Last US Marines to leave Saigon describe chaos of war's end

[webfact]

Last US Marines to leave Saigon describe chaos of war's end
By MARGIE MASON

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam (AP) — As the Marines scrambled to the roof of the U.S. Embassy, they locked a chain-link gate on every other floor to slow the throng of panicked Vietnamese civilians sure to come behind them. They knew if the crowd pushed through to the top, they could easily be overrun by hundreds of people desperate to get a seat on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon.

The men barricaded the rooftop door using heavy fire extinguishers and wall lockers and waited nervously as Vietnamese gathered outside rammed a fire truck through an embassy entrance. They could hear looting going on below and watched as cars were driven away and everything from couch cushions to refrigerators was carted out of the offices. South Vietnamese soldiers stripped off their uniforms and threw them into the street, out of fear they would be shot on sight by the northern enemy.

It was still dark when the U.S. ambassador left the roof on a helicopter around 5 a.m. April 30, 1975. A message went out over the radio with his code name, "Tiger, Tiger, Tiger," followed by "Tiger out," to signal that the diplomat was en route to safety.

As the sun came out, the remaining Marines realized they had been forgotten. The pilots mistakenly believed that the call meant everyone had been evacuated. The Marines had no way to contact U.S. airmen ferrying Vietnamese allies and Americans to aircraft carriers offshore because their radio signals didn't carry that far.

The last U.S. servicemen in Vietnam were stuck alone atop the embassy, hoping someone would realize they were there before the city fell to rapidly advancing communist forces.

____

On the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon on Thursday, a group of Marines who were there that day returned to what is now Ho Chi Minh City for a memorial ceremony at the site of the old embassy, which is now the U.S. Consulate. They had been in charge of guarding the embassy and the defense attache office beside Tan Son Nhut airport, and were tasked with helping to get the last Americans out.

The days leading up to the end of the Vietnam War were chaotic and exhausting. Northern enemy forces had been sweeping southward for weeks, capturing major South Vietnamese strongholds as they went. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the capital, Saigon, also fell. Rumors of a looming bloodbath gripped the city, and Americans along with their South Vietnamese allies were being evacuated on cargo planes from the airport.

Lance Cpl. John Stewart, now 58, of Nacogdoches, Texas, was assigned to take a bus through Saigon to pick up those eligible to leave. He was just 18 and had only been in the country a couple weeks, but he saw anger growing among those on the streets as people realized the end was near and the U.S. was pulling out its last remaining citizens. At one point a rocket hit near the bus and it was shaken by shrapnel, but no one was injured and the evacuation continued.

"We were having to pull people off or physically keep them from getting onto the buses," he said. "You couldn't blame them for wanting to get out, but it had gotten to the point where we could only take those that we absolutely had to. We couldn't take everybody. That's when your brain tells you this is really happening and we've reached the end, and hopefully we'll get out before the end gets here."

Stewart and the others were already shaken after a rocket attack killed two Marines — Cpl. Charles McMahon and Lance Cpl. Darwin Judge — early April 29 while they stood guard at the defense attache compound. They would be the last U.S. servicemen to die in a war that killed some 58,000 Americans, up to 250,000 South Vietnamese allies and an estimated 3 million North Vietnamese and civilians.

Thirteen of the original Marines on Thursday placed red roses in front of a plaque and saluted it on the old embassy grounds as taps played.

The bodies of McMahon and Judge were found by Sgt. Kevin Maloney, now 62 of Hollywood, Florida. But there was no time to mourn. Like Stewart, he had to help load buses.

While in the city, he locked eyes with a little boy with light brown hair. He was only supposed to pick up Americans, but he shoved the kid and his mother into one of the front seats anyway, knowing that the child was most likely the son of a GI. He has no idea whether they made it onto a plane and on to America, as many Vietnamese did after being evacuated.

Once the airport became too bombed out to continue operations there, helicopters were ordered to land at the embassy for the final flights.

Maloney was later moved there to help. He spent hours going over the wall to help pull Americans and allies from other countries out of the mob and into the compound so they could be airlifted. He grabbed their hands to pull them up, while beating back the Vietnamese. He left his pistol inside the compound, fearing someone might grab it from his holster and fire shots into the thousands of people.

The scene became so insane that Sgt. Don Nicholas, now 62, of Green, Ohio, was sent to the attache office to guard millions of U.S. dollars before the cash was burned and the compound blown up by the Americans to keep the enemy from raiding it and obtaining classified documents. He later stood watch at the embassy and was shocked when a Vietnamese man, desperate to get into the compound, ran a spike from the gate into his foot as he climbed over the wall. Others began offering "anything and everything" to get inside.

