This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

In a thrilling moment-by-moment narrative based on a wealth of recently declassified documents

and in-depth interviews, authors Bob Drury and Tom Clavin tell the remarkable story of the evacuation

of Saigon in Last Man Out, the true story of America's heroic final hours in Vietnam.

This closing chapter of the war had become the largest scale evacuation ever carried out,

as improvised by a very small unit of Marines.

Here's Bob Drury with the story.

In 1973, the United States, South Vietnam, and the Democratic Republic of North Vietnam

signed a Paris Peace Accords.

Now according to those accords, everybody hoped and wished, especially in the United States,

that we were going to have another Korea situation, that it was going to be a country divided

into, there was going to be a DMZ, there was going to be a peace line for whenever. The North Vietnamese never had any idea of standing by

these accords. They were constantly probing, probing, probing, they even were allowed to leave men,

130,000 men, construction workers, on the soil of the Republic of Vietnam. Finally, in the fall of 1974, led by a charismatic and strategic and tactical genius,

and unfortunately named genius, General Vantian Dung, they decided to invade.

They broke the Paris Peace Accords. And we knew they were doing this. We had satellites. We had B-52 photos. We had everything. But Congress was just so sick of the war in Vietnam. We were out. We had some men. We had marine security guards, MSGs, at provincial consulars. We had a half a platoon in Saigon. We had some advisors in. We were in the middle of recession here in the United States.

We just didn't want to spend any more money. We just wanted to kind of wipe our hands of Vietnam. It was a bad deal.

Dung didn't believe that. He thought us capitalist running dogs. We have something up our sleeve.

So he probed at first, sending out scout teams.

They met with no resistance.

The South Vietnamese Army, the Arvans, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, fell apart.

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