They took up what others could no longer bear.
Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.
They carried infections.
They carried chess sets, basketballs,
Vietnamese-English dictionaries,
insignia of rank, Bronze Stars, and Purple Hearts,
plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct.
They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery.
They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae
and various rots and molds.
They carried the land itself...
Vietnam.
Thank you.
I can tell you, as I look back over those months and years,
that we have met with the wives and the mothers
of those of you who were prisoners of war,
they were and are the bravest, most magnificent women
I have ever met in my life.
And now, if they will give me my official toasting glass,
I will propose the toast.
Tonight...
On May 24, 1973,
President Nixon invited
all the returned prisoners of war and their families
to Washington.
Among them was Everett Alvarez,
the first pilot shot down over North Vietnam.
Sometimes, I feel too much attention
was being paid to us, the P.O.W.s.
And what about the poor guys that fought the war, those kids?
You know, that came home, um, you know, amputees...
Uh, wounded with the injuries of war.
What about them?
We had our own challenges,
and the key was to, to face these
and yet maintain our, our honor.
That's what it was.
Dr. Hal Kushner,
who had been a prisoner for more than five years,
was unable to attend.
He was reunited with his family at Valley Forge.
We flew to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.
And I came off the helicopter and I saw my wife...
and my daughter,
who I hadn't seen since she was 21/2.
And she was born in 1963.
So she was ten years old.
And my son, who I had never seen,
a week before his fifth birthday.
And he had on a little tie and a little coat.
And my mom and dad.
And my mother was just overcome with emotion.
And I just...
It was just an incomprehensible moment.
And we hugged everybody.
And my little boy had a flag, American flag.
Like many P.O.W. marriages,
Hal Kushner's would not survive.
On March 29, 1973,
the last American troops left South Vietnam.
Fewer than 200 Marines would remain,
assigned to guard consular offices
and the American Embassy
and other installations in Saigon.
Thousands of other Americans, including C.I.A. agents,
diplomats, and contractors,
stayed behind, as well.
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 were at the beginning,
engulfed in an apparently endless civil war
and struggling over what kind of future they would have.
For the United States, combat did end,
but controversy over the war did not.
The best you could say about Vietnam
was that certain blood was being shed
for uncertain reasons.
The blood was for sure...
the bodies, the widows, the orphans...
they were certain.
Nobody disputed it, the dead people were dead.
But the rectitude of the war was in great dispute.
Smart people in pinstripes
couldn't make their minds up about the war.
And I remember asking myself...
"Was it worth it?"
Maybe it was all a big mistake, and, you know,
what, what was it all about?
We answered the call,
me and probably 21/2 million other young Americans
who went over there.
It was a cause worth the effort.
And sometimes, things just don't turn out
and the guys in the white hats don't win.
But that doesn't make it, uh,
or doesn't basically take away
from the rectitude of the cause.
Subcommittee will come to order.
Night after night during the spring, summer,
and fall of 1973,
Americans watched the Nixon administration
slowly come apart.
Blackmail,
enemies lists,
dirty tricks,
a vice president forced to resign,
perjury, cover-u p,
abuse of presidential power,
secret White House tapes.
Mr. Butterfield, are you aware
of the installation of any listening devices
in the Oval Office of the president?
I was aware of listening devices.
Yes, sir.
Good evening.
The country tonight is in the midst of what may be
the most serious constitutional crisis
in its history.
I told the president about the fact
that there were money demands being made
by the seven convicted defendants.
He asked me how much it would cost.
I told him I could only make an estimate
that it might be as high as a million dollars or more.
He told me that that was no problem.
I had no prior knowledge of the Watergate break-in.
I neither took part in nor knew about
any of the subsequent cover-up activities.
The one frustrating thing about...
about going to Canada was,
it left me outside the debate here.
I felt about... frustrated with that till this day.
As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Jack Todd,
who had deserted the United States Army
and fled to Canada,
had never felt so bitter,
so disenchanted, so out of touch
with what the United States seemed to have become.
He asked himself, "How did we let this gang take charge?"
Then he made a decision he would always regret:
he renounced his American citizenship.
I thought it was a political act,
renouncing my American citizenship.
And it was the stupidest thing I have ever done in my life.
I'm a Canadian citizen and I'm proud of it.
It's a wonderful country, but in here, I'm an American.
Well, the agreement was called
"The Agreement to End the War
and Restore Peace in Vietnam."
And, of course, that was a huge euphemism.
It neither ended the war nor did it restore peace.
And if you look at the substance of it,
it really was a withdrawal agreement.
We were withdrawing our forces
in exchange for prisoners of war.
Those are the two matters that were definitively settled
by the peace agreement.
We got our troops out and we got our prisoners back.
The rest is just all a model of nebulosity and vagueness
and didn't resolve a darn thing.
Neither North nor South Vietnam
had had any intention of observing the cease-fire
called for in the peace treaty signed in Paris
on January 27, 1973.
Even before the ink was dry,
each side had sought to claim as much territory as it could
in what became known as "the War of the Flags."
Within three weeks of the ceasefire,
there were already some 3,000 violations by both sides.
South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu,
who now commanded the fifth-largest army on Earth,
insisted the ARVN take and hold every inch of South Vietnam,
something they had been unable to do
even with the help of nearly 600,000 American troops.
Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese had attacked Tay Ninh,
near the Cambodian border,
hoping to establish a rival capital of their own
in the South.
Hanoi installed surface-to-air missiles near Khe Sanh,
just below the DMZ.
At the same time, ARVN troops attacked enclaves
seized by the North Vietnamese.
The fighting went on for months.
Hanoi built a new paved highway
within South Vietnam itself,
down which convoys of 200 to 300 vehicles
soon began streaming:
trucks, tanks, and heavy guns moving in broad daylight.
And they began laying down a giant oil pipeline
to fuel their vehicles in the South.
