Last summer, I decided to post the full text of my mother’s Vietnam letters sent to her parents between July 1974 and March 1975. They are, I think, a valuable addition to the documented history of the last days of South Vietnam.
Last week, I published the last letter home (March 27, 1975) and thought I was done with this segment of “Stories of Vietnam.”
However, of course, my father had stayed behind. The day after my family and I flew out of Saigon on April 3, 1975, he typed this letter to my mother. It is one of three letters he sent from the city before leaving for Phu Quoc Island. There is one additional letter written from the ship, the American Challenger, just five days after the Fall of Saigon.
I will reprint each letter on the day it was sent, and then by May 5, I will have reached a conclusion to this section of “Stories of Vietnam.”
Fri. 4 April [1975]
Nancy, my love,
Just discovered the envelope with your final message in my typewriter. Right back at you! I love you too, and all our troops.
I assume you will be in Boise before this arrives, and I hope the trip was not too traumatic. In any case, I envisioned you getting aboard the plane and having a couple of Martinis after things settled down and relaxing a bit. I was acutely aware of how nervous you were during the departure process—and no wonder. Just good that I could go with you through it and that our friends helped us so much.
Well, one tragedy follows another. Late this afternoon, we learned that an American Air Force plane taking orphans to the States crashed outside Tan Son Nhut. It was on our news within the hour. But then tonight we have had appeals on the radio for blood and instructions of who to call to get after-curfew transportation. They said they needed all kinds—like the emergency in the Seoul hotel fire.
So after the usual frustrating thing of trying to call numbers you can’t get (the embassy operator either hung up on me or inadvertently cut me off), I got the mission warden, only to find that the needs had been satisfied. The last report I got was that about ten people out of the total 247 were rescued.
What a tragedy! I cry. I left my name and number with the mission warden and said I would be glad to give blood should it be needed. So I wait.
My thing goes apace. It seems our plans change daily and hourly. It seems that we are the only people really moving. All the others seem to be satisfied to hold incessant meetings with each other, to write memos and cables, etc., but not to do anything.
I have been told that our evacuation plan, because it was the only well-thought-out one, was to be the model for others in the Station. I now have two tons of rice (and 20 gallons of Nguc Mam) at #7, and tomorrow morning, I will have medical supplies from the dispensary (to get this, I had to agree that we take three of their nurses with me, but they may come in handy). We are also getting the garbage bags and other necessary items.
We are also on the verge of getting $50,000 in green, which we will use to get a ship from Singapore (takes 3 days). So far, I am doing almost all of this on my own, and your husband may be shot by the bureaucracy, but I intend to get my people out regardless of the consequences. I spoke to Hoa tonight and will take her and Cuc and Amin (if he can get here) on my ship—or at least get her on the list of people to be taken out. She is resigned to die at the hands of the VC, but I don’t think that should be necessary. I will talk to Mr. Bi later.
Talk now is of getting one million people out. I don’t believe it. They may try and then cry and say we are sorry. I am not operating that way. I may fail, but I intend to do what is necessary before the crunch comes and succeed. There are many details. I can’t write here for obvious reasons.
If we make it, it will be an odyssey worth writing a book about –if we don’t make it, it still will.
[handwriting] All my love to everybody, Jim
As I mentioned in the previous post, my mother arranged for the family—all eight of us—to fly out on April 3, 1975. For some reason, she’d changed our original plans of accompanying the hundreds of orphans on the Babylift Flight of April 4. Had she stuck with those plans, many of us may have perished in the crash of that CA-5. It wasn’t until I was over 40 that I realized that, for my entire life until then, I’d held the unconscious belief that I was alive because orphans had died.
These “Stories of Vietnam” offer a historical and personal glimpse into the Vietnam Era, a history worth preserving and sharing. If you agree, please support my efforts by liking, commenting, or sharing.
I am the author of the nonfiction book, For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story ever heard, which combines the history of the Vietnam War with tales from my family’s lives including how we resided in Saigon in 1974-75 as the North Vietnamese Army was making its way toward the city, and how, at the eleventh hour, my father, a CIA official, coordinated the rescue of over 1,000 South Vietnamese—the staff and families of “House Seven.”
I continue to publish current and retrospective “Stories of Vietnam” here on Substack, adding layers to my own stories and featuring other voices, including those of Vietnam veterans and Vietnam refugees. I reside in the Capital District of New York.
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