Louis’s Post-War Vietnam

Day 141 – South China Sea – Find Insignia on CruiseMapper

The first time Louis left Ho Chi Minh City, was on April 30, 1975, the day the city – Saigon then – was taken over by the North Vietnamese. Louis was a 28-year-old cameraman for Canadian Television Network (CTV), a newsman assigned to the world’s biggest story.

The imminent end to the interminable Vietnam War had been the talk in the rooftop bar at the Hotel Caravelle the night before.

Mortar fire was heavy and close. The South Vietnamese president had already resigned, and the city was encircled by North Vietnamese troops. It was just a matter of time before they took over the city, and now the time had come down to hours.

Into the Streets

When they awoke the next day, Louis and his reporter Henry Champ knew from the clamor outside their windows the time had come. They headed to the streets to cover the end of the Vietnam War. On the way out the door, they acquired a random Canadian tourist from the hotel lobby. The tourist (what was he thinking???) had recognized the red maple leaf on Louis’s camera and asked if he could come along as their soundman and escape from the country with them. They said he could.

Outside the hotel where Louis and Henry had lived for two months, chaos ruled. Everyone was going somewhere, anywhere, and fast. Men, women with children, whole families were running, biking, driving, scootering, fighting their way through the multitude, desperate to leave the city. Louis remembers filming, filming, filming but doesn’t remember whether Henry was interviewing, interviewing, interviewing at the same time. Knowing Henry, that must have been the case.

The pair worked the story until the only other Western journalists left were the ones who had decided to remain behind to cover the arrival of the North Vietnamese forces. After returning to the Caravelle for their luggage and remaining equipment, the two CTV newsmen and their volunteer soundman flagged down one of the US military buses ferrying evacuees to the airport and headed out.

Evacuation

But they had worked too long. The airport had fallen. The evacuation from the airport was over. Angry South Vietnamese soldiers left behind by the Americans fired on their bus, shattering the windows, scattering the passengers on the floor. Over the bus radio, Louis and Henry could hear the US Marine driver being ordered to take people anywhere but the US embassy.

The beach was mayhem. Boats were all but sinking under the desperate crowds that piled into them. The bus passengers unloaded briefly, then realized a sea evacuation would be impossible. Piling back into the bus, they demanded to be taken to the embassy. The driver complied.

The scene at the embassy is the one everyone of a certain age still remembers – the throngs of desperate people scrambling up the 14-foot wall in a frantic climb for safety. Most of climbers were Vietnamese, a few were Westerners. It didn’t matter that Louis and Henry were not Americans. White faces were all given a hand up and over. Brown faces were required to show an exit paper the US had provided its workers. Those with papers got a hand up. Those without got a shove back to the ground.

Louis doesn’t remember how he scaled a 14-foot wall, but he and Henry made it to the top and the helping hands. Once inside the compound, they resumed filming. After all, this was the world’s biggest story. Every 10 minutes, a helicopter lifted off, headed for an aircraft carrier off the coast to drop a load of evacuees before returning for more.

Louis and Henry boarded one of the last Chinooks (like the one pictured below) to leave before the ambassador himself took off. In less than 24 hours, 7,000 people left Vietnam the way they did, part of the largest helicopter evacuation in history.

Having waited so long to leave, Louis and Henry were now the only TV journalists on the aircraft carrier. Louis became the newsman who filmed the black clouds of helicopters flown from the abandoned US air base by escaping South Vietnamese carrying their families and pets and the tumult as one emptied helicopter after another was rolled into the South China Sea to make room for the next. Louis finally reached land at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, exhilarated by having been at the center of such a story, too young to fully appreciate the rarity of it.

The Return

Returning to Ho Chi Minh City via Insignia, Louis was on a mission to find as much what he could of that day and the two months of war coverage that preceded it.

The Hotel Caravelle is now the five-star Caravelle Hotel where drinks are still poured in a rooftop bar but to a vastly different crowd. The view to the Majestic, a war-era hotel that Louis and Henry had watched burn from their perch atop the Caravelle, is obscured by a next-door high-rise, but the famous Continental Hotel with its charming French patio furniture is still in full view.

To hunt down more sights, Partout hopped on the backs of two scooters with guides who zipped us around the city. The grandchildren of citizens who were young when Louis left the city the first time, the guides cheerfully sought out locations their ghost from the past distinctly or vaguely remembered.

Among the locations was the former US personnel residence at 22 Gia Long Street made famous for its rooftop evacuation of people who reached it by ladder. Louis’s guide found an image online to help set up a photo of the building (yellow, right). Today, 22 Gia Long Street is an apartment building. Before covid, Louis would have sipped coffee in its rooftop coffee house the guide said anyone could enter until the pandemic ended its long life.

The holy grail of Louis’s quest was the embassy building itself. Alas, the complex turned out to be long-gone, demolished in the late 1990s along with its iconic wall, both replaced by a gleaming new consulate.

Other memories awaited reviving. In the War Remnants Museum (the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes until that proved to be less than highly marketable), the top floor is given over mostly to the photographs and lives of journalists who lost their lives covering the Vietnam wars. Among these was Michel Laurent, a Frenchman one year older than Louis when he was killed during action outside Saigon on April 28, 1975. The last photojournalist to die in the war, Laurent’s body lay in a ditch where Louis saw him on his own last ride from the front.

Back on the good ship Insignia, an eternity away from 1975 Saigon, guests asked how Louis’s quest affected him emotionally. He said it made him feel old. Landmark buildings may remain in the city but relatively few of the people who live there now were alive on April 30, 1975, or care much about it except as a date in history, long past and personally irrelevant. History has moved on.

Another Question Answered

Lizzy asked, “What trick in your 215 square feet is most clever that could be used in a ‘real room’ design?”

We tried to design an accessory dwelling unit for the back yard of our Sandpoint house last summer but gave up on the project when we could not get a 1-bedroom, 1-bath apartment much under 900 square feet. Now, we feel like designing 500 square feet would be a snap. The biggest trick would be cutting the bathroom down to size. We can stand in ours and touch all four walls without a stretch and you know what? It gets the job done, at least for one of us at a time; the rest is frosting. The next trick is the tried-and-true one of built-in storage.

And the final trick? Adopting “less is more” as a mantra and living smaller and neater. “Shipshape” has taken on a whole new meaning on the ship.

Where’s Snowy?

Besides hiding in the rooftop bar of the Rex Hotel, scene of the “five o’clock follies” where foreign correspondents were briefed daily by the American Information Service during the Vietnam War.

Coming Soon!

Fellow Travelers – A Family Story