Sometimes in tragic, even shameful circumstances, individuals make heroic decisions.
The challenge of Oscar-nominated “Last Days in Vietnam,” airing April 28, 8-10 p.m. on RMPBS, is the difficulty of celebrating the moral actions of a few within the amoral war that haunts the nation. The mind reels while trying to hold both thoughts at once.
Yet the narrowly focused film, chronicling a short period hour by hour, contains a world of cultural, historical , familial and bureaucratic strife.
The events surrounding the fall of Saigon, 40 years ago this week, are representative of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam overall, the film argues. The end game was as full of blunders and miscalculations as the entire American engagement in southeast Asia: promises that couldn’t be kept, a war that was unwinnable, an international commitment that couldn’t be abandoned.
Thankfully, in the decisive moments, certain government and military professionals went against orders — trusted their gut, as one puts it — and did the right thing.
The film begins with the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon planning the troop pullout while the North Vietnamese continue prosecuting the war. The narrative then flashes forward to April 1975 as U.S. personnel are ordered to leave, panic spreads in the streets of Saigon, and South Vietnamese loyalists try to flee the country.
Tremendous archival footage and detailed personal accounts allow director-producer Kennedy to piece together a tick-tock of the chaotic final days and hours.
As the Viet Cong make a final push into South Vietnam and are poised to take Saigon, several American Embassy personnel, helicopter pilots and commanders must decide whether to obey orders from Washington to evacuate only Americans or to try to save as many Vietnamese loyalists as possible.
“Last Days in Vietnam,” a compelling 2014 feature-length documentary, captures the emotion as well as the history behind the minutes and hours of the evacuation.
When it was time to pull the plug on the operation, an agreed-upon signal was sounded: The American radio announcer would say it’s hot, “105 degrees and climbing,” and the station would immediately play Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas.” The music, played over images of crowds pushing to get out of Saigon, is suitably mind-blowing.
“The burning question was, who goes and who gets left behind,” retired Colonel and veteran U.S. diplomat Stuart Herrington recalls. He was the last member of the U.S. Army to leave Vietnam, from the Embassy rooftop. His question hangs in the air as the camera pans the faces of desperate Vietnamese, many of whom had worked with the Americans and were “dead men walking” if they didn’t make it out.
The scenes are heartbreaking. So is the commentary by Binh Pho, a child at the time, who made it as far as the embassy courtyard, listening to helicopters come and go. He still hears the sound in his head.
The iconic photographs of people climbing the gates or lined up, hoping to get on the last helicopters off the roof (of the American Embassy, also at an apartment building, on a tennis court, a parking lot) tell only part of the story.
Even if you followed news accounts at the time, or studied the war in the decades since, chances are you haven’t heard this angle on the events.
“I thought it was a lot easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission,” Richard Armitage recalls. Armitage, a member of the office of the U.S. Defense Attache, organized a massive naval evacuation — “like something out of Exodus” — that may have saved 30,000 lives.
The heroism constantly contrasts with the shame. The film switches back and forth between the field and the White House, with President Gerald Ford uncharacteristically losing his temper, according to his press secretary, Ron Nessen, when Congress failed to approve his request for $722 million to help the Vietnamese. Americans were in no mood to give another cent to the war effort.
Kennedy (“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” and a film about her mother Ethel Kennedy, “Ethel”) has created a powerful historical document that allows viewers to share the complexities of the moment, the ambivalence of the times, the continuing guilt in retrospect.
