It came as no surprise Fall of Saigon remembered on 40th anniversary
Thomas Drewitz is shown as a U.S. Army lieutenant circa 1969 in Bien Hoa at the III Corps Tactical Zone of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.
John Tecklenburg II of Amwell Township is shown in a pensive moment in this photo shot in the late 1960s while he served in the Vietnam War.
John Tecklenburg II of Amwell Township is shown in the center rear, wearing glasses, with the U.S. Army 46th Engineering Battalion in Long Binh, Vietnam, circa 1969.
District Judge Larry Hopkins is shown with a nameplate crafted in Vietnam, something that serves as a reminder of his service in the war there.
The Rev. George Chortos is shown inside Immaculate Conception Church.
The Fall of Saigon that ended America’s involvement in the Vietnam War proved to be a bittersweet moment for veteran John Tecklenburg II.
The Amwell Township man was earlier assigned to a U.S. Army construction and engineering branch that built about 40 miles of Highway 1 from Saigon to Xuan Loc, the same road the communist forces would use to retake the city and South Vietnam in 1975.
“I have some mixed feelings …” Tecklenburg said, recalling the two-day attack on Saigon that many Americans watched on television news programs 40 years ago Wednesday and Thursday.
“I was watching it on TV, and I really thought what a waste of human effort it was,” said Tecklenburg, who became a corporate investment attorney after the misbegotten war came to an end.
It would take the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army two more years to capture what is now known as Ho Chi Minh City after the last U.S. combat soldiers left South Vietnam in March 1973. Some U.S. Marines remained behind that year, along with those advising the South Vietnam Army, until the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon on April 29, 1975.
American Ambassador Graham Martin procrastinated in ordering an evacuation of the embassy in Saigon, before journalists, U.S. staff and members of the military scrambled to flee the country as the city was coming under attack.
Over the next 18 hours nearly 1,000 Americans and thousands of Vietnamese refugees were evacuated to ships by U.S. helicopters. Two Marines were killed in an April 30, 1975, attack on Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat Airport, making them the last Americans to die in the war. There were many South Vietnamese abandoned at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon by the time the evacuation was called off.
Those who sympathized with the United States feared for their lives, and many of them would be sent to reunification labor camps after the war’s end.
The fall, however, came as no surprise to many American veterans of the war, including Thomas Drewitz, a retired Washington dentist who served in Vietnam.
Drewitz was a U.S. Army lieutenant assigned to a real estate office, and he knew the war’s end was approaching when his unit received orders in 1970 to start turning property back over to the Vietnamese.
“I felt badly about that,” Drewitz said. “I felt if (U.S. troops) were leaving, people were dying for nothing.”
The war resulted in the deaths of 58,300 Americans and countless more Vietnamese.
District Judge Larry Hopkins of Charleroi also knew from his experiences in Vietnam that the North Vietnamese Army would take control of South Vietnam.
“When we left Vietnam we kind of knew Saigon would fall,” said Hopkins, who served in a U.S. Air Force airmail terminal in Danang from 1971 to 1972.
“I believed wholeheartedly we had to stop the spread of communism,” said Hopkins, referring to one of the reasons Congress authorized President Lyndon Johnson to take any actions needed to prevent attacks against U.S. forces in Vietnam in August 1964.
The defeat in the often-misunderstood war was an embarrassment for the U.S. military, a Vietnam War expert said.
The Fall of Saigon took place after a “tortuous few months of a steadily collapsing South Vietnam regime,” said Bob Rodrigues, an adjutant professor at Duquesne University, where he teaches a course on the history of the Vietnam War.
America at the time was recognizing the significance of the 200th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, that launched the Revolutionary War.
“And (then) 200 years later we were forced to finally abandon a misplaced plan to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and step aside for the independence of Vietnam, a country that had been fighting for its independence off and on for 2,000 years,” said Rodrigues, who also teaches at Chartiers Valley High School.
“Given the context of our upcoming celebration of the bicentennial, this was perhaps a low point in United States history that we were leaving a 20-year commitment in such an ignominious manner,” he said. “The United States was experiencing a first taste of defeat in history, and it was less than palatable.”
“It was kind of sad,” said the Rev. George Chortos, a retired Roman Catholic priest in Washington who served two tours as a chaplain in the Southeast Asian country, and left there in 1973.
Chortos said many Americans at the time had misconceptions about “what was going on over there” while support for the war was divided and the nation was seeing anti-war protests.
“Millions of people fled for their lives because if the North took over they would be killed,” he said. “They had to get out of there or they were going to die. We were fighting for people’s lives. Unfortunately the message didn’t get through.”
Many Americans believed in 1965 during the buildup in Vietnam that our military was infallible following the country’s victory in World War II, Rodrigues said.
“Fathers expected their sons to serve the country as they had done; sons sought the opportunity to come home as heroes like their fathers had done,” he said.
Rodrigues said Americans today are more aware of the “machinations of their government,” and that is one of the legacies of the Vietnam War.
“Vietnam is a distant mirror that needs to be revisited again and again and tapped for its lessons,” he said.