Marines Returned 40 Years After Leaving Saigon

Last U.S. Marines to leave Saigon describe chaos of Vietnam War's end 
Chicago Tribune
April 30, 2015

On the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon on Thursday, a group of Marines who were there that day returned to what is now Ho Chi Minh City for a memorial ceremony at the site of the old embassy, which is now the U.S. Consulate.

Last Marines out
Dita Alangkara, AP
Former U.S Marines pose for a group photo during the unveiling ceremony of a plaque dedicated to their fallen comrades Cpl. Charles McMahon and Lance Cpl. Darwin Judge, the last U.S. servicemen killed in the Vietnam War, at the U.S. Consulate in Ho Chi Minh City.

As the Marines scrambled to the roof of the U.S. Embassy, they locked a chain-link gate on every other floor to slow the throng of panicked Vietnamese civilians sure to come behind them. They knew if the crowd pushed through to the top, they could easily be overrun by hundreds of people desperate to get a seat on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon.

The men barricaded the rooftop door using fire extinguishers and wall lockers and waited nervously as Vietnamese gathered outside rammed a fire truck through an embassy entrance. They could hear looting going on below and watched as cars were driven away and everything from couch cushions to refrigerators was carted out of the offices. South Vietnamese soldiers stripped off their uniforms and threw them into the street, out of fear they would be shot on sight by the northern enemy.

It was still dark when the U.S. ambassador left the roof on a helicopter around 5 a.m. April 30, 1975.

A message went out over the radio with his code name, "Tiger, Tiger, Tiger," followed by "Tiger out," to signal that the diplomat was en route to safety.

When the sun came up, the remaining Marines didn't realize that the pilots mistakenly believed that the call meant everyone had been evacuated. No one was coming for them, and they had no way to contact U.S. airmen ferrying Vietnamese allies and Americans to aircraft carriers offshore because their radio signals didn't carry that far.

The last U.S. servicemen in Vietnam were stuck alone atop the embassy, hoping someone would realize they were there before the city fell to rapidly advancing communist forces.
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Correction for the above article. The last killed were: Mayaguez Incident May 12, 1975

Eighteen Marines and airmen were killed or missing in the assault and withdrawal from Kho-Tang. Twenty-three others were killed in a helicopter crash en route from Hakhon Phanom to U-Tapao, but the objectives of the operation were achieved.
The Mayaguez and its crew had been rescued, though at high cost.

Enemy at the gate: The history-making, chaotic evacuation of Saigon
CNN
By Thom Patterson
April 29, 2015

Story highlights
Chopper pilots tell stories about last days of Vietnam War
"Operation Frequent Wind" was history's largest helicopter evacuation
On 40th anniversary, witnesses tell how 7,000 fled Saigon via chopper in under 24 hours

(CNN)The CIA Air America helicopter bounced as it touched down on an aging apartment building in Saigon.

Its pilot knew there was no room for error. Scores of South Vietnamese were lined up on that rooftop, waiting anxiously to scramble aboard his chopper. They knew 150,000 North Vietnamese troops were just outside the city, ready to pounce.

Delicately working the controls, the pilot reduced power just enough to set down but leaving enough lift in the spinning rotor to keep much of the aircraft's weight off the rickety roof.

He held steady, while desperate men, women and children, some carrying luggage, hoisted themselves inside the vibrating aircraft. The pilot made sure they stayed clear of the deadly rotor blades while he avoided rooftop antennas that could trigger a crash.

After 15 passengers squeezed into a compartment meant for nine, it was time to go. Very slowly, the pilot raised the aircraft and pointed the helicopter forward. About 40 minutes later, the evacuees landed safely aboard a U.S. Navy ship offshore.

Now, imagine doing that again. And again. And again. All day long. No sleep, little food. Overbearing tension.
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Nam Nights Of PTSD Still
If you are a veteran with PTSD, remember one thing, you are not stuck feeling the way you do right now. You can heal and live a better life. PTSD caused the change in you but you can change again and then help other veterans heal as well. Vietnam veterans have been doing it for decades.

