “If I had tried to talk, I would have cried. I know of no words in any language that are adequate to describe the sense of shame that swept over me during that flight.”

One hundred and twenty-nine Marines remained in the compound. They, too, did their best to pull back into the embassy without alerting the Vietnamese that they were being left behind. They almost made it. “The crowd in the street realized that we were leaving,” Juan Valdez recalled. “They started coming over the walls, over the fence. We locked ourselves inside the embassy and closed the doors. And put the bars down to lock the doors. And then we all found ourselves up on the embassy roof.”

Ambassador Graham Martin meets the press aboard the USS Blue Ridge, the fleet’s flagship, as the evacuation comes to an end.

The crowd stormed through the now-open gates. Someone commandeered a fire truck and rammed it through the back door of the chancery. When people rushed in behind it, James Fenton followed them. “The typewriters were already on the streets outside, there was a stink of urine from where the crowd had spent the night, and several cars had been ripped apart….The place was packed and in chaos, files, brochures and reports were strewn about.” A plaque commemorating the five Americans who died defending the embassy during the Tet Offensive had been ripped from the wall. Fenton found a smashed portrait of President Ford and a framed quotation from Lawrence of Arabia: “Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their way and your time is short.”

An evacuation helicopter lands on the deck of a U.S. Navy ship off the Vietnam coast.

In Washington, Henry Kissinger was speaking to the press. Reporters asked him if the ignominious retreat from Saigon wasn’t evidence that the whole Vietnamese effort had been a colossal error. He refused to take the bait: “I think this is not the occasion, when the last American has barely left Saigon, to make an assessment of a decade and a half of American foreign policy, because it could equally well be argued that if five administrations that were staffed, after all, by serious people dedicated to the welfare of their country, came to certain conclusions,…maybe there was something in their assessment, even if for a variety of reasons the effort did not succeed….But I would think that what we need now in this country, for some weeks at least, and hopefully for some months, is to heal the wounds and to put Vietnam behind us and to concentrate on the problems of the future.”

A reporter asked Kissinger if he was confident that all the Americans who wanted to come out of Saigon were now out. Kissinger said he thought so. An aide handed him a note. It said 129 Marines had somehow been left behind on the embassy roof.

Helicopters were dispatched to pick them up.

Eventually, only Sergeant Valdez and his ten-man embassy security unit remained. “Then everything stopped,” he recalled. “Until that time [the helicopters] were coming in pretty steady. But then we just found ourselves left there, and we started wondering, ‘Why did they stop,’ you know? Eventually we got word that it was because the admiral had decided to stop the Marines from flying because they had been flying continuously around the clock. Anyway, we were sitting around in the dark in our own little thoughts. Not doing too much talking. I started thinking maybe the North Vietnamese would direct those artillery rounds that they had directed the day before at Tan Son Nhut onto the embassy roof and that would have blown us off because there was no way we could escape. The other thought that came to my mind was we only had small arms weapons. Eventually we would run out of ammunition. But we pretty much decided that we were going to fight it out anyway and if we have to get killed, so be it. That was it. We didn’t want to surrender.”

Navy crewmen push a helicopter overboard to make room for others attempting to land. “The image that remains in my mind,” former adviser James Willbanks recalled, “is the picture of the helicopters being pushed over the side of the carrier, because the helicopter was everything in Vietnam—it was ‘dust off,’ it was resupply, it was fire support, it was everything—and all I could think of was what a waste, what a waste.”

More than an hour went by. The sun began to rise. Then, Valdez remembered, they saw puffs of smoke “coming from way out at sea.” It was a helicopter. “It was a relief because we had already started seeing North Vietnamese tanks coming down the road. The helicopter came in and one of the Marines, I believe it was Staff Sergeant [Michael] Sullivan, my assistant, grabbed me and started pulling me in as the ramp’s going up.”

The helicopter carrying the last U.S. Marines lifts off from the embassy roof; Master Sergeant Juan Valdez is in the center, farthest from the camera. Word that they’d made it reached the White House at 8:00 p.m., Washington time, April 29, 1975—and sparked jubilation.

At 7:53 a.m., April 30, 1975, the last helicopter lifted off the embassy roof with Valdez and his men aboard. More than fifty thousand people had been evacuated aboard fixed-wing aircraft, and nearly seven thousand more had been lifted out by helicopter during Operation Frequent Wind, more than one thousand Americans and almost six thousand Vietnamese.

The American war in Vietnam was finally over.

The Republic of Vietnam had just four more hours to live.

