Word: saigon
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...stand at Cu Chi was a model of lionheartedness compared with what the NVA columns entering Saigon proper found on April 30. The South Vietnamese soldiers confronting them did not just flee; they threw away everything that could identify them as soldiers and tried to melt into the general population. Bui Tin, an NVA colonel and journalist, says he spent that last morning "with one of our units taking a fortress that had been held by a South Vietnamese division. All the South Vietnamese soldiers who had fled had abandoned their uniforms. Everywhere you looked on the road, they...
That set the stage for the final, and almost comically unheroic, scene of the war. NVA Major Nguyen Van Hoa, commanding tank No. 843, a Soviet-made T-54, with six other tanks following, had entered Saigon before dawn. His little column ran into a brief fire fight at the Thi Nghe bridge, knocking out two ARVN M41 tanks. Rolling into almost deserted streets, the column kept going toward its target, the Presidential Palace. But where was it? Says Major Hoa: "The only directions we had were to go through seven intersections and we would find the palace." His column...
...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...
...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...
Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger nonetheless argued that Graham Martin, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, should begin evacuating the remaining Americans in Saigon and sympathetic Vietnamese. So little was done, though, that Lionel Rosenblatt and Craig Johnstone, two mid-level State Department officers in Washington, made a desperate effort to short-circuit the bureaucracy. They requested leave and hopped a commercial flight to Saigon to organize an unofficial rescue mission. Arriving at the embassy on April 22, they learned that orders were out for their arrest. They posed as French businessmen, holing up in an empty apartment found...