Bill Holiday, a retired veteran social studies teacher of 48 years, believes in exposing students to primary sources in history and would introduce his students at Brattleboro Union High School to people — like Alan Carter — who could tell them firsthand about their lived history. Holiday is a member of the board of trustees of the Brattleboro Historical Society.
DUMMERSTON-On April 29, 1975, as artillery pounded the outskirts of Saigon and thousands of desperate Vietnamese people pressed up against the walls of the U.S. Embassy, Alan Carter climbed onto the roof with a small group of colleagues as helicopters alternated rapidly between landing and liftoff.
Carter had been ordered onto the first chopper, but he refused to leave while Vietnamese staff were still trapped elsewhere in the city. He felt responsible for them.
Hours later, in the early morning of April 30, he finally boarded the second-to-last helicopter off the embassy roof, carrying little more than an attaché case and the clothes on his back.
Decades later, Carter would describe the entire U.S. involvement in Vietnam in searing terms:
“There was no national interest to be involved. We stumbled into it stupidly, got over-committed into it stupidly, fought it stupidly, and left it stupidly,” he said.
He described it as “a fabric of deception and lies to the government, to itself, and to the American people.”
* * *
The words still carry particular weight. Carter was no outsider or activist academic. He was a World War II veteran, a longtime U.S. Information Agency (USIA) officer, and a member of the senior staff at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon during the final months of the war.
He was responsible for public affairs and the U.S. Information Service (USIS) program in Saigon, and he sat in the very meetings where intelligence assessments were rewritten to fit political goals.
Following his retirement from government in the early 1980s, Carter lived in Brattleboro and Westmister West for over 30 years.
He joined The Experiment in International Living, the organization that would grow into World Learning Inc., as vice president for international programs. He later served as executive vice president, acting president, and chief operating officer for the organization.
In a quiet room, much later and far from the chaos of Saigon in 1975, Carter would sit before a group of American students and say something that would still startle him: He called the entire U.S. involvement in Vietnam “ridiculous” and “a fabric of deception and lies — to the government, to itself, and to the American people.”
It’s not the kind of sentence you’d expect from a senior U.S. diplomat who was on the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, boarding the second-to-last helicopter out as the city fell. But that is precisely who Alan Carter was, and that is exactly what he would say.
I knew Alan Carter for over 25 years, until his passing on Jan. 25, 2019. During that time he spoke to me and various adult and student groups on numerous occasions, both formal and informal.
Alan Carter’s story is not just about a war gone wrong. It’s also about what happens when an entire diplomatic mission becomes captive to its own illusions.
* * *
Alan Carter’s path to Saigon did not begin in a policy seminar or a war room. It began first in World War II and then at the University of Michigan, where he majored in political science and initially imagined a career in the Foreign Service.
After the war, however, he fell in love with broadcasting, and he spent about 10 years pursuing his dream to become “the Edward R. Murrow of my day.”
A turning point came when an old friend, by then a speechwriter in the Eisenhower White House and later a liaison to the USIA, called and said, “We need someone with broadcasting background to go overseas for us.” Carter barely knew what USIA was, but he went to Washington, took the interviews, and was soon posted abroad.
That decision began what he calls the most important of his three careers: a long government career in public diplomacy and information work. He eventually served as counselor of public affairs in South Vietnam, heading the USIS program in Saigon.
He emphasized that despite Vietnam, he still viewed federal service as “an extraordinarily rewarding important thing to do,” and he encouraged young people who aren’t naturally entrepreneurial but want to serve their country to consider the option seriously.
* * *
Carter’s posting to Vietnam was laced with irony. Long before he arrived in Saigon, he had already been philosophically and conceptually opposed to the Vietnam War.
In the 1960s, while he was assistant director for Near East and South Asia at USIA in Washington, nearly every U.S. agency was stressing “counter-revolutionary warfare” and the need to confront communism worldwide. Carter, by contrast, aligned himself with many Americans who viewed the U.S. intervention in Vietnam as fundamentally misguided.
In 1968, the influential ambassador to Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker (who called Dummerston his home), contacted Carter by cable, requesting him to lead what was then the largest psychological warfare unit ever mounted by a U.S. civilian agency: the Joint U.S. Public Affairs Office (JUSPAO). Carter refused — first, because he didn’t believe in “psychological warfare,” and second, because he objected to U.S. policy in Vietnam.
The Paris Peace Accords had been signed in 1973; U.S. combat troops were gone, leaving behind only advisors; and Washington told itself that the war was effectively over. When Carter was offered a senior post in Vietnam as minister-counselor for public affairs, it felt harder to refuse on moral grounds, since his objections had centered on a war that, officially at least, had ended.
He accepted. In doing so, he walked into what he would later call “as bad an embassy as I have ever worked with” — an embassy warped by ideology, saturated with Cold War orthodoxy, and prone to manipulating facts for political effect.
