The fall of Saigon, 50 years on

 

Saigon changed hands with remarkable ease. Fears of street-to-street fighting proved unfounded. Instead, the Southern army simply melted away. 

In a scene that would be televised around the world, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the gates of the presidential palace where the cabinet of the old regime was waiting to surrender.

In the absence of a more senior officer, the surrender was accepted by Colonel Bùi Tín, a journalist who many years earlier had witnessed the departure of the French from Hanoi. 

Bùi Tín would eventually become disillusioned with the new order. He was destined to end his days in Paris, an exile from his homeland. 

His memoir Following Ho Chi Minh is one of the very few inside accounts of life in the upper reaches of the secretive Vietnamese Communist party.

Chris Mullin describes the last days of the Vietnam war and the aftermath

https://www.amazon.com/Following-Ho-Chi-Minh-Vietnamese/dp/0824822331

Financial Times 12 April 2025

https://www.ft.com/content/88e50241-6760-4fa8-8fbf-2f20280043b5

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Vietnamese Minister of Defense Gen. Pham Van Tra participate in a ceremony officially welcoming Rumsfeld to Hanoi

U.S. stocks head for punishing selloff as ‘unknown unknowns’ could drag market lower, JPMorgan analysts warn

In the darkness, Don Nicholas’s memories of fighting in Vietnam and Afghanistan blur into a single dream. 

The shapeless green of the Southeast Asian jungle morphs into the brown ridges of the Hindu Kush, finally settling into black until his yells wake his wife.

Mr. Nicholas is a rarity in the U.S. military. He served as a Marine guard at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon when the South Vietnamese capital fell in 1975 and, decades later, as an Army foot soldier patrolling the mountains of Afghanistan.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/american-vets-see-echoes-of-vietnam-in-afghanistan-withdrawal-plan-11619446397

Marines guard the evacuation of civilians at Tan Son Nhut airbase

while under Viet Cong fire, during the fall of Saigon, 

on April 15, 1975

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2012/10/summers-says-euro-crisis-approach.html

Consider the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. Kissinger won a Nobel Prize, but Saigon fell.

The fear was that after the U.S. troops left, North Vietnam would resume the war. What would happen, Nixon asked Kissinger, if Hanoi simply waited a while and then gobbled up South Vietnam?

“If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam,” Kissinger said, “we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence.”

So what they were really after was a “decent interval” between the U.S. withdrawal and South Vietnam’s collapse. 

https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/02/decent-interval.html