26-04-2025
Kissinger said my Saigon chopper story broke his heart
In his sunlit living room in California, Colonel Stuart Herrington's eyes wander over the mementos of a war that won't leave him. Medals, commendations and pictures with the former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger hang on the wall.
But what really makes him pause is the oil painting he bought just before the fall of Saigon, when he was 34 years old, from a young Vietnamese artist who was flogging his life's work in a hotel lobby to departing American soldiers. The painting is a self-portrait. It shows the young artist against a black background, staring at the viewer, a garnet-red scarf wound tight around his neck like it's strangling him.
'We were in way over our heads. But the country that won World War II can't possibly be over its head, right?' Herrington tells me, remembering the sentiment of the time.
He is 83 now, his walking tentative, recent memories slipping. But the battles of half a century ago are set in stone. The sticky heat of the jungle in Vietnam, the boom of the Viet Cong mortars, the rattle of the helicopter as it took off from the embassy roof.
The assurances he told the waiting crowds in Vietnamese: hay giu im lang — stay quiet; se khong co ai bi bo roi — no one's going to be left behind; toi se di phia sau cung — I'll go last; dung so — don't be afraid. Words that still bring him deep shame for those they abandoned that day.
It's been 50 years since he followed the order to evacuate, since he watched Saigon disappear below him, along with the faces of the hundreds who had gathered there in the belief that the Americans would rescue them. And nine years since a remarkable encounter finally brought some closure.
In the spring of 1970, it was all very different. The war was raging and then-Captain Herrington, raised in Pittsburgh and working as a military intelligence officer in West Berlin, had just been rather reluctantly sent to Vietnam.
On arrival, he was told that two of his predecessors had been killed in an ambush. 'It had a reputation for being a very nasty place,' he recalls.
His job was to gather intelligence to thwart Viet Cong activity. Using his knowledge from West Berlin, he developed a system of treating captives well, developing rapport — rather than just beating them up. 'Over time, they came around, and they talked,' he says.
With that intelligence, and with Herrington's fast-developing Vietnamese language skills, they were soon hitting target after target. 'I loved it,' he says. 'It was just as exciting a thing as ever, and it was something you could really believe in.'
After 20 months, the army dragged him, 'kicking and screaming, out of there'. Back in the United States, he was miserable, and schemed to get back to Vietnam. By July 1973, he had made it.
When he arrived, the news was not good. Intelligence assessments, dismissed as alarmist in the US, warned that while the North Vietnamese had been stymied in the 1972 Easter offensive, they would push again. The assessments grew darker, and the US began making plans for an evacuation.
One day, Herrington was walking through the lobby of the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon when he saw the oil painting that hangs in his living room today. The artist, Do Quang Em, was standing next to it. He told him he'd been drafted into the South Vietnamese army, and that he'd sell him the painting for £170.
'He said, 'any Vietnamese will tell you that this is a losing cause',' Herrington told me. He was right. By the end of April 1975, North Vietnamese forces were streaming towards Saigon.
On April 29, around midday, Herrington learnt that the US was evacuating. He rushed to the embassy, which was besieged by thousands of Vietnamese trying to get out: GIs' girlfriends, southern officials and anyone who had worked with the Americans and feared retribution.
'They were climbing over the walls, they were banging at the gates, screaming and yelling,' he recalls. 'It was a panic situation.'
The Americans had already spirited thousands of their allies out of the country. But they hadn't expected so many more to cram themselves into the embassy, begging to be taken away.
Abandoned evacuees watch a helicopter fly away from the embassy
NIK WHEELER/CORBIS
Herrington used a loudhailer to assure the crowds, in Vietnamese, that there would be no one left behind. As the night wore on they began to get them out, corralling them into waiting helicopters.
'You had to be the enforcer,' he says. 'When somebody was holding up the show and trying to drag a heavy suitcase into the helicopter, you had to go up and pry their hands away from their suitcase. It was really ugly.'
The sun had set when they got the message that still haunts Herrington today. Only four more lifts would be permitted. Command back in the US had grown mistrustful of the crowd estimates, believing (incorrectly) that the US ambassador Graham Martin was 'trying to evacuate all of Vietnam through the embassy', and decided to cut them off.
The colonel in command told Herrington and the other soldiers. When they started to protest, the colonel said he agreed, but that they had to follow orders. 'He said 'we don't have any choice'.'
They were devastated. All of them, he says, were invested in the 'words and the promises' they had made. Yet when the time came, around 5.30am, Herrington told the waiting crowd that he was going to the lavatory, and slipped up to the roof with a handful of other Americans, climbing aboard an empty helicopter and flying into the Saigon night.
'It was pretty awful,' Herrington tells me. 'And I have a hard time with it, even 50 years later. It's just difficult to think that it had to come to that, after all that effort… It was just a terrible mental, physical, moral conundrum that we were caught in.'
Four hundred and twenty people were left behind, as well as a small detachment of US marines, who would be the very last to leave a few hours later. Between 4,000 and 5,000 Vietnamese and 1,000 Americans had been lifted from the US embassy in Saigon over those two days at the end of April 1975.
The work of Herrington and his colleagues, taming the crowds, ensured the landing zone wasn't smothered.
In 1997, Herrington told the story of the betrayal on a television show. The next morning, he received a phone call from Henry Kissinger, who had been secretary of state during the withdrawal, asking him to lunch. Hearing the story of the 420 people left behind, seemingly at his command, Kissinger said, had deeply affected him.
'He said, 'I must tell you, you broke my heart',' says Herrington.
In the White House situation room, Kissinger said, they had thought they'd got everyone out. 'He told me, 'If I'd known that there were only 420 people left … I'd have surely ordered three or four more helicopters'.'
The guilt continued to gnaw at Herrington. Then, in 2016, he got a call from a reporter at CBS. They'd found one of the people who was left behind. His name was Bien Pho, he was in the US and he was ready to meet Herrington.
After he had been left at the embassy, Pho had, like many others, been taken to 're-education camp' by the communists for a year. He made it to the US in 1979, married and settled down. He bore no ill will towards the Americans who had abandoned him.
'He was the sweetest guy in the whole world,' Herrington says. 'His whole attitude was, that's past, that's done, not a biggie. I was choking back tears at the thought of his graciousness.'
After so many years, the old soldier has found something approaching closure.
As he goes about his routine with his wife, Lan, and his black labrador, Winston, Herrington thinks about how the US failed to understand Vietnamese language, history and culture, resulting in a 'terrible, horrific waste of money, lives, families, fortunes'.
Again and again, he says, he sees the same mistakes being made, from Iraq to Afghanistan, and now Ukraine. 'We say we're here to help you, we go, we reach out. The president makes it a cornerstone of his foreign policy for his whole time in office, assures [them] they're with them all the way. And another president comes in, and you know the rest of that story,' Herrington says.
He leans back in his chair and looks out of the window, across the shimmering California suburbs. 'I think, 'Here we go again'.'
