Good Morning Vietnam

ON THE leafy corner joining Mac Dinh Chi Street and Le Duan Boulevard, the former American Embassy squats against the morning sun. Twenty years ago, with Communist forces rapidly advancing on Saigon, young Marines on the other side of these bars did their best to hold back the crush of Vietnamese wanting to be let inside. Even at that late stage, they could not believe America would abandon them.

At the time I was a junior in high school, too young to remember in much detail the course of the war but vividly aware of its impact around me: the older boys suddenly in uniform; the prayers for the fallen at the end of the Memorial Day parades; the frenzy of TV images alternating between combat in Vietnam and protest at home. But nothing has seared itself in my memory as much as the images from those last, sad days around this compound.

WM

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William McGurn

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ON THE leafy corner joining Mac Dinh Chi Street and Le Duan Boulevard, the former American Embassy squats against the morning sun. Twenty years ago, with Communist forces rapidly advancing on Saigon, young Marines on the other side of these bars did their best to hold back the crush of Vietnamese wanting to be let inside. Even at that late stage, they could not believe America would abandon them.

At the time I was a junior in high school, too young to remember in much detail the course of the war but vividly aware of its impact around me: the older boys suddenly in uniform; the prayers for the fallen at the end of the Memorial Day parades; the frenzy of TV images alternating between combat in Vietnam and protest at home. But nothing has seared itself in my memory as much as the images from those last, sad days around this compound.