At the height of the Vietnam War, Ralph White tried to join the U.S. Marine Corps but was turned down because of an eye injury he had sustained playing tennis. As the fighting drew to a tumultuous close in April 1975, however, 27-year-old White was in Saigon, acting true to the leatherneck motto “Semper fidelis” – only by civilian means.
By cajoling, twisting arms and cleverly bypassing red tape, White found an ingenious way to rescue 112 Vietnamese employees of Chase National Bank and their family members: he simply adopted all of them in the presence of U.S. justices of the peace on emergency duty at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat Airport. In the face of an impending defeat of the United States’ South Vietnamese ally, this American civilian who had wanted to be a Marine achieved a small but remarkable victory.
Four days later, on April 30, Soviet-made T-54 tanks completed the communist conquest of South Vietnam by bursting through the gate of the presidential palace in Saigon. Inside, newly appointed South Vietnamese President Duong Van “Big” Minh offered to transfer power. North Vietnamese Col. Bui Tin replied, “There is no question of your transferring power ... You cannot give up what you don’t have.”
To me, a German, these words sounded identical to the terms the Allies imposed on my country in 1945 when I was still a child: unconditional surrender. The irony was that while at the end of World War II a manifestly evil government was forced to surrender this way, the opposite was true 30 years later in Saigon: a totalitarian regime with deeply inhumane features bullied a much more humane – though faulty – opponent into capitulating unconditionally, and the world cheered.
Having covered Vietnam for West Germany’s largest publishing house over a period of five years, I concluded that the wrong side had won. There was no reason to rejoice. Yet when President Gerald Ford proclaimed at Tulane University in New Orleans that the Vietnam War “is finished as far as America is concerned,” one week before South Vietnam was finally crushed, he received a standing ovation.
