A New Documentary Film on Last Days of South Vietnam

choi

Ralph Blumenthal, The Ones Who Were Left Behind; A film exposes an untold chapter in the fall of Saigon. New York Times, Aug 31, 2014
www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/movie ... 7s-documentary.html
(documentary review on Rory Kennedy, Last Days in Vietnam, 2014 “that opens Friday” Sept 5 in New York City)

Excerpt in the window of print: A superpower’s sudden and chaotic helicopter exit from Vietnam.

Note:
(a) Rory Kennedy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rory_Kennedy
(1968- ; youngest of the eleven children of U.S. Senator Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy; born "six months after her father was assassinated. Her mother chose the name 'Rory' because she felt it bore resemblance to her father's nickname 'Bobby'"/ On Aug 2, 1999 married Mark Bailey--"The wedding was originally scheduled for July 17 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, but was postponed after the plane carrying her cousin John F Kennedy, Jr crashed en route to the event”)
(b) Last Days in Vietnam
www.lastdaysinvietnam.com
(c) “in Da Nang, the longtime base of the Marines, Bruce Dunning of CBS captured the terror of South Vietnamese soldiers and refugees trying to claw their way aboard departing aircraft. ‘There’s a sea of humanity,’ he cried in a famous broadcast excerpted in the film. ‘We’re pulling away, we’re leaving people behind. People are falling off the air stairs!’”

Bruce Dunning, CBS News Correspondent Who Reported 'the Last Flight from Da Nang,' Dies at 73. CBS, Aug 23, 2013.
www.cbsnews.com/news/bruce-dunni ... da-nang-dies-at-73/
(d) “With some 5,000 Americans still in the country, as well as imperiled Vietnamese, like their office staff and girlfriends and housekeepers — a vast population numbering, with dependents, in the hundreds of thousands — a longstanding embassy evacuation plan listed four options: by ship down the Saigon River; by commercial or military flights out of Tan Son Nhut Airport; or, least feasibly, by helicopters.”

Tan Son Nhat International Airport
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tan_Son_Nhat_International_Airport
(has its origins in the early 1930s, when the French colonial government constructed a small airport with unpaved runways, known as Tân Sơn Nhất Airfield near the village of Tan Son Nhat)

(e) “The destroyer escort Kirk received 17 helicopter loads of refugees, each chopper getting pushed overboard to clear the deck for the next landing * * * Miki Nguyen, whose father, a South Vietnamese helicopter pilot, had tried to fly a twin-rotor Boeing CH-47 Chinook to the Kirk. But the giant chopper would have instantly capsized the frigate-size vessel, so he hovered nearby just over the water.”
(i) USS Kirk (FF-1087)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Kirk_(FF-1087)
(named for Admiral Alan Goodrich Kirk; 1972-1993)
(ii) Boeing CH-47 Chinook
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CH-47_Chinook

In the background of the photo in this Wiki page is a Chinook.