Vietnam veterans share thoughts on Fall of Saigon on its 50th anniversary

Yahoo

01-05-2025

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (WJHL) — Fifty years ago today, South Vietnam's capital city, Saigon, was captured, bringing an end to the brutal years-long Vietnam War.
'It was inevitable. We had no chance. It was a political war,' said Army codebreaker Robert Hughes. 'I wasn't surprised at all. But I cried.'
News Channel 11 asked every veteran featured in our 10-part series on The Vietnam War: 50 Years Later about their thoughts on the Fall of Saigon as people who served there, even though the United States had pulled out two years before.
'To lose Saigon and the whole South like that…it was a disgrace because we were better fighting men than that,' said Army veteran Lowell Cable. 'They didn't have the equipment that we had. We were fighting a conventional war with guerrilla warfare. It's like it was all for nothing. And that really gets disheartening when you think of it that way.'
More than 58,000 servicemembers were killed in the war. Fifty years later, how it ended still stings to those whose lives were forever changed because of it.
'They died. What'd they die for? I don't know,' said Navy Seabee John White. 'I'm very disappointed in the way it all turned out.'
The U.S. exited militarily in 1973.
'These South Vietnamese senior officers, generals, were leaking information to the North Vietnamese; that's why I could never get a B-52 mission that would go in and take out bridges and parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the truck parts,' said Master Army Aviator Thomas Reeves.
Reeves was stationed in the headquarters in Saigon with one of the highest security clearances someone could get at the time.
'It was coming well before April of 1975, we had so much of our troops out and we lost a lot,' Reeves said. 'The Vietnamese training was going poorly. They were never going to be able to take over. They folded and ran, and I realized that this war was going to end. We were never going to win it.'
Others also saw the Fall of Saigon coming well before it happened.
'We were turning stuff over to them. And, you could see some of the boats come back and their equipment, it'd be gone missing. You could see the writing on the wall,' said Navy Brown Water River-Rat TJ Miles. 'We didn't lose the war. Washington lost the war for us.'
Those feelings that had been suppressed for decades resurfaced in 2021 when the U.S. withdrew from Afghanistan.
'Vietnam was a different situation. The enemy was in charge of the country long before we ever pulled out and leaving all the weaponry and the ammunition and everything in tact for them to have,' said Army Airborne Ranger Ed Johnston. 'When we pulled out of Afghanistan the way we did, that brought all that feeling right up to a big boil in a hurry because there was no sense in that withdrawal.'
While each veteran News Channel 11 spoke with had a different duty in Vietnam, they all had similar feelings about what happened on this day 50 years ago, even though they had already returned home.
'They just turned their back on them. Left. All the equipment that's left, and we haven't learned anything. We did it again in Afghanistan,' said Army veteran Bill Blankenship. 'Everybody that served feels that way. They turned their back on all the guys who fought, died. '
The next segment of The Vietnam War: 50 Years Later airs Thursday at 5 p.m.
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