"Women were like, 'Take us in, we'll have sex with you. Here's gold. I have this money, here's jewels. Please just let me in!'" he said. "Within 48 hours, that's all I heard. People begging."

___

Once the Marines got word that they were to abandon their posts and prepare to evacuate, they moved up to the roof, where they could see parts of the city burning. Many had not slept in two or three days and were running only on adrenaline. No one knew what would happen when the Americans finally left and the city was overtaken by the enemy.

There were about 80 men crowded on the rooftop. One stood guard next to a small window where Vietnamese, who had forced their way inside and through all of the locked gates in the stairwell, were pressed — hoping and waiting more helicopters were coming for them to board.

A couple of hours passed. No choppers.

"They literally forgot about us," said Master Sgt. Juan Valdez, now 77, of Oceanside, California, who was the detachment commander. "Everybody was in their own thoughts. I was on one side thinking, 'What was going to happen next?' My worst thought was if they were able to direct artillery fire to (the air base), what was to keep them from directing artillery fire on the roof?"

The men passed around a bottle of whiskey and waited. Finally, they heard the whirring of helicopter blades. They stripped off their flak jackets, helmets and packs to save weight and stuffed as many people as possible into the last birds that landed. After one last glace to make sure all of his men were gone, Valdez was the last man to board the last helicopter.

On the chopper out ahead of him, Sgt. Douglas Potratz, now 60, from Fullerton, California, watched Saigon burn.

"I felt sad because I felt like we had lost the war and so many lives had been spent on the war here," he said. "I felt like we were entrusted to keep the traditions going and to not let the country go to communism and we had failed, and I felt very low at that time. I felt like it was the end of the world."

The scenes of the women with wailing babies frantically begging to be saved outside the embassy walls haunted his dreams for years, but he said coming back four decades later to what is now called Ho Chi Minh City with the same men he left with so long ago has helped him heal.

"When I saw that that the country had moved forward, it gave me a little peace in my mind and let me move forward mentally knowing that it wasn't frozen in time anymore," he said. "Things do progress. Things do move forward, and I could put the past away and have better memories instead of just bad memories about this country."
____

Mason covered Vietnam as an AP correspondent based in Hanoi from 2003-2012.


-- (c) Associated Press 2015-05-01

[sanuk711]

Robert McNamara's (secretary of defense at the time of the war) 11 lessons from Vietnam

From Robert McNamara's 1995 book "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam".^[7]

1. We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
2. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
3. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
4. Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
5. We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
6. We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.
7. After the action got under way, and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening, and why we were doing what we did.
8. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
9. We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
10. We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
11. Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.

[Sydebolle]

18 year old kids in a war against people they didn't know, couldn't hate and never represented a threat to their country or their families - fought this war on the other side of the planet in a steamy place with drugs, hookers, the works? Well, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford are all gone, 58'000 Americans lost their lives - 58'000 Americans too many. But nobody speaks of the millions and millions of Indochinese losses; majority civilian of course.
April 30th, 1975 official declaration of the US having lost yet another war - left Cambodia - the vacuum left behind was Pol Pot's ticket to carry out his genocide.

Another American foreign policy plunder of the very first degree; of the 239 years of existence the US have been at war for 222 years. Culprit Kissinger, still alive, even accepted the Peace Nobel prize in 1973 for his endless efforts in Vietnam - now how pathetic is that!

Written 20 years ago by the US longest service Defence Minister on the Official America quote
From Robert McNamara's 1995 book "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam".

1 We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries … and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.

2 We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.

3 We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.

4 Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.

5 We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.

6 We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement … before we initiated the action.

7 After the action got under way, and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course … we did not fully explain what was happening, and why we were doing what we did.

8 We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.

9 We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action … should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.

10 We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions … At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.

11 Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.
unquote

I rest my case - no lesson learnt!

[JAG]

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the US involvement in Vietnam, and I am not an American so I do not offer a view on whether they should have been involved or not, to pull the plug on South Vietnam as they did, having propped it up for so long was a great betrayal.

[pkspeaker]

At least back then the US had he wisdom and maturity to see that endless involvement in Vietnam was bad for America, not just bad for Vietnam, so they cut their losses and left.. whereas now in Iraq they don't know when to quit, they keep pouring money and material into this civil war that never ends as long as foreign countries like the US, Iran, Gulf States continue to interfere.

