The burning question was who goes and who gets left behind. — Former U.S. Army Captain Stuart Herrington in the American Experience’s ‘Last Days of Vietnam’ Award-winning producer-director, Rory Kennedy’s latest documentary, ‘Last Days of Vietnam,’ dramatically recreates the chaotic endgame and resulting moral quandary that accompanied America’s involvement in the Second Indochina War.

Gary R. Edgerton

> The burning question was who goes and who gets left behind.

--- Former U.S. Army Captain Stuart Herrington in the *American
Experience*'s 'Last Days of Vietnam'

Award-winning producer-director, Rory Kennedy's latest documentary,
'Last Days of Vietnam,' dramatically recreates the chaotic endgame and
resulting moral quandary that accompanied America's involvement in the
Second Indochina War. She and her creative team burrow far below the
surface of the historical record to reveal representative human
portraits of those relatively few U.S. sympathizers and South Vietnamese
soldiers who escaped the fall of Saigon, which ended the conflict once
and for all, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of other collaborators
to face the brutal consequences of harsh reprisal, certain imprisonment,
and in some cases, death.

The anarchy that was unleashed in those final days is well known, as is
the larger historical narrative of what happened when, where, and why.
Kennedy was only six years old when Saigon fell in the early morning
hours of 30 April 1975 to the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the
Việt Cộng, a political and military organization that opposed the South
Vietnamese Government and their American allies. She and her
screenwriter-husband, Mark Bailey, and their co-producer-screenwriter,
Keven McAlester, effectively and economically create the larger context
early on so they can focus more intently on the human dimensions of the
story that lay hidden beneath the socio-political and military
realities.

The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)'s 27-year-old historical series,
*American Experience*, [will present the television
premiere](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/lastdays/) of
'Last Days of Vietnam' on 28 April 2015, commemorating the
40^th^anniversary of this complex and harrowing finale to the conflict
in Southeast Asia, described by one witness in the film as 'the Vietnam
War in microcosm.' The first chapter (7:28 minutes) of the program is
[now available online at PBS
Video](http://video.pbs.org/program/american-experience/), while the
entire work will be accessible to anyone through the same link the day
after the April 28 televised debut.

::: {#attachment_5397 .wp-caption .alignleft style="width: 310px"}
[![Last Days in
Vietnam](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CSTLastDaysofVietnamPBSAmericanExperience.jpg-300x169.jpg){.size-medium
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sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CSTLastDaysofVietnamPBSAmericanExperience.jpg.jpg)

Last Days in Vietnam
:::

The tangled array of events that led to the end of the Vietnam War were
set in motion more than two years earlier with [the signing of the Paris
Peace Accords](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Peace_Accords) on 27
January 1973 by the North and South Vietnamese Governments, the
Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, and the United
States. This agreement was designed to guarantee a permanent two state
solution for Vietnam, while connoting a symbolic defeat for South
Vietnam and America to many observers, despite President Richard Nixon's
assertion that the treaty meant 'peace with honor.' Not surprisingly,
the U.S. Senate never ratified the accords.

Rory Kennedy's 'Last Days of Vietnam' also underscores how Richard
Nixon's 9 August 1974 resignation because of Watergate sent shock waves
9,000 miles away in Vietnam. As her energetic retelling of the history
indicates, the PAVN and Việt Cộng believed Nixon was a 'madman' who
would commence bombing immediately if they ever broke the 1973 Paris
agreement by initiating further hostilities. Once he was gone, however,
all bets were off, as an emboldened PAVN invaded South Vietnam on 10
March 1975, pushing quickly and inexorably towards Saigon.

The goal of the PAVN and Việt Cộng was to reunify Vietnam. The United
States' courtly and old-school ambassador in Vietnam, Graham Martin,
serves as a personification of America's misguided hubris, its utter
confusion, and total denial in the face of the oncoming PAVN and Việt
Cộng threat. He stubbornly disallowed any talk of evacuation until
Saigon swelled with over a million refugees and most escape routes were
closed. As the final days approached, there were no good options left.
The remaining 80 percent of this 97-minute historical documentary
concentrates solely on the endgame that unfolded in late April. April 29
in particular is revivified in intimate and heartbreaking detail.

***American Experience*: 'Last Days of Vietnam'**

The youngest of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy's 11 children, Rory co-founded
Moxie Firecracker Films in 1998 with fellow independent filmmaker Liz
Garbus. Kennedy has produced and directed more than 25 socio-political
and cultural documentaries, including the [Emmy award-winning HBO
special, *Ghosts of Abu
Ghraib*](http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/ghosts-of-abu-ghraib#/)*,* in
2007. 'Last Days of Vietnam' premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film
Festival where American Experience Films acquired the rights to
distribute it. After a modest 15 city theatrical release, it was
selected as one of the five Best Documentary Feature nominees of 2015,
an honor richly deserved.