Nixon had privately promised President Thieu
that he would retaliate with American airpower
if Saigon ever seemed seriously threatened.
But in Washington, week by week,
as the secrets of Watergate kept tumbling out,
Nixon's influence on Capitol Hill steadily weakened.
In June of 1973, an energized Congress,
reflecting the views of a majority of Americans,
voted to stop all military operations
in or over Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia
by August 15,
and insisted that they not be resumed
without congressional approval.
"America wants peace,"
Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts declared.
"Congress is strong in its resolve to end the killing."
To abandon the South Vietnamese,
when all we were providing them at the end was money,
was reprehensible,
and disrespected the sacrifices of all soldiers,
ours and the South Vietnamese.
I think the moral obligation,
that doesn't stem from a philosophical commitment
to stopping communism.
Now it stems from our keeping our promises
to this erstwhile, unfortunate ally.
That they had us as the ally
where the other guys had the Soviet Union
and communist China.
Most Americans, I think,
would not like to hear it said that the communists
were more faithful allies than the United States.
But that is, in fact, what the case was.
While one regrets that we pulled the rug out,
in some respects,
I think the ultimate outcome would've been the same.
Had we continued, it would have cost
probably more lives in the long term
with no change in the outcome.
In the 18 bloody months
that followed the signing of the peace accords,
South Vietnam's position became more and more precarious.
But by the summer of 1974,
few Americans were paying attention.
They were riveted by what was happening to their own country.
to investigate fully and completely
whether sufficient grounds exist
for the House of Representatives
to exercise its constitutional power
to impeach Richard M. Nixon,
president of the United States of America.
- Mr. Danielson? - Aye.
- Mr. Drinan? - Aye.
- Mr. Rangel? - Aye.
- Ms. Jordan? - Aye.
- Mr. Lott? - No.
On July 27, 1974,
the House Judiciary Committee recommended
that the president be impeached for abusing his office.
On August 9, rather than face impeachment,
Richard Nixon became the first president in American history
to resign.
Always remember,
others may hate you,
but those who hate you don't win
unless you hate them,
and then you destroy yourself.
At the presidential palace in Saigon,
President Thieu closed his office door
and refused to see anyone.
He had staked South Vietnam's survival
on Nixon's personal pledge
that North Vietnamese aggression would be met
by renewed American airpower.
Just a few days after the new president, Gerald Ford,
moved into the White House,
Congress cut in half the funds
for military and economic assistance
Nixon had promised to deliver to Saigon.
Conditions in South Vietnam continued to deteriorate.
With the American military presence gone,
one out of every five civilian workers was jobless.
Prices soared.
There were many mistakes made by the Americans,
but the biggest mistake
was in creating the sense of dependency.
Another mistake was in creating an army in their own image,
an army that was used to fighting a rich man's war.
And South Vietnam was too poor
to be able to sustain that kind of war.
Thieu had steadily grown more authoritarian,
closing newspapers, restricting opposition parties,
selling political and military appointments.
A coalition of Catholics and Buddhists charged him
with corrupting every aspect of South Vietnamese life,
and demanded his resignation.
Thousands of demonstrators
poured into the streets of Saigon.
Meanwhile, the chronically underpaid South Vietnamese Army
had its pay cut further.
It began to disintegrate.
As many as 20,000 men were deserting each month,
most heading home to try to help their families survive
in such hard times.
Those ARVN who stood and fought
often had to do so without the sophisticated weaponry
they'd been trained by the Americans to use.
Much of the equipment Nixon had provided
was ill-suited to the war the South was now waging,
aircraft for which there were no trained pilots
or ground crews,
artillery and military vehicles
for which there were no spare parts.
And the U.S. Congress was in no mood to provide more.
Fuel ran low.
So did ammunition.
Before long, artillerymen in the Central Highlands
could fire just four shells a day,
and infantrymen were limited to 85 bullets a month.
In November of 1974,
the Politburo and the Central Military Committee met in Hanoi
to discuss strategy.
Some members urged caution.
They worried that if they tried
to push Saigon to the point of collapse too quickly,
the Americans would return.
Final victory, they calculated, would come in 1976.
Party First Secretary Le Duan didn't agree.
"Now that the United States has pulled out," he said,
"it will be hard for them to jump back in."
He ordered a test attack
to see if the Americans would intervene with airpower
as they had during the Easter Offensive
21/2 years earlier.
In December 1974,
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.
The United States did nothing in response.
President Ford, preoccupied with other problems...
inflation, unemployment, tensions in the Middle East...
held a press conference
that offered the South Vietnamese no comfort.
Are you considering
any additional measures, beyond a supplemental,
of assistance to the South Vietnamese government?
I am not anticipating
any further action beyond that supplemental
at this time.
Washington seemed to have no interest
in fulfilling the secret pledges
Nixon had repeatedly made to Thieu.
He was stunned.
With the communist flag
planted in a provincial capital just to the north of Saigon,
to me, the handwriting was on the wall.
I then communicated with my family, and told them
that even though my tour was supposed to take me till August,
that I would be home sooner.
And then I began to quietly, one little box at a time,
mail my possessions out of Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese now undertook
a new assault on cities in the Central Highlands,
including Ban Me Thuot,
where their forces outnumbered the over-extended ARVN
nearly six to one.
Ban Me Thuot fell in two days.
And here is the second province to fall,
and it falls fairly quickly.
At that point, they realize,
"Well, we don't have to wait till 1976,
we can go for it now."
Hanoi was delighted
by the Americans' lack of response.
But all the previous offensives Le Duan 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.
For weeks, the ARVN top command
had warned Thieu that his already weakened forces
were spread too thinly;
that it was no longer possible to defend the entire country.
He had angrily resisted.
But now, suddenly, he changed his mind.