[jagfx]

Actually in Ho Chi Minh City for the last few days for the first time. Pretty impressed to tell you the truth. Did a tour of the War Remnants Museum today. It was an eye opener to say the least. There is a lot of history there but there is also a lot of propaganda also. Now whether you agree with the US and its allies getting involved in Vietnam is neither here nor there, but one thing that did disturb me and the wife today was the story on Agent Orange and other chemicals of the same type. In hindsight though, the US probably thought that all they were doing is killing crops etc and had no idea on the affect on both the civilian population or the their own troops. Doesn't matter which way you look at it, war is hell. We should avoid it at all costs. The Vietnamese are pretty forgiving and it is now 40 years since reunification, so most don't remember the war. At the end of the day, I still feel sorry for those US Marines wondering if they were going to be rescued or not as most of them were probably not there by choice. War sucks - period. Heading back to Thailand in a few days but have enjoyed my time in Saigon...

[chuckd]

I talked to a long time friend of mine that was flying one of the helicopters that last day in Saigon.

He doesn't remember how many trips he made but when he landed on the Blue Ridge at dusk, they told him his day was over and they pushed his helicopter over the side.

He was Air America.

I was working in Tehran and had a retired US Army officer as my roommate. He got his wife out through the Embassy that last day and returned her to the US and came back to work. We remained friends until his death years later.

[fredge45]

At least back then the US had he wisdom and maturity to see that endless involvement in Vietnam was bad for America, not just bad for Vietnam, so they cut their losses and left.. whereas now in Iraq they don't know when to quit, they keep pouring money and material into this civil war that never ends as long as foreign countries like the US, Iran, Gulf States continue to interfere.

Interesting rational for a complete <deleted>!

[NickJ]

I guess war and the mistakes of war boil down to the calamity of human nature....it keeps repeating itself. Divides us in many ways......sad the human condition. One day it may come to a boiling point.

[zydeco]

of the 239 years of existence the US have been at war for 222 years.

Well, at least the US is doing better than the British, who it seems have been at war continuously since 1707.

"The timeline of constant combat may stretch even further back, given Britain's imperial engagements, all the way to the creation of the British army in 1707.No other country, even those with similarly militaristic traditions, has been engaged continuously over such a long span. Even during 1968, a year often hailed by members of the British armed forces and some military historians as a year of peace, there was fighting."

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/11/british-forces-century-warfare-end

Edited May 2, 2015 by zydeco

[tifino]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indochina_War_timeline

and just as mentioned in the other parallel Thread, the US involvement in the Vietnam War, (known in Vietnam as the American War), ended at the Armistice signing at the end of Feb'73

The Associated Press is again continuing the profit making story of when 'they' decided the war ended. That's why the Thread title is ambiguous, as it appears they want the gullible readers to believe the Marines were experiencing the end of a war withthe US in 1975.

No, it was a civil war between the North and the South

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~salvador/Spring%20thru%20February/Vietnam/Vietnam%20timeline.pdf

[Scott]

Off topic posts and replies removed.

[Thongkorn]

of the 239 years of existence the US have been at war for 222 years.

Well, at least the US is doing better than the British, who it seems have been at war continuously since 1707.

"The timeline of constant combat may stretch even further back, given Britain's imperial engagements, all the way to the creation of the British army in 1707.No other country, even those with similarly militaristic traditions, has been engaged continuously over such a long span. Even during 1968, a year often hailed by members of the British armed forces and some military historians as a year of peace, there was fighting."

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/11/british-forces-century-warfare-end

In truth Britain has been at war for thousands of years, Since the Viking invasion. and are still at war with the EU.

[tifino]

what the Marines experienced in 1975, reinforced it wasn't a good idea to let yourself be captured.

just before the actual war's end of 1973, a 1972 doco on how dangerous it was to be a POW - at a time of more so madness, than chaos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbncFBhiTHI#t=4734

[Robby nz]

Came across this photo that a friend sent me.

The evacuation of Saigon, in which some 45 UH-1

Hueys and one CH-47 Chinook

were pushed overboard to make room for others to land (1975).

[tifino]

Came across this photo that a friend sent me.

The evacuation of Saigon, in which some 45 UH-1

Hueys and one CH-47 Chinook

were pushed overboard to make room for others to land (1975).

yes all those videos you see of the 1975 evacs' display Sth-Viet aircraft being dumped.

The USN aircraft carriers etc were only taking on any US A/Craft, and there was no planning for, nor provision for the SVA ones.

The one shown was piloted by a SthViet - who commandeered it privately, and that was going on - on a wholesale level