Word: minh
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...left. I ordered the gunner to fire one at the gate. But it misfired. So I decided we would just drive through the gates into the palace and raise our flag." Inside the palace, some South Vietnamese officials had shown up to attend the swearing-in of Duong Van Minh's government (he had barely had time to select a Cabinet). But Minh was at the gates waiting to greet NVA troops. He and his entourage, however, scurried inside when tank 843's gunner fired his single shot...
Accounts of what happened then differ, but all start with a bit of bureaucratic farce: while Minh waited inside the palace for someone to surrender to, NVA troops milled around on the grounds waiting for an officer of sufficiently high rank to show up and receive the surrender (according to their regulations, this could be done only by a colonel or general). Colonel Bui Tin says he was the man. He walked into Minh's office around 11:30 and found that Minh had already written out a surrender that he had read over the Saigon radio...
Nguyen Huu An, then an NVA major general, tells a different story. He says he entered the Presidential Palace at 11:30, only to find that "the men who had taken the surrender, Lieut. Colonel Bui Van Thong and Deputy Commander Pham Xuan The, had taken Big Minh to the radio station to read it. Colonel The had drafted the surrender for Big Minh, but when Minh looked at it, he complained that The's handwriting was so bad he couldn't decipher the document. So he asked The to read it to him or write...
...rate, by noon on April 30, the NVA was broadcasting that it had captured Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City, after the communist leader who had started the rebellion in what was then a French colony all the way back in 1946. There was more to come: for Vietnamese, the "re-education" camps, the flight of the boat people, the gradual softening of a harsh communist regime. For Americans, the new sensation of total, undisguisable defeat. But amid all the joy, bitterness, fear and misery, the overwhelming sentiment of Americans, and even of some Vietnamese, was probably...
...Reported by Bonnie Angelo/ Washington, Hannah Bloch/New York, William Dowell/Ho Chi Minh City and Frank Gibney Jr./Hanoi