In Honorable Exit: How a Few Brave Americans Risked All to Save Our Vietnamese Allies at the End of the War, Thurston Clarke tells an engaging but incomplete version of the shambles that concluded America's involvement in South Vietnam. Though certainly more honorable than our recent abandonment of Afghanistan, the Vietnam exit was marred by poor planning that Mr Clarke blames primarily on Ambassador Graham Martin, with lesser failures by President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. I don't know about Mr Martin, but Mr Ford certainly did his best to avert the collapse of the ARVN when the North Vietnames tanks came over the border. It was the US Congress that refused to appropriate money or let American pilots take part as we had promised Saigon we would do when US troops were pulled out two years earlier. In the end, 130,000 Vietnamese and Montagnards were evacuated thanks to the heroic efforts of individual American servicemen and civilians, but thousands of more were left behind. Ed Sprague, a US advisor in the Highlands, managed to get 2,000 Montagnards to a beach in Nha Trang, where they waited in vain for an American ship to pick them up.
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