But there were many hundreds of thousands more, including former members of the South Vietnamese army and their families, who faced torture and retribution from the ruling North Vietnamese. In the months following the fall of Saigon, U.S President Gerald Ford and Congress authorized the evacuation and resettlement in the United States of approximately 140,000 refugees from South Vietnam and Cambodia. The following day ApSaigon fell to the North Vietnamese. South Vietnamese citizens try to scale the walls of the American Embassy in an attempt to flee Saigon and advancing North Vietnamese troops. Those Left Behind Faced Torture and 'Reeducation' The lucky ones made it to refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia or the Philippines, and more than 2.5 million refugees were eventually resettled around the world, including more than a million in the United States. Countless thousands died at sea, victims of pirates or overcrowded, makeshift boats. Over the next two decades-from 1975 to 1995-more than three million people fled Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. The swift fall of Saigon in 1975 signaled the end of America’s failed military intervention in Southeast Asia, but it only marked the beginning of what would become one of the largest and longest refugee crises in history.

TV news cameras broadcasted harrowing images of the chaotic airlift, including crowds of desperate South Vietnamese citizens swarming the gates of the American Embassy in Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City by the conquering communists. personnel and several thousand South Vietnamese military and diplomatic officials. On April 29, 1975, as communist North Vietnamese troops closed in on the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon, the United States ordered the immediate evacuation of U.S.

The luckiest refugee