Last Days In Vietnam

I went to see the documentary film Last Days in Vietnam at the Esquire Theater here in Denver Sunday night. The Vietnam War raged during most of my formative years.  It started in 1965 when I was in the 7th grade at Fort Dearborn Grammar School in Chicago, and was televised back to America on the nightly news every evening.  When I was at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa during my college freshman year, I had to register for the draft in nearby Cedar Rapids.  The following year, I remember hurrying with much anxiety to the Illinois Institute of Technology's Campus Bookstore to check my lottery number in the Chicago Daily News (one of the city's evening papers) and see if I was going to be drafted.  My number was over 300, thank God, and I missed that free trip to Southeast Asia.  After graduating college, I also remember taking a trip with my parents in April of 1975 to Stuart, Florida and listening to live reports of the fall of Saigon on the radio.  It is this period that the film Last Days In Vietnam covers.  The ambassador to Vietnam, Graham Martin, was in denial about the fall of Vietnam, and refused to make any plans to evacuate either American citizens or the Vietnamese that supported the US and who would be in grave danger after a takeover.  This resulted in the chaos of Saigon's final days.  The movie depicts the heroic actions of many Americans to get these vulnerable Vietnamese and their families out of the country, and also shows how in the end it was too little too late to save many of them.  A sad ending to a very sad and tragic war.