America’s Bitter End in Vietnam

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It was not a proud day to be an American. As our CH-46 Marine helicopter lifted off the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon at 5:30 a.m., April 30, 1975–taking the last of the Americans, except for the Marine guards, to USS Okinawa and safety–the full extent of our betrayal struck home. The 420 evacuees below, whom we had given our solemn promise not to abandon, began to press at the Marine guards then withdrawing into the embassy.

But it was too late. America had not only fecklessly abandoned its erstwhile ally in its time of most desperate need but also had shamefully abandoned the last several hundred of those evacuees who had trusted America to the very end. Included were the local firemen who had refused earlier evacuation so as to be on hand if one of the evacuation helicopters crashed into the landing zone in the embassy courtyard; a German priest with a number of Vietnamese orphans; and members of the Republic of Korea (ROK) embassy, including several ROK Central Intelligence Agency officers who chose to remain to the end to allow civilians to be evacuated ahead of them and who would later be executed in cold blood by the North Vietnamese invaders.

The worst of it was that it was all unintentional, the result of a breakdown in communication between those on the ground running the embassy evacuation, those offshore with the fleet controlling the helicopters, and those in Honolulu and Washington who were making the final decisions. In short, it was the Vietnam War all over again.

My return to Vietnam in July 1974 had begun on an entirely different note from my earlier tour in 1966-1967. The contrast with my first tour, when I was the battalion S-3 (operations officer) of the 1st Battalion, 2nd Infantry, 1st Infantry Division, and later, after being wounded for the second time, as a G-3 operations officer with II Field Force Vietnam, could not have been more stark. In 1975, Vietnam was practically at peace.

It was so peaceful that my wife and 18-year-old younger son accompanied me to Saigon, joining a number of other families of the U.S. Mission–i.e., the U.S. Embassy staff; the 50 military members of the Defense Attaché Office (DAO); and the small U.S. delegation of the Four-Party Joint Military Team (FPJMT), to which I was assigned as chief of the negotiations division. The embassy was located in downtown Saigon, but the DAO and the FPJMT were located at the old MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) compound at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in suburban Saigon some miles away.

Thomas Polgar, who was the CIA station chief at the time, commented in an article in the August 1989 Vietnam Magazine (’Managing the Company Store’): ‘In 1973-1974 I routinely drove from Saigon to My Tho in the Delta…and let my people drive to Da Lat. The principal roads throughout the country were basically safe for daytime travel.’

When my older son, then a cadet at West Point, joined us for Christmas vacation in 1974, the two boys wanted to join an embassy group driving to Vung Tau to go swimming. I refused, remembering the two U.S. divisions that had been needed to open that road less than a decade before through what was then extremely hostile country.

But the Viet Cong had practically disappeared some six years earlier in the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive. From then until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, the war was primarily between North Vietnamese Army (NVA) regulars and the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF), with the Viet Cong playing almost no role at all. And, after Tet ‘68, the United States began to disengage as well. Following the Battle of Hamburger Hill in May 1969, all U.S. tactical offensive operations were severely curtailed, and by July 1969 the U.S. troop withdrawal began. By August 1972 all U.S. ground forces had departed.

By March 1973, in accordance with the Paris Accords, all remaining U.S. military forces, with the exception of the 50-man DAO and the members of the FPJMT, had left Vietnam. What fighting there was in 1973 was limited to skirmishes in the hinterlands between the RVNAF and the 15 NVA divisions, including 149,000 combat troops and 71,000 support troops, which were allowed to remain in South Vietnam under the terms of the Paris Accords. Many would later blame those accords for the collapse of South Vietnam.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, Vietnam War

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