50 years after end of Vietnam War, chaotic embassy evacuation still pains many

Yahoo

15-04-2025

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) – 50 years ago this month, some of the most dramatic, traumatic moments in American history took place, marking a political and cultural turning point for the nation.
Through April 1975, military helicopters evacuated South Vietnamese orphan children and then, on April 29, the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in a scene of rooftop chaos and desperation that millions of Americans witnessed on their living room TVs.
The moment has faded from memory for many Americans, if they were ever actually aware of it, and even if they were of a requisite level of awareness, they may have forgotten. It was, after all, half a century ago – exactly half a century.
The last U.S. military units had left Vietnam two years before, leaving the South Vietnamese Army to defend what was left. In over a decade of fighting, some 58,000 U.S. troops had been killed, along with 200,000 South Vietnamese troops and more than a million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong irregulars. Civilian deaths approached 2 million.
The war had divided the U.S. like no other conflict since the Civil War. And now it was ending before our eyes in televised pandemonium.
Louie Vega, a semi-retired Kern County Superior Court judge, was a door gunner on an Army attack helicopter.
'I'm glad I wasn't there' at the U.S. Embassy, Vega said. 'I just can't imagine feeling that impending doom. And trying to get out of there, and trying to be the last person out of there alive and hearing the explosions of the oncoming North Vietnamese Army. It was chaos. … The last unit, the Embassy guards, they were stranded at the top of a roof and they weren't sure they were going to get out of there alive. So, it was sad. It was sad to see what the war had come to. And all the money that we put into it. All the material, all the guys that lost their lives.'
Ed Budney was a visual combat tracker wounded four times on a mission four months into his deployment – twice by enemy fire, twice by friendly fire. The war's ignominious end stays with him.
'Did we lose it?' he said. 'I think we all knew we couldn't win. We weren't attacked. It's not like a 9/11 where we had to retaliate. Or World War II where we had to retaliate. We went in there of our own free mind. Did we win? I don't know.'
A sense of relief tempered the frustration for opponents of the war. Eddy Laine participated in protests.
'Finally,' Laine said. 'Finally. It was a demonstration of the poor decision making that our country engaged in for years and years about going into Vietnam and about continuing in Vietnam and the effect it had on human lives.'
For protestor Verda Varner, it was some vindication to go with the sorrow.
'Our generation then was cannon fodder for a useless war that we had to stop,' she said, 'and so we took to the streets and we stopped it.'
Randa Hunter, who grew up in a conservative Bakersfield family, saw the carnage as clearly as might be possible for a 19 year old girl.'We thought the government knew what it was doing,' she said. 'Stopping Communism.'
Seven years later was the chaotic pullout.
'I thought of the soldiers that were left in Afghanistan and the screaming and yelling in the States,' she said, 'and I thought, 'Well I continue to play back what happened when we left Vietnam.' If you want to see chaos. If you want to see families taking airplanes, begging to get on a plane, throwing their kids onto a C5-1A cargo plane to get out of there, or taking helicopters and pushing them off aircraft carriers 'cause they didn't have any room, that's chaos and that was abandonment.'
Hunter said we need to appreciate history.
'Look at the mistakes that have happened. Let's not repeat them,' she said.
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