Fort Hood new General survived Vietnam War

New one-star is U.S. military's first general born in Vietnam
Military Times
By Michelle Tan
Staff writer
August 6, 2014

Brig. Gen. Viet Luong's family escaped Vietnam when he was 9, shortly before the fall of Saigon. He is the first Vietnamese-American general officer in the U.S. military's history. (Army)

“My family made the escape the day before the fall of Saigon,” he said. “We barely escaped.”

They were taken to the USS Hancock, a now-decommissioned Navy aircraft carrier, and eventually to Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, which was set up to receive refugees from Vietnam.

Col. Viet Luong pinned on his first star during a ceremony Wednesday at Fort Hood, Texas, becoming the first Vietnamese-born general officer in the U.S. military.

Luong, the 1st Cavalry Division’s deputy commanding general for maneuver, and his family escaped Vietnam in 1975 as political refugees. The infantry officer and 1987 graduate of the University of Southern California has commanded a battalion of 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers in Iraq and led the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team, the storied Rakkasans, into combat in Afghanistan.

“It’s a personal honor for me to be promoted to the rank of general officer, but I don’t want the promotion to be too much about me,” Luong told Army Times. “It’s a tribute to my soldiers and [noncommissioned officers], the folks who’ve worked to get me where I am.”

Luong said he is grateful for the opportunities granted to him as a U.S. citizen.

“It’s a testament to what this nation stands for, and her ideals, and the opportunities my family has gotten,” he said.
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Ollie Sauls Jr. long lost casualty of war

Round Rock’s long lost casualty of war
Discovery shows Round Rock lost two in the war
Austin Community Newspapers
By Cristina Peña
May 16, 2014

Sauls was killed in action May 27, 1968 just fewer than three months into his first tour of duty and shortly after turning 21. According to May 31, 1968 news release from the Department of Defense, he was attached to the Army’s 4th Calvary Regiment when he suffered multiple fragmentation wounds in hostile action in Gia Dinh Province, which surrounds Saigon. He earned multiple awards and decorations during his short time as a private first class in the Army including the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross with Palm and the Purple Heart.

For more than four decades, Round Rock residents have been under the belief that there was only one local person killed in action during the Vietnam War. But now, thanks to family members and local veteran groups, another Round Rock resident is being recognized for his military contributions.

Ollie Sauls Jr., born in April 1947, grew up on a large cotton farm just off County Road 110 – just east of the current Round Rock city limits – and lived locally until 1955 when he left to live in Arizona, California and eventually Detroit. Though his 12-person family moved often, Sauls’ grandparents and some extended family continued to reside in Round Rock.

Sauls’ uncle, Clarence L. Sauls, and cousins, Ella Morrison, Mildred Sauls and Rita Effinger are his only living relatives currently residing in Round Rock. But other family members, like his grandparents, are buried with him on a family plot in the Hopewell Cemetery off Sam Bass Road, adjacent to the historic Round Rock City Cemetery.

Local veteran Jim Torres found Sauls’ gravesite while combing the cemetery for veterans’ names to include on a new veterans memorial monument, slated to be built by 2015.
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Vietnam KIA receives posthumous PHD from University of Pennsylvania

Posthumous Ph.D. to be awarded at Grad Commencement
Monday, May 13, 2013

This year, in addition to conferring standard degrees on our graduates, the department will grant a Ph.D. posthumously to Mortimer Lenane O’Connor, who was a doctoral student in English at Penn from the late 1950s through the mid 1960s. Mort, as he was known, had completed his courses and exams and was nearly finished with his dissertation when he was deployed to Vietnam.

He served there as Lieutenant Colonel in command of the Army’s 1st Battalion, 2d Infantry. He was killed in action in the Iron Triangle north of Saigon on April 1, 1968.
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received via email from Paul Sutton

Vietnam War at 50: A lesson for Afghanistan?

