President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, April 29, 1975

Courtesy Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

A CIA employee helps Vietnamese evacuees onto an Air America helicopter from the top of 22 Gia Long Street, a half-mile from the U.S. Embassy, April 29, 1975

Bettmann/Corbis

Aboard the USS Kirk, crew members signal the Chinook to hover over the deck and drop its passengers out, April 29, 1975

Courtesy of Hugh Doyle

Rory Kennedy. 

Lyndie Benson
Fill 1
Fill 1
April 07, 2015
In The Mix

Summoning Up Saigon

American Experience revisits a painful chapter in U.S. history.

Kathleen O’Steen

Few people look back on the end of the Vietnam War with any sense of national pride or mission accomplishment.

More than 3 million people were killed during the conflict — 58,220 of them Americans — and by the time it was over, the North Vietnamese had broken the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and were marching on Saigon as some 5,000 American embassy employees and military personnel scrambled to evacuate.

Yet, in the midst of the mayhem that broke out during the crisis, there were remarkable acts of heroism, sacrifice and, yes, betrayal, that have gone mostly untold — until now.

In WGBH’s documentary Last Days in Vietnam, premiering April 28 on American Experience, filmmaker Rory Kennedy takes viewers back to those fateful days in April 1975, when some among the military at the American Embassy chose to disobey orders and make life-saving decisions for many South Vietnamese who, in the chaos and panic of the final days, had poured over the embassy’s walls seeking to escape.

“I felt it was a good time to tell this story, not only because it was a moment when many of these survivors are still alive, but also because the timing is interesting, given our military pursuits in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Kennedy says. “As we’ve been withdrawing from Afghanistan, there are serious questions about what our responsibility is to the people we’ve left behind in a war we haven’t won.”

In telling this story, Kennedy says she wanted to let the actual participants speak directly about their experiences — from Army Captain Stuart Herrington, who quietly authorized airlifts for hundreds of fleeing South Vietnamese, to Miki Nguyen, who was a little boy at the time that his father, a South Vietnamese helicopter pilot, put his family in a CH-47 Chinook and headed out to sea.

Kennedy even convinced a reluctant 91-year-old Henry Kissinger, who was Secretary of State during the war, to speak about the time.

“I wanted the viewer to feel that they were present in the experience of this moment in history,” she says. “I wanted to keep them grounded in actual footage.”

As she was doing research for the film (it was written by Kennedy’s husband, Mark Bailey, and Keven McAlester), Kennedy says she found a treasure trove of undeveloped film footage that had been shot on the USS Kirk, a destroyer that was used to evacuate thousands of South Vietnamese from Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Saigon.

The footage, which had been found in a garage, showed never-before-seen images of South Vietnamese helicopters unexpectedly bringing in evacuees and then being pushed overboard into the sea to make room for more helicopters.

There was even footage of young Nguyen and his family, approaching the ship in a South Vietnamese helicopter and being tossed out to waiting hands below on deck as the Chinook was too large to even touch down. His father, who was piloting the helicopter, ended up ditching the craft in the ocean as he himself bailed.

“The war in Vietnam clearly was a not a high point in our history,” Kennedy says, “but what we tried to do [with this documentary] was distinguish between the policy of the government and the people on the ground doing heroic acts.”

As the documentary came together, it was decided not to use a voiceover narration.

“This is something that is so infused with emotion and politics, I just wanted audiences to feel that this story was being told truthfully,” she says. “I often feel narrators are there to tell audiences what they’re supposed to think. I think people can come to their own conclusions.”

Kennedy says that as she researched the film, she came to the realization that by the time Americans were forced to flee, there were only “stupid choices” left.

“The time for good decisions had long since passed,” she says. “My hope is that before we engage in any more conflicts, people will make those type of connections and realize the human cost of war.”

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