The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

42 APRIL 2015 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL their victory on May Day, and we were going. They may have painted our choppers with their targeting systems, but they let us go unimpeded. After a while, we landed under floodlights on the USS Hancock , a World War II vintage carrier. Those of us with pistols handed them over. I slept for much of the five days' journey to Subic Bay, the Philippines. “Just a Few More” The evacuation concluded in the early morning of April 30. Amb. Martin admirably stretched out the evacuation to get out every Vietnamese he could—“just a fewmore helicopters.” Sev- eral inbound crews crashed from vertigo. The exasperated Navy finally resorted to a direct presidential order for the ambassador to get on a designated helicopter, just before dawn. That’s what it took. Once the ambassador departed for the fleet, “Americans only” for boarding was strictly enforced. In the process, some 400 Viet- namese—including all mission firefighters who had volunteered to stay to the end—were abandoned. Captain Stuart Herrington, a Vietnamese-speaking DAO officer, had kept the crowd under control by promising that he would not leave until they left. He was utterly devastated to be ordered—forced—to abandon those to whom he had given his personal word. Retired Colonel Herrington deservedly serves as the moral centerpiece of Rory Kennedy’s documentary, “Last Days in Vietnam.” n I grabbed a nine-passenger van with a full fuel tank and headed out for the designated safe house where political section contacts were supposed to assemble.