When Iowa native John Morgan received orders to assist with the Vietnam War, it was a “tremendous surprise.”
President Richard Nixon had announced that the war was over in January 1973. But here Morgan was, two months later, assigned to evacuate people at risk to North Vietnamese troops.
“I'm not happy about being subjected to possibly being killed when I thought a war was already over,” Morgan said. “But now, I feel proud that I served my country in the way that I did, that my missions, my actual combat missions, had to do with saving people and not hurting anyone.”
Fifty years ago, on April 29, 1975, Operation Frequent Wind began. The U.S. military evacuated more than 1,000 Americans and 5,500 “at-risk” locals from Saigon — now known as Ho Chi Minh City — in the largest helicopter evacuation in history.
Morgan was 26 years old. He remembers the terror and uncertainty he had to swallow. He didn’t know if he was going to be shot at. He didn’t know if he would be able to go back to his family.
“There were emotional feelings that I knew I had to set aside,” Morgan said, “Because I couldn’t fly my helicopter if I had a focus on something other than what I was doing.”
Morgan got up at 4:30 in the morning and was sitting in his helicopter by 6 a.m., ready to start the evacuation. But his squadron was told it was placed on hold.
The order to fly was given almost eight hours later. Morgan flew back and forth between Saigon and his landing ship seven times; most of the trips were during the night.
He remembers the people who crammed into the helicopter, some standing, some sitting. On some trips, there were close to 100 people.
“There were feelings, after the fact, of anger. Why had this ambassador put our lives in more danger because of the delay?” Morgan said.
It would be 30 years later, when the government released documents about the Vietnam War, that Morgan would learn why U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin had refused to leave. Martin did not want to abandon South Vietnam to communism.
“Initially, I thought we were there to help these [Vietnamese] people and they wanted us to help them,” Morgan said. “And then, as it turns out, no. They all didn't feel that way. As a matter of fact, most of them didn't. Most of them were happy that we left.”
In the years following his service, Morgan said that many Americans did not see his time in Vietnam as something honorable, given the widespread protests against the war. They believed he had killed people. But Morgan is glad he was able to save Vietnamese and Cambodian people who could’ve been tortured and executed by Viet Cong forces.
Morgan's experience is documented in his memoir, titled Fly the Friendly Skies of Cambodia and Vietnam.
