Tears Before the Rain: An oral history of the fall of South Vietnam

By Larry Engelmann

Book Overview

CBS camera-man Mike Marriott was on the last plane to escape from Danang before it fell in the spring of 1975. The scene was pure chaos: thousands of panic-stricken Vietnamese storming the airliner, soldiers shooting women and children to get aboard first, refugees being trampled to death. Marriott remembers standing at the door of the aft stairway, which was gaping open as the plane took off. There were five Vietnamese below me on the steps. As the nose of the aircraft came up, because of the force and speed of the aircraft, the Vietnamese began to fall off. One guy managed to hang on for a while, but at about 600 feet he let go and just floated off--just like a skydiver.... What was going through my head was, I've got to survive this, and at the same time, I've got to capture this on film. This is the start of the fall of a country. This country is gone. This is history, right here and now.
In Tears Before the Rain, a stunning oral history of the fall of South Vietnam, Larry Engelmann has gathered together the testimony of seventy eyewitnesses (both American and Vietnamese) who, like Mike Marriott, capture the feel of history right here and now. We hear the voices of nurses, pilots, television and print media figures, the American Ambassador Graham Martin, the CIA station chief Thomas Polgar, Vietnamese generals, Amerasian children, even Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Through this extraordinary range of perspectives, we experience first-hand the final weeks before Saigon collapsed, from President Thieu's cataclysmic withdrawal from Pleiku and Kontum, (Colonel Le Khac Ly, put in command of the withdrawal, recalls receiving the order: I opened my eyes large, large, large. I thought I wasn't hearing clearly) to the last-minute airlift of Americans from the embassy courtyard and roof (I remember when the bird ascended, says Stuart Herrington, who left on one of the last helicopters, It banked, and there was the Embassy, the parking lot, the street lights. And the silence).
Touching, heroic, harrowing, and utterly unforgettable, these dramatic narratives illuminate one of the central events of modern history. It was like being at Waterloo, concludes Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes. It was so important, so historical. And today it is still very obvious that we Americans have not recovered from Vietnam....Nothing else in my lifetime was as important as that--as important as Vietnam.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195053869
• ISBN13: 9780195053869
• Release Date: August 1990
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Allowing a broad range of narrators to tell their truth

Engelmann's Tears Before the Rain is a very well balanced oral history of the fall of South Vietnam. Airline attendants tell frightening stories of commercial jets being mobbed by desperate South Vietnamese trying to escape before the flood of Norht Vietnamese troops overtake Saigon. US Military officers, an ambassador, and CIA field chief give their perspectives from the American point of view. South Vietnamese army officers and soldiers give another account, one of betrayal by the United States. I can certainly understand the perspectives of the South Vietnamese. They feared for their lives and the lives of their families. The North Vietnamese forces controlled large portions of rural South Vietnam and they were ruthless to former South Vietnamese government officials and their families. This book is a very fast read, the narrative statements have been well edited into seemless paragraphs and any prompt questions by Engelmann have been removed. Our entry into the war was a terrible miscalculation. Our leaving the war was a human tragedy for all those South Vietnamese who had grown dependent on the United States. Engelmann's book puts a personal face on these tragic times. Well done and worth 5 stars.

Just buy it.

I've read a fair amount about Vietnam (Fire In the Lake, Karnow's Vietnam, Chickenhawk, etc.), all definitely worth reading, but this book ... the many stories and experiences, is the most memorable. It's rare to find a singular event remembered and retold from so many different perspectives. Well balanced and presented.

Tears of human tragedy. Joys of human triumph.

I shed many tears while reading this beautifully written collection of stories about the fall of Saigon. They are stories of tragedy inflicted by human beings upon each other. They are stories of human spirits surviving, triumphing over the most horrible situations. You will never be able to forget the people, the stories once you read the book. I highly recommend it.

Yes. Once again, it's a book you must read.

Like a Gideon giving away bibles. I read and then gave away 4 copies of this book. I bought 10 more copies. I gave them away. I then bought 20 more copies and gave them away. Yes, this book is that good! You must experience it. Professor Englemann has produced a superb collection of first hand accounts by those who experienced the last 3 months of the Vietnam War. Please buy it and read it. I can't afford to buy it for everybody!