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Those Who Stayed: A Vietnam Diary
An American Eyewitness in Vietnam at the End of War and Beginning of Peace
By the end of April 1975 almost all Americans and thousands of terrified Vietnamese had left Saigon, fearing the bloodbath predicted by many if the Communists took over. But Claudia Krich and a few other humanitarian aid volunteers stayed. They had no weapons, no cement barriers, no bomb shelter, and no real safety, but they were determined to remain in the city.
Those Who Stayed is Claudia Krich’s personal first-hand account of the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and the beginning of the new Provisional Revolutionary Government. Her vivid impressions of those intense, historic days emerge primarily from her journal, capturing the uncertainty, fear, and excitement as the North Vietnamese soldiers arrived. She intertwines personal, sometimes heart-breaking episodes with major historic events.
Several short pieces by others with unusual first-hand knowledge enliven and contextualize the book. Fascinating and unique, engaging and entertaining, Those Who Stayed is the extraordinary story of an adventurous young woman in the right place at the right time to chronicle a vital moment in history.
By the end of April 1975 almost all Americans and thousands of terrified Vietnamese had left Saigon, fearing the bloodbath predicted by many if the Communists took over. But Claudia Krich and a few other humanitarian aid volunteers stayed. They had no weapons, no cement barriers, no bomb shelter, and no real safety, but they were determined to remain in the city.
Those Who Stayed is Claudia Krich’s personal first-hand account of the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and the beginning of the new Provisional Revolutionary Government. Her vivid impressions of those intense, historic days emerge primarily from her journal, capturing the uncertainty, fear, and excitement as the North Vietnamese soldiers arrived. She intertwines personal, sometimes heart-breaking episodes with major historic events.
Several short pieces by others with unusual first-hand knowledge enliven and contextualize the book. Fascinating and unique, engaging and entertaining, Those Who Stayed is the extraordinary story of an adventurous young woman in the right place at the right time to chronicle a vital moment in history.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published April 1, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 27, 2026
Can you imagine being a U.S. humanitarian worker in Vietnam in early 1975, as the forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation Front (NLF) took control of large areas of the country as they marched toward Sài Gòn? The word on the street was that upon taking Sài Gòn, the rebel forces would carry out mass reprisals against anyone they associated with the U.S.-supported “puppet” regime in the South, potentially hundreds of thousands of people. Expecting that no U.S. citizen would fare well in the resulting chaos, the U.S. Embassy frantically urged everyone to get out of the country while they still could.
Claudia Krich lived out just such a scenario. She worked through the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as part of a small team of U.S. aid workers collaborating with local staff at a rehab center for war-injured Vietnamese in city of Quảng Ngãi, located on the coast, well north of Sài Gòn. As the revolutionaries approached Quảng Ngãi, Claudia, her husband, Keith Brinton, and most of her expatriate colleagues heeded the call to get out of town, relocating to the relative safety of Sài Gòn.
She and Keith did not, however, decide to leave Sài Gòn in the frantic exodus taking place in late April of 1975. “Those Who Stayed” is Krich’s first-person, account of what she saw, thought, and did, between April 8 and July 8, 1975. Because she was an avid diary writer, the bulk of the book is a series of diary entries made during that time. I assume that she has edited the entries to make them more accessible to someone reading them five decades later.
As someone who was living in El Salvador when the rebels there carried out a “final offensive” in 1989, I found the diary fascinating. There must be a story about why it took 50 years for this book to appear. The author makes no claim to do anything other than letting us see what she was seeing, and she does that in a very compelling way.
At the time, Krich felt that the fears of mass violent reprisals were way overblown, which is one reason that she and Keith decided to stay, accompany the Vietnamese in a turbulent time, and see what would happen. In her telling, the victorious soldiers of the National Liberation Front and, eventually, the North Vietnamese Army emerge more like curious visitors, smiling for photos and overwhelmed by the mind-boggling materialism of Sài Gòn. Far from the blood-thirsty warriors, bent on vergence imagined by U.S. officials. Krich does report on killings and other abuses in the aftermath of the communist takeover, but nothing on the scale of what the U.S. Embassy—and many Sài Gòn residents—were predicting.
