They Are All My Family: A Daring Rescue in the Chaos of Saigon's Fall

by John P. Riordan, Monique Brinson Demery (With)

Overview

Published for the fortieth anniversary of the final days of the Vietnam War, this is the suspenseful and moving tale of how John Riordan, an assistant manager of Citibank's Saigon branch, devised a daring plan to save 106 Vietnamese from the dangers of the Communist takeover.

Riordan -- who had served in the US Army after the Tet Offensive and had left the military behind for a career in international banking -- was not the type to take dramatic action, but once the North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon in April 1975 and it was clear that Riordan's Vietnamese colleagues and their families would be stranded in a city teetering on total collapse, he knew he could not leave them behind. Defying the objections of his superiors and going against the official policy of the United States, Riordan went back into Saigon to save them.

In fifteen harrowing trips to Saigon's airport, he maneuvered through the bureaucratic shambles, claiming that the Vietnamese were his wife and scores of children. It was a ruse that, at times, veered close to failure, yet against all odds, the improbable plan succeeded. At great risk, the Vietnamese left their lives behind to start anew in the United States, and now John is known to his grateful Vietnamese colleagues and hundreds of their American descendants as Papa.

They Are All My Family is a vivid narrative of one man's ingenious strategy which transformed a time of enormous peril into a display of extraordinary courage. Reflecting on those fateful days in this account, John Riordan's modest heroism provides a striking contrast to America's ignominious retreat from the decade of conflict.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610395038
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	04/07/2015
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	552,039
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

John Riordan is a former vice president of Citibank. He served in the US Army, landing in Vietnam at the end of the 1968 Tet Offensive, and then went on to a career at Citibank, with a focus on the bank's branches in East Asia. Riordan now owns and runs an environmental farm in Wisconsin.

Monique Brinson Demery earned an MA in East Asia Regional Studies from Harvard University and is the author of Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu. She lives in Chicago.

Table of Contents

Map of Saigon, April 1975 viii

Chapter 1 Last Flight to Saigon 1

Chapter 2 April 3, Saigon: The Call 11

Chapter 3 The Ides of March, 1975 21

Chapter 4 April 3, Disaster Preparedness 33

Chapter 5 April 3, Money on Fire 47

Chapter 6 April 4, Leaving Saigon 63

Chapter 7 April 5-12, Hong Kong 75

Chapter 8 April 14, Saigon Briefings 87

Chapter 9 April 17, Dinner in Hong Kong 97

Chapter 10 April 18, Return to Saigon 107

Chapter 11 April 19-20, Weekend in Saigon 117

Chapter 12 April 21, Breaking Curfew, Saigon 131

Chapter 13 April 22, Day One 139

Chapter 14 April 23-24, Days Two and Three 151

Chapter 15 April 25, Day Four 165

Chapter 16 April 26, Flying Out 177

Chapter 17 The End of April 185

Epilogue 201

Acknowledgments and Life Notes 213

Notes 223

Index 229

Editorial Reviews

02/09/2015
Timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the April 1975 end of the Republic of Vietnam (and event known in the U.S. as “The Fall of Saigon”), this breezily written memoir, filled with reconstructed dialogue, relates how Riordan, a former assistant manager of Citibank’s Saigon branch, successfully rescued 105 South Vietnamese Citibank employees and their families before the Communist takeover. Riordan had served as an Army officer in Vietnam in 1968, working for the Studies and Observation Group (SOG), a covert special-operations unit, though he downplays his role as a minor one: “a noncombatant in charge of the medical supplies for interdiction missions.” His real story begins on Apr. 18, 1975, when he disobeys his bank superiors’ orders and flies from Hong Kong to Saigon. The heart of the book details Riordan’s relentless efforts to get his former coworkers and their families on evacuation flights, making it out four days before the “revolutionary flag went up over Saigon’s presidential palace.” Riordan focuses on a tiny slice of the big story: an elite bank manager and his well-off employees who feared for their lives and fortunes in the face of the imminent takeover. B&w photos. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"A nail-biting account of one man's quiet heroism in the face of impossible odds."-Kirkus Reviews

“The book provides lots of details, replete with lots of reconstructed quotes, of Riordan's against-the-odds mission. And it has a string of happy endings—a rare and good thing for a book about the American war in Vietnam.”-VVA Veteran

"John Riordan is a quiet, gentle man who defied his bosses and in many ways his own nature when he rescued 106 of his Vietnamese colleagues and their families in the closing days of South Vietnam's collapse. He did it in a plot so devious and ingenious, I doubt even Graham Greene could have thought it up. Now he is telling the story in a book masterfully written with verve and heart. So hats off to John Riordan for his astonishing act of derring-do and for writing a great book." -Lesley Stahl, correspondent for 60 Minutes

"John Riordan has provided a moving testament to the redeeming power of human decency even in one of the darkest chapters of American history. Bravo for what he accomplished and for this riveting book." -Craig R. Whitney, former Vietnam bureau chief of The New York Times

From the Publisher

2015-01-15
Memoir of a bank manager's unlikely role in the evacuation of South Vietnamese from war-torn mid-1970s Saigon.With the assistance of Demery (Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu, 2013), Riordan chronicles his time as a mild-mannered manager of a bank in Saigon and his more important role as a savior of dozens of South Vietnamese families fleeing the rolling juggernaut of communism in 1975. The author first got acquainted with Vietnam through his 15-month tour of duty in the United States Army, but then he found himself in a new and seemingly passive role in international financial services. By the spring of 1975, what seemed like a routine civilian position became the last outpost of American financial interests in South Vietnam and the setting for the final airlift of Americans and South Vietnamese out of the country. Although the narrative lacks the dramatic punch of a more seasoned writer, Riordan builds his story in measured prose, giving a vivid sense of the history of Vietnam that comes from lived experience rather than research. At the height of the crisis in Saigon, the author was faced with a choice that no one should ever have to make. Although he was told to limit his evacuees to American citizens, he found an ingenious way to also save many of his longtime South Vietnamese bank colleagues—by exploiting an obscure legal loophole that involved, amazingly, passing his colleagues off as family. "I wasn't trying to be a hero," he writes, "but it seemed right to me to at least try to help my colleagues and my friends. When I could not stand by, they all became my family. Now they have become our neighbors, our friends, and our fellow Americans. In the case of these 106 lives, the tragic and chaotic end of the [war] became the beginning of something new." A nail-biting account of one man's quiet heroism in the face of impossible odds.

Kirkus Review