I found myself standing beside General Big Minh Saigon’s last president as he surrendered

I found myself standing beside General Big Minh, Saigon’s last president, as he surrendered.Not long after we were back at Saigon Radio describing the drama live to the BBC There was a thunderous knocking at the door. Forty-eight hours before the BBC governors had issued a well-intentioned order that all staff must leave Vietnam. It was an act of betrayal, but as these southerners waited they must have known that ahead lay incarceration and many years inside communist re-education camps.We drove away from the embassy agreeing that evacuation was now a dead issue. The Vietnamese still on the rooftops were among thousands who had worked for US agencies, intelligence and military, and had been promised evacuation But on this last morning the US had run out of time. In front of the Caravelle we tied a Union flag to the radio aerial of the Fifties American sedan we had hired, one of those Sunset Boulevard specials with huge rear fins.

All over downtown Saigon groups of looters were carrying and dragging furniture and other trophies from government offices President Thieu had already left the country. No one bothered us as we filmed the evisceration of the US embassy from which the CIA and proconsuls had sanctioned heavy bombing, counter-terror and free-fire zones in a failed nation-building effort, hoping to turn South Vietnam into South Korea. On half a dozen rooftops within a one-mile radius of the embassy lines of southern civilians stood looking at the sky as if they were devotees of an ancient ritual for the gods Two hours passed and they remained. But by then the flow of US Marine helicopters had trickled almost to a stop. Nearly all Americans had already been plucked from the embassy grounds. This was about the time the last American general in Vietnam was using thermal grenades to burn $3m in cash as he abandoned his headquarters, called Pentagon East, beside the airport The money was too big to fit in his Huey.

Overt repression is finished but today there are 20 to 30 “persons of concern” whom the diplomats try to track ­ and they could be in or out of jail at any given time.Thirty years is a long time and the authorities have wasted a lot of it with poor economic policies. Now the warrior generation, with its fixation on war and the past, its unwillingness to forgive and forget, is dying off and younger, pragmatic apparatchiks are ready to take over. And the children of the elite are studying all over the world so that, too, will bring change at home. There doesn’t seem to be any upsurge of pent-up frustration with the status quo .. maybe the population has learnt it’s best to be docile.