Getting it Wrong in a Photo...
It became the most remembered photograph of the fall of Saigon, capturing the last chaotic days of the Vietnam war, and most people believed that it showed desperate Americans crowding on to the roof of the United States Embassy to board a helicopter. That is what the picture caption usually says.
But as with much about the Vietnam war, the caption is wrong. The building is an apartment complex. The people fleeing are Vietnamese. The last helicopter left about 12 hours later.
In its way, the photograph is a metaphor for all the misunderstanding that plagued the Vietnam war. Americans, whether conservative or liberal, often imposed their own ideas on that troubling war, and that seems to be what happened with the picture, said Hubert Van Es, a United Press International photographer who took it, on April 29, 1975, from the roof of a nearby hotel.
"I put the correct caption on it," said Mr. Van Es, "but people back in the United States just took it for granted that it must be the embassy, because that was where they believed the evacuation took place."
"The picture was of an apartment building for the employees of the United States Agency for International Development, its top floor reserved for the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy chief of station. The address was 22 Gia Long Street, I lived around the corner as one of the last two correspondents of The New York Times remaining in Vietnam and left later that afternoon, by chopper from Tan Son Nhut Airbase." Van Es Said.
