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Exit, Ingloriously Americans Evacuate Saigon • Hubert van Es • April 29, 1975


If Joe Rosenthal’s famous photo of Americans raising the flag at Iwo Jima in 1945 shows the U.S. at a peak of national achievement, the photo above, taken 30 years later, captures a frustrating, anguishing low point in U.S. military and diplomatic history. Fourteen years after President Kennedy sent the first U.S. military advisers to aid the government of South Vietnam in its war to retain its independence from the North, the North Vietnamese Army was poised to enter Saigon, and the last Americans in the South’s capital queued up on a rooftop to make their escape, along with local civilians who had worked in the losing cause. Dutch cameraman Hubert van Es’s photo is often described as showing the top of the U.S.


embassy; in fact, the helicopter was part of the Air America fleet operated by the CIA, and this evacuation location was atop an apartment building used for CIA operations in Saigon.


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HUBERT VAN ES—BET TMANN CORBIS


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