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The Communists closed in on Saigon. At last, on the 29th of April, they rocketed Tan Son Nhut, the huge airfield through which millions of American soldiers had passed over the years, coming into the war zone or going back to "the world." The last two Americans to die before Saigon's fall were killed in the attack: Marine Lance Corporal Darwin Judge and Marine Corporal Charles McMahon.
In anger and despair, some South Vietnamese turned upon the Americans who were now clearly going to abandon them. ARVN soldiers menaced Westerners in the streets. Terrified crowds of Vietnamese surrounded the U.S. embassy on Thong Nhut Street, begging their old protectors to get them out. Some tried to hand their babies over the wall into the embassy compound. Marines used tear gas and rifle butts to hold off what had become a mob of America's allies. Relays of helicopters began ferrying people out of the compound, evacuating the Americans and many of the Vietnamese who had worked for them.
U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin had behaved for weeks as if South Viet Nam was not going to fall at all, whistling with glum urbanity through the Asian Gotterdammerung. He did not want to start a panic. Now, at 3:30 on the morning of Wednesday, April 30, 1975, President Ford flashed orders from the White House for Martin to board a helicopter on the embassy roof and get to the U.S. fleet in the South China Sea.
Many civilians were lifted from the roof of the Pittman apartments. Of the vast American military commitment to Viet Nam, only eleven Marines remained on the embassy roof. Crowds of Vietnamese by this time were looting the embassy. A man's arm smashed through the window of the door leading to the rooftop helipad. A Marine jerked the arm down smartly onto the broken glass, and as the Marines waited for their deliverance, they alternated between studying the sky to the southeast and raking arms across the glass to keep the Vietnamese at bay. A Chinook-46 escorted by six Cobra gunships came fluttering in from the sea. The Marines dropped canisters of tear gas onto the crowd below, and then they boarded their Chinook. But they had also gassed themselves. As Journalist David Butler writes in his new book The Fall of Saigon, "They forgot that a settling helicopter sucks up air. So the last official Americans out of Viet Nam, the eleven Marines and the crew of the CH-46, including the pilot--all flew blind out of Saigon."
Out in the South China Sea, so many South Vietnamese helicopters were trying to get down onto the American flight decks that Navy crews simply pushed the landed choppers, one after another, into the sea in order to make way for the next--millions of dollars of American helicopters dumped over the side like garbage from the fantail. The spectacle became one of the last enduring images from history's most visual war.
Thus did the Americans leave Viet Nam, after 16 years, 58,000 dead, 300,000 wounded and $150 billion expended.
The other anniversaries of this season, such as next month's 40th anniversary of V-E day, will have about them a certain triumphal air for Americans. They will celebrate not merely the fact that the U.S. won but that they fought on the side that incontestably should have won. The outcome of World War II seemed to validate American power as an instrument of virtue in the world.