George Packer
“This is not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on CNN on Sunday—and he was right. By the time helicopters took off from Saigon rooftops in April 1975, the evacuation of endangered South Vietnamese had been going on for several weeks. The first stage was unofficial, and often illegal, as American diplomats, intelligence and military officers, veterans, and private citizens scrambled to get their Vietnamese associates onto CIA black flights without passenger manifests, or rickety naval vessels out to the South China Sea. The official evacuation began only in the last days, when American leaders finally faced that the situation was hopeless. By the time the last helicopter left the U.S. embassy, on April 30, 135,000 Vietnamese had been rescued. A few hours later, the first North Vietnamese division reached downtown Saigon.
