Is "Kim's Nightmare" scene in Miss Saigon historically accurate?

[Lot666]

Posted: 6/2/17 at 9:37am

According to this NY Times article from 2000, the famous rooftop evacuation took place at an apartment building, not the U.S. Embassy:

The World; Getting It Wrong in a Photo

Did something similar happen at the embassy, or did the show's creators make the same mistake as the "people back in the United States [who] just took it for granted that it must be the embassy, because that was where they believed the evacuation took place"?

[dramamama611]

Posted: 6/2/17 at 9:40am

Or, they took dramatic license.....and made it work for the show.

[Lot666]

Posted: 6/2/17 at 9:45am

To sort of answer my own question, I just found this Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Frequent_Wind

It states that "The U.S. Embassy in Saigon was intended to only be a secondary evacuation point for embassy staff, but it was soon overwhelmed with evacuees and desperate South Vietnamese. The evacuation of the embassy was completed at 07:53 on 30 April, but some Americans chose to stay or were left behind and some 400 third country nationals were left at the embassy."

So apparently there was a famous photograph in which many people mistook an apartment building for the embassy, but there was also an embassy evacuation.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled program.