A little after 4 on the morning of the 29th of April when the North Vietnamese army started to shell Tan Son Nhut. Some of their rockets fell on the Defense Attache Office compound, and I got the news that there were Marine casualties. Two of my kids ---Lance Corporal Darwin Judge and Corporal Charles McMahon----had been killed. By that afternoon, my guess was that we had as many as 10,000 people outside the embassy and perhaps 160 Marine guards to secure the perimeter. There were not enough Marines to man those walls and to keep people from coming over into the Embassy. The walls were substantial, but once the people made up their minds to come over, there was no way we could hold them back. We put our men on the walls to insure that the people outside couldn't just come up and jump over or climb over. We didn't know, after all, who was coming in. And we knew that the people outside were merel

Somebody had a jug and passing it around --Bobby Frain, I think. We were still lying low, waiting for that helicopter. Sometime just before 8 a.m., I saw the bird off in the distance. One unescorted CH-46 out of the sunrise. I saw it before I could hear it. It finally landed about 7:58.We started to board. I think some of us realized that this was a historic moment. We were the last American troops to leave Vietnam. At first everybody ran to the helicopter. Then there were just three of us left on the roof - Bauer, Valdez and me. Bauer had been sitting the farthest away, so he was the last one to reach the helicopter. But then, as I recall, Valdez paused at the tail of the helicopter to snap a picture. In fact, I think he snapped two. And at that as we rose above the crowd, we could only look down and thank god that we had climbed out of that mess and had prevailed.

Martin was vigorous at the time but for 70 hours or more, he had taken little rest, and he was not a young man and it was taking its toll. We were really making it up s we went along. As night fell, there was still a crowd inside the embassy grounds, and I realized that we were going to need lights and the standing lights in the embassy were not going to work. So we got the Mission Warden vehicles and the sedans and things that were still in there, and we swung them into a semicircle and we made sure they had gasoline. Then we started the engines and let them idle and left the lights on.

During the course of the afternoon and evening, we knew that there were still a lot of people outside the embassy that we had to get in. At the same time, we could not open the gates. So if there were someone out there that we wanted to bring in, then we'd put a bunch of people on the wall, reach down, grab him by the collar and hair and just yank him up and over the wall. To the Marines, it was like moving meat. And it was absolute chaos. I heard stories all afternoon about what was happening out there along the wall, strange things, sad things One Marine was handed a pepper bag filled with uncut gems. He handed it back. It belonged to a wealth Chinese businessman who just wanted to get his family out of the country before it was too late. There was some difficulty during the afternoon of birds (helicopters) gaining access to the landing zone (LZ). The fact that nobody got hurt is a testament to the professionalism of all of the people who were flying. They did a marvelous job. They were getting shot at by a bunch of knuckleheads ---there were looters and all kinds of people who had stolen weapons. We called them "cowboys". You could tell exactly where they wee once twilight came because you could see the tracers, and I would tell a helicopter pilot coming in, "They're firing at you." And he would reply, "We know, we know." Several of the helicopters had bullet holes in them. They were sitting ducks and to the degree possible, we would tell where the cowboys were. If they were in a building across the street from the front of the embassy, then we got the word out to the Vietnamese national policemen who would attempt to go in there and clean out the jerk who was doing the shooting.

y Vietnamese wanting to go to America. But in those groups, there were also some troublemakers and there might be some guys with demolition materials and charges or something like that. We were getting warnings from the Vietnamese military though the CIA all afternoon.

Late in the night, we learned that there was going to be a limit imposed on the flights. We had to run around counting people to see who was going to get out and who was not going to out. It was grim. The problem was always leakage. There was no way Martin could ever give an accurate assessment of the numbers. I think we probably ended up taking 2,500 people out of the embassy. Anytime during the night the number of people inside the grounds seemed to remain steady. Early in the evening, there was a pause in flights. It was in co

Some common words found in the essay are:
Marine NCOs, French Embassy, Airport York, Mission Warden, Carey Carey, North Vietnamese, Steven Bauer, Hilda Milk-maid, Charles McMahon----had, Marine Corporal, people outside, north vietnamese, people inside, wall people, people wall, sixth floor, front door, doors embassy, inside embassy grounds, heard stories, night people, people wall people, tan son nhut, front door embassy, night people inside,
Approximate Word count = 3277
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)