When it finally arrived, the day that the G.I.s called X-plus-60 was hot and mildly anticlimactic. On the withdrawal deadline two months after the Paris truce signing, the U.S. military command in Viet Nam was closed down in a simple midday ceremony in a parking lot near Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airbase. No U.S. military band was available for the occasion. Loudspeakers blared out a recording of The Star-Spangled Banner, and a color guard rolled up the blue flag of the command under which 2,500,000 American G.I.s had served since 1962. Ellsworth Bunker, a distinguished career diplomat who had served as U.S. ambassador to South Viet Nam since 1967, also furled his flag last week. President Nixon accepted the resignation with "deepest personal regret," and named former ambassador to Italy Graham Martin to the post.
It took 19 flights to lift out the 2,500 American servicemen who still remained in the country on the last day. At about 5:20, a chipper North Vietnamese colonel stationed at the rear cargo ramp of a hulking U.S. Air Force C-141 transport presented a bamboo scroll painted with a Hanoi pagoda scene to an embarrassed American sergeant, whom he thought to be the last departing American. Moments later, Army Colonel David Odell, the Tan Son Nhut base commander, shouldered through the crowd and stepped to the boarding ramp; he had been having a final glass of champagne near by. Though the 825 American members of the Joint Military Commission were to stay on in Viet Nam for another two days, Odell could tell his grandchildren that he was officially the last man out.
By 5:30, the C-141 carrying Odell and 55 other departing servicemen was airborne. Outside the Tan Son Nhut gates, a crowd of newly unemployed Vietnamese base workers were busy hawking chairs, tables and canned goods that had been freshly looted from a G.I. mess hall. It was not an inappropriate finale; the last days of the U.S. military presence in Viet Nam were one great, giddy scramble. TIME Correspondent David DeVoss reports:
After four years of being urged to stay out of Viet Nam's larger cities, there they were: the last U.S. servicemen, buzzing about Saigon on driver-pedaled cycles, flirting with bar girls, buying souvenirs and generally staging the biggest shopping, sex and sightseeing spree ever seen in the city.
For many of the G.I.s, the departure proved an emotional experience, carried out in the dark recesses of bars like Randy's Randa-Vous and the Snake Pit. "All my goodbyes are taken care of," said Army Specialist Four Nelson Coffey, 29, of Portageville, N.Y. "I've paid my girl friend's rent till the end of the month and given her a couple hundred piasters so she'll survive. I guess if she can't hook up with a civilian soon, she'll go back to the rice paddies."
At the last minute, about 400 other G.I.s were frantically trying to arrange to get their fiancees and wives back to the States. The waiting room at the U.S. Consulate in Saigon was packed with nervous Vietnamese women and mixed-blood children, all lined up to receive U.S. visas.