Thieu ordered his troops to abandon the highlands,
to withdraw under fire
and then regroup in order to retake Ban Me Thuot.
It would have been a near-impossible task
with a carefully worked-out plan.
Thieu had none.
The result would be disaster.
Within a week,
Pleiku and Kon Tum were in enemy hands.
According to Western diplomats here in Saigon,
the South Vietnamese are quitting the Central Highlands
because they hope to avoid a complete rout.
The withdrawal is said to be an attempt
to save men and equipment that may become sorely needed
in other, more heavily populated parts of the country.
As the ARVN fled south,
400,000 civilians fled with them.
The enemy blocked the main roads
so that they had to take a disused back road.
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."
Then, Hue fell.
On March 29, 1975,
the North Vietnamese entered Danang,
South Vietnam's second-largest city.
Civilians and soldiers alike tried to flee.
"Danang was not captured," an American reporter remembered.
"It disintegrated in its own terror."
On the same beach where the U.S. Marines
had landed nearly ten years earlier,
beginning America's combat involvement in Vietnam,
16,000 ARVN soldiers fought for space
with 75,000 terrified civilians
aboard an improvised fleet of freighters and fishing boats
headed south for Cam Ranh Bay, Vung Tau, and Saigon;
anywhere they thought Northern troops might not follow.
Thousands drowned struggling to reach the boats.
Thousands more were killed by enemy shells
raining down on the beach.
Danang, Tam Ky,
Quang Ngai, Qui Nhon,
Nha Trang, Cam Ranh Bay.
The North Vietnamese kept moving closer and closer
to Saigon.
It was stunning to sit there in Saigon,
writing the daily ledes
on the fall of all these places.
You just were overwhelmed
with ten years' worth of history
and seeing all of it come unglued.
At the end of March,
18 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 North Vietnamese now decided
to move against Saigon
and take it before Ho Chi Minh's birthday on May 19.
It became clear to Thomas Polgar,
the C.I.A. station chief in Saigon,
that the time had come to begin preparing for an evacuation.
There were still some 5,000 Americans in Saigon,
and there were also as many
as 200,000 South Vietnamese and their families
who had cooperated with the United States.
But Ambassador Graham Martin disagreed.
He was a resolute Cold Warrior,
who had been appointed to reassure Thieu
of continuing American backing,
and his feelings had only been intensified
by the death of his son in Vietnam.
He had not been appointed ambassador,
he had told an aide,
to "give Vietnam away to the communists."
The C.I.A. was being alarmist, he said.
There would be no attack on Saigon,
and, therefore, no evacuation.
President Thieu also continued to insist all was not lost.
The ARVN were ready to "fight on to the last bullet
and the last grain of rice," he said.
Just 40 miles east of Saigon,
North Vietnamese forces attacked
the town of Xuan Loc on Highway One,
the last obstacle on their way to Saigon.
Although they were outnumbered and outgunned,
the South Vietnamese commander refused to retreat.
He was determined to keep the enemy from his capital.
You're certain that you can hold Xuan Loc?
Surely, surely.
I am certain to you.
I am sure with you I can hold Xuan Loc.
Even the enemies uses, you know, the double forces
or maybe three time more than my forces.
But no problem, sir.
No problem.
A vast human tragedy
has befallen our friends in Vietnam and Cambodia.
On April 10,
President Ford appealed to a joint session of Congress
for emergency aid to Saigon.
If they refused and Saigon fell,
Congress, not the White House, should take the blame.
Under five presidents and 12 Congresses,
the United States was engaged in Indochina.
Millions of Americans served,
thousands died,
and many more were wounded, imprisoned, or lost.
The president asked Congress for $722 million
in military aid.
There was no applause.
Most legislators, and their constituents,
thought it was too late to make any difference.
In the end, Congress voted against any military aid.
I didn't think that it is good
for a big nation like the U.S. to behave like that.
Because by that time,
we didn't ask for the blood of American soldiers.
I mean, the last minute, they washed their hands like that.
It is not up to a diplomat to use strong words
against the American,
but I felt deeply sorry about it.
We broke every rule in the book to get people out,
the young officers did,
while the ambassador continued to stonewall
both the embassy and Washington.
Evacuation plans were finally drawn up.
There were four options:
sealift by cargo ships anchored in the port of Saigon,
airlift by commercial airliner,
a military airlift,
and, as a last resort,
evacuation by flights of helicopters
to a flotilla of U.S. Navy ships
in the South China Sea.
Ambassador Martin continued to show little interest.
The slightest sign that the United States
would abandon South Vietnam, he said,
would produce panic in the streets.
On April 21,
Xuan Loc finally fell to the North Vietnamese.
The ARVN had valiantly held on for 12 bloody days.
Highway One was now open all the way to Saigon.
That evening, President Thieu resigned.
Four clays later, the C.I.A. would spirit Thieu to Taiwan,
where an American emissary brought him
a private message from President Ford.
It was not a good time for him to visit America.
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."
News of Thieu's resignation
had sent thousands of panicked Vietnamese
rushing to Tan Son Nhut Airport,
hoping to get out of their country.
Some had exit visas; many did not.
Marines did what they could to establish order.
Master Sergeant Juan Valdez was the noncommissioned officer
in charge of Marine Corps Security Guards in Saigon.
He had been one of the first Marines
to land in Vietnam in 1965.
People were trying to bribe the Marines.
You know, they were bringing money out there, jewelry,
to get them out of the country.
I think just about every Marine that was at the gate
encountered this type of bribes.
But they had to refuse them, yeah, yeah.
Duong Van Mai Elliott's family
had fled Hanoi in 1954,
leaving behind her older sister, Thang,
who had joined Ho Chi Minh's forces.
Now, 2O years later,
with the North Vietnamese closing in on Saigon,
they were faced with the prospect
of fleeing once again.
My mother didn't want to leave.