While there is little evidence of large-scale reprisals after the communist takeover of Vietnam, the victors in the American War did not simply say “let’s let bygones be bygones.” They organized a “re-education” program that obliged hundreds of thousands of southern supporters of the U.S. project to provide forced labor and undergo intensive ideological conditioning. Krich deals with this phenomenon as it begins to unfold around her, but from her vantage point, the author could not possibly comprehend the scope of the program or the abuses that would come to characterize it over time.
Gareth Porter, an award-winning correspondent with deep knowledge of postwar Vietnam, gives a more complete treatment of the re-education program in an appendix, but this book does not begin to provide a complete view of the full impact of postwar re-education in Vietnam.
Much of Krich’s time is spent interacting with soldiers and communist “cadre” in administrative roles in the new Provisional Revolutionary Government. She makes several visits to an office attempting to secure permission for her and Keith to move from one tiny apartment to another. She encounters a brick wall until she magically stumbles into the right person, a friendly cadre who not only grants her permission but tells her that it wasn’t necessary for her to seek such permission in the first place. These entries offer an interesting view from below of a new bureaucracy in formation.
One of the subsections of the diary entries is entitled “A Culture of Visiting,” and at least a third of the diary describes Krich making visits to friends and acquaintances or receiving such visits in her home. This verges on being too much of a good thing, but it does provide an interesting window on a culture in which interpersonal connection plays a very different role than it does in the culture Krich left behind in the U.S.
Many important life moments occur in the three months covered by this book. Krich becomes pregnant, loses her pregnancy, and then, inadvertently, becomes pregnant again. After a period of difficult decisions, Claudia decides to go forward with the pregnancy and the desire to protect it becomes an important factor in Krich’s growing sense of urgency about finding a way to return to the U.S.
It is surprisingly easy for Claudia and her husband to get permission to leave the country on one of the planes taking foreigners out of Sài Gòn, but it is then maddeningly difficult to turn that permission into an actual departure. By this time, the young couple has learned the value of unbridled persistence, and the book’s final diary entry reports that they have flown to Hong Kong and then back to the U.S.
After the diary entries end with her safely back in the U.S., an epilogue responds to some of the reader’s leftover curiosity. We learn that the pregnancy about which Claudia was very concerned in Vietnam led to the couple’s first daughter, Airy, who eventually had two sisters. It took some time, but Claudia and Keith eventually got back to Vietnam and re-connected with many of their closest friends there. The book ends with several short topical pieces providing explanations of issues mentioned but not fully explored by Krich in her diaries. These are helpful, but do not begin to answer the questions raised in the diary entries.
With this book, Claudia Krich has made a unique contribution to our understanding of a critical moment in our history and, especially, in the history of a people who suffered greatly in what they continue to call the American War.
Claudia Krich lived out just such a scenario. She worked through the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) as part of a small team of U.S. aid workers collaborating with local staff at a rehab center for war-injured Vietnamese in city of Quảng Ngãi, located on the coast, well north of Sài Gòn. As the revolutionaries approached Quảng Ngãi, Claudia, her husband, Keith Brinton, and most of her expatriate colleagues heeded the call to get out of town, relocating to the relative safety of Sài Gòn.
She and Keith did not, however, decide to leave Sài Gòn in the frantic exodus taking place in late April of 1975. “Those Who Stayed” is Krich’s first-person, account of what she saw, thought, and did, between April 8 and July 8, 1975. Because she was an avid diary writer, the bulk of the book is a series of diary entries made during that time. I assume that she has edited the entries to make them more accessible to someone reading them five decades later.
As someone who was living in El Salvador when the rebels there carried out a “final offensive” in 1989, I found the diary fascinating. There must be a story about why it took 50 years for this book to appear. The author makes no claim to do anything other than letting us see what she was seeing, and she does that in a very compelling way.
At the time, Krich felt that the fears of mass violent reprisals were way overblown, which is one reason that she and Keith decided to stay, accompany the Vietnamese in a turbulent time, and see what would happen. In her telling, the victorious soldiers of the National Liberation Front and, eventually, the North Vietnamese Army emerge more like curious visitors, smiling for photos and overwhelmed by the mind-boggling materialism of Sài Gòn. Far from the blood-thirsty warriors, bent on vergence imagined by U.S. officials. Krich does report on killings and other abuses in the aftermath of the communist takeover, but nothing on the scale of what the U.S. Embassy—and many Sài Gòn residents—were predicting.
