Iowa (RI) — This week Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of the last day of the Vietnam War.
A US Marine and Iowa native remembered the day that nearly seven thousand people were evacuated from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, as North Vietnamese troops stormed in. John Morgan was a 26-year-old Iowan flying people out of Vietnam by helicopter that day. Morgan says if he hadn’t helped evacuate Vietnamese and Cambodian allies, they could have been tortured and executed.
Morgan was one of the many helicopter pilots on that mission. He says he pushed down his fear so his emotions would not get in the way of doing the job he needed to do.
Morgan says on some of his trips there were close to a hundred people in the helicopter. Morgan says he’s grateful to be alive. In 2020, he wrote a memoir about his experiences called, “Fly the Friendly Skies of Cambodia and Vietnam.”
Some 115 thousand Iowans served in the Vietnam War, and 868 of them died there.
(Lucia Cheng, Iowa Public Radio)
KIWA Staff Photo