* * *
The U.S. Embassy in Saigon, under Ambassador Graham Martin, was unlike any Carter had served in. Instead of staffing it with people who held a diverse mix of views, Martin had imported his own cadre of true believers — “cold warriors” — fiercely committed to the South Vietnamese cause and the U.S. mission.
Carter described the ambassador as dedicated and as a “super-patriot” but said his zeal warped his judgment. Martin, he said, ran the embassy like a “one-man band,” surrounding himself with “yes men.”
Before accepting the assignment, Carter confronted Martin in Washington. The prospective employee warned the ambassador that he was not known as a yes-man, that he disagreed with many of the embassy’s policies and practices, and that he couldn’t imagine why Martin would want him on the team.
Martin replied that he was criticized for being surrounded only by loyalists and wanted at least one person on staff who might say “no” from time to time.
Carter later concluded Martin “didn’t mean a damn word” of it.
Once in Saigon, Carter quickly saw what some State Department officials in Washington already suspected: The embassy’s reporting was distorted, politicized, and sometimes flatly dishonest.
* * *
Two layers of misrepresentation stood out to Carter.
• The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) did not control the Mekong Delta. Local U.S. officials reported this reality to Saigon, but the embassy’s reports to Washington did not acknowledge this. If Congress knew the military situation was deteriorating, the embassy believed, it would not appropriate the funds they wanted.
• By late 1974 and early 1975, U.S. intelligence showed the North Vietnamese extending and supplying the Ho Chi Minh Trail and building up for a new campaign. If Congress knew that were the case, it would be reluctant to provide military aid. An adjusted story would keep the dollars flowing.
Carter explained that this was not simply about one man’s mendacity. The entire senior structure — from ambassador, to deputy chief of mission, to political and economic counselors, to defense attachés — participated in the “fudging of the truth.” Most had been brought in precisely because they already agreed with Martin’s line.
This pattern echoed what they were reading in Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie and what another insider, CIA officer Frank Snepp, documented in his book A Decent Interval — a title referencing then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s view that the U.S. needed only a “decent interval” between its withdrawal and South Vietnam’s inevitable collapse.
Carter agreed: From start to finish, the war was a chain of misjudgments and deceits.
* * *
When Carter arrived in September 1974, conventional wisdom in the embassy was that the U.S. and Saigon had at least two more years — the “decent interval” Kissinger had spoken of — to shore up the South Vietnamese state.
That illusion lasted about a week. At his first senior staff meeting, Carter saw how dissent would be handled.
Two outgoing consuls from the field spoke candidly about the embassy’s toxic relationship with the press and the gap between what journalists saw and what the embassy was saying. Carter backed them up.
Martin responded with a short, blistering rebuke about newcomers who arrived full of “advice” without understanding what they were talking about. Everyone in the room understood he was talking about Carter.
Afterwards, Carter confronted him privately:
“You just shot me down,” he said. “I haven’t been here a week, and you shot me down, and nobody is going to pay any attention to me anymore.”
Martin feigned surprise and denial, but, as Carter explains, the damage was done.
* * *
By early 1975, what began as a limited North Vietnamese campaign escalated unexpectedly.
Hanoi’s planners had not intended an immediate endgame; they expected stiff resistance. Instead, they discovered a “totally enfeebled” South Vietnamese army and started pushing harder, even though their logistics weren’t fully prepared for a rapid victory.
In the central highlands and coastal areas, cities like Pleiku and Da Nang became symbols of that unraveling.
As the military situation deteriorated in January–March 1975, the embassy grudgingly turned to “what if” planning. What if South Vietnam were overrun? How would the U.S. extricate its own personnel and the Vietnamese who had worked closely with it?
Carter’s section alone had 32 American staff, and approximately 300 Vietnamese employees, plus many local contacts in ministries and the media who would be at risk if collaborators were labeled as American.
Embassy units were ordered to draw up priority lists of who should be evacuated: those in politically sensitive positions, those with long service to the Americans, those with visible ties to U.S. programs (like information and media), and key contacts in Vietnamese institutions.
He and his executive officer worked late into the night, night after night, trying to sort people into categories and rank them. Simultaneously, the human pressure outside his villa and office mounted.
Every morning, when he stepped outside his villa ringed with barbed wire, he would find one to three dozen Vietnamese people waiting.
They believed Carter’s title gave him the power to save them. Many fell to their knees; some begged him to take even just their children or their spouses. All were terrified of what might happen if the communists identified them as pro-American.
Carter would later call this one of the most emotionally draining experiences of his life. And there was very little he could do. Fixed-wing flights out of Saigon were limited and already heavily reserved for the most sensitive cases.
* * *
One incident from the spring of 1975 would, in Carter’s view, illustrate Martin’s “Machiavellian” mind at work. A plane loaded with Vietnamese orphans crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board.
A few days earlier, Carter had been called on his secure line from Washington. A State Department official, distrustful of the embassy’s reporting, asked for his personal assessment of the situation on the ground.
