World Exclusive: The Last Americans to Leave Vietnam

Do you remember the dramatic footage of American soldiers and South Vietnamese citizens evacuating from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam on April 30, 1975? As a teen, I watched the riveting news reports of that evacuation and wondered who was on the very last helicopter to leave the embassy roof. Who were the very last American troops to officially leave Vietnam? 

That question lingered in my mind for two decades. And in 1994, as a correspondent for People magazine, I embarked on a journalistic mission to become the first person to identify the men on that very last chopper. These men were a part of history, yet the U.S. military never compiled an official list of their names. It wasn’t easy tracking them all down. It took a bit of detective work. But I was resolute. After nearly a month, I found them. It was a world exclusive of which I'm still proud. 

The magazine flew every member of that crew who could make it to San Diego for a highly emotional reunion that I was honored to host. That was the first time these Marines - most of them guards at the embassy - had been together since that horrific day on the embassy roof. 

What I did not know until I started interviewing them was that they all thought they'd been left behind and that they would likely die on that roof that night. They waited for hours for that final helicopter to come while the embassy beneath them and the city around them crumbled.

When the producers of the play Miss Saigon read my story in People, they called me and invited all these Marines, and me, to the Washington DC premiere of the play at the Kennedy Center. The play, which puts the Madame Butterfly story into a Vietnam context, has a scene at the end that poignantly depicts the helicopter escape by these American Marines.

It was, appropriately, my first visit to Washington. I could not have felt more patriotic and more proud to bring these guys together, again. We all met up before the play at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, better known as The Wall, which most of them had surprisingly not seen. There wasn't a dry eye among these tough Marines at The Wall as they read the names of buddies lost, or when they watched the final scene of Miss Saigon. 

Miss Saigon 

They were watching their own life up on that stage. Afterward, the ranking and most vociferous member of the group, Maj. Jim Kean, commented on the fact that one of his men on that helicopter, S.Sgt. Robert Frain, had reportedly killed himself in 1993 after a battle with depression. My assumption is that Frain may have had post-traumatic stress (PTSD) from his Vietnam days. But I don’t know for certain. 

"I really miss Bobby," Kean told me that day at The Wall, his voice cracking. "I wish he was here with us."

Now here we are again, in another protracted war that many insist is not winnable. The war in Afghanistan is the longest in American history, and whether you think we should stay or go, it's hard not to think about the possibility of the Taliban violently storming the country just as the North Vietnamese did when the Americans left Vietnam. 

As I've written before, our brave and confident troops think they can train the Afghans in time to restore order and keep the Taliban down by the time we leave in 2014. When the last American warriors do leave Afghanistan, I'll be thinking about those men in Saigon 35 years ago, the last to leave Vietnam, and what they saw as they looked out that heli's window: a city, and country, in ruins and being taken over by the bad guys. 

The hope among American military and its allies, and all of us, is that we will leave Afghanistan in a much better state than what we left behind in Vietnam. Regardless, we've been there long enough. It’s time to bring our men and women home. All of them. And, most importantly, we must support them after they come home.

EXCLUSIVE: BIRTH DEFECTS INCREASING AMONG CHILDREN OF OUR TROOPS

Yet another tragic consequence of war has emerged, but most Americans don't even know about it. Children of American veterans face a much higher risk of birth defects than the general population, according to Birth Defect Research for Children (BDRC), a non-profit organization that provides parents with information about birth defects and support services for their children.

BDRC, which created The National Birth Defect Registry and has been tracking birth defects and developmental disabilities among children of U.S. military veterans since 1990, says incidents of birth defects in that population are tragically on the rise. And now the organization is asking the public for help in garnering support for a research center to study the phenomena.

BDRC has started a petition urging the Department of Veterans' Affairs (VA) to establish a research center to identify how toxic chemical exposures may have triggered birth defects in veterans’ children and provide state-of-the-art diagnosis and treatment.