From the left: White House Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld; Henry Kissinger; Richard Smyser, a staffer with the National Security Council; General Brent Scowcroft; and Ron Nessen, the White House press secretary

A frightened ARVN guard appeared at the door of Nguyen Tai’s cell early that morning. The North Vietnamese army was just an hour or so away, he said. A second guard, equally anxious, reported that every one of his superiors had run away. Tai agreed to vouch for all four of the guards who remained if they would help him stay alive in the crossfire that he feared would follow. They agreed and let him out of his cell for the first time in years. He climbed with them to the roof, where he told the guards to hang white flags and to write in chalk, “Don’t shoot. There are prisoners here.” Then he sat down with them to wait.

As North Vietnamese troops continued to move into the city from all sides, their supporters rose up to join them. “At 8:15 that morning,” Nguyen Thanh Tung remembered, “the attack began everywhere in the city. I was excited. Everything was ready, but it was boiling in my mind. I raised the first flag in the government building of District 9.” For the past four years, she had pretended to be a simple street seller while secretly organizing NLF sympathizers to be ready for this day. Few can have sacrificed more for her cause. She had lost her parents, eight brothers, and her husband, battling first the French, then the Americans. She herself had fought the Saigon government since the moment it was established in 1955. And just a few weeks earlier, with victory almost in sight, she had had to absorb the news that her two soldier sons, who had been a source of fierce pride to her, had both been killed fighting the South Vietnamese on the same day. “After I raised the flag,” she remembered, “the local people brought out their own flags, small and large. Everybody fulfilled their assignments, to take over all the places. The forces of the Saigon regime ran like ducks. I didn’t know what to say. I just shouted, ‘Oh my God, everybody, my comrades, we have won our independence! Liberty has come!’ The local women were surprised to see me, a street vendor, revealed as a leader like this. They grabbed me and tossed me up in the air, like volleyball players with a ball. While I was waiting for the surrender, I was thinking of my family, and so many families. So many people had been killed. In a couple of hours, everybody would rejoice.”

President Minh spoke from the Presidential Palace at midmorning. He urged what was left of the South Vietnamese army to stop fighting. “We are here waiting,” he said, “to hand over the authority in order to stop useless bloodshed.”

“If Minh hadn’t ordered the surrender, it would have been horrific,” recalled Bao Ninh, whose unit had now reached the outskirts of Saigon. “We all would have died. My friends who served in the ARVN still curse President Minh. They hate him because he ordered them to surrender, letting the communists win. But they forget if he hadn’t given that order, they wouldn’t have survived and gone to the USA and become American citizens. They would have died with me in Saigon.”

“When President Minh declared the surrender,” South Vietnamese General Pham Duy Tat remembered, “I still had my personal command helicopter. I still had a pilot.” He had done his best to oversee the hopeless retreat from the Central Highlands, and when things fell apart his American adviser urged him to leave, even pledged to care for his family once it got to the United States. “But finally,” he remembered, “I decided to stay, not to flee. I gave the helicopter back to the Air Force. There were two reasons: To be honest with you and with myself, I really disliked the Americans at that point. They came to Vietnam to help us fight the communists, and they abandoned us. Not only did they pull out of Vietnam, they also cut off the aid. Obviously, they wanted South Vietnam to collapse. Secondly, I looked at my Ranger unit. None of my Rangers ran away. How could I, as a Ranger, abandon my post? When I decided to stay, I knew I had to accept what was going to happen to me. Everybody was talking about a bloodbath those days. As a Catholic, I couldn’t commit suicide as some other people did. So I accepted my fate.”

That morning, Colonel Tran Ngoc Toan still commanded what was left of the Fourth South Vietnamese Marine Battalion near Bien Hoa, just twenty miles east of Saigon. He had been fighting the North Vietnamese for sixteen years and had survived terrible wounds suffered at the battle of Binh Gia. One of his men took him aside. The soldier was carrying a small portable radio under his arm, Toan recalled, “and he said he’d heard ‘Big’ Minh call on us to lay down our arms and surrender. I got mad at him.” But there was nothing he could do. His commanding general had long since bribed his way aboard a ship and fled the country. An American friend had urged Toan to get out, too, he remembered. “But I said no. I can’t desert my country.” Still, further fighting was pointless. His men saw to it that he traded his camouflage uniform for civilian clothes. “I decided to walk to Saigon, back to my family,” he remembered. “Viet Cong were everywhere. I wanted to die. Yeah. By that time I wanted to die right away. I didn’t want to live anymore. But I thought about my family, my children. One was nine years old. The other was four. So, I thought about them and kept walking back to my family.”

