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March 25, 1975
Mar. 25th, 2026 11:19 amI hadn't seen dad since August the year before when he'd been brought home from Saigon for a week. Sis and I got three days out of summer camp to see him. It's how I got to see Nixon's resignation on TV (we barely had radio at summer camp). It wasn't until 1986 that I asked Dad if that's why he'd been brought back. Turns out that he'd been brought back to brief the National Security Council at Camp David and had been in the White House (not the Room Where It Happened, but close) during the resignation speech.
But today's date was when he came back, end of the tour of duty. I greeted him with "We just heard on the radio that Da Nang fell." His response was "That's the end, then." At that point we hugged and said "love you" and "missed you," but we were a military family of a particular time and culture.
The official date of the Fall of Saigon is April 30, my parents wedding anniversary. Between March 25 and April 30, dad took quite a bit of his saved leave. It had been planned, but he took more than originally planned because I got a virus.
Now the virus is interesting. The doctor suspected mononucleosis -- which panicked me because there used to be PSAs about "the kissing disease" -- and cultured me for it. My fever was dreadfully high. But when the doctor called that night about the culture -- he'd fast tracked it due to the fever -- he stated they'd never seen anything like it before.
I think things might have been easier for Dad if he'd been going to the Pentagon a couple of times a week. There would have been others who understood better than we could.
There was a project to get as many of the mixed-race kids out of there that they could. They were reasonably certain that non-Asian children would get the mothers killed and might get the children themselves harmed.
It mostly went well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Tan_Son_Nhut_Lockheed_C-5_crash
One plane crashed. We saw it on the news and were, of course, deeply saddened by the 138 people killed. About two hours after the news, Dad got a direct call. His secretary, Loni, had been one of the people killed on the flight. In the ten days-ish that he'd been home we'd heard stories about her helping people get in to see him or keeping people from seeing him or just about her general good humor. After that week, I heard her name maybe a dozen times before his death. He just couldn't tell stories, not humorous ones at any rate, about that time.
If you subscribe to Prime Video, you can see "The Last Days of Vietnam" for free. It helped me pull a few things into perspective. If you're on the close enough filter that you know my real name, the January 14, 2021 entry on this blog has an interview with my father about this time in his life.
But today's date was when he came back, end of the tour of duty. I greeted him with "We just heard on the radio that Da Nang fell." His response was "That's the end, then." At that point we hugged and said "love you" and "missed you," but we were a military family of a particular time and culture.
The official date of the Fall of Saigon is April 30, my parents wedding anniversary. Between March 25 and April 30, dad took quite a bit of his saved leave. It had been planned, but he took more than originally planned because I got a virus.
Now the virus is interesting. The doctor suspected mononucleosis -- which panicked me because there used to be PSAs about "the kissing disease" -- and cultured me for it. My fever was dreadfully high. But when the doctor called that night about the culture -- he'd fast tracked it due to the fever -- he stated they'd never seen anything like it before.
I think things might have been easier for Dad if he'd been going to the Pentagon a couple of times a week. There would have been others who understood better than we could.
There was a project to get as many of the mixed-race kids out of there that they could. They were reasonably certain that non-Asian children would get the mothers killed and might get the children themselves harmed.
It mostly went well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Tan_Son_Nhut_Lockheed_C-5_crash
One plane crashed. We saw it on the news and were, of course, deeply saddened by the 138 people killed. About two hours after the news, Dad got a direct call. His secretary, Loni, had been one of the people killed on the flight. In the ten days-ish that he'd been home we'd heard stories about her helping people get in to see him or keeping people from seeing him or just about her general good humor. After that week, I heard her name maybe a dozen times before his death. He just couldn't tell stories, not humorous ones at any rate, about that time.
If you subscribe to Prime Video, you can see "The Last Days of Vietnam" for free. It helped me pull a few things into perspective. If you're on the close enough filter that you know my real name, the January 14, 2021 entry on this blog has an interview with my father about this time in his life.
