"Eyewitness to the Last Day of US Military Command in Vietnam" Topic

"The calendar said March 29, 1973. But the last few thousand American soldiers in Vietnam called it "X plus 60"—the 60th day of the truce, and the deadline for the last U.S. troops to go home.

It was, when it came, a day with an overwhelming sense of anticlimax. Camp Alpha, the processing barracks for departing GIs at Saigon's Tansonnhut Air Base ("It's Camp Omega today," someone murmured as we drove through the gate), gave the impression not of a war zone but of a second-rate hotel lobby at the end of a salesmen's convention. In the lines of men coiling out of the gymnasium-like staging area onto buses that would take them to the flight line, you saw none of the teenaged grunts or fresh-faced platoon leaders who actually fought the battles. The last soldiers of America's war in Vietnam were captains and majors and senior sergeants, middle-aged men with thinning hair and thickening waists. Looking at them, you remembered not battle but the beery haze of officers' and NCO clubs. Many of them had seen combat in earlier tours, of course. But they were leaving now from offices, not foxholes, where with typewriters and duplicating fluid they had carried out the necessary but hardly glorious tasks of shutting down the American war machine…"

link

Armand