A Democratic senator compared the scene in Kabul as the U.S. rushed to evacuate embassy personnel and Afghan allies to the fall of Saigon …
A Democratic senator compared the scene in Kabul as the U.S. rushed to evacuate embassy personnel and Afghan allies to the fall of Saigon in 1975 on Monday. “Sad. My father was our next-to-last ambassador in Saigon, and our ambassador when ‘peace deal’ was negotiated in Laos,” tweeted Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. “How that all ended deserved more attention.” Two years after withdrawing troops from Vietnam, former President Gerald Ford ordered the evacuation of Americans from Saigon, along with South Vietnamese allies, as the city fell to the North Vietnamese faster than anticipated. It took 80 helicopters over 19 hours to evacuate Saigon, with thousands of Vietnamese civilians climbing the walls of the U.S. embassy with the hope of getting onto one of those helicopters.