She said she didn't want to be a refugee again.
She had been a refugee too many times.
Plus, my sister Thang was about to arrive
and meet us after all these years.
She said she wanted to stay and see Thang.
My father was determined to leave,
because he was afraid that if we stayed, we'd be killed.
He got mad at my mother, and they argued,
but in the end, my mother yielded
to his, uh, insistence that we should... they should leave.
I knew that the end was approaching.
When you are at the center of the storm,
you have to get out.
When I myself and my immediate family,
and my father and his immediate family,
went to the Tan Son Nhut Airport,
through the whole thing I said, "This is crazy, you know.
Why, why do we have to leave under these conditions?"
It was so humiliating.
And I carry that humiliation with me to the United States.
When I get in line to sign up for a job,
you know, I was a...
I remind them of the war in Vietnam,
which the Americans hate.
You have to lose a nation and a dream
to feel... to feel that humiliation.
We have always sent a wreath
to his grave at Arlington.
Partly in remembrance, of course, of him,
but also thinking, if other grieving people are there,
or just people that are visiting to pay their respects,
that it's good for them to know that people are,
that the soldiers are remembered.
Today...
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.
On April 27, 1975,
rockets landed in the heart of Saigon.
It was the signal for the North Vietnamese to begin
their main assault on the city.
They attacked from five sides,
"like a hurricane," their commander said.
The White House ordered all American cargo ships
to sail out to sea without waiting
to take on any passengers.
There now could be no organized sealift.
When the communists began shelling
the seaside town of Vung Tau, just southeast of Saigon,
thousands of terrified people
clambered into any vessel they could find
in hope of rescue by the Americans.
Before the exodus ended,
more than 60,000 refugees from Vung Tau
would be picked up.
But thousands more were left behind,
floating helplessly at sea.
At the American Embassy,
Ambassador Martin cabled Henry Kissinger,
now secretary of state,
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 began to wonder
whether he had lost 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.
Evacuation planners had quietly designated
two spots within the embassy
as potential helicopter landing zones-
a courtyard that could accommodate large choppers,
and the helipad on the embassy roof,
meant for smaller ones.
An old tamarind tree stood in the center of the courtyard.
Again and again, the Marines asked Ambassador Martin
for permission to cut it down
so as not to interfere with the lift-offs and landings
they were certain would soon have to begin.
He always refused.
That tree was a symbol of American resolve, he said.
Cutting it down would send the wrong message.
Meanwhile, General Duong Van Minh,
who had been part of the coup
that overthrew President Diem 12 years earlier,
was sworn in as the new president of South Vietnam.
He called for an immediate cease-fire
and asked that Americans leave within 24 hours.
On April 29, at 3:58 in the morning,
North Vietnamese rockets began falling
on Tan Son Nhut Airport.
The North Vietnamese were just“.
Walking these shells...
these big 130-millimeter artillery shells
all over the airfield,
destroying the runway, basically.
It was close enough
that you could hear the incoming go overhead.
Two Marine guards,
Lance Corporal Darwin Judge, of Marshalltown, Iowa,
and Corporal Charles McMahon, Jr., of Woburn, Massachusetts,
were killed in the barrage...
the last American servicemen to die in Vietnam.
I still blame the ambassador.
This shouldn't have happened.
You know, if the ambassador had taken action
and gotten people out of there, which he was supposed to,
this would have never happened.
The runways were cratered
and blocked by wrecked planes,
littered with jettisoned bombs and fuel tanks.
The Americans had run out of evacuation options.
It was time to call in the helicopters
from the offshore fleet.
There was no way
all of the remaining South Vietnamese
could be evacuated.
The tamarind tree in the embassy compound
was finally hacked down
so helicopters could begin landing.
So they had to chop this big tamarind tree clown,
cut it in pieces, tow it away.
And then they had to get the fire department
to wash all the debris and everything
so when the choppers land,
they wouldn't suck up all those debris
into the, uh, into the engines.
Just after 11:00 a.m.,
a prearranged signal to evacuate was broadcast
over a special radio frequency in the capital:
"The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising."
It was supposed to be followed by Bing Crosby
singing "White Christmas."
But the disc jockey couldn't find the record
and played Tennessee Ernie Ford's version instead.
Americans and Vietnamese with proper papers
gathered at pre-arranged collection points
and boarded convoys of buses.
Angry South Vietnamese beat on the sides of the vehicles
as they moved through the crowded streets
to the airport.
Philip Caputo, now covering the fall of Saigon,
was among the evacuees.
We were evacuated from Tan Son Nhut Air Base.
But we drove past the embassy, and you just saw this scrum,
this horde of people pressing up against the walls,
and Marines standing on the wall
and gun-butting people to, uh, to keep them...
to keep them from pouring over the walls.
The evacuees at the airport were divided
into helicopter teams of 50 each,
and led down a long hallway to the tarmac.
Someone in Caputo's group joked
about finally seeing "light at the end of the tunnel."
The choppers take off.
And they're flying, uh... flying toward the coast.
And you could look down and all you could see,
all around Saigon, all around the airfield,
were just these plumes of smoke from burning buildings,
from exploding artillery shells.
And I'll never forget going over that coastline,
seeing the entire 7th Fleet... dozens and dozens...
and this enormous fleet out there like that.
And I just remember this sense of, of disbelief, completely.
Disbelief and relief at the same time.
There were anywhere from 10,000 to 12,000 people
surrounding the embassy.
We're supposed to get Americans out of there.
And we were supposed to get South Vietnamese
that worked for us in the embassy.
The C.I.A. was behind us,
and they were pointing at the people
who were supposed to get out.
But every time you reached out to grab a specific individual,
other people were grabbing your hands
and trying to pull you down with them, you know,
so that you could help them out.
Some Americans had left so rapidly,
they'd left the 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."
I realized what the Americans had often done in Vietnam.
