THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL-MAY 2025 21 Intelligence Agency) got out on the airlift, as did a number of those employed by the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the U.S. Information Agency. Ambassador Martin determined the timing of the evacuations from the country. His decisions to delay evacuations had life-anddeath consequences. On April 25, a 40-man force attached to the Seventh Fleet augmented the small force of beleaguered Marines defending Tan Son Nhat Airport. At 3:45 a.m. on April 29, the North Vietnamese army attacked the airport, and their heavy shelling forced an immediate halt to the evacuation. The first rocket landed on the main road, killing the last two Marines to die in Vietnam, Lance Corporal Darwin L. Judge and Corporal Charles McMahon Jr. In the chaos that ensued, their remains were left behind. At the U.S. embassy, the order for a helicopter evacuation was finally given. Amb. Martin made the staff wait until the North Vietnamese had already entered Saigon before they could cut down a large tamarind tree on the embassy grounds to make room for helicopters to land. His opposition to giving the general evacuation order until the last moment resulted in many people who worked for U.S. civilian agencies being left behind. The helicopter airlift was too late and too disorganized to rescue many of the locally employed staff who had been told to wait in safe houses for transport to the airport. Martin contended, against the strong protest of senior U.S. staff at the embassy, that a mass evacuation would have caused panic in South Vietnam’s army and the Marine units defending Saigon, ending hopes for a negotiated cease-fire. By delaying evacuation until the airport in Saigon had been destroyed, Martin failed the Vietnamese who had supported the United States and were left behind. For 24 hours without a break, Master Gunnery Sergeant John J. Valdez loaded helicopters from the embassy compound. Just before 5 a.m. on April 30, Valdez and Ken Moorefield, a Foreign Service officer and former infantry captain, put Amb. Martin, dazed and suffering from pneumonia, aboard one of the last helicopters to take off from the embassy roof. Moorefield later reported that, as he rode in another helicopter headed for the U.S. fleet, “I realized my war, our war, was finally over.” When the ambassador departed, the coded message “Tiger is out” was issued, causing confusion among some of the helicopter pilots—who thought the message meant that the evacuation was complete. Still on the embassy roof with the last of his Marines, Valdez noticed that the flow of choppers had decreased: “No birds in sight. But I never thought for one minute that the choppers would leave us behind.” A helicopter returned and lifted the Marines off just before 8 a.m. Valdez was the last Marine to climb aboard. Three hours later, North Vietnamese troops crashed through the gates of Saigon’s presidential palace. Thirty Years Ago In early 1995, former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara publicly expressed his shame over the war’s conduct. McNamara said what most Americans already knew: U.S. leaders had let down members of the armed forces when they sent them into battle and had failed the American people by their prosecution of the war. Twenty years after the fall of Saigon, the debates remained personal and painful. In May 1995, a presidential delegation headed by Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Hershel Gober visited Vietnam and found the government remarkably forthcoming with information about the U.S. servicemen lost during the war. The delegation reported that “more than 800 separate POW/MIA documents have been turned over to U.S. officials by the [Socialist Republic of Vietnam] government.” The success of Gober’s mission allowed President Bill Clinton to argue that genuine collaboration with the Vietnamese was the best way to achieve America’s overriding goal in Vietnam: the fullest possible accounting for Americans missing from the war. Flanked by almost every Vietnam veteran serving in Congress, as well as Bobby Muller, chairman of the Vietnam Veterans of America, in a wheelchair, President Clinton announced his decision to normalize relations on July 11. Drawing on Abraham Lincoln’s words, the president said: “This moment offers us the opportunity to bind up our own wounds. They have resisted time for too long. We can now move to common ground.” He closed by quoting scripture: “Let this moment ... be a time to heal and a time to build.” Veterans in Congress supported President Clinton, including Senator Frank Murkowski, the Republican who chaired the By decimating the team of Foreign Service Asia experts— people who would have known about 11 centuries of enmity between Vietnam and China—McCarthy left the State Department unprepared.
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