These are reporters that did the research and they added in what happened after most reporters leave off. The Mayaquez Incident

• Vietnam War: Judge and McMahon are generally considered the last to die. Lt. Col. William Nolde, a military professor at Central Michigan University who'd volunteered for Vietnam, was killed by artillery fire on Jan. 27, 1973, 11 hours before the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords. He's considered the last U.S. fatality in the war's combat phase.

But the killing didn't end even after the fall of Saigon. Two weeks later, Cambodian communist forces seized the U.S. merchant ship Mayaguez. The United States launched a military rescue operation on an island where the crew was thought to have been held. When the force withdrew, two Marines — Gary Hall and Danny Marshall — were accidentally left behind, and later killed.

Vietnam War at 50: A lesson for Afghanistan?
By Rick Hampson and Carmen Gentile
USA TODAY
7:32 AM, July 3, 2012

At center, brothers Jeff Walling, right, and Mike Walling, left, sit as their father Air Force Lt. Col. Charles M. Walling of Phoenix, is buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington, Friday, June 15, 2012. Walling's F-4 Phantom jet crashed during a mission in Vietnam in 1966 but his remains were not recovered until 2010. / AP Photo

By April 29, 1975, America's war in Vietnam had been over for two years. But as he stood post at the gate of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, a city encircled by 16 communist divisions, Sgt. Bill Newell got the news: Two fellow Marine security guards had been killed at the airport.

Charlie McMahon and Darwin Judge were new in country; McMahon had arrived 11 days earlier. They'd never fired their weapons in combat. They'd been assigned to the airport in part because it was safer and would be evacuated sooner.

Instead, because of an enemy rocket, they'd be the last Americans to die in the Vietnam War.

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Vietnam vet makes sure others aren't forgotten

Vietnam vet makes sure others aren't forgotten

MICHELE HASKELL/Times Herald-Record
Published: 2:00 AM - 11/11/11
Forty-nine American soldiers lay dead in a town near Saigon. They had walked into an ambush. Most were kids, not long out of high school, in the thick of the Vietnam War.

"I had to pick up the bodies," says Eldred's Kevin Thomas Marrinan today. "Bits and pieces. It was awful."

This is what Marrinan saw as a young soldier in 1968, just a few years after he had left the Bronx. He had grown up near a veterans hospital, where he saw shellshocked men with vacant eyes, hiding behind Fords, Chevys and Pontiacs in the streets.

Those horrible memories of lost lives came rushing back to Marrinan, 64, just a few years ago. He was placing tiny American flags on the graves of veterans in small Sullivan County cemeteries in Lumberland and Highland for the American Legion Sylvan Liebla Post 1363 of Highland when he saw that some of the graves of World War II vets were littered with dirt and debris. The names of the soldiers and where they served were buried, like the soldiers.

Marrinan thought of the bodies he saw in Vietnam. He thought of the lonely bodies in the dozens of aluminum coffins he sat next to on the cargo plane he took home when his father died.

"I thought of what these guys went through," he says, "and how nobody remembers them."
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Good-bye Travis Air Force Base, Hello Vietnam

Winning hearts and minds in Vietnam


By Martin Bell



In my 46 years of experience in journalism, I have often found that the most remarkable material surfaces by accident.

So it is with the Saigon Songs, recordings made in the Vietnam War, which have never been broadcast before.

They are among the most moving mementoes of war I have ever heard.

Their edge is sharpened, it seems to me, by a special relevance to the wars of today.

The Saigon Songs date from the Americans' hearts and minds campaign, between 1965 and 1967, as they poured their ground troops into Vietnam in support of the South Vietnamese government.

Hearts and minds

The campaign was run by Maj Gen Ed Lansdale of the US Army, who by all accounts was a most remarkable man.

His weapons were not guns but words and music, through which he hoped to persuade the people in the villages to resist the North Vietnamese communists and the home-grown insurgents, the Viet Cong.



Maj Gen Lansdale gathered round him a group of singers and performers including Pham Duy, the most noted Vietnamese folk singer of the time, and Hershel Gober, a young lieutenant from Arkansas who was as handy with a guitar as he was with a rifle, and was serving with Vietnamese forces in the Mekong Delta.
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7698055.stm