This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Today we have a history story brought to us from the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida.

In April of 1975, the United States was engaging in an evacuation of Saigon, which at the time was

the capital of South Vietnam. This evacuation plan known as Operation Frequent Wind came as the North Vietnamese

were closing in on South Vietnam. Here's historian Hill Goodspeed with the story.

So there were U.S. nationals who were still in Saigon, and there were also other people wanting to get out.

And the embassy, of course, needed to be evacuated.

So the U.S. Navy sent a fleet of ships, and they operated off the coast of South Vietnam.

And there was pretty much an aerial shuttle is the best way to describe it.

Of Marine Corps and Navy helicopters flying in country and landing primarily on the grounds of the

U.S. Embassy to pull people out and take them to the ships offshore. There was also aircraft

flying from airfields in South Vietnam getting people out.

These helicopters would fly out to the U.S. ships. There would just be an array of people that were

getting off from various backgrounds. They could be South Vietnamese individuals just trying to escape,

families just trying to get out, knowing that the North Vietnamese

forces, the communist forces coming in, would not treat those who had worked with the American

forces during the long U.S. involvement in Vietnam very well.

Amidst this operation, there was one man, a South Vietnamese pilot, who decided to take into his own hands the safety of his family.

Major Bung Lee.

During the long involvement of U.S. forces in Vietnam, there was a training program that existed to integrate South Vietnamese personnel and military forces into U.S. operations.

Certainly a big part of that was training pilots to fly various missions,

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