Saigon Fell 35 Years Ago, but Its Legacy Endures

(April 30) -- The signal went out at dawn, April 29, 1975 -- Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" on Armed Forces Radio.

Across Saigon, the music set Americans moving toward the U.S. Embassy and a parking lot at Tan Son Nhut air base, where they crammed themselves and whatever they could carry into helicopters sent from Navy ships off the coast.

The final "rush to the door," as the Wall Street Journal put it at the time, was on: 150,000 North Vietnamese troops were on the outskirts of the city, with nothing in the way of their advance.

At 8:35 the next morning -- 35 years ago today -- the last U.S. helicopter and 10 Marines lifted off from the embassy roof. Just over two hours later, a red and blue Viet Cong flag was hoisted above what had been South Vietnam's presidential palace. The war was history.

South Vietnam fought the last two years of the conflict without U.S. help, as President Richard Nixon withdrew American combat troops as part of the Paris peace accords. A week before Saigon fell, President Gerald Ford declared during a speech in Louisiana that the war "is finished as far as America is concerned."

Perhaps that, along with the fact that barely half of today's 300 million Americans were alive when Saigon fell, explains why for most of us the anniversary is passing almost unnoticed.

Still, the war and its end helped define and arguably still divides a generation. "Is this another Vietnam?" has been the first question asked about every American military operation or foreign policy initiative for the last three decades.

John McCain's courage as a Vietnam prisoner of war and John Kerry's antiwar activism after he came home from Vietnam made both men national figures, ultimately propelling each to a failed campaign for the presidency. And for millions of Americans, pro- and anti-war alike, images of the fall of Saigon and the rest of the Vietnam War are touchstones, seared into memory like the burning twin towers of Sept. 11 and the riderless horse in President Kennedy's funeral procession.

"Eighty-one helicopters from carriers in the South China Sea landed at Tan Son Nhut airport and on the roofs at the United States Embassy compound to pick up most of the approximately 1,000 remaining Americans and several thousand Vietnamese," Associated Press correspondent George Esper wrote in a dispatch filed that day.

"But large groups of other Vietnamese clawed their way up the 10-foot wall of the embassy compound in desperate attempts to escape approaching Communist troops. United States Marines and civilians used pistol and rifle butts to dislodge them.

"At the airport, angry Vietnamese guards fired in the air and in the direction of evacuees on buses, shouting, 'We want to go too.'"

The last man out at Tan Son Nhut was a Marine colonel, Al Gray, who went on to become commandant of the Corps. "We burned and blew up the buildings, blew out the communications equipment, and I burned $8 million that had been put in barrels," he told the San Jose Mercury News last month.

"It broke my heart, having been there for about five years," Gray, now 81, recalled. "Here we were, letting down everybody and not doing what we originally planned to do."

Offshore, a flotilla of U.S. warships and auxiliary vessels, including four aircraft carriers, took on 50,000 Vietnamese passengers. Helicopters making their final runs from Saigon were emptied and then pushed into the water to make room for more arrivals.

On the carrier Midway, sailors watched a tiny, single-engine observation plane buzz the deck and fetched a note dropped by its pilot: "Please rescue me. Major Buang, wife and 5 child." The deck was cleared and he landed safely.

The migration in the final months of the war brought some 150,000 Vietnamese to the U.S. Many went first to camps created by the Marines at Camp Pendleton, in southern California; other resettlement sites were built at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Eglin Air Force Base in Florida and Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania.

There also were private resettlement efforts. Church groups found homes for thousands of South Vietnamese troops, families and orphaned children.

A few days before Saigon fell, Betty Tisdale, a former secretary on Capitol Hill and the wife of an Army doctor, whisked 219 kids out of the country from the An Lac Orphanage she and other volunteers ran in Saigon. Caring for orphans became Tisdale's passion; today she runs a charity in Seattle, HALO, that raises money to build and equip schools and orphanages overseas.

Tisdale, 87, and about 60 of the An Lac children, many parents themselves now, gathered for a reunion in late March near Fort Benning, Ga. "I don't think they knew what was going on [during the evacuation]," she told AOL News. "I saw some tears in some of their eyes."