Standing on the U.S. Embassy roof as tanks rumbled toward Saigon and gunfire rang out below, Juan Valdez wondered if he and his fellow Marines might have actually been forgotten.
Working through the night, as a mob of desperate people pressed against the compound’s gates and spilled over its walls, he had helped evacuate nearly 2,100 Americans and Vietnamese fleeing the collapse of South Vietnam. But after Ambassador Graham Martin was airlifted to safety with the embassy’s American flag, the helicopter evacuation had been canceled — the result of a misunderstanding, as air staff didn’t realize a group of Marines was still waiting to be picked up.
A call for help went out. And Master Sgt. Valdez waited for what “seemed like an eternity” for the last helicopter to arrive.
When it landed, he nearly didn’t make it on board. After telling his 10 fellow Marines to get on, and waiting to ensure they boarded safely, he slipped as he stepped onto the ramp. The helicopter began to take off as one of the Marines, Mike Sullivan, did a head count. They were one man short.
“I remember looking at the ramp, and two hands were over the top of it,” Sullivan recalled in Last Days in Vietnam, an Oscar-nominated 2014 documentary. Master Sgt. Valdez was yanked on board as the chopper departed.
It was 7:58 a.m. on April 30, 1975, just a few hours before the North Vietnamese burst through the gates of the presidential palace, hoisted a Viet Cong flag, and celebrated the end of a war that had lasted 20 years, costing the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and untold Vietnamese.
Master Sgt. Valdez, the last Marine to leave Vietnam, was 88 when he died Feb. 15 in Tucson, Ariz., where he was living. To the leathernecks who served under him, it was only fitting that he was the last of their unit to depart Saigon.
“He was a model leader, always looking after his troops,” said one of those Marines, Doug Potratz. “When I went to his house 40 years after the fall of Saigon, he had all our individual ID pictures on the mantel of his fireplace. He never forgot us.”
“In some ways he was like a dad to us,” said Dave Norman, one of the 11 Marines on the last helicopter out of Saigon. “But in other ways he was like a principal. If you screwed up, you didn’t want to be in the principal’s office.”
Mr. Valdez spent 32 years in the Marine Corps, retiring in 1987 as a master gunnery sergeant. Even then, he remained intimately involved with the Corps, working as a civilian in the housing office of Camp Pendleton, the primary Marine base on the West Coast.
“He was always a Marine, taking care of Marines,” Potratz said.
During his first tour in Vietnam, from 1965 to 1967, Mr. Valdez served as a platoon sergeant in an amphibious assault vehicle unit. He returned to the country in September 1974 as the top noncommissioned officer — affectionately known as “Top” — in the embassy’s Marine security guard detachment, with a commander, Maj. James Kean, who was based out of Hong Kong before being summoned to Saigon.
Following the departure of American combat troops in 1973, the embassy Marines were among the last U.S. service members in Vietnam. “We were there to protect American lives, as well as American property. It was just a day-to-day job,” Mr. Valdez said.
As the North Vietnamese advanced toward the capital, he and Kean played a critical role evacuating Americans and their allies. More than 50,000 people were flown out of Tan Son Nhut Air Base before rocket and artillery fire made the flights unsafe. Some 7,000 others were then airlifted as part of Operation Frequent Wind, the final stage of the evacuation, which the U.S. military later called the largest helicopter evacuation in history.
At the embassy, helicopters landed every 10 minutes on the roof or in the parking lot, where Marines chopped down a tamarind tree to expand the makeshift landing zone.
The operation got underway on April 29, 1975, after two of the detachment’s young Marines, Darwin Judge and Charles McMahon, were killed in a predawn rocket attack at Tan Son Nhut. Later that day, Armed Forces Radio delivered a not-so-secret signal to indicate that the airlift was on.
“The temperature in Saigon is 105 degrees and rising,” an announcer intoned. Then the station played the holiday song “White Christmas.”
Master Sgt. Valdez and Kean “didn’t pull any punches,” Potratz said in a phone interview. “They got us in the conference room after Judge and McMahon were killed. They said, ‘There are almost 100,000 North Vietnamese surrounding the city. We don’t know if they’re going to evacuate us or not. But if we die, we die like Marines.’ That kind of stuck to us. After that, we stuck together and did the best we could.”
As thousands of people rushed to the embassy, Master Sgt. Valdez and other Marines guarded the perimeter. He later recalled lifting people over the gates, helping them inside the compound before realizing there wouldn’t be enough helicopters to evacuate everyone.
“Please, at least take my children out,” he was told by parents. “I’ll stay, but take my little girl now.”
Those who were allowed into the compound were searched for weapons — guns were thrown into the embassy pool — before being escorted to a helicopter.
According to Kean’s after-action report, some 10,000 people eventually breached the embassy gates. Master Sgt. Valdez and the remaining Marines prepared to be evacuated while locking down the elevators and barricading doors, using fire extinguishers and other equipment to block off the rooftop.
For many, images of the chaotic withdrawal came to symbolize the futility of a war that should never have been prolonged, let alone started.
Mr. Valdez said that the departure was painfully resonant in 2021, when the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan ended in chaos and bloodshed. As he saw it, the U.S. had repeated some of the same mistakes in both wars.
“We spent so much money, so many weapons, and so many Marine and Army deaths, and for what?” he asked in an interview with Noticias Telemundo. “For what?”
Juan Jose Valdez was born in San Antonio, Texas, on Aug. 19, 1937. His father was a landscaper, and his mother was a homemaker from Mexico. He enlisted in the Marines in 1955, at age 17.
Mr. Valdez died of pneumonia, said his sons Anthony and Michael Valdez. In addition to his children, survivors include a brother; two sisters; a grandson; and three great-granddaughters.
Late in life, Mr. Valdez participated in frequent reunions with his Vietnam detachment, including in a 2015 trip to Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — where a plaque was dedicated to McMahon and Judge, the last Americans killed in action on the ground in Vietnam. The unit’s surviving members had reconnected in 2000, when they traveled to Judge’s Iowa hometown for a memorial service honoring their fallen comrades.
“For a period I went through survivor guilt,” Mr. Valdez said in prepared remarks for the service. “Why wasn’t it me instead. Why did I, who had been in country longer, and had already served a previous tour in Vietnam, lived and these two men died. There were, and still are, no easy answers.”
But “more than anything else,” he added, “we need one another now. Each of us grieves, and when we grieve together, the healing begins.”