A row of North Vietnamese tanks rumbled past the newly abandoned U.S. embassy toward the Presidential Palace. James Fenton ran out into the street and flagged down the first one. A soldier invited him to jump on. “The tank speeded up and rammed the left side of the palace gate. Wrought iron flew into the air, but the whole structure refused to give. I nearly fell off. The tank backed again, and I observed a man with a nervous smile opening the center portion of the gate. We drove into the grounds of the palace, and fired a salute….Soon the air became full of the sound of saluting guns. Beside the gate, sitting in a row on the lawn, was a group of soldiers, former members of the palace guard. They waved their hands above their heads in terror. An NLF soldier took his flag and, waving it above his head, ran into the palace. A few moments later, he emerged on the terrace, waving the flag round and round. Later still, there he was on the roof. The red and yellow stripes of the Saigon regime were lowered at last.”

General Minh offered to hand over power to the first soldiers to enter the red-carpeted reception room. They laughed at him. “All power has passed into the hands of the revolution,” one officer said. “You cannot hand over what you do not have.” But Colonel Bui Tin, the same soldier who had said farewell to U.S. troops at Tan Son Nhut nearly two years earlier, was more conciliatory toward Minh and his staff. “You have nothing to fear,” he said. “Between Vietnamese there are no victors and no vanquished. Only the Americans have been beaten. If you are patriots, consider this a moment of joy. The war for our country is over.” Minh was escorted from the palace. Within hours, victorious soldiers were calling Saigon Ho Chi Minh City.

It was noon.

The streets were littered with ARVN boots and uniforms, James Fenton reported, “and…in the doorways, one would see young men in shorts, hanging around with an air of studied indifference, as if to say, ‘Don’t look at me, I always dress like this—it’s the heat, you know.’…Occasionally, the relinquished jeeps of the former regime came past, full of youths in gear that was intended to look like Viet Cong attire. These new revolutionary enthusiasts were immediately distinguished in appearance and behavior from the real thing. Some of them were disarmed on the spot.”

A South Vietnamese police officer walked to a memorial built to honor those who had fallen defending South Vietnam. He saluted it, stood there for a time, and then shot himself in the head.

North Vietnamese troops reached Nguyen Tai’s prison around twelve thirty. He ran downstairs and out the door, and embraced the first soldiers he saw, weeping with joy. The battalion commander greeted him and let him ride along so he could see the jubilant crowds for himself.

The North Vietnamese regimental commander, Lo Khac Tam, who had first tasted combat in the first full-scale battle of the American war in the Ia Drang Valley, now found himself watching that war end in Saigon. “It was strange that it had such a quick and rapid, and unexpected end,” he remembered. “I couldn’t have imagined how happy I would be. All of Saigon lit up like a giant fireworks display. But I didn’t want to go out to the streets. I immediately thought of my fallen comrades-in-arms. The war had ended, and I had survived, but I cried tears of deep sorrow over the loss of my comrades.”

A North Vietnamese tank pushes through the gate of the South Vietnamese presidential palace, April 30, 1975.

Back home, Americans who had been involved in Vietnam and watched Saigon’s fall on television experienced a host of conflicting emotions, too.

Rufus Phillips, who had been associated in one way or another with Vietnam since the earliest days of America’s involvement there, “felt so bad that it’s hard to describe. I had tears in my eyes. And it was really hard to watch those films of the helicopters departing. And I knew that a lot of Vietnamese I knew personally had been left behind.”

“My first reaction was elation,” recalled Bill Zimmerman, who had been working to end the war since 1965. “I felt like applauding. I felt like riding on one of those tanks and waving a North Vietnamese flag along with all the other Vietnamese patriots who were doing that. And then I realized or began thinking about all the sacrifice and all the suffering that had been the center of our attention for the previous eleven years—all the wasted lives, all the lost careers, all the people who had made sacrifices to end the war, all the people who had been injured and killed in the war, the resources no longer available to Americans in poverty. It became a very bittersweet moment. Glad that it was over. Glad that the right people had won in the end. But tremendously sad and mournful about the incredible loss suffered by our country, their country, and all the people in both countries.”

“I felt relief that the destruction, the killing, finally came to an end, and I didn’t care which side won,” Duong Van Mai Elliott remembered. “It was a very messy ending to a very messy war. I felt a sense of relief, but also a sense of sadness. To me, Vietnam won. The Vietnamese people won because they finally could live normally. And I felt sad because I saw that my family was again fleeing—this time from their homeland—and their future was very uncertain. And I knew that with the communists taking over, Vietnamese society would be changed drastically.”

On May Day, the day following the fall of Saigon, crowds turn out to have a look at the men who have captured their city and obliterated their government. A French diplomat thought a third of the city’s citizens were frightened, a third were enthusiastic, and another third were indifferent. General Van Tien Dung, who had commanded the Ho Chi Minh campaign and triumphed far faster than he and his superiors had imagined, realized that “the conclusion of this struggle was the opening of another, no less complex and filled with hardship.”