::: {#attachment_5401 .wp-caption .aligncenter style="width: 310px"}
![Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey at the 2014 Sundance Film
Festival](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/463372221-300x200.jpg){.size-medium
.wp-image-5401 loading="lazy" decoding="async"
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sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}

Rory Kennedy and Mark Bailey at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival
:::

'Last Days of Vietnam' balances the tragic story of public defeat and
the shame of a hasty retreat that deserted a majority of America's South
Vietnamese allies with numerous examples of personal heroism that
occurred without official knowledge or sanction hidden in plain sight.
The narrative of the film is structured around the commentaries of
approximately 20 witnesses who range from former Secretary of State and
National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, who appears fully engaged at
89, to the aforementioned Captain Herrington, who revivifies as well as
anyone the moral dilemma faced by armed service personnel who were given
clear instructions to only evacuate U.S. citizen and their dependents or
be court marshaled and jailed for disobeying orders.

**Captain Herrington's Moral Dilemma**

Mistakes, subterfuge, and misperceptions abound. Because of Ambassador
Martin's tragic delay, the filmmakers depict the U.S. Embassy as a
beehive of refugees desperate to leave the country. Special forces
advisor, Richard Armitage, shares a story that even his son was
surprised to learn about afterwards of how he was briefly locked up for
colluding with South Vietnamese Navy Captain, Kiem Do, to evacuate
30,000 refugees on ships across the South China Sea to the Philippines.
As he explained on camera, 'I thought that it was a lot easier to beg
forgiveness than to get permission.' Kennedy and her colleagues also
correct the historical record at times, such as clarifying that the
iconic photograph of a frenzied stream of humanity climbing a ladder to
a helicopter ready for take off during the fall of Saigon actually
occurred at the home of the C.I.A. station chief rather than at the U.S.
Embassy.

**Left to right, U.S. Embassy and a C.I.A. official's house in Saigon on
29 April 1975  
**

::: {#attachment_5399 .wp-caption .aligncenter style="width: 310px"}
[![U.S. Embassy and a C.I.A. official's house in Saigon on 29 April
1975](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Saigon-hubert-van-es-300x196.jpg){.size-medium
.wp-image-5399 loading="lazy" decoding="async"
aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5399" width="300" height="196"
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sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}](https://cstonline.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Saigon-hubert-van-es.jpg)

U.S. Embassy and a C.I.A. official's house in Saigon on 29 April 1975
:::

All in all, 'Last Days of Vietnam' is a gripping tale of rueful
retrospection not to be missed. The executives at *American Experience*
should be commended for taking on a subject that never sugar coats those
final 36 hours, which brought the 30-year Vietnam War to a humbling and
abrupt close for the United States. More than anything else, it's the
story of the South Vietnamese refugees who escaped, many of whom
repatriated to America, such as Miki Nguyen and his family, who now live
in Seattle. Miki recounts how his father, Ba, piloted a Chinook
alongside the U.S.S. Kirk, dropping him at six and the rest of his
family on to the deck before crashing the vehicle into the sea because
it was far too large to land on the ship. Ba then miraculously surfaced
in the water and was lifted aboard to safety.

**Miki Nguyen's Story**

Given that the incidents covered in 'Last Days of Vietnam' happened 40
years ago, many potential viewers may simply be unaware of the
cataclysmic events that surrounded the fall of Saigon, while others may
consider it ancient history and ask why revisit such an ignominious part
in America's past. The answer is that there is still a lot to learn that
Kennedy and her team uncovered in their research and present in the
documentary, such as 12 minutes of never before seen Super 8 footage
that vividly brings to life the helicopter airlift of the South
Vietnamese who were lucky enough to escape. All told, an estimated
130,000 refugees got out of the country during the fall of Saigon, many
of whom and their offspring make up the 1.5 million Vietnamese Americans
who currently reside in the United States.

What Kennedy and her team were able to uncover through their
resourcefulness will surprise even those audience members who lived
through and remember this pivotal historical moment first-hand. In a
nutshell, 'Last Days of Vietnam' never scapegoats or falls victim to the
one bad apple excuse: it clearly demonstrates that by 1975 the American
presence in South Vietnam was broken, inept, and unwilling to accept
defeat. The courageous individuals were those who bucked this system to
do the right thing. Kennedy's film will not be the last word on the
subject, but it makes its own unique and valuable contribution to the
conversation. Next up from PBS on the topic is Ken Burns and Lynn
Novick's 10-part 18½-hour miniseries, *[The Vietnam
War](http://kenburns.com/films/vietnam/)*, scheduled to premiere during
the fall of 2017.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

**[Gary R. Edgerton](http://www.garyedgerton.com/)** is Professor and
Dean of the College of Communication at Butler University. He has
published twelve books and more than eighty essays on a variety of
television, film and culture topics in a wide assortment of books,
scholarly journals, and encyclopedias. He also coedits the *[Journal of
Popular Film and
Television](http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/vjpf20/current#.VPtJbk10zcs).*


— Former U.S. Army Captain Stuart Herrington in the
<em>
 American Experience
</em>
’s ‘Last Days of Vietnam’  Award-winning producer-director, Rory Kennedy’s latest documentary, ‘Last Days of Vietnam,’ dramatically recreates the chaotic endgame and resulting moral quandary that accompanied America’s involvement in the Second Indochina War.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF THE ‘LAST DAYS OF VIETNAM’