They had forgotten that these were 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.
Elsewhere in the embassy,
Marines frantically destroyed classified documents.
The top of the roof had two big incinerators
right underneath the helicopter pad.
And the Marines burned classified material
around the clock.
But to my understanding, even when we left,
there was still classified material left behind.
Well, when the choppers finally began coming in,
the downdraft ripped open those bags
and there was classified material
all over the parking lot.
When the North Vietnamese arrived,
they apparently Scotch-taped that material back together
and it became a blood list that they could use
to track down people, Vietnamese, who'd worked for us.
Embassy officials dumped bags of currency
into an oil drum
and set it afire.
Millions of dollars in contingency funds
went up in smoke.
"This will be the final message from Saigon station,"
the C.I.A. chief Thomas Polgar wired to Washington.
"It has been a long fight and we have lost.
"Those who fail to learn from history
"are forced to repeat it.
"Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience
"and that we have learned our lesson.
Saigon signing off."
More than 50 U.S. helicopters
now crisscrossed the sky over Saigon,
picking up evacuees from designated rooftops,
as well as the embassy,
ferrying them to the fleet far out at sea,
then returning for more.
Some desperate South Vietnamese officers
also commandeered helicopters
for themselves and their families,
dangerously crowding the decks
of the American aircraft carriers.
There was no room for them.
The image that remains in my mind
is the picture of the helicopter
being pushed over the side of the carrier.
The helicopter was everything in Vietnam.
I mean, it was dust-off, it was resupply,
it was fire support, it was everything.
All I could think of was: what a waste, what a waste.
As I watched that all unfold,
I, I felt responsible.
I was ashamed.
We had told these people
that we would be there to support them
and we were not.
About 9:15 on the last night,
Polgar came and he said, "We've got to all leave.
"We've been ordered by headquarters to leave.
Let's go."
Ambassador Martin had wanted to be the last man to leave.
But at about 4:00 in the morning of April 30,
a CH-46 touched down on the embassy roof.
Its pilot carried orders from the president himself.
Martin was to leave, now.
"I guess this is it," he said.
As Martin was helped aboard,
he was handed the furled American flag
that had flown from the flagstaff the previous day.
He lifted off at 4:58 a.m. and headed out to sea.
President Ford had also ordered that from then on,
only Americans would be evacuated.
Tens of thousands of South Vietnamese
would be left behind,
and more than 400 were still waiting
in the embassy courtyard.
Time and again, they had been assured
helicopters were on the way to pick them up.
I was directed
to stay with the Vietnamese and keep them warm,
meaning, "Don't give any hint
that all these promises we made to them are for naught."
I felt sick at heart, I had a hard time.
It was dark out, so I didn't have to worry
about looking these folks in the eye.
But I made my excuse and, um...
"I have to go to the bathroom."
And left into the landscaping,
circuitous route to the back door of the embassy,
to the chancery building,
and made my way to the roof.
Some 129 Marines remained in the compound.
They did their best
to pull back into the embassy and up onto the roof
without alerting the Vietnamese
that they were about to be left behind.
We locked ourselves inside the embassy
and found ourselves up on the roof.
It was actually after we got up on top of the roof
that we started seeing all these masses of people.
Some of them had already come on the embassy compound.
And they broke those doors.
And that's how those, uh, South Vietnamese
were able to get inside the embassy.
This action closes a chapter in the American experience.
The president asks all Americans to close ranks,
to avoid recriminations about the past,
and to work together on the great tasks
that remain to be accomplished.
Now, to, uh, give you details of the events of the past few days
and to answer your questions,
Secretary of State Kissinger.
Mr. Secretary, are you confident
that all the Americans that wanted to come out
are out of Saigon,
and do you have any idea
of the number of Americans who remain behind?
I have no idea of the number of Americans
that remain behind.
Uh, I am confident that every American
who wanted to come out,
uh, is, is out.
What we need now in this country
is to heal the wounds and to put Vietnam behind us.
An aide handed Kissinger a note.
It said that the 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.
But then, an hour went by
with no sign of any more helicopters.
Their radio was dead.
The Marines had no way to contact the fleet
to see if anyone was on the way.
Everything stopped.
We're being left behind.
People are sitting around in their own little thoughts,
uh, not doing too much talking.
We pretty much decided that we were going to fight it out,
use these small arms that we had
and just fight it to the end.
We started seeing two puffs of smoke coming from out at sea.
As they got closer, then we were able to determine
that they were helicopters.
It was a relief.
One of the Marines, I believe it was Staff Sergeant Sullivan,
my assistant,
grabbed me and started pulling me in
as the ramp's going up.
At 7:53 a.m., April 30, 1975,
the last helicopter lifted off the embassy roof.
Master Sergeant Juan Valdez
was the last American to climb aboard.
The government of South Vietnam
had less than five hours to live.
President Minh spoke from the palace at mid-morning.
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."
At noon,
North Vietnamese tanks flying Viet Cong flags
smashed their way through the gates
of the presidential palace.
Within hours, victorious soldiers
were calling Saigon "Ho Chi Minh City."
All over town, ARVN soldiers tore off their uniforms
and did their best to melt into the crowds.
Families burned their photo albums
so there would be no evidence
that their sons or husbands had ever fought for South Vietnam.
Colonel Tran Ngoc Toan had been fighting the communists
for more than 12 years,
and had survived terrible wounds
suffered at the Battle of Binh Gia.
He was leading what was left
of the 4th South Vietnamese Marine Battalion
near Bien Hoa, 2O miles east of Saigon.
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 refused.
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.
It was a very messy ending
to a very messy war.
I felt a sense of relief,
but also a sense of sadness when it ended.
I felt relief that the killing, destruction,
finally came to an end,
and I didn't care which side won.
To me, Vietnam won.
Vietnamese people won
because they finally could live normally.
