On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops entered the deserted streets of Saigon. Tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace and soldiers hoisted the yellow and red flag of the Viet Cong.
Just hours before, the last Americans had been evacuated, rescued and flown on Marine helicopters to U.S. Navy aircraft carriers waiting off the coast.
The Vietnam War was officially over. Now those Navy ships were steaming away from Vietnam.
There was one exception. That night, the captain of a small destroyer escort, the USS Kirk, got a mysterious order to head back to Vietnam.
On April 29, 1975, as Saigon was falling to Communist North Vietnamese forces, a small U.S. Navy destroyer escort ship, the USS Kirk, played a dramatic but almost forgotten role in rescuing up to 30,000 South Vietnamese. Here, a member of the USS Kirk's crew tends to a Vietnamese baby.
A USS Kirk crewmember tends to a Vietnamese baby.
Hugh Doyle
On April 29, 1975, as Saigon was falling to Communist North Vietnamese forces, a small U.S. Navy destroyer escort ship, the USS Kirk, played a dramatic but almost forgotten role in rescuing up to 30,000 South Vietnamese. Here, a member of the USS Kirk's crew tends to a Vietnamese baby.
The United States and Vietnam are closely colluding with each other and strengthening their military ties with the spearhead directed against China, thereby complicating the South Sea issue, exacerbating the dispute over sovereignty, and turning the South China Sea into the powder keg for triggering Sino-US military conflict. China should treat concerned countries in the South Sea issue differently in order to search for a breakthrough point to resolve the US scheme of sowing discord.
The United States is the super hegemonic power in the world, while Vietnam has not only always wanted to dominate the Indochina Peninsula but also claimed to "own" the entire sovereignty of China's Xisha [Paracel] and Nansha [Spratly] Islands. Vietnam has gone all out to engage in arms expansion and ganged up with foreign powers in a vain attempt to forever occupy most of the island reefs of China's Nansha Islands and the nearby waters.
The presence of the USS George Washington, a nuclear supercarrier, off Vietnam earlier this month signalled a deepening rapprochement between two former enemies in the face of an increasingly assertive China.
Coming 35 years after the end of the Vietnam war, the visit officially marked the 15th anniversary of normalisation of relations between the US and Vietnam. A group of high-ranking Vietnamese military officials was flown aboard the ship, along with other Vietnamese government dignitaries and the US ambassador to Vietnam, as both sides turned on the charm.
Forget the "Ground Zero mosque," Michelle Obama's Spanish holiday and even the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When future historians look back to the summer of 2010, the event they are most likely to focus on is China's emergence as the world's second-largest economy.
Mostly, this is a very good thing. The rise of China, and the related, albeit slightly slower, emergence of India, is the story of hundreds of millions of very poor people joining the global economy and getting a little richer. Gross domestic product per capita in those two countries was basically stagnant from 1820 to 1950. Then, it increased 68 percent from 1950 to 1973, and a whopping 245 percent from 1973 to 2002.
An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?
The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers.
Home