“That day I got a call from the VVAW national office from some friends of mine from the old days,” John Musgrave recalled. “They were having a big celebration drinking booze and one of them said, ‘Oh well, it’s a great day, isn’t it?’ And I said, ‘Are you nuts? No, it’s not a great day.’ I mean, now I know for sure that it was all for nothing. There ain’t no doubt in my mind now. To see America leaving like that after we’d given sixty thousand, almost sixty thousand of our sons and daughters. That wasn’t something to celebrate. I knew we were abandoning millions of South Vietnamese that had trusted us, thrown in their lot with us, and I knew bad things were going to happen to them. That wasn’t anything to celebrate. I thought it was just one of the saddest moments I’ve ever seen in American history. I could take no pleasure in it.”

“I happened to be at a conference at Tufts University,” recalled Lewis Sorley, who served as an executive officer with a tank battalion in 1966 and 1967. “The dean there was a former ambassador who spoke to us late on that day—that fateful day, as it turned out. And he said he had just come back from Washington, where the spring weather was beautiful and the daffodils were in bloom, to Boston, where it was as gloomy and gray as it was in his heart. And people hissed at him and booed him. I was there in uniform. One of my great regrets was that I did not get up and start laying waste to those people who disrespected the ambassador and his sorrow at the fall of South Vietnam.”

“What I held on to at that time,” remembered Mike Heaney, who had been wounded in an ambush in 1966 in which ten men from his platoon were killed, “was that maybe we have learned a lesson that we, as a country, as a young country, needed to learn—that we just can’t impose our will on others. So my men didn’t die in vain. They died to teach us something valuable. Unfortunately, I don’t really know that we have learned that lesson. But that’s the way I felt then.”

DUST OF LIFE, DUST OF WAR

VIET THANH NGUYEN

WHENEVER AMERICAN SOLDIERS spend time in a foreign country, they usually leave behind a legacy of the forgotten children they fathered with local women. In Vietnam, these mixed-race children with American fathers are called bui doi, or “the dust of life.” The Vietnamese people, victims of French and American racism, look down on these Amerasian children without any sense of hypocrisy. Vietnamese people, so sensitive about how people of other races treat them, mistreat their own in a way that is all too human. Children of mixed blood remind those of pure blood of the violations done to their country and their identity. These children are doomed by the racism of their countrymen to be blown about in the streets and alleys, to fend for themselves.

Their fate reminds me of another kind of dust, the detritus blown into the air when a bomb or shell hits the ground, or when a war shatters a country. Native soil displaced and dispersed, people scattered on the wind and the tide. They, too, are the dust of life, or the dust of war, carried far and wide. After the end of the war that needs no name—if one has lived through a war, it is ever and only the war—hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese people fled their country by air and ocean. They became refugees, the so-called boat people. It is a dehumanizing term, calling forth feelings ranging from pity to revulsion from those who watch their life-and-death struggles on the South China Sea. I prefer to call these people “oceanic refugees.” If that term is not appropriate, then I will settle for “heroes,” for these people were courageous rather than pitiful, embarking on a journey that perhaps only half survived.

Americans know that over fifty-eight thousand of their soldiers died in the war, but no one knows how many Vietnamese people fled their country, or how many disappeared at sea. Americans have recorded the names of every single one of their dead, but no one has tracked all the names of the missing Vietnamese. Call the difference what you will: power, privilege, inequality, injustice, irony. The difference between a strong country and a weak country, even if the weak country did defeat the stronger one, can be measured by their abilities to remember their dead and their missing.

But what of the dust of life and the dust of war? Who remembers them? The Vietnamese diaspora now number over three million in more than thirty countries, or about the same number as live in Thanh Hoa, the third-largest city in Vietnam after Hanoi and Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. Three million is a little smaller than the population of the city of Los Angeles, and a little larger than Chicago. The majority, nearly two million, are in the United States, but sizable populations of more than 100,000 live in Cambodia, France, Australia, Taiwan, Canada, Germany, South Korea, and Japan. I wonder about the anomalous thousands who live in New Caledonia, Qatar, or Israel. As strange as it occasionally feels to be a Vietnamese American, at least I have a large community of fellow Vietnamese Americans from which to draw support. But to be one of a handful of Vietnamese in Israel seems to be a lonely existence—nearly as lonely, I imagine, as those Vietnamese political prisoners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who were dispatched into exile by their French overlords to Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean.

The significance of the Vietnamese diaspora can be measured not only in numbers but in function. It is the third force between the binary poles of Vietnam and the United States. The diaspora simultaneously belongs to or in both countries and yet at the same time is an occasionally discomfiting, even threatening, presence. For the victorious communists of Vietnam, the overseas Vietnamese who fled in the 1970s and ’80s were “puppets” who had been manipulated by the French and then the Americans. The state was happy to see these “traitors” leave, and yet, in a Vietnamese version of catch-22, the state imprisoned them if they were caught leaving. From overseas, the Vietnamese diaspora became even more of a danger to the Communist Party. Freed from the regime’s oversight, the diaspora became a refuge for anticommunist feeling, especially in the United States and Australia, both of which had fought against Vietnamese communism.

