30 April 75

[PRB]

Saigon fell today...it was an angry day at the NCO club, but this is nice and I'm sure Cal Berkley will post their note soon too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O57oyJ9OnGQ&sns=fb

[Badger52]

Thanks for posting that.

(screw berkeley)

[MR2]

Damn allergies.

[Trapper John]

I will never forget the feeling that I had the day the Media won their war and we lost our honor - or at least that's how it felt to me.

Today, 38 years later, I vow to take back that honor.

[Richard]

I, too, remember it well. I was back in the 7th SFGA upon returning from SEA the year before - our bags were packed in the team rooms as we sat watching it on the TV in the snack bar adjacent to Alamo Field and I wondered how my friends still back at JCRC were doing cordinating the evacuations.

It really bothered me in 1985 and I was in a funk for a couple of weeks over the memories and my feelings about it.

And so it goes...

Richard

[PRB]

I was at Ft. Benning that April...what I really remember was all of the Vietnamese Officers and NCO's that were attending the Infantry school.
As bad as all of us felt it could not hold a candle to watching guys realize they had no Country to return too.
No idea about their families.
No idae about their future.
I've never seen such abject loss.
Sadly, we all felt responsible for a portion of that.

[Dusty]

I knew several Vietnam vets, and nothing has ever impressed me more than the way they sucked it up and drove on, regardless of how they were tramped on by the public. The lackadaisical effort to retrieve our POW-MIA's, the way Bob Howard and many other heroes were treated, etc.-not much disappoints and pisses me off more.

[Cobwebs]

I remember when I returned home in 72 and my father who was a decorated pilot in WWII asked me if South Vietnam was going to carry on without American support. (The die was cast by then) I lowered my head and told him that the country is doomed. I never felt more low in my life than I did the following 3 years as I watched our friends be slaughtered. Haunts me to this day.

[Stedfast]

Memories, brought forward once again, of what could have been.

[Trapper John]

Originally Posted by Cobwebs

I remember when I returned home in 72 and my father who was a decorated pilot in WWII asked me if South Vietnam was going to carry on without American support. (The die was cast by then) I lowered my head and told him that the country is doomed. I never felt more low in my life than I did the following 3 years as I watched our friends be slaughtered. Haunts me to this day.

I felt that same sorrow for our Cambodian comrades. I thought we abandoned them and the grief and anguish in the aftermath was overwhelming. But where our government just turned its back, many of our Brothers and other vets took it upon themselves to relocate thousands of the ARVNs, Montagnards, and Khmeres without hooplah, or parades, or government support and at their own expense.

I just learned yesterday that R J Del Vecchio, a Marine combat photographer, still makes an annual trip to VN at his expense plus some donated funds to take care of ARVN survivors still in country that are ostracized and the poorest of the poor in VN.

It's the quiet efforts of these men that honors us all and to all of you quiet, unassuming heroes- I thank you, I salute you {Salute}

[mojaveman]

Attachment 25178

An iconic image of that time.