The Fall of Saigon

It took place 50 years ago today.  I was twenty years old, and in college.  I don’t pretend to an exhaustive understanding of the history, but I remember it as the end of the Vietnam War, and as what has become, in the popular understanding, the largely undeserved disgrace of the United States.

I knew some family members of those who were on the roof of the Saigon embassy, desperately waiting to be rescued.  And, thank God–some, although not all, of them–were.

What a mess. Such an iconic moment that–almost fifty years later–President Joe Biden chose to invoke it, just before the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, saying that “there’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable.” 

Maybe not.  Although I don’t remember seeing people desperately clinging to the undercarriages of planes flying out of the South Vietnamese capital, and then falling–one at a time–to their deaths.  Not in 1975.  But I saw them do so in 2021.  And I saw others being airlifted out, in ways that Biden promised they would not be.

Perhaps the 2021 Afghanistan reprise was even worse than the original.

And then there are the thirteen US service men and women dead at Afghanistan’s Abbey Gate:

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. David L. Espinoza;
Marine Corps Sgt. Nicole L. Gee;
Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover;
Army Staff Sgt. Ryan Christian Knauss;
Marine Corps Cpl. Hunter Lopez;
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee J. McCollum;
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Dylan R. Merola;
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Kareem M. Nikoui;
Marine Corps Cpl. Daegan W. Page;
Marine Corps Sgt. Johanny Rosario;
Marine Corps Cpl. Humberto A. Sanchez;
Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jared M. Schmitz; and
Navy Petty Officer Third Class Maxton W. Soviak.

Together with the more than 150 Afghan civilians injured, and untold numbers along with several others, including British nationals, also killed.

The disaster in Saigon in 1975 set the stage for, and ignited, a reckoning, and a self-loathing in the West, the unfortunate consequences of which still have not been fully realized.

Rest in Peace, all.