On a rusty at the top of a nine -story apartments building that no architect would admire, someone had scratched a statement: “Fall of Saigon”.
Nguyen de Hiep can still see what happens. On April 29, 1975, when the South Vietnam government collapsed in the last hours of the war, it observed from the next as an American helicopter landed on the roof of the axis of the building’s elevator, a space barely large enough to hold its skates.
A multitude of Vietnamese civilians made its way down a narrow ladder towards the military helicopter, shouting and cheating for its position. An American with a white dress shirt introduced a few fortunate on board.
“Everyone was fighting to get there,” said Mr. Hiep, whose father helped maintain the building known as Pittman, where he lived and worked on the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. “It was very chaotic, only people in the building could go.”
What the witness became iconic and misunderstood, after a photo of the Hubert van scene is reached the news cables with the incorrect legend of an editor saying that he showed desperate evacuated in the United States embassy.
I visited the Pittman 50 years later with a simple question: What happened after the Americans left?
Thousands of the US bureaucrats once occupied Saigon, doing the invisible work of a cataclysmic conflict of the comfort of ordinary buildings. Among the desktop lunches, they spread anti -communist messages, calculated costs and developed food and ammunition logistics.
When they went in a hurry, Vietnam’s winning revolutionaries touch on the places of the quiet American documentation and inserted loyal and needy: new tenants with new roles, with the aim of building a socialist state.
They got on the ground floor. And as a modern city of nine million grew around it, renamed for Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary leader of Vietnam, the old structures became experiments in national evolution.
Within its walls, family life joined two epochs. The more I knew the buildings and their residents, the more I saw the drama of a complicated nation. Start with postwar deprivation. Pragmatism displaced despair, but without completely erasing distrust or regional divisions born or deep and a long war between the north and the south, in which the United States played an extended role.
Communist Booty
The Pittman is shorthand for Americans. The name of the name remains a mystery.
Sitting directly at the center, it was one of the many buildings that the Americans leased through Saigon, in this case for the CIA and USAID, and its elevator used to make it feel modern.
Now, it is a wide window to the other side of the street in Towers three times that is at the top of a shopping center by one of the largest developers in Vietnam.
Inside the Pittman, less has changed. Two families to whom the government moved to the second floor in the 1970s are still there, in studies from side to side to the side of a cafeteria where workers in the building now fill the same dining room that the CIA once used and USAID
Trinh Thanh Phong, which caused an unofficial tour, said he was proud to have grown in a spot of war. His father was from the deep south of Vietnam, but fought for the north, then worked for a state chemical company with offices on the top floor.
“Hello a lot for the revolution,” said Phong. “This is how we have this.”
His mother, Truong Thi Net, sat at the door. When I showed her Van’s photo, she shook her head.
“It’s the first time he submits it,” he said. “But I recognize the upper floor.”
On the fifth floor, two women, Nguyen Chan Thy, a counter, and Tran My Len, a customs manager, worked in a quiet office on a Saturday.
If the families below represented the thin years just after the war, when the Soviet style planning paralyzed the economy, the business on them spoke with the 90s and beyond, when Vietnam adopted free trade. Your company manages logistics for leather manufacturers.
“We carry his dream,” says a sign at the office entrance to the office.
President Trump’s tariffs stopped for now, but set 46 percent for Vietnam, threaten that optimism. When examining Van’s photo, both women were surprised. So many people. Very few seats in the helicopter. It was difficult for them not to see Mr. Trump’s commercial policy as another example or abandonment of the United States.
They said that the entire region was at risk, but Vietnam had waited more respect, given the legacy of the war in a country where the leftover bombs and dioxins still lives.
“I am not saying that it is a betrayal, but it is not decent,” said Mrs. Lien, referring to rates. “It is not a decent way of dealing with a place where it caused so many problems.”
A few doors on the street is a large gray building that once housed the information service of the United States, which had been in charge of winning hearts and minds. Sometimes that implied promotion democracy; On other occasions, they put using “PSYOPS”, psychological operations found to manipulate opinion.
The building was designed by Arthur Kruze, a French modernist, and had included a library and radio studies, according to Tim Doling, author of several books on the architectural heritage of Saigon. As of 1956, Americans rent three floors instead of building something their own, a repeated pattern in Saigon.
Doling said it was something that made the influence of the United States more difficult to see once the Americans left Saigon.
But there were still clues or adjustment in a present way.
Nguyen Thi Bich Giang, 66, who sold soft drinks outside the old USIS building when I presented myself, said he had moved with his father, who worked with communist propaganda operations, after the US propagandists left. He got a job on a print plant, where she with her husband, Truong Tan, and they have a leg in 37 l and your trong once. Now they live above an elegant cocktail bar of Egypt that plays a lot Taylor Swift, and a high -end seafood restaurant that sells Canadian lobster.
The wealth gap is not the only division of the building. Mr. That and Mrs. Giang also represent different Vietnams.
At the end of the war, he was studying to become a doctor from the South Navy of Vietnam, like his father. She was from a family of revolutionaries: “VC, VC”, Mr. who joked, pointing and smiling at his wife, a former member of his old enemy, the Viet Cong.
They were jovials together when we are for the first time, but only in their department one night, Mr. Admitted that he is a lot with the southern defeat.
His medical studies, his dreams, his condition, evaporated. Everything that love could do and learn to survive in a system that would not see it in the way he saw his wife “VC”.
“It’s 50 years, but wounds are still there,” he said after playing a ballad on his guitar. “Distrust still exists.”
Stability? Or fear?
Some of the old American buildings seemed to organize less common suspicions in other places.
The security guards in a tourism agency moved me away from a villa where the American war commander, General William C. Westmoreland, lived in the 1960s.
On the back of the corner, in one of the largest apartment buildings where US officials were replaced by Vietnamese homologues, a resident refused to provide a name, fearing police problems; Another examined my credentials.
The building in 218 Nguyen Dinh Chieu had worked briefly as the headquarters of the US naval support activity. Uu. Saigon, or NSA, which focused on logistics. After the war, that the official ended on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam state news agency moved in family boxes, concentrating on a nearby community.
The doors remained unlocked. The wide halls were football releases, the Gardens balconies, since the next generation learned to globalize and compete.
Huynh Kim ANH, 76, former human resources for the Government Institute of the City of Development, said a certificate on his wall that shows a scholarship for his daughter Sydney University.
“We have had a very stable life here,” he said.
The proximity of the community, however, made the building a maze of whispers. In the early years, meals with better meat were hidden, to avoid gossip, residents said; Later, criticism of anything official caused generational arguments that were strong, then silent.
Today, the Nose building, the Pittman and others are again in transition, aging in deterioration and reinvention.
Saigon, as many still call him, feels restless. Trains in a new subway line are too many minutes separately. A national campaign against corruption has paralyzed construction. In the NSA building, the gray comrades are dying and the new tenants are turning Roman into yoga studies, looking for well -being, not Lenin.
In Pittman, the need for renewal is acute. A roof bar that had taken advantage of the theme “Fall of Saigon”, with war and peace graffiti, closed a couple of years ago. Mr. Hiep, who still lives near where he saw the country of the helicopter, now wonders if the war is too distant to attract tourists for much longer.
Mr. Phong, who provided the tour of the Pittman, to move forward, but does not know where to go. He works as a security guard for a large software company, but he hopes that the government will skip his family again to move from his well -located apartment in the middle of this dynamic city.
“Change is always happening,” he said. “I’m proud to be here. But it’s time to leave.”
Tung NGO contributed reports.
