The following is a review of White Christmas in April: The Collapse of South Vietnam, 1975 (ISBN 082044538X) by J. Edward Lee and Toby Haynsworth. The review appeared in the April 2000 issue of Vietnam magazine.

South Vietnam's collapse is documented in grim detail in a new collection of firsthand accounts.

By John I. Witmer

While its title suggests merely a cute ploy to entice potential readers, White Christmas in April: The Collapse of South Vietnam, 1975 (Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York, 1999, $27.95), edited by J. Edward Lee and Toby Haynsworth, actually refers to a deadly serious code. On April 29, 1975, Radio Saigon began playing Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" as a signal to begin Operation Frequent Wind: the evacuation of all American personnel from South Vietnam.

Two aspects of this book make it a powerful vehicle for re-examining America's departure from South Vietnam 25 years ago: the impact of the accounts of people who were there and the behavior of those who were responsible for the evacuation of so many Vietnamese under unbelievably chaotic conditions. Plans had been made for the orderly evacuation of some Vietnamese who had been employees of the U.S. government and some who were thought to be politically vulnerable in the event of a Communist takeover. The "orderly" part of the operation fell apart under the pressure of North Vietnamese military advances. As a result, some of those Vietnamese scheduled for evacuation did not make it out in time. What this book emphasizes over and over is that, while it was not pretty, a successful evacuation of substantial proportions was conducted. Before Saigon was surrendered to the NVA on April 30, 1975, more than 100,000 people were taken out of South Vietnam by sea and airlift--an immensely noteworthy accomplishment, but one judged meaningless at the time in contrast to what was felt to be the overwhelming ignominy of the Communist victory.

The events of those apocalyptic latter days in Saigon are conveyed to the reader through the recollections of 25 direct participants and two indirect but highly significant observers of those events. One of those observers, Alexander Haig, President Richard Nixon's chief of staff at the time of Nixon's resignation, has no doubt in his mind that the collapse of South Vietnam was directly related to the fall of Nixon, whom the North Vietnamese feared. With Nixon's departure, the North felt emboldened to make its move. An unelected President Gerald Ford had neither the political will nor the political capital, with Congress or the American public, especially after pardoning Nixon, to order the reintroduction of U.S. military forces into Vietnam, or even to counter the open invasion by the North. The second observer, Jack Brady, was serving as staff director of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs in 1975. Brady makes it clear that the Democratic majority, particularly the members of the so-called Class of 1974, were in no mood to continue military aid to Saigon, even though treaty issues were at stake. The behavior of Congressional fact finders, sent out to evaluate continued support for Saigon, contrasted sharply with that of those Americans who had their butts on the line.

The other 25 contributors to White Christmas represent a nice balance among U.S. military and civilian and nongovernment personnel, as well as four Vietnamese. Tran Trong Khan, counselor at the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, D.C., at the time he was interviewed for the book, was a VC officer who was in Saigon in April 1975. His views on the breakdown of the Paris Peace Accords give additional insight into the motivation of the NVA. Leon Nguyen, commander of the South Vietnamese fleet, used his position to commandeer naval craft to rescue many South Vietnamese. Ly Bung, a major in the South Vietnamese air force, put his family aboard a Cessna aircraft and proceeded to successfully land it on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Midway, which was standing 70 miles offshore. Mary Vu, an officer's wife, records her family's flight from their homeland.

Each of the people interviewed for this book fills in a bit of the picture of what was happening in South Vietnam during those last fateful days. They draw a terrifying and bleak picture of a country in disintegration.

But these horrific stories also evince the basic decency and honor of U.S. military personnel in the path of the advancing NVA, in a war that was no longer theirs. Their government had planned for the evacuation of about 1,000 Vietnamese, yet these men and women, risking their lives and careers, creatively interpreted orders or got around them so that 100 times that number were eventually brought out. They all worked together with an instinctive humanity, bending rules here, taking outrageous chances there, knowing that it was the right thing to do. This book is a fitting tribute to all those Americans who did what was right, even when their government told them it was wrong.