The Fall of Saigon as Seen By a Journalist on the Ground

“I’m kind of feeling my 44 years at the moment,” New York Times foreign correspondent Malcolm Browne wrote to a friend after departing Saigon in April 1975. “This Vietnam stint was the most dangerous and exhausting one I had had there, and leaving the place (ignominiously, on an evacuation helicopter) tore some of my heart out.”

As Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese 50 years ago this month, Browne’s reporting and private correspondence illuminates the tragedy that befell South Vietnam and its people in those final days, shows the resiliency of its refugees, and serves as a useful juxtaposition with the very different but equally heartbreaking U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

Browne was no stranger to groundbreaking political events. He had served in the Korean War; as a fledgling journalist, he covered the civil rights movement in the South and reported from Cuba on its new revolutionary state under Castro in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Associated Press sent him to Vietnam in 1961, three years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident that vastly escalated U.S. involvement in the war. Browne’s 1963 photograph capturing Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức’s self-immolation remains one of the iconic images of the war.

During his first stint in Vietnam, from 1961-1965, Browne was stationed in Saigon as the Associated Press bureau chief. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Peter Arnett, who worked with Browne at the AP in Vietnam, Browne represented a shift within the industry. Unlike his fellow AP colleagues who, if they had attended college did so in the Midwest and often at state schools, Browne had graduated from Swarthmore with a degree in chemistry. He cut an imposing figure, towering over his fellow journalists at six-foot-three with wavy blonde hair. Aloof and intellectual, Browne was not “one of the boys,” noted Arnett. Moreover, Browne had the ear of newly appointed AP general manager Wes Gallagher, which also rankled his peers.

Browne tended to keep his own counsel, adopting an almost detached attitude while submitting 3,000-word stories on the AP wire, which the news organization published much to the annoyance  of colleagues who believed the wire service should be providing shorter, more compact accounts, according to Arnett’s recounting in his book, Saigon Has Fallen.

As bureau chief, Browne created the Associated Press Short Guide to News Coverage in Vietnam, a 25-page manual for reporters working within his unit. “If the military had anything similar, it would have been classified,” wrote Arnett. Browne’s work was highly regarded, and he shared the 1964 Pulitzer Prize with fellow foreign correspondent David Halberstam.

While in Saigon, Browne met Huynh thi Le Lieu (Le Lieu), who then worked for the Saigon government’s information ministry. They married in 1966, by which time he had left the AP.

According to Browne, in the late 1950s both the South and North Vietnamese governments recruited Le Lieu; she chose the southern regime but eventually grew disillusioned with its authoritarian turn, later joining the United States Information Service. The move, along with Browne’s sometimes withering coverage of the South Vietnamese government, left them under police surveillance and experiencing harassment, according to Browne’s book, Muddy Boots and Red Socks: A War Reporter’s Life. The Brownes left Vietnam in 1966.

By 1968, he had landed at the New York Times, where he spent the next several years covering events in South America, South Asia, and Eastern Europe. Le Lieu, too, worked for the newspaper as a talented photographer, often accompanying her husband and photographing the events he covered.

In mid-March 1975, the Times cabled Browne, who then was stationed in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia, asking him to immediately head to Saigon. What followed for the Brownes was a chaotic, heart-rending abandonment of a country they both loved.

By early March of 1975, the North Vietnamese were relentlessly marching south. It became clear that they would be in Saigon soon and that in all likelihood the South Vietnamese government would fall in the near term. The Times wanted Browne on the ground if the capital fell. Having been blacklisted when he last left the country nearly a decade earlier, Browne negotiated his return upon arrival from the home of the United States embassy press chief, gaining entry only after helping a South Vietnamese official arrange his own departure from the country. He, Le Lieu, and fellow Times journalist Fox Butterfield spent the next several weeks working “20 hours a day like automata, dodging bullets, writing and trying to act human, all of it more by inertia than any remaining act of will,” Browne wrote to friends in May 1975. In several letters, Browne described their overall experience as “unmitigated hell.”

