The plan to take the Afghan
translators out of Afghanistan to a safe place via an airlift is for me an
uneasy echo of what happened at the end of the Vietnam War, when a similar plan
was in place to take South Vietnamese who had assisted the U.S. military to
safety. Some people may recall a series of unfortunate decisions meant that the
planned airlift never happened. I vividly recall watching the fall of Saigon on
network television. It was a shock; the United States didn’t lose wars. Not
like that.
All of the remaining American staff
were safely rescued. But thousands of South Vietnamese who were dependent on us
were on the brink of being abandoned. Of course, I hope we do better this time,
but we’ll have to wait and see. However, the Taliban is moving quickly to
overrun the country. Here’s hoping history does not repeat itself.
It wasn’t until decades later
when I was researching the fall of Saigon for my book Man with No Yesterdays
that I learned of the remarkable effort to rescue as many of our South
Vietnamese friends as we possibly could.
Vietnam was called “the
helicopter war” for good reason. This remarkable aircraft ferried our fighting
men to battles, extracted them from battlefields, dropped supplies to remote
outposts, provided transportation of medical personnel and for the wounded to
field hospitals. Many brave men died piloting the crafts. Many door gunners
died. Helicopter pilots sometimes performed remarkably heroic feats.
Thanks to the marvels of the
internet, while researching this book I found news coverage from the CBC and so
watched exactly what my character Jake Cameron saw. Since I had learned more
about the importance of helicopters in the kind of warfare we encountered in
Vietnam, seeing those scenes of the aircraft being ditched into the ocean I
found even more disturbing and tragic. It became almost an analogy of the war
itself: all the valiant fighting and loss of life ─ to what end?
When searching for a photo to include
in an addendum to the book I came across Dr. Bertram Zarins’ remarkable picture
of a chopper dying in the South China Sea after ferrying refugees from Saigon
to the waiting ships of Task Force 76. There was not room on the ships for the
many helicopters that had been pressed into use for the escape of additional
South Vietnamese.
The original plan of an airlift
by fixed wing aircraft, which would have rescued many more, was thwarted by the
speed of the North Vietnamese Army’s march on Saigon. The use of helicopters,
the last resort for attempting evacuation, became Operation Frequent Wind. The
Marine helicopter pilots flew back and forth for almost twenty-four hours
straight and ended up saving nearly 6,000 South Vietnamese.
One more example of personal
valor by our magnificent military.
Photo courtesy of Dr. Bertram Zarins