Carter cabled back that there was “fear bordering on panic” and that one of the great challenges would be whether the U.S. could safely evacuate itself and vulnerable Vietnamese through the “pandemonium” that might come.
After the plane crash, Martin summoned Carter to his residence, ostensibly to discuss the tragedy as a “public affairs problem.”
Instead, he launched into a speech.
Martin said the crash should “never have happened” and claimed that if he had been consulted, he would never have allowed that type of plane to be used.
The ambassador then blamed the crash, indirectly but clearly, on “people who go around cutting me off from the advice I would be giving Washington” — a jab at Carter and his direct communication earlier.
Carter pressed him: “What you’re saying is that I am responsible for the plane crash?”
Martin didn’t quite say “yes,” but his implication was unmistakable.
For Carter, this was a stunning example of a leader twisting reality to serve his own political narrative and protect his authority.
* * *
The embassy evacuation concept had three tiers:
1. Primary tier: Fixed-wing aircraft from Saigon’s Tân Sơn Nhất Airport.
2. Secondary/complementary tier: evacuation by sea.
3. Last resort: Helicopters, which were considered dangerous because they were low-flying, carried small loads, and were thought likely targets for soldiers of a betrayed South Vietnamese army who might fire on departing Americans.
In practice, the worst-case scenario became reality.
On the night of April 28–29, 1975, senior embassy staff — including Carter — met to review the situation. Artillery had reportedly blasted the runways, making fixed-wing operations impossible.
Martin refused at first to fully believe it and insisted on driving to the airport himself to inspect the runways. When he finally did so, he accepted the reality and triggered the helicopter plan.
Meanwhile, Carter was juggling grim responsibilities:
• His USIS compound, several kilometers from the embassy, housed about 200 Vietnamese who had “overnighted” there in hopes of catching the next plane out.
• His staff lists, carefully assembled over weeks, had been dumped in a pile somewhere in the embassy and were now useless.
• Late in the process he was ordered to help create new lists for another 10,000 evacuees overnight, even as the military situation collapsed.
As fixed-wing operations ended, convoys of buses tried to move people from Saigon to helicopter pickup points. Carter later recalled helping a Marine captain who didn’t even know the locations of all the designated pickup zones, improvising under fire to get people in place.
* * *
On April 29, the embassy grounds were ringed by thousands of desperate Vietnamese, pressed against the walls and gates. Inside, staff were blowing safes, shredding documents, and burning files.
Helicopters began landing not only on the embassy’s helipad but also on several other U.S.-controlled rooftops in Saigon which had been fitted with landing zones in recent months.
Carter was ordered to board the first helicopter at around 1 p.m. with his key American staff. He led them up to the roof.
He then refused to get on.
“I put my crew on the plane, and I would not go. I stayed behind because I had left Vietnamese people, my staff in particular, in the compound,” he said. “They were trapped.”
The plan — already badly frayed — had been reduced to a brutal directive: Only Americans would be permitted on the final lifts, despite explicit promises made earlier to senior Vietnamese staff that if the Americans evacuated, they would take them, too.
Carter tried to find a way to reach his Vietnamese colleagues.
He phoned the compound and told them to slip out, one by one, and make their way to his villa halfway between the compound and the embassy. He hoped he could walk or smuggle them into the embassy through the crowds.
But transport had broken down; bus drivers were deserting, vehicles failing, emergency plans collapsing.
When members of Carter’s staff called the Marine guard at the embassy to ask for him, they were told — correctly, from the Marines’ perspective — that their boss had left on an earlier helicopter. Believing he had abandoned them, they scattered from the villa for their own safety.
Carter spent hours making calls and trying to locate transport, but never found them before he too was forced to leave.
He eventually boarded the second-to-last helicopter out of Saigon in the early hours of April 30, alongside a few American correspondents, the ambassador’s secretary, and the ambassador’s dog, a detail that would still sting him years later for what it symbolizes about priorities in that final chaos.
* * *
When speaking about his last days in Vietnam, Carter would take pains to emphasize two things:
The helicopter pilots and crews were extraordinary, he said. They would fly 24 hours straight, often ditching perfectly good helicopters off aircraft carriers to make room for more evacuees, and getting “all the Americans out” and at least “a handful” of Vietnamese employees and key civilians in the last lifts.
Secondly, contrary to many fears, no widespread revenge fire came from South Vietnamese troops. Carter knew of only a few shots taken at helicopters, causing minimal damage at worst.
Still, for months afterward, Carter would wake up with nightmares about the people he could not get out. He worried not just about those he knew personally, but about the entire process:
“We left people behind that we swore we would take out if we got out and we didn’t,” he would say. A lot of people got out that shouldn’t have been taken out or gotten out.”
Every time Alan Carter spoke of the last days of Vietnam and his efforts to evacuate his Vietnamese staff and others who had aided the American effort there, he would became visibly emotional and moved to tears.
They had been left behind.
It weighed on him to the end of his life.
This Voices Historical Lens was submitted to The Commons.
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