Despite the fact that the southern Vietnamese were American allies, and indeed were the people in whose name the United States fought its Vietnam War, the initial reception to Vietnamese refugees was lukewarm. Congress, to its credit, opened the doors to refugees, but in the recessionary 1970s, the majority of Americans did not want them. Most of the first wave of 150,000 Vietnamese refugees were rescued from South Vietnam in April, with the final stage of the evacuation signaled by the song “White Christmas” on Armed Forces Radio. They were sent to American bases in the Philippines or Guam, which had stationed many of the planes used to bomb Southeast Asia. Perhaps to erase that memory, the operation was dubbed “New Life.” The ironies, or the absurdities, were accentuated by the fact that the admiral in charge was the father of rock star Jim Morrison. Another irony was that many of these Vietnamese refugees felt compelled to express their gratitude at being rescued, even though they thought that the United States had betrayed them. They would save their resentment for their own homes and their own communities, expressed in their own language, spoken out loud with the assurance that Americans neither could listen nor cared to understand.

Once in the United States, most of the refugees would be sent to four camps in Southern California, Arkansas, Florida, or Pennsylvania. I ended up in the latter, at Fort Indiantown Gap, where I personally experienced the logic of dispersal favored by the U.S. government. Fearful of having large concentrations of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees, the government sent the refugees to all parts of the country. This is why significant populations of Hmong can be found in Montana and Wisconsin, cold and white states which are unlikely places that they would have chosen to live in. The Hmong were residents of the highlands of Laos, and many had fought on the American side during the war, mobilized by the CIA. As the war ended, most were unceremoniously abandoned by the CIA and left to fend for themselves, with disastrous human consequences. As for my family, no one had heard of Pennsylvania, or the city we settled in, Harrisburg. In order to leave the camp, refugees had to have sponsors who would guarantee that we would not be a drain on welfare. No sponsors would take my entire family, however, so my parents went to one sponsor, my ten-year-old brother went to another, and my four-year-old self went to a third. While my separation from my parents only lasted a few months, it was interminable to me. This history—the residue of war, the impersonality of bureaucracy, the randomness of chance—remains imprinted on me.

I experienced my first white Christmas in Harrisburg. Photographs of that time show me, four years old, bundled up in a brown parka, a smile on my face. I enjoyed Harrisburg for the three years that we lived there, a time when I was blissfully unaware of the whiteness of my world or the conditions in which we lived. Only on returning thirty years later and driving the streets of my old neighborhoods did I realize that our first home, so large in my memory, was much reduced in reality, a small box in a lower-middle-class suburb. Our second home, rambling and Gothic in my mind, was in a depressed neighborhood of decaying houses whose only visible residents were African Americans, gathered on the stoops. All over the country, other Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugees found themselves in alien and bewildering situations, in cold climates, in all-white provinces, in urban ghettos, in the Midwest and the Deep South. For many, these situations were not the America that they had seen in Hollywood movies or magazine photos. Some stayed; some, hearing of more attractive cities, girded themselves for another move.

My parents heard from a close friend who had been settled in San Jose, California, that the weather and economic opportunities were good. She had opened perhaps the first Vietnamese grocery store in the city. My parents had risked their futures and gambled with their lives twice before. The first time was in 1954, when Vietnam, already divided into three by the French during their period of colonial rule, was divided into two by agreement of the French, the Americans, the Soviets, and the Chinese. The Vietnamese of all sides reluctantly went along. My parents were northern Catholics, and persuaded by their priests and by CIA rumors of anti-Catholic persecution under a northern communist regime, they fled south with 800,000 other Catholics. Then, in 1975, they fled again to the United States, leaving behind an adopted teenage daughter, my sister, whom I would not see for nearly four decades, on my return to Vietnam. The prospect of moving yet once more in 1978 must have been daunting to my parents, but much less so as economic migrants versus refugees fearing bloodbaths.

Thousands of other refugees were likewise moving from their places of initial settlement across the United States to Dallas, Houston, Seattle, New Orleans, Arlington, San Jose, and especially Orange County in Southern California, the places that would become home to the largest concentrations of Vietnamese. They began a process of Americanization that would eventually transform them in the perception of other Americans, from being unwanted refugees to being another manifestation of the Asian American model minority. My brother, for example, was ten years old when he arrived in the United States in 1975. In 1982, he graduated valedictorian of his public high school and went to Harvard. Today he is a doctor and professor and chaired the White House Committee on Asian American and Pacific Islanders.

