Fall Of Saigon: Scenes from the Sudden End of a Long War by David Butler

by David Butler

NBC news reporter David Butler was there. He witnessed the apocalyptic departure of the U.S. from the rooftops of Saigon—the passionate end of a war that divided America for a decade. Now he recreates the pulse and feel of that climactic event, and the tumultuous weeks before it that marked the collapse of Vietnam, with a book so powerful, so immediate, that it reads with the authority of the best history and the excitement of great fiction.

Paperback

Reviews

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often wonder how those who insist on 'trigger' warnings on what they read or cope with older, particularly, non fiction works. How would those sensitive souls deal with reading about the nightmare flight from Da Nang on barges and the children, and adults, who had died and how their corpses were stacked like firewood on the docks of Cam Ranh. Probably they don't read such things but reading about it traumatised me because 'The Fall of Saigon' by David Butler made it so patiently obvious why, after Vietnam, it had taken nearly thirty years before America once again embarked on a series of delusional, and unsuccessful, series of foreign wars. Those later wars resemble Vietnam in the distressing fact that while USA military casualties are minutely recorded civilian deaths were not.

David Butler's book was published in 1985 - ten years after he left Saigon on the penultimate day of the existence of South Vietnam - and it is a splendid impressionistic compilation of the broader military and historical events as a review in the New York Times in 1985 said:

"...he has written a detailed and at times poignant journalistic re-creation of those terrible last 55 days, beginning with the North Vietnamese attack on Ban Me Thuot in the Central Highlands that unleashed the debacle." (full review at: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/12/bo... - not behind a paywall)

It is the breadth of personal anecdotes and the stories of individuals that are both the great strength and weakness of the book. Although I think 'The Fall of Saigon' is very good it cannot replace Frank Snepp's 'Decent Interval' as the essential account of the tawdry debacle in Saigon. In part Butler can't match Snepp who was the CIA's chief analyst in Saigon while Butler wasn't even a long term correspondent in Saigon. His portrayal of US Ambassador Martin is much more sympathetic then Snepp but I trust Snepp more.

One of the excellent reasons to read Butler's, Snepp's, or any of the other first rate accounts of the end of South Vietnam is as a corrective to all those who are trying to create a counter factual narrative that America could have won Vietnam and thus, in a sense America did win, or at least didn't lose. But the truth is that the loss in Vietnam was built into the DNA of the operation. What you need to realise is that the USA spent something in the region of $168 billion dollars (never mind the dead of both sides) to create something less substantial than a house of cards. If the USA had given everyone in Vietnam North and South (circa 42 million in 1975) a million dollars they might have won and saved billions and prevented so many deaths.

I have one more anecdote from Butler's book to share, it is a minor one, but it says everything about the arrogance of those 'ugly Americans' who thought they were working to create a free Vietnam but were always outsiders. It concerns the evacuation of one of the consular staffs in South Vietnam and how the consul was prepared to shoot dead a young conscript in the South Vietnamese army who was refusing to let the Americans pass his road block. In the end he did, so he wasn't shot but for anyone who knows their theology there is no difference between intention and action. The sin is in the intention. America's intentions in Vietnam, like its 21st century wars, were compromised from the beginning and nothing prospers on such foundations.