And sad because I saw that my family was again fleeing,
and 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.
Lo Khac Tam had been fighting
in the North Vietnamese Army for nearly ten years now,
beginning with the bloody clash in the Ia Drang Valley,
the first full-scale battle of the American war.
Now he was watching that war's end.
In Vietnam, we finally have reached the end of the tunnel,
and there is no light there.
What is there, perhaps, was best said by President Ford,
"a war that is finished."
I happened to be at a conference
at Tufts University,
and the dean there was a former ambassador
who spoke to us late on that day,
as it turned out, the fateful day.
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 gloomy and gray as it was in his heart.
And people hissed 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.
I got a call from the V.V.A.W. national office
from some friends of mine from the old days.
They were having a big celebration,
drinking booze and, "Ah, well, it's a great day, isn't it?"
And I said, "Are you nuts?"
I said, "No, it's not a great day."
To see America leaving like that,
after we'd given almost 60,000 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.
That wasn't anything to celebrate.
I thought it was just one of the saddest moments
I'd ever seen in American history.
So when some future politician, for some reason,
feels the need to drag this country into a war,
he might come out here to Arlington,
and stand maybe right over there somewhere,
to make his announcement and to tell what he has in mind.
In Vietnam, the Communist Party is triumphant.
And they have exceptionalism, too.
And their exceptionalism gets in their way
just like our exceptionalism got in our way.
So they unify the country in a military sense,
and then they, they don't really unify the country after that.
They, they try, but they fail.
In the end, there was no bloodbath
on the scale many had feared,
but hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in the countryside
are thought to have been killed
in individual acts of revenge or political retaliation.
Those who had served the Thieu regime,
from generals to ordinary clerks,
were required to undergo re-education.
Enlisted men were assured
they would only have to submit to three days of "study."
Officers needn't attend for more than a month.
A million and a half people
are believed to have undergone some form of indoctrination.
ARVN cemeteries were bulldozed or padlocked,
as if the memory of an independent South Vietnam,
and those who had died for that cause,
could both be obliterated.
The communists,
in their effort to erase vestiges
of the former regime,
have not allowed the South Vietnamese
who lost their sons in the war
to mourn, to have their graves and to honor their memory.
It caused a division that lasts to this day,
that the winners would not accommodate the losers
in some way.
After 30 yea rs of war, much of Vietnam lay in ruins.
Three million people are thought to have died,
North and South.
Still more had been wounded.
Thousands of children fathered by American servicemen
had been left behind.
Villages needed to be rebuilt, land had to be reclaimed.
Cities were choked with refugees.
Millions were without work.
President Ford imposed an economic embargo.
Washington refused to recognize the new government of Vietnam.
But Le Duan and his allies on the Politburo
remained optimistic.
"Nothing more can happen," one committee member said.
"The problems we face now are trifles
compared to those in the past."
Le Duan resolved, with Soviet help,
to turn all of Vietnam into what he called
an "impregnable outpost of the socialist system."
Hanoi forcibly collectivized agriculture in the South,
virtually abolished capitalism,
nationalized industries,
and appointed planners to run it all
along strict communist lines.
The result would be economic disaster.
Inflation rose as high as 700% a year.
People starved.
To compound its problems,
Vietnam found itself, once again, at war,
caught between the interests of the two communist powers
that had once been its staunchest allies,
China and the Soviet Union.
After the brutal Maoist regime in Cambodia
raided border areas,
Vietnamese troops, with Soviet arms and encouragement,
crossed the frontier in 1978 and overthrew it.
A frustrating ten-year
counterinsurgency campaign followed
that some called "Vietnam's Vietnam."
Before it was over,
the Vietnamese would lose some 50,000 more men,
almost as many as the Americans had lost in their war.
Meanwhile, communist China,
determined to punish Vietnam for invading Cambodia,
and to show Moscow it would not have a free hand
in Southeast Asia,
sent 85,000 troops storming into northern Vietnam.
They devastated areas along the border
before the Vietnamese pushed them back.
The South China Sea, 1978.
They come ashore at the rate of 10,000 a month,
much faster than the United States or any other nation
is willing to accept them.
They come chasing an elusive memory:
the promise of America.
A million and a half people would eventually flee Vietnam:
supporters of the old Saigon regime,
refugees from the renewed fighting
along the Cambodian border,
and ethnic Chinese residents of Vietnam,
whom the new government had treated especially harshly.
Hundreds of thousands of the boat people died.
Others suffered in refugee camps
throughout Southeast Asia.
Some 400,000 eventually made it to America,
where they settled in nearly every state,
industrious, entrepreneurial,
more eager to take part in American political life
and more likely to become American citizens
than other immigrant groups from Asia.
But for that first generation of Vietnamese Americans,
memories of their homeland could never be erased.
I remember I was
with one of my daughters, uh...
at an intersection and some guy came up behind me
and blasted the horn.
When I came to my senses,
I was on the hood of his car,
about to, trying to kick his windshield in.
And I went... and there's people all over looking at me.
I mean, this is crazy. This is crazy.
And then I started going, "Well, this is weird."
I sort of slinked back to my car and, you know,
my daughter, she's about four, looking at me,
"Wow, what's that all about?"
And I go, "What is that all about?"
I had no idea.
I had no idea that it was even related to the war.
It is as old as war itself.
The ancient Greeks called it "divine madness."
It was "soldier's heart" in the Civil War,
"shell shock" during the First World War
and "combat fatigue" in the Second.
Following Vietnam, it was given a new name,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder...
And what you learn is that PTSD doesn't go away.
But now if someone honks the horn,
and it startles me, I'm still...
My heart rate's still going to go up,
and it'll be there for five minutes and I'm like this.
But, "Ten, nine, it's just some asshole,
"he's had a bad day at work, eight, seven, six,
"it's not... no one's shooting at you, you're safe,
it's seven, six, five, four, three, two, one."
