VIETNAM: THE FALL

Jack Day's

Worlds: A Veteran's Experience

1975: The Fall

Many veterans try to leave Vietnam behind. I managed to ignore it until March and April 1975.

Then the newspapers were full of North Vietnamese advances. Pleiku and the Central Highlands were among the first places to fall. I remember the stories of a column of refugees from Pleiku, unable to get to Qui Nhon on Route 19, fleeing south toward Nha Trang unsuccessfully on a minor road through the jungles. But the NVA owned the jungle.

I was working for a consulting company and every day one of my duties was to read through the Commerce Business Daily to learn of new contract possibilities. The CBD had announcements of various engineering projects in Vietnam. Bureaucracy works slowly, and by the time some of these announcements appeared, asking bids to build a bridge on this highway in Vietnam or a building in that town, the highway or town had come under NVA control. Da Nang, Hue, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, Cam Ranh Bay: each day the newspaper brought word of another town that had fallen, of ARVN troops that broke and ran, throwing their uniforms in the trash and attempting to mingle with the civilian population, of NVA tanks moving south unopposed, of panicked soldiers from one town fleeing to another, spreading the contagion of panic there too.

There were talks of re-drawing lines, of regrouping forces and attempting to hold the new line here, or here, or here. But the lines disappeared faster than the NVA could approach them, and the news continued to broadcast the names of familiar places lost to the enemy.

The rightness or wrongness of what we had done in Vietnam stopped mattering for a while. These were places American lives had been sacrificed to defend, and now they were gone. It was a very upsetting time. It was a depressing time. It was a time of pre-occupation with every bit of news, every detail, as if it were our own lives which were still in danger, as if paying attention could affect the outcome. It was a time of adrenaline and staying awake late at night and finding it hard to concentrate on the requirements of everyday life. Finally, it was over, and the news stopped, and there was a void, a sort of ache that would last for years.

Last Helicopter Out

UPI Photo

I began looking for other veterans to talk with.

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