Betty Mekdeci, BDRC’s tireless founder and executive director,  says veterans are dying, but even more tragically, the children they’ve left behind are suffering. 

"But we don't know where to send these folks for treatment," she says. "That's what this petition is all about. If more people knew this was going on, I believe they would support what we are doing. Americans are very supportive of our troops. This is the very least we owe them: to take care of their children."

BDRC was the first organization to discover birth defects in children of Gulf War veterans way back in 1992. Recent peer-reviewed scientific studies confirm that hundreds of thousands of Gulf War veterans were exposed to toxic chemicals while deployed. 

A 1997 study by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research showed that among Gulf War veterans' children, the birth defect rate is more than seven percent at birth. The normal birth defect rate, Mekdeci notes, is 2 to 3 percent at birth.

Here are just some of the published papers that have found links between service in the Gulf War and birth defects:

•          1997 Teratology – Aranetta - tripling of Goldenhar Syndrome in Gulf War veteran infants born in military hospitals.

•          2001 Ann of Epidemiology – Kang – increased reporting of birth defects significantly associated with military service in the Gulf War.

•          2003 Birth Defects Research – Aranetta – higher prevalence of tricuspid valve insufficiency, aortic valve stenosis and renal agenesis in infants conceived postwar by Gulf War veteran fathers; hypospadias in boys born to Gulf War veteran mothers.

•          2004 Internat. J. of Epidemiology – Doyle – increased risk of miscarriage, malformations of genital system, urinary system, digestive system, musculo-skeletal system and non-chromosome anomalies in children of Gulf War veteran fathers.

And it's not just the Gulf War. Veterans of the Vietnam War have suffered greatly from exposure to toxic chemicals including Agent Orange/dioxin. And veterans who fought more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, too, have been exposed to a variety of toxic chemicals.

Paul Sullivan, a highly respected veterans advocate who works at Bergmann & Moore, a law firm that solely represents veterans, says toxic exposures are prevalent among our deployed troops because there are no enforceable environmental laws on the battlefield for ingestion, inhalation, or absorption of hazardous chemicals. 

"There was widespread depleted uranium dust contamination of hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members during the 1991 Gulf War," explains Sullivan. "However, the VA has refused to perform long-term, post-deployment scientific medical research on Desert Storm veterans, even though this is a known carcinogen and associated with birth defects in animal studies."

Sullivan notes that the Department of Defense (DoD) also confirms hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members were exposed to low levels of chemical warfare agents, pesticides, experimental pills, massive oil well fire pollution, and other waste in Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. 

"Nearly 2.5 million Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were stationed at or near burn pits that destroyed human remains, surgical supplies, plastics, fuel, and other harmful poisons," says Sullivan, who emphasizes that veterans with disabled children should know their legal rights when dealing with the VA.  

"There are two benefit laws applicable to the children of Vietnam War veterans," he says. "Veterans of both genders who have biological children diagnosed with spina bifida may receive VA disability benefits for the child. And biological children of women Vietnam War veterans diagnosed with certain medical conditions may be eligible for VA as well."

VA Regulation 38 CFR 3.815, which lists the medical conditions, can be found at this link.   

"Because battlefields are heavily contaminated, Congress should fund significantly more scientific research into the long-term adverse impacts of military toxic exposures," suggests Sullivan. "And when scientific research finds more associations between toxic exposures and adverse medical conditions among the biological children of our veterans, VA should provide both benefits and treatment."

Mekdeci says that since 1991, thousands of veterans, their spouses, and their children have sent the BDRC poignant, heartbreaking messages about how exposure to chemicals has affected their lives. 

“These families are frustrated because they don’t know where to turn for proper diagnosis and treatment of their children’s disorders," she says. "We want to serve our veterans as they have served us by petitioning for a 'Children's Center' that would be staffed by specialists who would provide free diagnosis and treatment for their serious health conditions and work with their doctors back home to continue care in their own communities.” These children did not sign up to go to war."