A Daring Rescue in the Chaos of Saigon's Fall
February 9, 2015
Timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the April 1975 end of the Republic of Vietnam (and event known in the U.S. as “The Fall of Saigon”), this breezily written memoir, filled with reconstructed dialogue, relates how Riordan, a former assistant manager of Citibank’s Saigon branch, successfully rescued 105 South Vietnamese Citibank employees and their families before the Communist takeover. Riordan had served as an Army officer in Vietnam in 1968, working for the Studies and Observation Group (SOG), a covert special-operations unit, though he downplays his role as a minor one: “a noncombatant in charge of the medical supplies for interdiction missions.” His real story begins on Apr. 18, 1975, when he disobeys his bank superiors’ orders and flies from Hong Kong to Saigon. The heart of the book details Riordan’s relentless efforts to get his former coworkers and their families on evacuation flights, making it out four days before the “revolutionary flag went up over Saigon’s presidential palace.” Riordan focuses on a tiny slice of the big story: an elite bank manager and his well-off employees who feared for their lives and fortunes in the face of the imminent takeover. B&w photos. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners.
February 1, 2015
Memoir of a bank manager's unlikely role in the evacuation of South Vietnamese from war-torn mid-1970s Saigon.With the assistance of Demery (Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu, 2013), Riordan chronicles his time as a mild-mannered manager of a bank in Saigon and his more important role as a savior of dozens of South Vietnamese families fleeing the rolling juggernaut of communism in 1975. The author first got acquainted with Vietnam through his 15-month tour of duty in the United States Army, but then he found himself in a new and seemingly passive role in international financial services. By the spring of 1975, what seemed like a routine civilian position became the last outpost of American financial interests in South Vietnam and the setting for the final airlift of Americans and South Vietnamese out of the country. Although the narrative lacks the dramatic punch of a more seasoned writer, Riordan builds his story in measured prose, giving a vivid sense of the history of Vietnam that comes from lived experience rather than research. At the height of the crisis in Saigon, the author was faced with a choice that no one should ever have to make. Although he was told to limit his evacuees to American citizens, he found an ingenious way to also save many of his longtime South Vietnamese bank colleagues-by exploiting an obscure legal loophole that involved, amazingly, passing his colleagues off as family. "I wasn't trying to be a hero," he writes, "but it seemed right to me to at least try to help my colleagues and my friends. When I could not stand by, they all became my family. Now they have become our neighbors, our friends, and our fellow Americans. In the case of these 106 lives, the tragic and chaotic end of the [war] became the beginning of something new." A nail-biting account of one man's quiet heroism in the face of impossible odds.
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