Today, April 30, 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the day the last Americans left South Vietnam. The last day the US flag flew over the American Embassy. The day thousands of panicked South Vietnamese fled their homes, desperate to escape the encroaching North Vietnamese Army, and flooded the grounds of the Embassy.
The evacuation, named Operation Frequent Wind, began the previous day. By 4 am on the 30th, the American Ambassador Graham Martin was still at the Embassy. Some said his reluctance to leave and his slow response to the impending crisis was due to the 1966 loss of his son Glenn to the war. One of the helicopter pilots tasked with evacuating the last Americans sent Martin a message to leave, stating “the President sends.” In other words, President Ford had ordered him out. Martin finally complied.
With the song “White Christmas”–the prearranged signal to evacuate–blaring in the streets, civilians and the remaining Americans climbed to the rooftops and were rushed to waiting helicopters that ferried them to ships waiting in the South China Sea, among them the USS Midway, the USS Hancock, and the USS Kirk. A flotilla of destroyers and freighters also received evacuees.
The last Marine to board the last helicopter, Master Sergeant Juan Jose Valdez, climbed aboard just two hours before Saigon surrendered to the North Vietnamese Army. Sergeant Valdez, a San Antonio, Texas native, was in command of the Marine Security Detachment at the Embassy. He and his ten remaining Marines assured the successful evacuation of all Americans who chose to leave. For his efforts he was awarded the Navy Commendation and the Navy Achievement medal.
During Operation Frequent Wind over 50,000 people fled the city. From the Embassy, some 900 Americans and more than 1100 Vietnamese were removed via helicopters. The Marine pilots flew 682 sorties, logging more than 1000 flight hours to bring people to safety.
I have written before about Ann Bryan who assisted in the airlift of orphans during Operation Babylift. And in the novel, I wrote about soldiers from Signal Corps who provided food, clothing, and Christmas gifts for children in the orphanages in Saigon. Here’s another remarkable story of courage and inventiveness during those last chaotic days. In April of 1975, as the fall of Saigon became inevitable, Chase Manhattan Bank asked 27 year old Ralph White to relocate from the Bangkok office to Saigon to keep the bank open as long as possible and to rescue its senior Vietnamese employees if the bank had to close.
Arriving in Saigon, White encountered resistance from the Ambassador Graham Martin who refused to support the bank’s evacuation of its employees. White realized it wasn’t only the senior staff who would have to go; all of the bank’s employees were at risk. With civilian aviation in and out of Saigon halted, White turned to a clandestine evacuation operation being run without Martin’s knowledge, and with remarkable inventiveness he managed to get all of the bank’s employees to safety. Ralph White chronicled his experiences in his book, Getting Out of Saigon. If you’re interested in this chapter of history I think you’ll enjoy it.
I first became interested in writing a novel about Saigon when I read the biographies and memoirs of a handful of women who reported on the war despite opposition from the military and from the hundreds of their male colleagues. I’ve spent nearly three years reading and writing about the remarkable people whose determination, courage, and skills shaped the war. I’ve discovered that American perceptions about the war end to focus only on the fighting men who waded into a poorly-understood conflict, into an alien culture whose values and goals were so different from our own. And on the 58,220 who never came home. Each life precious and remembered.
But it’s important to recognize the rest of the approximately 2.7 million US troops who served in Vietnam during a decade of war. They, too, have their scars and stories, their terrors and triumphs, many of which remain untold. In a 2018 interview with The Stanford Daily, Don Hirst, who worked at Overseas Weekly, said “Vietnam is a very complex war. It was like a diamond: lots of facets. Each one is different, each one is viewed differently, and I’d say we all had different Vietnams.”
I hope A Season In Saigon encourages those troops to share their stories and in so doing, find closure and peace.
