You’ve seen that famous picture of the helicopter landing on the roof of a building removing people, and the people standing on the stairway waiting. Well, if you could see closer, you could see me in that picture. I stood on that stairway with the others and waited and watched Saigon falling around us. Then finally a helicopter came and took us to the top of the crowded embassy and we got out of there. I remember that there was a tremendously big tamarind tree in the courtyard of the embassy. I watched the big Chinook helicopters come in, and when they came down that old tree was shaking back and forth. And you feared a little bit. But they came right down and then went right back up again, straight–just like an elevator. Tremendous work machines.

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Then they asked if any of us wanted to go out to Tan Son Nhut airport; they said a plane would be there for us. So I went to the airport with some others. I wanted to see what was happening out there. I took my nurse with me all the way to Tan Son Nhut. But once we were there, she said she could not leave. I blessed her and wished her luck and she left–I never saw her again. We stayed at the MACV headquarters on the tennis courts, waiting for something to happen. Then the Marines came in and surrounded the place, and the big helicopters came in that could hold about 70 people. The choppers lifted off at about 6:30 that evening and took us out to USS Midway.

On Midway, it is pretty well known what happened. They had to push off some of the helicopters to make way for a small Vietnamese helicopter that landed the next morning. There were no Americans with me when I went out to Midway. I don’t think there were any other American priests in the country at that time. I didn’t see any on Midway. They transferred most people off Midway within a few hours. But I stayed on board. I told them I thought I might have been exposed to tuberculosis, and they sent me down to the sick bay to be examined. I was released the next day.

I was very sad at the time, and I can remember looking up at the ceiling on April 30 on Midway and realizing that a whole nation had gone under. Here I was safe on the ship, and they were under their new masters. I guess I felt lower at that moment than at any other time in my life.

While on Midway I thanked some of the Marines who brought us all out. I said, ‘Thanks a million,’ and I asked one of the Marines if they had had any trouble or anything. He said, ‘No, I was stationed in the embassy. We went into the embassy and we didn’t have any trouble at all after we cut the damn tamarind tree down.’ They didn’t cut it down completely, but they cut most of it down. The U.S. ambassador used to come and point to that tree for visitors and he would say, ‘You see that tree. That’s a symbol of the strength of America.’ And then the Marines, almost symbolically, cut that tree down.

When I was on Midway I sent word to Camp Pendleton, where many of the refugees were taken, and asked them if they had any type of job I could do to help them. I said that I would appreciate it if they could give me work. I told them that I didn’t need a salary, I just wanted to work with the Vietnamese.

I had come into Los Angeles and then went to San Francisco and then Utah. After I went back to Utah, they called me and said, ‘We want to get the Marines out of the job of being the chaplain coordinators with the Vietnamese at Camp Pendleton; we want them to go back to their Marine work. Would you come and be the coordinator for the Catholic Vietnamese in the camp here?’ I went in June and stayed until the end of the camp that Christmas. The Marines were kind enough to let me be the chaplain in the camp, and they also let me sleep in the Marine camp.

I felt happy to be with my people again–the Vietnamese. They were sad, of course, but not as sad as the people who came out later on the ocean–not as sad as the boat people. The Vietnamese who came out in 1975 and who I worked with at Camp Pendleton were pretty much the intelligentsia. They were aware as to what had been going on in Vietnam, and they were very smart to have come out when they did. They all seemed to do well when they arrived in America.

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