Sally Vinyard, a Defense Department civilian in Saigon during South Vietnam's April 1975 fall, gathered sheets and pillowcases to serve as body bags after the crash of a plane dubbed "Operation Babylift." It had been carrying hundreds of babies and women out of Vietnam.

Known as "the last woman out," she was in charge of housing American and South Vietnamese refugees at an evacuation center near the Saigon airport.

"One time, a busload of orphans was brought in," she said.

"Forty tiny babies. I had six bottles between my fingers."

She obtained clearance and evacuated the infants.

Vinyard was the only American woman left at the evacuation center when North Vietnamese shelled the runway in late April.

"That day I thought, "What the hell's the difference. We're all going to die here anyway.' ...

"Finally, we got out on the helicopters, and we were fired on as we left. I went to Guam and helped with processing there. When I got home to the States, I realized that no one wanted to hear about it. It was too embarrassing, or too painful, one or the other."

Finding an inner truce

While Vinyard fought for her own life and those of others in April 1975, Toby Haynsworth, now a retired professor of business at Winthrop University, was a career naval officer and a commander aboard the USS Midway in the South China Sea. The aircraft carrier was a transfer point for airlifted refugees.

Haynsworth haled from a military family and believed in the war's cause.

At the same time, J. Edward Lee, now a Winthrop associate professor of history, was a former college newspaper editor graduating with a portfolio full of anti-war columns and editorials. He watched the fall of Saigon at home on TV.

He was adamantly opposed to the conflict.

A quarter of a century after Saigon's fall, the United States has restored relations with Hanoi and a Baskin Robbins flourishes in Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

But like most who survived the '60s scarred with a national guilt over anti-war protests, death and defeat, Haynsworth and Lee had never found closure.

They collaborated on the book "White Christmas in April: The Collapse of South Vietnam, 1975." It is an oral history by 27 people whose lives were forever marked by the evacuation of Saigon in April 1975. The book's title is based on Radio Saigon's 1975 cue for Americans and South Vietnamese allies to flee the city: The station played Bing Crosby's "White Christmas" over and over and over again. Thousands of terrified refugees surrounded the U.S. Embassy in Saigon seeking safety.

Haynsworth and Lee wanted to salve the nation's lingering wounds with true tales of courage amid chaos. They wanted generations born since then to understand a turning point in our national history, a time sometimes described as one in which the U.S. lost its virginity.

The co-authors spent five years traveling and interviewing people who lived through the fall. Their subjects' stories are vivid and alive, as though they had relived the experience many times since Radio Saigon played "White Christmas."

Haynsworth and Lee discuss their book with equal passion.

"Ever since I left South Vietnam, I've been concerned that the heroics were not known," Haynsworth said.

Said Lee: "I felt like I had to write this book. Because I didn't serve, I owed it to the people who did. I came away from this project feeling these people had told their stories. Some of these people had never talked about it much.

"The project brought me a real sense of completion."

Lee, 46, said he and the elder Haynsworth - 20 years apart in age - "came from totally different worlds." Although they had divergent opinions during the war, "there was no difference of opinion about the courage of these people," he said of those in the book.

Landing of a lifetime

Maj. Bung Ly was a South Vietnamese military hero who had never demonstrated his daring more dramatically than on April 30, 1975, when he circled the USS Midway.

He skirted the aircraft carrier in a small Cessna for an hour off the coast of Saigon. Aboard were his wife and five children, all fleeing a future in a North Vietnamese reeducation camp, or worse.

He made three passes at the carrier, dropping tool-weighted notes onto the deck. Two bounced into the sea. The third, anchored with a wrench, found its mark.

It read, "Can you move the helicopters to the other side? I can land on your runway. I can fly one hour more. We have enough time to move. Please rescue me. Maj. Ly Bung, wife and 5 children."

Crew members began shoving multimillion dollar helicopters into the South China Sea for the Cessna.

Ly had no tailhook, had never landed on an aircraft carrier.

"The family and I were nervous and everything," he says in the book, "White Christmas in April."

"So I came flying down for a first pass. I had to measure how strong the wind was, how the carrier was moving, and how fast. I came in once, and thought I'd do it on the second one. The second time I came in, I just shut off the whole engine. That way I could keep it short and stay on there. I believe I was back on about one-third of the deck."

As the family careened to a safe stop, hundreds of cheering crewmen rushed to them.

A patriotic believer

Haynsworth had watched Ly's miraculous landing aboard the Midway's closed-circuit TV.

The son of a World War II veteran and a Navy man for 20 years before returning to school for his Ph.D., Haynsworth remembers a nation divided over the war.

"I bought into the Domino Theory," he said. "The policy was to contain communism. I believed in what we were doing. I believed it was dishonorable to renege.

"A lot of people in this country did not agree that the obligation of this country was to defend against communism."

Mention of Jane Fonda still sparks a tightness to his jaw and a blaze in his eyes. He recounts a tale of how POWs in North Vietnam gave a visiting Fonda their Social Security numbers so folks back home would know where they were. Fonda reportedly turned the numbers over to the POWs' captors instead.

"She betrayed people," he said vehemently. "I don't have a problem with people who disagreed with the war out of conviction."

He recalls terrified, grief-stricken South Vietnamese boarding the Midway in shock as though they were enduring a death in the family. Many left family behind and departed their homeland forever with a few precious possessions.

Helicopters were repeatedly pushed over the side of the carrier to make room for more refugees. The refugees were fed on the Midway, then carried to sanctuary aboard transport ships.

He describes the sailors' compassion for refugees as "heartwarming."

Even those sailors not on deck watched Ly land his little Cessna via the Midway's closed-circuit TV. Haynsworth remembers reverberating whoops throughout the huge aircraft when the plane screeched to a halt.

He interviewed Ly for the book at Ly's home in Orlando, Fla.

"It was a great thrill to me," he said with a smile. "He has raised his five children, all college graduates, and there were grandchildren running around. It was wonderful to see this now-American family so secure and so successful. He was successful by American standards."

Breaking a promise

Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence officer during the war, wept when he relived the evacuation from the U.S. Embassy and the 420 people he promised he would save - then left behind.

The CIA was transporting allies to the embassy aboard Air America.

"You could see these folks praying before their turn on the helicopter comes," he said. "You could see them sitting quietly on the roof."

Outside, thousands of refugees attempted to scale the embassy walls to reach the helicopters. Herrington and others established a second landing area in the embassy parking lot.

"There was no plan to pull anybody out of the embassy, other than a few off the roof, and then a few buses - a couple hundred people," he said. "We came up with an ad hoc plan ... "

More than 100,000 people were evacuated. But Herrington still weeps for 420 people he abandoned in the parking lot. He had promised to accompany them to safety, but when word came the last chopper was departing, he excused himself on a pretext, boarded and left them behind. Some of the 420 were taken to Hanoi. At least one was beaten to death.

"I focus on the 420 people because it was very painful for me to be there in the parking lot with them, meet with them, and promise them that we were not going to leave them," he said. "But in the broader perspective of the whole show, this is just one more tiny tragedy. It is not a big story."

A patriotic skeptic

"Look at the end of the war and you can look at the war in its entirety," said Lee, who describes the war period as "a societal nervous breakdown."

He wrote the book for his students, who, he said, do not understand the cause, the division, the trauma.

"I feel this is the book I came to Winthrop to write," he said. "My students were born in 1981. This book is for students born in 1981."

"White Christmas" is not flattering to Henry Kissinger and President Gerald Ford. Time magazine published pictures of them in tuxedos on April 30, 1975, the day they determined the airlift would conclude.

"They were all dressed up with other places to go," Lee said. "The politicians just didn't care about those 420 people. Herrington said he will be haunted for life."

Lee interviewed former White House Chief of Staff, former Secretary of State and former NATO commander Alexander Haig. The book quotes Haig as saying,"It was all over, for all intents and purposes, by April 1973," when Nixon became ensnared in Watergate. Ford, urged by Haig to renew bombing of Hanoi as South Vietnam crumbled, said, "I just don't think the American people have the stomach for a resumption of this."

According to the book, Haig replied, "I think that you'll be a one-term president."

"And I got up and left," Haig continued. "That is the sad end of that war."

Alone up on the roof

Sgt. Terry Bennington, a U.S. Marine supervising the rooftop evacuation, recalls that embassy laundry women began bringing their children to work, then became increasingly afraid to go home at night. He credits Ambassador Graham Martin with the decision to evacuate as many South Vietnamese as possible.

Embassy personnel and others would reach into the crowds outside and pull Americans up over the wall.

They dodged sniper bullets as refugees boarded helicopters. Martin twice ignored a presidential order to leave the embassy and finally had to be dragged out in exhaustion, according to Bennington.

When the last helicopter lifted off the roof, Bennington reminded those departing that 11 Marines would wait for one last chopper.

"So he takes off, and that's when there's this big lull," Bennington said in the book. "Nobody's been able to say if it was two, three or four hours. I don't remember. I know it was over two hours, and it felt like six, but I honestly don't remember."

The Marines lay low on the roof and watched the North Vietnamese move in. Bennington speculates his superior, Gen. Richard Carey, needed permission from Washington to send one last helicopter back for the Marines.

"All I remember was it was light when they came and got us," he said. "I know that it was 0759 on 30 April - one minute before the North Vietnamese Army commenced its major assault. We were in the air while they were assaulting."

Conquering defeat

About 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam war.

The book includes interviews with local people, such as Mary Vu, a South Vietnamese evacuee raised by a family in York County,

where she now operates the restaurant Mary's Place. Winthrop professor Haney Howell, CBS News' bureau chief in Saigon during the evacuation, recalls Vietnamese friends who shoved their baby into his arms in hopes he would carry it to America.

"More than the families of the people whose names are on the wall of the Vietnam Memorial visit it," said Haynsworth. "It is visited by millions of people each year. It's a period of history that is important to American people."

Lee describes the war as "the defining moment of my generation," and one that changed the nation forever.

"I think we question authority more now," he said. "If Clinton got us involved in the Balkans, we would say, "Should we do this?' We question now."

The history professor contends that, for history to be of use, people must take a lesson from it. He hopes his students will take this lesson:

"Ordinary people can be heroes under certain circumstances. There are ordinary people here. There were a lot of heroes in April 1975 in Vietnam."

Contact Karen Bair at 329-4080 or kbair@heraldonline.com.