Word: saigon
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...March 1975 signaled that South Vietnam could no longer muster either the strength or the will to hold off the armies sweeping down from the communist North. The fall of Danang late in the month produced scenes of horror that appeared to foreshadow what might happen later in Saigon: panic-maddened South Vietnamese soldiers trampling women and children to get aboard the last American 727 to fly out; desperate soldiers clinging to the landing gear of that plane only to fall off into the South China Sea or be crushed against the undercarriage...
...Communist troops drew closer to the South Vietnamese capital through early April, the atmosphere in both Saigon and Washington further darkened. Schools in Saigon and its suburbs conducted lessons and assigned homework as usual, but Nam Pham, then 18, and Diem Do, who was 12, noticed their classes getting smaller day by day. Says Do: "One day a couple of guys would be gone, and then a couple more, and then the teacher wouldn't show up. Everybody was scared. They sensed that something tragic was about to happen," and some were already fleeing the country...
...meeting almost daily, sometimes with a pipe-puffing President Gerald Ford, to hear the latest news--uniformly bad. On April 17 the Senate Armed Services Committee, reflecting an overwhelming American desire to be done with Vietnam, rejected an Administration request for $722 million in emergency aid to the Saigon regime. "Those bastards!" exclaimed the usually calm Ford. Though nobody believed the aid would turn the tide, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and others had hoped it might enable South Vietnam to put up enough of a last-ditch fight to persuade the North to negotiate a truce. Two days after...
...Saigon the CIA had already begun "black" (secret) flights, spiriting out of the country Vietnamese collaborators who could expect only prison or death after a communist victory, and the U.S. embassy had begun burning its files. (Not fast enough: long lists containing the names of Vietnamese and specifying what they had done to help their American allies eventually fell into the hands of the Northern victors.) cia analyst Frank Snepp, in his book Decent Interval, recalled roaming the embassy grounds on April 15 and noting a telltale sign of onrushing disaster: the outdoor swimming pool was unusable because of ashes...
...that final week, the Northern armies had encountered little ARVN resistance. A unit commanded by General Ly Tong Ba did put up a fierce fight at Cu Chi, about 12 miles from Saigon, through the night of April 28 and on into the afternoon of the 29th. But, finding his position untenable, Ba decided on a fighting retreat to Hoc Mon, a bit closer to Saigon. "I bring my staff with me, working, fighting," says Ba. "Oh, the bullets just...