Vietnam war

Vietnam: 40 Years Later

ON April 30, 1975, the army of communist North Vietnam took Saigon, toppled the government of South Vietnam, and brought two decades of American military involvement in Vietnam to an end. Today the fall of Saigon is defined, at least in the west, by two indelible images. The first, taken by the late Dutch photographer Hugh Van Es, shows a line of desperate Vietnamese trying to board an American helicopter from a rooftop in downtown Saigon.