While there is little evidence of large-scale reprisals after the communist takeover of Vietnam, the victors in the American War did not simply say “let’s let bygones be bygones.” They organized a “re-education” program that obliged hundreds of thousands of southern supporters of the U.S. project to provide forced labor and undergo intensive ideological conditioning. Krich deals with this phenomenon as it begins to unfold around her, but from her vantage point, the author could not possibly comprehend the scope of the program or the abuses that would come to characterize it over time.
Gareth Porter, an award-winning correspondent with deep knowledge of postwar Vietnam, gives a more complete treatment of the re-education program in an appendix, but this book does not begin to provide a complete view of the full impact of postwar re-education in Vietnam.
Much of Krich’s time is spent interacting with soldiers and communist “cadre” in administrative roles in the new Provisional Revolutionary Government. She makes several visits to an office attempting to secure permission for her and Keith to move from one tiny apartment to another. She encounters a brick wall until she magically stumbles into the right person, a friendly cadre who not only grants her permission but tells her that it wasn’t necessary for her to seek such permission in the first place. These entries offer an interesting view from below of a new bureaucracy in formation.
One of the subsections of the diary entries is entitled “A Culture of Visiting,” and at least a third of the diary describes Krich making visits to friends and acquaintances or receiving such visits in her home. This verges on being too much of a good thing, but it does provide an interesting window on a culture in which interpersonal connection plays a very different role than it does in the culture Krich left behind in the U.S.
Many important life moments occur in the three months covered by this book. Krich becomes pregnant, loses her pregnancy, and then, inadvertently, becomes pregnant again. After a period of difficult decisions, Claudia decides to go forward with the pregnancy and the desire to protect it becomes an important factor in Krich’s growing sense of urgency about finding a way to return to the U.S.
It is surprisingly easy for Claudia and her husband to get permission to leave the country on one of the planes taking foreigners out of Sài Gòn, but it is then maddeningly difficult to turn that permission into an actual departure. By this time, the young couple has learned the value of unbridled persistence, and the book’s final diary entry reports that they have flown to Hong Kong and then back to the U.S.
After the diary entries end with her safely back in the U.S., an epilogue responds to some of the reader’s leftover curiosity. We learn that the pregnancy about which Claudia was very concerned in Vietnam led to the couple’s first daughter, Airy, who eventually had two sisters. It took some time, but Claudia and Keith eventually got back to Vietnam and re-connected with many of their closest friends there. The book ends with several short topical pieces providing explanations of issues mentioned but not fully explored by Krich in her diaries. These are helpful, but do not begin to answer the questions raised in the diary entries.
With this book, Claudia Krich has made a unique contribution to our understanding of a critical moment in our history and, especially, in the history of a people who suffered greatly in what they continue to call the American War.
March 26, 2025
I have just finished reading Those Who Stayed : A Vietnam Diary. It is a diary of fear, hope, courage and bravery. Claudia's clear prose makes the journey easy to follow and the historical context appendix tells what happened after Claudia left Vietnam. I highly recommend reading this book to anyone who is interested in Vietnam history.
July 18, 2025
A fascinating, on-the-ground account of life after the "fall" of Saigon. In the States, we feared a bloodbath. But Kritch saw enemies greeting one another for the first time, people feeling free to complain, without fearing their neighbors might be secret police, and a new government forming, it's citizens energized and hopeful.
March 3, 2026
I did learn quite a bit about what life in Saigon was actually like during the transition and about the role of U.S. propaganda in attempting to create chaos. However, because she didn't actually stay past the transition at the end of the U.S. war there, the book seems naive in its implication that all was well.
June 9, 2025
I hope readers will enjoy this unique story of my choice to not flee with the American evacuation. Only a handful of us stayed, and I'm the only one who kept a diary. It's been 50 years since that war ended, but readers tell me this new
book is suspenseful and fascinating to read, and it is timely.
book is suspenseful and fascinating to read, and it is timely.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews