Remembering the fall of Saigon
A deserter recalls the war and the Canada that took him in
It was the spring of 1975 and I was about to get married. My college roommate, Larry Grossman, was planning to fly up from Washington, D.C., for the wedding. He was an officer in the U.S. State Department at the time, just back in the U.S. after a posting to Argentina. His plans changed with the fall of Saigon on April 30. Larry was fluent in Vietnamese, so even as the last helicopters flew away from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Larry was on his way to the Philippines to help translate for the tidal wave of refugees leaving Vietnam. Somehow, he still managed to fly halfway around the world in time for my wedding at the end of May.
Forty years later, on the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, the war that scarred the lives of my generation still comes down to that final debacle: the last Americans and a handful of Vietnamese with the right connections being helicoptered off the roof of the U.S. Embassy, while other Vietnamese desperate to flee were beaten away with rifle butts. That such an end to the war was inevitable from the beginning is one of the tragedies of our times.
For those who want to get a sense of what Saigon was like in those final days of the war, Australian journalist John Pilger produced the definitive account and caught perfectly the mingled comedy and tragedy of the final days: a little girl dying after a rocket attack, American contractors desperately hacking at a giant tree in the embassy courtyard, trying to get it out of the way so that helicopters could land as the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops closed in on the South Vietnamese capital.
The Vietnam War resulted in the deaths of 58,000 soldiers serving in the American military and somewhere between 1.5 million and 3.6 million Vietnamese. Much of the country was devastated or defoliated by the use of the insecticide Agent Orange.
Like millions of other young men, Larry Grossman and I spent much of our last year of university talking about how to avoid being drafted. Larry was as opposed to the war as I was — ultimately, his solution was to avoid the war by going to it. He applied and was accepted by the State Department, and Vietnam was his first posting.
Larry completed his 20 years in State and went on to supervise elections for the UN in such global hot spots as Angola before retiring to a life guiding upscale cooking tours in Tuscany and Provence with his wife, a gourmet chef. Four years ago, he called to say that he had survived a brush with a rare form of cancer linked to Agent Orange. It was scary, but he didn’t seem particularly concerned.
A year later, in December 2012, he said in an email that he had contracted another rare form of cancer linked to Agent Orange. Again, he didn’t seem worried. I meant to call him at Christmas but in the usual press of things that time of year, I failed. In January, his wife called to say the cancer had killed him.
He won’t appear on the casualty lists, but I added the name of Larry Grossman to those of my friends killed by the war. At the top of the list is Staff Sgt. Ron Bales, a big, easygoing kid killed by an explosive booby-trap near Thua Thien in April 1971. I have traced his name with my fingertips on the great, curving wall of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington.
Sonny Walter, my closest childhood friend, did his tour in Vietnam, came home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder in 1969, helped persuade me to go to Canada, and slowly drank himself to death.
I was inducted into the U.S. army in November 1969. Two months would pass before Sonny’s advice took effect: I deserted from Fort Lewis, Wash., and crossed the border at White Rock, B.C., on Jan. 4, 1970. After a month living hand-to-mouth on Vancouver’s skid row, I landed a job at the Vancouver Sun and became a landed immigrant.
By May of that year, with the Sun on strike, I was volunteering to aid war resisters along with one Margaret Sinclair, later Margaret Trudeau. We were processing more than 100 draft dodgers and deserters a week through Vancouver alone.
The story was much the same in Toronto and Montreal. No one really knows how many young American males came to Canada between 1967 and 1972, but the usually accepted number is 100,000, of whom perhaps 30,000 stayed permanently in Canada after the various amnesties of the mid-1970s made it legal to return to the U.S.
It took decades for me to come to grips with the decision to flee the U.S. And it was a comment from Canadiens legend Dickie Moore that was responsible. I had written a column critical of the Canadiens, and Moore said that as a coward, I had no right to comment on the Habs. No, I thought, that was the bravest thing I have ever done. I began writing about it, first for the Montreal Gazette and a few years later in the memoir The Taste of Metal.
My own journey came full circle in April of 2013, when I was invited to speak to cadets at the West Point Military Academy, training ground for career officers in the U.S. army. The previous September, I had been interviewed at length by Lynn Novick for a new PBS documentary on the Vietnam War that will air in 2017.
Col. Gregory Daddis, a West Point professor, saw the segment and invited me to speak to his cadets, who were studying the Vietnam War.
When the second of two sessions finished, many of the cadets came up to shake my hand. Novick was there with the PBS cameras to record the event, an entente of sorts, reached nearly 40 years after the fall of Saigon.
We’re getting older now, the draft dodgers and deserters who remain in Canada. We all have our regrets and our private satisfactions, joys and sorrows.
History shows that the massive antiwar movement did not succeed. Right did not equal might as tens of thousands of us gave up our country in the failed attempt to end the war. But in the process we gained a new country and, for better or for worse, Canada got us.
We gained a new country and, for better or for worse, Canada got us