Last Days in Vietnam Page #3

It held that in an emergency,

all Americans still in the country,

about 6,000 people, would be evacuated

and that no South Vietnamese

would be evacuated with them.

I was a student.

The school's not closing,

but it seemed like nobody's

interested in school anymore.

You can't stay here.

You can't live with the Communists,

especially if you have a

connection with the Americans.

Then you really gotta get out.

If we really made up a list

of endangered South Vietnamese,

the ones who really worked

closely with us during the war,

this number could be 150,000, 200,000.

Including their families,

many more than that.

But the idea of talking

about an evacuation

and of planning for an

evacuation of Americans,

let alone an evacuation of Vietnamese,

was still anathema in the embassy.

If you mean, "Is South Vietnam

on the imminent verge of collapse?"

I think the answer is

quite definitely no.

We were dealing with an ambassador

who was just convinced that somehow,

he was going to be able to pull this out

and that there wouldn't

have to be an evacuation

and therefore, there

wouldn't have to be a concern

about evacuating South Vietnamese.

The situation in South Vietnam

has reached a critical phase

requiring immediate and positive

decisions by this government.

There are tens of thousands

of South Vietnamese employees

of the United States government,

of news agencies,

of contractors and

businesses for many years

whose lives, with their dependents,

are in very grave peril.

I'm therefore asking the Congress

to appropriate without

delay $722 million

for emergency military

assistance for South Vietnam.

If the very worst were to happen,

at least allow the orderly

evacuation of Americans

and endangered South

Vietnamese to places of safety.

There was no way in 1975

that the Congress was

going to vote any money

to go to the aid of South Vietnam.

We had pulled out our troops in 1973

and public opinion

at that point shifted.

The people of the United

States, having seen Watergate,

having seen the

deception of the generals,

weren't about to give any

help in Southeast Asia.

And you know, Kissinger knew this.

We knew we were not going

to get the $722 million.

By that time it made no big difference,

but President Ford said

he owed it to Vietnam to make a request.

We've sent, so to speak,

battleship after battleship

and bomber after bomber

and 500,000 and more men

and billions and billions of dollars.

If billions and billions didn't do

at a time when we had all our men there,

how can $722 million save the day?

This is the way my map

looked in mid-April.

The North Vietnamese just

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