'Last Days in Vietnam'

In a moving 100-minute narrative, Kennedy takes us through the devastating months of March and April 1975, during which the communist Viet Cong swooped down from North Vietnam to invade the south, surround Saigon, and ultimately seize the city.

Kennedy has researched her topic meticulously, assembling stunning film footage and interviewing numerous Americans and Vietnamese who lived through the debacle, including Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, and naval officer Richard Armitage, who subsequently served in the George W. Bush administration. Through these narrators, the film provides a historical context, beginning with the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, which established a tenuous division of North and South Vietnam. Following the withdrawal of American forces and resignation of Richard Nixon (who was deeply feared by the north), the Viet Cong began their takeover of the south and the unification of the country by force.

The thrust of Kennedy’s film, however, is not political, but rather humanitarian. As one American officer said, in essence: “Ultimately, what was at stake? Human lives.” Kennedy focuses on those final two traumatic days — April 29 and 30, 1975 — before the communist troops invaded the city, and the desperate, heroic effort on the part of American embassy personnel to get as many of their South Vietnamese employees and friends out of Saigon.

A frantic struggle

Ultimately, it’s a story told through pictures, supported by deeply moving firsthand narrative. In frame after frame, we see heroic Americans struggling frantically to evacuate the South Vietnamese against the orders of American Ambassador Graham Martin, who emerges as the story’s tragic figure. He had lost his only son in the Vietnamese war and lived in denial that the North Vietnamese would take over, desperately clinging to the hope that the sacrifice of so many American lives, including his son’s, was not in vain.

So the residual American army, navy, and embassy personnel began a covert operation to remove thousands of South Vietnamese and their families in military and commercial planes. They sought individuals and their families out, one by one — “from the tailor to the cook to the dishwasher,” recalls one American — and drove them to Tan Son Nhut airport, from which they were flown to safety.

Then, on April 29, when the airport was attacked by the Viet Cong, American personnel begged Ambassador Martin to authorize their last option, the evacuation of Vietnamese and the remaining Americans by helicopter.

The heart of the film features footage from that last day, when thousands of desperate Vietnamese — men, women, children — crowded around the American embassy, trying to climb the barbed wire fences and make their way to the embassy roof where the helicopters would pick them up, 15 at a time, and take them to US naval ships. “Who goes, and who gets left behind?” was the agonizing question that had to be decided in the moment, one embassy official recalls. The sound of those choppers and the images of those desperate people climbing those fences and crowding that rooftop will forever haunt the American psyche.

After an 18-hour airlift involving 75 helicopters, the ambassador, who still refused to leave, received an order from the White House and departed on one of the last helicopters. One embassy guard, Mike Sullivan, stayed behind until the very last chopper left at 7:58 a.m. “I was on the last one,” he said. There were still 420 Vietnamese waiting on the roof and in the embassy courtyard. “Leaving them behind was a deep betrayal,” he maintains today.

Personal accounts

As always in historical accounts, the personal story delivers the most power. Kennedy interviewed Miki Nguyen, whose father flew a South Vietnamese Army chopper to the naval ship US Kirk in a desperate effort to save his family. Nguyen, who was six years old at the time, narrates the rescue as the footage rolls. The chopper was too large to land on the Kirk, so we watch his father and mother tossing their children out of the chopper into the open arms of Americans on deck. Next, Nguyen plunged the chopper into the sea, jumped out of the cockpit, and swam to the ship. “My father had a few bars of gold in his pocket, our only remaining possessions. They were lost. But it didn’t matter.”

As a result of the cumulative rescue efforts, over 130,000 South Vietnamese were evacuated before the communists finally took over Saigon. Thousands who remained were forced into “reeducation centers,” where they died of disease or malnutrition.

The rest resonates with a tragic irony that surpasses the Greeks. Today, Vietnam is a communist county, an outcome that 58,000 American lives were sacrificed to prevent, in a war that tore our country apart. (The number of Vietnamese war casualties is estimated at 882,000). The United States has relations with communist Vietnam today, and Saigon — now named Ho Chi Minh City — is a tourist destination.

So, once again, the leitmotif: “What was it all for?” The release of Last Days in Vietnam couldn’t be more timely, given the recent tragic Iraqi war and the current threat of reinvolvement. What have we learned? Or, to put it more urgently, when will we learn the lessons that history offers us?

“I can still hear the rumbling of the Chinooks,” recalls Nguyen, now an American citizen. The sound of those helicopters should remain in our ears, as a warning of the consequences of our past tragic choices.