Rags-to-riches stories like his were far from unusual, and affirmed for other Americans the continuing viability of the American Dream. The educational success of some of these young Vietnamese refugees was compounded by the economic success of the refugee community as a whole. In the cities where they settled in large numbers, Vietnamese refugees took the most common route to establishing their claim to America: they bought property, especially commercial property. In the American capitalist dream world, the commercially successful “ethnic enclave” (versus the not-so-successful and equally visible “ghetto”) is a vocal and visible statement that the members of the ethnic group in question have become good, or at least acceptable, neo-Americans.

My parents did their part by opening perhaps the second Vietnamese grocery store in San Jose, a couple of blocks from their friend’s store. If this competition caused any tension, I was unaware of it. The friend eventually sold her small store and moved on to open a much bigger furniture store. My parents would also eventually move on from their grocery store to opening a jewelry store and acquiring other business property. But before they did so, they endured a decade of working in the New Saigon Mini Market at least ten hours a day, every day of the year except Easter, Christmas, and New Year. Then they would come home, boil organ meat for dinner, and resume work for another hour or two, a second shift in which I assisted. I rolled coins, counted cash, stamped checks, food stamps, and coupons for Women, Infants, and Children and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Then I wrote down the tally in the ledger and added up the total on a calculator. Long before I learned how to type, I knew the numbers of the calculator by heart.

Our experiences of hard labor were common among Vietnamese refugees, although my parents were uncommonly talented in making money. As businesspeople in Vietnam, they had not been high on the ladder of prestige, the upper rungs of which were occupied by the political and military elite. But in capitalist America, they had the ability to prosper. This was not the case for many other Vietnamese refugees, either those who came from the working class or those who came from the political and military elite and who discovered that their prestige meant nothing in the United States. Their skills in government, law, and war were usually not transferable. Downward mobility for these elites was the norm, and stories of military officers and judges becoming janitors circulated. For the working class, the grind of survival continued as it did in the old world. A lucky few—some of the bankers and technocrats, for example—resumed their careers with the American companies that had employed them in Vietnam.

Regardless of their level of economic success, almost all the Vietnamese refugees suffered emotionally. They had lost their country, and, in many cases, they had lost their property, their prestige, their identities. Many had lost relatives, either to death or separation. I remember faces in photographs, those of my grandparents, all in Vietnam. Only my father’s father would live long enough to see his child return to the North in the early 1990s, forty years after he had left. The other grandparents would die while my parents lived in the United States. I was too young to understand what a parent’s death would mean to a child who had not seen them in decades, who could not be by their deathbed. Fear and lack of comprehension struck me at seeing my mother break down crying on receiving news of her mother’s death. At twelve years or so of age, I felt only shame and embarrassment at having to wear a white band of mourning around my head as we drove through the city streets to a funeral mass. Wearing that band was Vietnamese tradition, but it was also a sign of our alien stature in the United States.

The suffering endured by these refugees saturated their lives and those of their children, even as their American neighbors remained mostly ignorant. For Americans, “Vietnam” meant the Vietnam War, and the Vietnam War really meant America’s war. During the 1980s and ’90s, I watched almost every movie made by Hollywood about the war, an exercise I do not recommend. The experience confirmed for me that Americans saw the war as about them, with the Vietnamese people of all sides relegated to the margins, where they were mostly to be silent, saved, raped, or killed. American books about the war, fiction or nonfiction, were not much better. At the same time that Vietnamese refugees knew that other Americans were not interested in them, they also feared that their children, raised on American soil, might be forgetting their language and their history. These refugees also knew that communist Vietnam was erasing the memory of their own existence in Vietnam, and now they could see that the same might be being done in America.

Much of refugee culture was therefore about preserving the history of the South Vietnamese. During gatherings of the refugees, the South Vietnamese anthem would be played, and veterans paraded in military uniforms. Vietnamese language schools tried to teach the language to the younger generation. Lunar New Year celebrations and religious events were occasions to reinforce the customs and culture of the old world, and to renew bonds in the new world, in whatever country the refugees found themselves in. Vietnamese-language newspapers and publishing houses reported on the lives of the Vietnamese and functioned as an oppositional press to the communist Vietnamese media.

Not least, Vietnamese musicians, singers, entertainers, and producers put on shows and acts in nightclubs, which would eventually lead to a few different music labels and televised variety shows. The most famous is Paris By Night, a song-and-dance extravaganza filmed in exotic locales from Las Vegas to Paris, and then marketed as videotapes and DVDs to the Vietnamese diaspora. Currently in its 119th episode, Paris By Night was also popular in Vietnam in the 1980s and ’90s, when its production values exceeded what the Vietnamese entertainment industry could produce. Shut out by Hollywood, Vietnamese refugee entertainers used the song-and-dance platform to tell stories about Vietnamese people and history.

Not everything was a success for Vietnamese refugees, however. Far from it. While some Vietnamese refugees became model minority success stories, many Vietnamese refugees did poorly when it came to education and economics. The first wave of refugees was more adaptable to American culture, given that they came from Westernized political and military elites. Later refugees often came from the working class or the lower ranks of the military. They were not as equipped to succeed in an American environment, and welfare dependency rates were high. War trauma likely played a role in making adjustment difficult. Gang violence in the Vietnamese community was pervasive, as young men, and some women, turned to crime and preyed on their own community, whose vulnerabilities they knew well.

Perhaps that propensity to violence was inherited from soldier fathers, or passed on through being refugees from war violence. In one notorious 1991 incident, four young men seized a Good Guys Electronics store in Sacramento, California, and held dozens hostage, ostensibly in a bid to get passage back to Vietnam. Three of them died in a shootout with police after killing three hostages. The violence of the war seemed to beget more violence even after the war ended. In a now-forgotten atrocity from 1989, a drifter named Mark Purdy armed with an AK-47 opened fire on a Stockton, California, schoolyard full of Southeast Asian children during afternoon recess. He killed five of them, ages six, eight, and nine. Domestic violence within the Vietnamese community was high, but not spoken of in public. This violence was a function not only of possible war trauma, but also of the decline in status of Vietnamese men. Warriors and workers in a Vietnamese patriarchal society, many found themselves grappling with a loss of prestige, authority, and earning power in their new countries. Taking out frustrations on wives and children was not uncommon.

Meanwhile, memories of the past would keep returning to Vietnamese refugee communities through the arrival of new refugees. In the 1980s, Vietnam began to release prisoners from its reeducation camps, and the United States, through its Humanitarian Operations Programme, absorbed many of them. These prisoners were former soldiers, politicians, lawyers, bureaucrats, and intellectuals affiliated with the southern Vietnamese government who had not managed, or who had not wanted, to escape in 1975. Some had been stranded, some had decided to stay and defend their country, and some had gambled on the mercy of the victors. The promises of reunification and reconciliation offered by the communist Vietnamese turned out to be empty. The victorious government sent hundreds of thousands to reeducation camps, although an exact number may never be known, for the same reason as an exact number of oceanic refugees may never be known. It is not in the interest of the victors to record such figures. Likewise, the numbers of those who died in the camps may remain unknown. But the reports of the survivors are gruesome, testifying to torture, starvation, hard labor, and ideological indoctrination, in addition to deaths by execution, illness, hunger, accidents, and land mines. Those who survived and made it overseas became among the most vociferous anticommunist opponents of the regime.

At least they made it to host countries. For thousands of other refugees, the oceanic ones, the journey led to countries that did not want them. These refugees had been driven to flee because the communist regime had persecuted them, either because they or their family members were affiliated with the southern regime, or because they were ethnic Chinese. In another irony, China, one of communist Vietnam’s biggest allies during the war, had turned on Vietnam in the postwar years. The victorious Vietnamese were insufficiently grateful and showed too much allegiance to China’s rival, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, China’s other Southeast Asian mentee, the Khmer Rouge, had provoked Vietnam with murderous border assaults (the Khmer Rouge hated the Vietnamese because of the history of Vietnamese colonialism in Cambodia, as well as the fact that much of South Vietnam was formerly Cambodian territory). Vietnam responded by invading Cambodia at the end of 1978, and China responded by invading northern Vietnam in a brief, bloody, and inconclusive war in 1979. The fallout for the ethnic Chinese of Vietnam was to be singled out by the Vietnamese regime, shaken down for their money and gold.

These were the political and economic reasons that drove hundreds of thousands of people to flee the country on overcrowded fishing boats and trawlers, many not made for voyages on the open sea. Their destination was Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Singapore, or the Philippines. The boats often broke down, or were capsized and sunk in storms, or were assaulted by Thai pirates. Some boats were rescued by passing cargo ships, but many other cargo ships avoided them. Some boats made it to shore but were towed out to sea by the local navies, for the governments of potential host countries had little desire to take in refugees. The crisis became a global one, and images of the “boat people” made headline news all over the world in the late 1970s and ’80s. Under a United Nations agreement brokered in 1979, the host countries of Southeast Asia would permit the refugees to stay in camps until countries of settlement could be found for them. For some of the refugees, the desperate journey was rewarded with salvation. Others died along the way, and thousands of others never made it out of the camps. In the Philippines, some refugees spent more than a decade waiting for settlement, and some never left. In Hong Kong, refugees were kept in what basically amounted to prisons, and many were deported to Vietnam. They responded with hunger strikes, riots, and immolations.

Why were so many countries reluctant to take refugees? Perhaps the answer could be found in the United States’ own response to refugees. The U.S. took in hundreds of thousands of Southeast Asian refugees out of a sense of obligation, and also because it was good foreign policy to highlight the abuses of a communist country. At the same time, the United States was rejecting refugees from Haiti. Those refugees were black, and there was no geopolitical benefit for the United States to take them. Refugees are the unwanted, the zombies of foreign policy who threaten to wash over our shores in human waves, take over our homes, and contaminate our minds and bodies. Vietnamese and other Southeast Asian refugees got a pass, but some of them would encounter the American fear of refugees once again. These people had moved to Louisiana and formed one of the largest Vietnamese American settlements there, a thriving community that was hit, along with the rest of New Orleans, by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Tens of thousands of New Orleans residents were rendered homeless and lived in fraught conditions. Images of their plight were broadcast on television and printed in newspapers, and some of the media called these displaced people “refugees.”

The reaction was swift. President George Bush said, “The people we’re talking about are not refugees. They’re Americans.” Jesse Jackson agreed with him for perhaps the first and only time: “It is racist to call American citizens refugees,” Jackson said. “To see them as refugees is to see them as other than Americans.” The view of Bush and Jackson is that there is something fundamentally un-American about being a refugee, since America could never possibly be such a wreck that its people would have to become refugees. This is the wish fulfillment of the American Dream, and to disturb that dream might be dangerous. The bipartisan reaction only drove home the precarious situation of Vietnamese refugees, who, if they held on to their refugee status, would also be holding on to their non-American status. But being a refugee could be as much a psychic condition as a legal one. Many refugees, me included, have never forgotten what it was like to be a refugee, even if now we might be among the bourgeoisie.

People often call me an immigrant, and describe my novel The Sympathizer as an immigrant story. No. I am a refugee, and my novel is a war story. The Vietnamese diaspora is partly an immigrant community but mostly a refugee community, created because of war and the forces of displacement that a war unleashes. The devastation of war is hard to leave behind for those who have endured it, and if sometimes there are happy endings, sometimes there are not. I think of how the dust of life, the Amerasians, went from being spit on in Vietnam during and after the war to becoming, briefly, prized possessions with the passage of the Amerasian Homecoming Act. Congress recognized that American soldiers had left behind children and that it was the duty of the country to take those children in. Relatives who had wanted nothing to do with these children suddenly came calling, for Amerasian children were now the ticket out of Vietnam. These relatives treated the Amerasians well until they came to the United States, whereon some of these relatives had no more use for them. So the dust of life in Vietnam became the dust of life again in America, unwanted by their Vietnamese relatives and unknown to their American fathers. Their stories are among the saddest of the war and its aftermath.

Over the past few decades, the diversity of the diaspora has grown in complexity. No single story can encompass the diaspora’s experiences. Many of the Vietnamese who now live in eastern Europe, for example, came not as refugees but as cheap labor in the postwar years, shuttled between friendly communist countries. While Vietnamese Americans became the model minority, the Vietnamese in eastern Europe were often perceived by their host countries in much more negative terms because of their origins as guest workers and their reputation as petty criminals. Now, many Vietnamese who go overseas from Vietnam do so as international students, because they have either earned scholarships or come from rich families. In the United States, these students are sometimes regarded with suspicion by Vietnamese Americans who fled communism, because the students often have ties to the regime through their parents. The greatest irony of this situation is that Vietnam is communist in name and politics only. In practice it is a capitalist country, and many of the capitalists are communist cadre or their relatives. Not without justification, some American visitors observe that the United States actually won the war in the postwar years, noting the triumph of the dollar in Vietnam and the positive image that many Vietnamese hold of the United States. This only goes to show that the war in Vietnam was not simply a war for freedom or democracy. It was very much a war about communism versus capitalism, in which economic ideology would prevail.

The unevenness of the world, its resistance to a simple binary between a good, capitalist America and a bad, communist Vietnam, is also highlighted by how many young Vietnamese Americans have chosen to return to Vietnam to make their fortunes. Vietnamese American actors and directors, shut out of Hollywood, are now stars in the burgeoning Vietnamese film industry. Entrepreneurs have used their bilingual and bicultural skills to open all manner of small and large enterprises, becoming cultural and economic ambassadors and brokers who work for multinational corporations and banks. Young Vietnamese Americans, and Vietnamese from all over the diaspora, go to Vietnam to study the language and culture in hopes of finding a connection with the country of their parents and grandparents.

The dust continues to settle, slowly, from the war. Sometimes it gets in the eyes and one has to cry. Sometimes it settles on the skin and hair, and we bring it with us wherever we go. And sometimes it simply remains invisible, and forgotten.