The United States pulled out the last of its combat troops from South Vietnam in March 1973. That ended the American War and completed the de-Americanization of the Fourth Civil War for Vietnam. Shortly after the signing of the Paris agreement, Hanoi resumed combat operations. The regime in Saigon, communist decision-makers publicly claimed, had failed to honor its side of the bargain, leaving them no choice. In 1974–5, Le Duan’s regime mounted yet another major campaign to bring about the collapse of its counterpart in the South. This time it calculated correctly, and its armies triumphed. Chapter 6 relates the rationale for Hanoi’s decision to proceed with the campaign, despite the possible resumption of US attacks against the North, and the reasons for its ultimate – and final – triumph on 30 April 1975.

That 130,000 Vietnamese evacuated alongside US personnel in April 1975 was neither haphazard nor unanticipated; the Ford administration fought vigorously for precisely this outcome. The sheer horror of the fall of Da Nang in late March shook US officials out of their complacency and forced them to confront South Vietnam’s imminent collapse. From the beginning of earnest, if belated, evacuation planning, administration officials labored to include South Vietnamese allies, which made the process much more contested than it otherwise might have been. In the face of consistent opposition, the administration ensured that it had the authority to use the US military to evacuate South Vietnamese nationals as well as the legal approvals necessary to resettle those individuals in the United States.

Ford argued that the United States had a “profound moral obligation” to its South Vietnamese allies. While depicting the obligation as moral rather than legal permitted the United States to frame the evacuation as a rescue rather than a withdrawal, invoking morality also fashioned the American obligation in ways that did not have obvious limits, temporal or demographic. Future nonexecutive actors seized on this language to successfully expand resettlement opportunities for growing numbers of South Vietnamese.