The Major's Story
No one has a better story of the fall of Saigon than James Kean, the marine major in charge of the embassy guards and the last commander out of Vietnam.
Twenty-five years after the city’s collapse, CBS News Correspondent Phil Jones still remembers what it was like to came face to face with frantic South Vietnamese civilians clamoring to escape, and is still angry about what he feels was a job America left undone.
In the early spring of 1975, as South Vietnam was falling, there was panic, beginning in the northern stronghold of Da Nang and moving south. As April drew to a close and the South Vietnamese regime teetered, desperate civilians fought to catch the last plane out of town to escape the advancing North Vietnam army. Everyone knew Saigon would soon fall.
"It's amazing," recalls Kean. "It was like, you know, the typhoon is coming, or, you know, the hurricane is coming and things get quiet and still and you can see the panic."
News footage showed people clawing at the walls of the embassy. Some climbed through barbed wire trying to get in.
"They were afraid that it was the end of the world," says Kean. "This Chinese businessman came up to…one of the marines on the wall. He handed him a brown paper sack and a baby. This was his grandchild."
"The marine looked at the brown paper sack. It was full of uncut gems. And the marine had to hand him back the baby and bag and say, 'I'm sorry.'"
Eventually, crowds stormed the embassy, and a hundred combat marines were brought in to help Kean's men. Still, there were too many Vietnamese and too few helicopters.
"You had 19-year-old marines deciding who lived and who died, who went and who didn't go," remembers Kean.
Around the embassy, everything was unraveling. The evacuation of Vietnamese was halted, and with chaos on the ground, Kean and his men fled to a chopper pad atop the embassy, waiting to be rescued. Eventually, 11 marines were left on the rooftop, "watching the city go berserk," the last hours of a long night of not knowing if or when they would get out.
"There were 17 divisions of North Vietnamese coming across the bridges into Saigon and when the sun came up we saw them," says Kean.
Despite the fear, the 11 Marines—the last bastions of a force of American servicemen that once numbered over 500,000 and lost 58,000 men—faced the final failure of U.S> policy in Vietnam.
"I went through the entire emotional gamut on the roof, from tears of being pissed off and ashamed," remembers Kean.
Finally, the chopper appeared. It was over for the Americans, but not for the Vietnamese he left behind.
"I can't tell you how mortified I was, doing this job when we knew that we were going to turn off the lights."
Today, Kean is comfortably retired on Cape Cod. Still, not a day goes by that he doesn't think about the fall of Saigon.
"I was ashamed. I was ngry. And all I could think about was that I went to that war and never lost a fight the whole time I was there, and we lost the damn war."