And I can control it,
whereas I couldn't do it before
because I didn't understand what was going on.
Adding to the pain many veterans felt
was their country's eagerness to forget the war.
There were few parades.
In many ways, everyone came home from Vietnam alone.
When I got home,
and my mom and dad were there,
my brothers and sisters, my wife.
And we're embracing and...
I couldn't relate to my wife or my mother what I had seen,
what I had done in Vietnam.
I could've talked to my brothers about it,
but they, they knew I didn't want to.
And so it just, uh, something unsaid, you know.
"Welcome back, Vince.
You've been through the, the wringer, but welcome back."
In April 1981,
a panel of eight architects and sculptors
gathered in an airplane hangar
at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington.
They were there to choose the winning design
for a Vietnam memorial for the nation's capital
from more than 1,400 submissions.
The memorial was the brainchild of a single stubborn veteran,
a former rifleman named Jan Scruggs,
who, after suffering a frightening flashback,
told his wife he wanted to "build a memorial
"to all the guys who served in Vietnam.
It'll have the name of everyone killed."
With other veterans,
he established a nonprofit organization,
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund,
and went to work collecting money and making plans.
In the end, some 650,000 Americans
would contribute more than $8 million.
The judges chose submission number 1026.
21-year-old Maya Ying Lin,
an architect student at Yale University,
got the $20,000 prize.
Her winning design is comprised
of two elongated triangles of black granite,
inset into a hill and inscribed with the names
of the 57,692 men and women who died in the war.
Lin, whose parents emigrated from China in the 1940s to Ohio,
thought she wouldn't win
because her design was too strange and too strong.
I had a general idea that I wanted to describe a journey,
a journey that would make you experience death
and where you'd have to be an observer,
where you could never really fully be with the dead.
It wasn't going to be something that was going to say,
"It's all right, it's all over,"
because it's not.
Differences about the war
colored people's feelings about the proposed design.
Some who believed that the war had been unjust and immoral
feared the monument was somehow meant to glorify it.
Others feared its stark design failed to do justice
to the cause for which Americans had fought.
The writer Tom Wolfe dismissed it
as "a tribute to Jane Fonda."
I don't care about artistic perceptions.
One needs no artistic education
to see this memorial design for what it is:
a black scar.
Black, the universal color
of sorrow and shame and degradation
in all races and all societies worldwide.
In a hole, hidden as if out of shame.
Mr. Chairman, members of the commission,
I speak as an individual,
a member from the general public.
What are the memorable images from the war in Vietnam?
A guerrilla,
shot at point-blank range.
A naked girl, afire, running,
screaming down a dusty road.
I think Maya Lin was right
in going beyond these kinds of images.
She resolved all the pain and conflict of that unhappy time
in a simple message of sacrifice and quiet heroism.
In an official vote of support for Maya Lin's design,
the American Gold Star Mothers spoke for many.
"Nowadays," they said,
"patriotism is a complicated matter.
"But perhaps that is why
"the V-shaped, black granite lines
"merging gently with the sloping earth
"convey the only point about the war
"on which people may agree:
that those who died should be remembered."
As you got out of the car and you approached the wall,
the intensity of which, it grabs you...
You go UP»-
You see the names,
you touch the names...
It's intense.
I did not like
the Vietnam wall.
I considered it an ugly, black ditch
and that it said the only people that, uh...
to be commemorated are the dead,
not because they're heroes, but because they're victims.
I didn't go.
Until...
one year...
they were going to put the wreath in front of...
the name of my roommate.
I had, I had to go.
So I've gone every year since then
to remember those we, we lost.
And, um...
I walk down to the far left
and I run my fingers over that name.
You go to that wall,
and even my son, who was nine years old when I first took him,
and you see over 58,000 names,
and you know that unwritten behind or beside each name,
there's a mother or a father or a wife or a daughter
whose lives were forever shattered
by that damn war.
I've been to the wall, more than once.
When I look back at the war and, you know,
think of the horrible things, you know,
we said to, you know, vets who were returning,
you know, calling them "baby killers" and worse,
I, you know... I feel very sad about that.
I can only say that, you know, we were kids, too,
you know, just like they were.
It grieves me, it grieves me today.
It pains me to think of the things that I said
and that we said.
And I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I didn't want to go.
And it was a beautiful summer morning.
Went to the Lincoln Memorial first.
A comforting place to be.
And...
And then crossed the street and walked in towards the entrance.
And, as you know, at first, you can't really see the wall,
and you're coming down into the grassy hill.
And when I caught sight of it,
I literally lost my breath.
Of course, I wept.
I had help getting lifted up so I could touch it.
I found my brother's name.
I looked at my brother's name
in the company of all those other people.
There was sadness.
But now he wasn't alone, either.
He was in the company of people.
And he was there
for people to know and to think about.
And he wasn't forgotten.
And he wasn't lost.
It was incredibly healing and freeing for me.
As I was walking towards it from the reflecting pool,
there were so many names on those walls.
And all of a sudden, my throat swole up,
and I thought, "I can't do this.
I can't do this right now."
And I collapsed.
And all the tears I'd been holding back...
I didn't cry, I sobbed.
I was on my knees, sobbing.
I couldn't stop, I couldn't get my breath.
And I was so grateful to God that it was there.
I thought,
"This is going to save lives.
This is going to save lives."
I was struck by its beauty
and how at peace Vietnam looked from the air.
I had a sense of anticipation in my body.
I had worked hard for many months with others
to organize this trip and to negotiate our arrival
with the Vietnamese government.
How do you do?
Toi ten Tom Vallely.
I came back to Vietnam as a veteran
to learn from history,
and to see how the place had changed.
There had only been 200 Americans
that had been to Vietnam since 1975,
and most of them had been correspondents
and had been in the South.
