Catching you up to Vietnam's 50th.
GRUMPY OLD VIETNAM HAND.
Now that excerpts from The Bite of the Lotus: An Intimate Memoir of the Vietnam War have stepped through its penultimate chapters on the cease-fire period of 1973–74, we’ve now caught up with the thread that I jumped ahead to earlier this year to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon - and from my memoir’s final chapter and its dramatic opening.
Those posts - all headlined Vietnam’s 50th - began in early 1975, just five months after Nixon’s resignation, as the North Vietnamese launched their assault on the provincial capital of Phước Long, northeast of Saigon near the Cambodian border. That first piece was posted here on 10 January 2025. A missed signal for sure.
Then, reliving those “next shoe to drop” days from fifty years ago, I took readers back - first to continuing excerpts from earlier chapters of my memoir (1969 & 1970), and then real life back on the ground in Vietnam for Tet (Lunar New Year) 2025, the Year of the Snake. Along the way came the breaking of the Napalm Girl story after Sundance, and a few other yarns - before, bang! - North Vietnam had launched its final offensive in March 1975. I’d rushed back from Cambodia as the Ban Me Thuot fell. And then the Central Highlands.
And then as posts as Hanoi’s blitzkreig south towards Saigon, the excerpts from earlier in my memoir continued (1971) - and then my real life was in April and remembering those last dramatic weeks back here, here, the Fall of Phnom Penh here, and then a scene-setter back in today’s Ho Chi Minh City here, as the South’s despair of 50 years before is relived here, my family ordered out here, desperate hopes for a last-minute solution, and then the moment of doom, and then running for that chopper.
And after witnessing the winner’s 50th Anniversary victory parade as a guest of Vietnam’s present-day Ministry of Foreign Affairs, remembering the Fall of Saigon and, from my unpublished writings, then stuck in the South China Sea and who knows what’s ahead.
So that’s how the excerpts from The Bite of the Lotus have run since I first launched this Substack back in August. There was a bit of back-and-forth with this year’s 50th anniversary, but hopefully now it all makes sense.
The memoir ends where it couldn’t at the time: beyond the smoke, the silence, and the shutter and typewriter clicks. Eight pages written as an epilogue, but felt more like an opening - of what came after. Australia. Return visits. Fifty years more of a life lived. The things we carry when the war is over, but memory isn’t. I haven’t shared it here yet. One day, maybe. For now, the story’s still catching up to it. And I’ve still got lots of words to get out there.
Still writing. Still remembering.