Reporting from Da Nang, they watched as boats and barges continually arrived, often carrying death. “On the deck of one barge we counted more than 50 bodies, mostly of children and old people, dead of hunger, thirst and exposure after nine days at sea,” Malcolm wrote to friends. The refugees’ attempt at escape was indicative of the dangers that would befall other Vietnamese people who followed during and after the war. Sometimes referred to as “boat people,” tens of thousands of Vietnamese took their chances on the open seas only to be preyed upon by pirates and the cruelties of nature. Thousands landed in overcrowded, often unsanitary tent city refugee camps in nearby countries.

“Le Lieu and I had a pretty harrowing time those last two months in Vietnam,” he wrote a friend, “and not only because of shells and rockets, but especially the wrench of personal ties.” Her mother, “too old and sick to have survived the ghastly voyage to Guam,” remained behind along with two of Le Lieu’s brothers and their families. Two other brothers with their families did evacuate with Le Lieu, but the couple left behind “thousands of others who had been close to us for so many years,” Browne wrote in a letter. Those who remained, including Le Lieu’s family, regretted it, living out hard lives under the new regime, Browne reflected years later.

The oppressive atmosphere took its toll. Relationships, whether enduring marriages or life-long friendships, were sorely tested. “There were times when even Le Lieu and I were at each other’s throats as we tried to sort problems out,” Browne recalled in his memoir. The final weeks, filled with “savagery and bitterness,” transformed “normally enlightened, fine people into mad dogs, robbing corpses, cutting throats to improve their own chances of survival,” he wrote to a friend shortly after. Cash bribes were common, and some Americans, “swine” by Browne’s account, “promised escape in exchange for money or gold or the sexual favors of women” only to disappear into the crowd. “The weeping of abandoned Vietnamese filled Tan Son Nhut [Airport’s] passenger terminal day and night,” he wrote.

Yet, there was heroism too.

As chronicled in the 2014 Oscar-nominated documentary, Last Days in Vietnam, the C.I.A. had established a black ops service, dubbed Air America, which ferried thousands of Vietnamese to the United States and elsewhere on countless flights in the final weeks before the shocking April 30 fall of Saigon. Air America was a rogue operation that threatened the careers of those involved, many of whom saw the issue in more elemental terms. “Sometimes there’s an issue not of legal or illegal, but of right and wrong,” former U.S. Army Captain Stuart Herrington told the documentarians.

With the Washington Post’s David Greenway, Browne helped dozens of Vietnamese working for the news agencies find seats on these outbound flights. Le Lieu often advised potential refugees on what to expect in America, emphasizing its “political and social greatness,” but also discussing language barriers and the inevitable racism they would encounter, Browne later wrote.

In late April, the North Vietnamese began closing in on Saigon, firing on departing planes and pockmarking the airport’s runway; it became impossible to fly out. The North Vietnamese assault led to horrific scenes as planes carrying hundreds of passengers exploded while taxiing or taking off while civilians ran along the tarmac hoping to jump onto a departing plane while dodging incoming fire.

Though a fictional account, Viet Than Nguyen’s unnamed narrator in his 2015 work, The Sympathizer, captures the horrific poetry of the moment. “Another explosion somewhere on the runway heightened the frenzy.…Men, women, and children caterwauled at an even higher pitch.…Another rocket exploded on the runway a few hundred meters behind us, lighting up the acre of tarmac.…A meteorite shower of rockets and artillery shells was falling on the runways, an apocalyptic light show.”

Reality, though perhaps lacking in description, matched The Sympathizer’s terrible ferocity. South Vietnamese civilian Nguyen Thi Lac remembered his experience laying prone on the ground as rockets fired all around them, the ground shaking and everyone around him crying, in the book Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam: “As I was lying there, I started thinking, ‘Oh no. We are going to die right here on the ground.’”

Nguyen managed to sprint to a nearby plane, scooping up an abandoned baby from the ground, rescuing it from being trampled, caring for it on the flight, and finally handing the child over to its young mother once they had reached the Philippines. The mother, “a teenager…all colorless and sick,” had abandoned the baby believing authorities would not let her leave if she still had it. She feared Nguyen would keep the boy, but instead, Nguyen picked up the baby and handed it to her, imploring her simply to “feed him now.” Despite his ordeal, Nguyen managed to maintain a sense of optimism. “I thought that maybe just the way that I held that little baby, now God would hold us. I started to see how wonderful it was to be alive.”

