As Communist troops overrun the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon in 1975, U.S. Marines coordinate the final evacuation of embassy personnel. Revisit the final chapter of America's struggle in a decade-long war with pictures, maps, video and stories.
War is no movie and there is little good to be said about it.
I went to Vietnam as a reporter in 1965 and the first thing I learned is that war is not as it was portrayed in those old World War II movies where death was always noble, usually neat and bloodless, and everything went according to plan. In Vietnam, I discovered death was never neat, injuries were often gruesome, almost nothing went as planned, and accidents happen. I thought of all that when I watched the furor explode around Bob Kerrey, the Congressional Medal of Honor winner who confessed to an awful and tragic mistake. Before he won that medal and before his foot was blown off by a grenade, his small group of men was fired on in the dark. CBS Kerrey, about 1970.