Many of the kids, you'd walk down the street,
and they'd go, "Lien Xo, lien Xo,"
which means "Russian."
And you'd go, “No lien Xo,
toi la nguoi My"... "I'm an American."
And their face would light up, and they'd go, "American!"
And it would spread like wildfire
through the schoolyard, or the street
that Americans were here.
And they'd come out and they'd be very, very friendly.
Good bye.
Goodbye! Goodbye!
Tom Vallely had served with the Marines in Vietnam.
16 years later, the country drew him back.
He founded the Vietnam Program
of the Kennedy School at Harvard,
and helped educate some of the country's future leaders.
I got very, very involved in the reconnecting
between the United States and Vietnam,
and how that reconnection takes place,
I spent a decade of my life putting those pieces together.
Although the United States
did not have diplomatic relations with Vietnam,
veterans had begun coming back on their own,
revisiting places where they had fought...
meeting old foes...
planting trees and building schools,
trying to put the war behind them.
Vallely worked closely with other veterans,
including three United States senators,
who became among the most influential American advocates
for normalizing relations:
John McCain from Arizona,
who had endured six years as a prisoner of war;
John Kerry from Massachusetts,
the ex-commander of a Swift Boat;
and Bob Kerrey of Nebraska,
a former Navy SEAL:
Their task would not be easy.
Hanoi insisted the United States make good
on a promise to provide funds for reconstruction.
For its part, the United States demanded
a complete accounting
of the 2,500 Americans whose remains
had never been recovered.
Hanoi, which had more than 300,000 missing of its own,
refused to cooperate.
But events both within Vietnam and far beyond its borders
slowly moved things along.
Le Duan died in 1986.
His successors adopted what they called doi moi,
a more pragmatic reformist economic policy.
As the Cold War ended, Soviet aid disappeared,
and Hanoi finally began to help U.S. military teams
search for American remains.
The architects of normalization
are the Vietnamese.
It's not the Americans.
And the normalization of Vietnam
is a strategy of the Vietnamese Communist Party
to join the world.
They want to join the world.
And the United States makes it hard for them to join the world.
So John McCain insists,
"Yeah, you want to have normalization?
All your prisoners need to be out of re-education camp."
"You want normalization?"
John Kerry... "1 need all the information about the missing."
In 1994,
after the Vietnamese met the Americans' demands,
the United States lifted its trade embargo.
Full normalization came the following year.
The new American ambassador was Pete Peterson,
who had spent six years in Hanoi as a P.O.W.
In November of 2000,
President Bill Clinton traveled to Vietnam,
the first American president to visit that country
since Richard Nixon reviewed U.S. troops there
31 years earlier.
Now we can say something
that was once unimaginable:
Today, Vietnam and the United States are partners.
We have shown that hearts can change,
and that a different future is possible
when we refuse to be prisoners of the past.
I went back to Vietnam.
I got in touch with a provincial vets organization.
This is a huge organization of Vietnamese vets,
all former enemies.
All former enemies.
But now, mellowed quite a bit, like me.
You know, they're guys my age, grandpas.
And after we got past the initial checking each other out,
and is this a political thing or not,
they could not have been more gracious and more loving.
They took me under their wing like a brother soldier.
We exchanged painful memories, stories.
And I did a little ceremony honoring the guys I'd lost,
honoring the Vietnamese enemies that we'd killed.
And just telling them, you know, they could be at peace now.
It was a wonderful, wonderful trip.
You know, you don't...
You don't get closure, but you get some peace.
You get some peace... got some peace.
In Vietnam, the land has largely healed.
Old animosities have mostly been buried.
But ghosts remain.
Americans and Vietnamese
work together to clean up places
where Agent Orange has poisoned the earth.
Unexploded ordnance, half-hidden in the ground,
still takes lives each year.
Aged mothers and fathers from northern Vietnam
still roam the south,
seeking to discover
what happened to their sons and daughters.
As we finally came lurching out of Vietnam...
We were beginning to doubt ourselves.
And, uh, that's a foreign feeling for an American.
We, we seldom doubt ourselves.
This turned out to be the most bitter, the most divisive...
or second-most bitter and second-most divisive...
war in our entire history.
And we still hurt because of it.
We have feelings of guilt about Vietnam.
More than four decades after the war ended,
the divisions it created between Americans
have not yet wholly healed.
Lessons were learned and then forgotten;
divides were bridged and then widened;
old secrets were revealed and new secrets were locked away.
The Vietnam War was a tragedy,
immeasurable and irredeemable.
But meaning can be found in the individual stories
of those who lived through it,
stories of courage and comradeship
and perseverance,
of understanding and forgiveness
and, ultimately, reconciliation.
"They shared the weight of memory.
"They took up what others could no longer bear.
"Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak.
"They carried infections.
"They carried chess sets,
"basketballs,
"Vietnamese-English dictionaries,
"insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts,
"plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct.
"They carried diseases,
"among them malaria and dysentery.
"They carried lice and ringworm and leeches,
"paddy algae and various rots and molds.
"They carried the land itself... Vietnam,
"the place, the soil...
"a powdery orange-red dust
"that covered their boots and fatigues and faces.
"They carried the sky.
"The whole atmosphere,
"they carried it...
"the humidity, the monsoons,
"the stink of fungus and decay, all of it.
"They carried gravity.
"They moved like mules.
"By daylight, they took sniper fire;
"at night, they were mortared.
"They crawled into tunnels and walked point
"and advanced under fire.
"But it was not battle,
"it was just the endless march,
"village to village.
"They marched for the sake of the march.
"They plodded along slowly, dumbly,
"leaning forward against the heat, unthinking,
"all blood and bone, simple grunts,
"soldiering with their legs,
"toiling up the hills and down into the paddies
"and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping,
"one step and then the next and then another.
"They made their legs move.
They endured."