Word: roofed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...going to leave you. Don't worry about it,'" as Summers recalls. "And we believed it at the time, which made it more bitter at the end." The officers formed the Vietnamese into groups of about 60 to be loaded aboard the helicopters that were landing on the roof and in the courtyard. During daylight, officers set off colored smoke bombs to help helicopter pilots locate the embassy. After dark, Herrington rigged up a different system. He found an old carousel slide projector, mounted it on the roof of one building, and had all the embassy's Ford cars parked...
...30th. Pilots flew for 10 to 15 hours straight; each trip took about 40 minutes in the air and 10 to 15 minutes on the ground loading up. Marine Captain Glynn Hodges landed at the embassy in midafternoon; his H-53 chopper was too big to perch on the roof, so it came down in the compound. "My troops couldn't believe the scene," says Hodges. "People were climbing fences. It was bedlam. We were afraid of the crowds. We had to wear gas masks, though we saw only smoke, no gas. We also wore flak vests. They were...
Though the first loads from the embassy were mostly Vietnamese, more and more Americans came out as the evacuation progressed. Snepp caught a chopper out at 9 p.m. on April 29. His description: "The roof of the embassy was a vision out of a nightmare. In the center of the dimly lit helo-pad, a CH-47 was already waiting for us, its engines setting up a roar like a primeval scream. The crew and controllers all wore what looked like oversized football helmets, and in the blinking under-light of the landing signals they reminded me of grotesque insects...
Herrington estimates that 420 Vietnamese were still in the embassy when that order came. Anguished, he made his way upstairs to the roof, after telling the Vietnamese that he was going to the bathroom. As the helicopter left, he caught sight of the embassy's all-Vietnamese volunteer fire department waiting patiently in their yellow coats in the parking lot. Herrington had asked them earlier if they wanted to leave but they insisted on staying to the last in case they should be needed to put out a fire that might disrupt the evacuation. Aboard the U.S.S. Okinawa, Herrington...
What was coming was the North Vietnamese army, and it did not take long to arrive. At 9 a.m., almost exactly an hour after the last American helicopter left the embassy roof, NVA General Tran Van Tra, operations commander for the final push, ordered his columns to move into the city from five different directions.They had waited, says Tra, because "our main purpose was to seize Saigon, not to kill people. We didn't want to stop the evacuation." In fact, Nguyen Huu Hanh, who had come out of retirement as an ARVN brigadier general to join Big Minh...