With the airport runway destroyed, Americans turned to thousands of helicopter lifts, carrying Vietnamese people to U.S. Naval vessels off the coast. Most of these trips were between the U.S. Embassy, besieged by Vietnamese desperate to leave, and the ships anchored offshore. Le Lieu had gotten out on April 28, boarding a flight for Hong Kong. Browne eventually found his way via helicopter to a U.S. supply ship. The numerous U.S. vessels were inundated by countless Vietnamese fishing boats and other ships, all hoping to leave their vessels for Naval ships. It was a scene Browne did not forget. “The sea was…strewn with fires and columns of smoke from scores of sampans, junks, and work boats that had put to sea seeking refuge,” Browne recounted in his memoir. “As navy ships picked people up from the little vessels, the Vietnamese fishermen were setting fire to their own boats.…it seemed like the end of the world.”

Between Air America and the endless helicopter flights, roughly 130,000 Vietnamese people were safely evacuated. That said, who got out and why was not determined in any orderly or just fashion. “The mass flight of Vietnamese, especially poor ones,” wrote Browne in a letter, “was not based on political considerations or anything rational, it was sheer panic.” While the vast majority of those who escaped deserved the opportunity, there were also a minority among them of drug traffickers, torturers, assassins, and other “undesirables,” some of whom had participated in the C.I.A.’s notorious Phoenix Program during the war.

One of the families Browne helped to evacuate was Times employee Vo Tuan Chan and his wife, Thuy. When Vo’s family did reach the United States, they shuttled from camp to camp along the West Coast. By June, they had established residence in Jamaica Queens. To its credit, the New York Times footed much of the bill for their stay in California and provided them with cash and a temporary job. Vo thanked the Brownes for their help and the Times’ “generous gift.” Amidst it all, he remained philosophical. “[The] [m]ost important thing for us is having enough clothes to wear in winter,” he wrote. Besides, he added, “[o]n top of that my wife is pregnant.”

Reflecting on his departure from Vietnam, Browne lamented its fall. “Much though I sometimes hated the evils of the place, I found in the end that my roots were deeper in Indochina than any other place in the world, and I was crying like a school boy when I said my last goodbyes.”

From 1975 to 1979, roughly 300,000  Vietnamese people made their way to the U.S., establishing themselves in cities and suburbs across the nation, from Little Saigon in Orange County to Eden Center in Northern Virginia, shaping American culture and politics in countless ways. For Vo Tuan Chan, the tragic year ended brightly with the birth of a baby boy.

Born at 8:28 am. Saturday December 6. At nearly 8 pounds and 17 inches, the child was a “big boy” especially since his mother was only 4 11’ and less than 100 pounds.  They named him Vo Tuan Chan Viet, “Viet reminds all of us of our origin,” he wrote Browne, “Chan-Viet expresses our hope that he’ll do something for and/or in Vietnam.”

In 2021, 46 years after the fall of Saigon, the present echoed the past when the U.S. withdrew its forces from Afghanistan, hastening the collapse of the Afghan National Security Forces and the takeover of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban, thus marking the end of yet another long and painful war.

To be clear, 2021 Afghanistan is not 1975 Saigon: They are different countries, different eras, and different people. Yet they share commonalities. Each nation had ousted a global power before U.S. involvement: the French in Vietnam and the former USSR in Afghanistan. Vietnam had been America’s longest war until Afghanistan displaced it, and both were, in the long term, bipartisan military adventures that turned tragic.

Plenty of voices warned that both efforts would inevitably end in failure; whatever one believes in this regard does not obscure the tragedy of withdrawal for Vietnamese and Afghans, particularly those that aided U.S. forces. In both cases, those left behind endured harder lives than those who escaped. American promises, while perhaps sincere in each case, went unfulfilled. A second chance to start over anew in America might have been the best we could offer, and yet, for many, even in that, the United States failed to deliver.