The Vietnam War ended in 1975, but several Americans stayed on. In every foreign war, there are stay-behinds. A few soldiers, typically deserters, others whose enlistments are up, and civilians such as aid workers, humanitarians, or government workers, who remain behind, who simply don’t want to leave the country.
Fifteen months after the North Vietnamese conquered Saigon, communist Hanoi booted from Vietnam an odd, eclectic assortment of American stay-behinds who simply had not left the country for various reasons, and sent them packing on a plane to Bangkok. I’m going to tell you about several of these returnees and their circumstances.
