The Fall of Saigon: Scenes From The Sudden End Of A Long War

592 Pages·1986·21.893 MB·English

by  David Butler

David Butler was born in Massachusetts. He has
worked as an editor at Playboy and Newsweek, and
made three trips to Vietnam during the war. He was
in Saigon reporting for NBC radio from mid-1974
until the helicopter evacuation on April 29, 1975.
When not in the United States, he lives in Asia.

The Fall of Saigon
Scenes from the sudden end of a long war
DAVID BUTLER
t
SPHERE BOOKS LIMITED
London and Sydney
First published in Great Britain by
Sphere Books Ltd, 1986
30-32 Gray's Inn Road, London WClX 8JL
Copyright© 1985 by David Butler
First published in the United States by
Simon and Schuster, 1985
Portions of the text centred on Graham Martin, Alan Carter
and Ken Moorefield in the final three days of April appeared
in slightly different form in Playboy.
Material from General Van Tien Dung's Our Great Spring
Victory copyright© 1977 by Cora Weiss. Reprinted by
permission of Monthly Review Foundation.
TRADE
MARK
I
This book is sold subject to. the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without
the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.
Set in 10 on IOpt Linotron Ehrhardt
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Collins, Glasgow
For my parents
John Butler
and
Blanche Butler. nee Blanche Madelein Dufault

Acknowledgments
I am of course indebted to everyone who spoke to me for
publication. The section titled 'Sources' following the next
indicates who many of those people are. Some of them had
reason to harbor some mistrust of journalists. They spoke to
me on the chance that I was out to get it right. I thank them
for that leap of faith.
Joyce Barnathan� Germaine Swanson and Jackie Bong
\Vright were especially helpful when I first moved to
\Vashington to work full time on this book in 1982.
The Historical Research Foundation, in New York City,
generously underwrote a two-month reporting trip to France
and England in the summer of 1983. That trip also led to an
article for National Review about Dr N yen Van Hao. I am
gu
grateful to the foundation for its grant, which was supported
by \Villiam F. Buckley, Jr. I thank .Mr Buckley for that, and
for the thousand other kindnesses he has shown me through
the last fifteen years.
Additional financial support was provided by my parents;
and by Dr and Mrs Paul Butler, Mr David G. Dawley, Ms
M. Louise du-Fault, Rev. Omer L. Dufault, Dr and Mrs
Steven R. Geary, Ms Elizabeth Butler Heath, Mr Peter
Roundy and Ms Margareta Musacchia, and Mr and Mrs
Steven Strasser.
All of them eith.er lent or gave me money that allowed me to
continue writing, .uninterrupted by the demands of a job, after
I had run through my publisher's advance. For their faith in
the value of this book, they have my heartfelt thanks.
Generous moral and financial support also came from
Arthur Kretchmer at Playbo;1•
I must acknowledge a special debt to Peter Roundy, whom
I met in 1961, when I was twenty, and working as the
attendant in the locker room of a New Hampshire golf resort
during a college summer vacation. Peter was a couple of years
younger than I, and an assistant pastry chef at the same resort.
He was then and is now the possessor of one of the three most
lively and subtle minds. I have ever encountered. Night after
Vll
night, in telephone conversations between Washington, D.C.,
and south Florida, where Peter now teaches American young
people - white, black, Vietnamese and other - how to make a
sentence, a paragraph, an essay, he has acted as patient
sounding board, gentle critic and stern coach. Until the next
project, I will miss the constant goading, and encouragement.
Finally, through the two and a half years of researching and
writing that went into this book, Mr Nguyen Hung Vuong was
my (unpaid) master teacher in countless matters, many but
not all of them Vietnamese. It was Mr Vuong, for example,
who tried to teach me the importance of the Second lnter­
nationale in the history of Vietnamese communism. He never
succeeded, but the failure was mine, not his. Mr Vuong is
absolved of any blame for whatever misinterpretations of
Vietnamese attitudes, customs or history appear in the text.
He is largely responsible for whatever I happened to get right
in such areas. For scores of hours of guidance and en­
couragement, I express my deep and abiding gratitude.
Vlll