Lin and Duc are killed during the evacuation

Linh and Duc are killed during the evacuation when a bullet strikes them as they are trying to board the plane carrying The General’s party out of Saigon. The unnamed narrator and Bon manage to get them aboard before the aircraft leaves, but cannot save them. Their deaths turn the escape into a lasting bereavement, and the bullet’s unknown origin leaves Bon unable to resolve whether the shot came from friend or foe.

The evacuation turns into a rescue

As The General steps onto the plane’s ramp, the narrator pauses to let Linh and Duc go ahead. When they do not appear, he turns back and finds Bon kneeling with Linh on the tarmac. Katyushas continue to strike the runway, and the loadmaster urges the narrator to board as the plane begins moving toward open runway. The evacuation’s urgency now competes with the need to bring Bon and his family with them.

The narrator runs back through abandoned luggage and tries to pull Bon away from Linh, but Bon is immobilized by grief. The narrator separates them and carries Linh toward the plane. As the aircraft taxis away under continuing fire, The General catches Linh at the ramp. Bon runs alongside the narrator with Duc, and the loadmaster takes the child aboard. Bon slows with his head bowed; the narrator pushes him onto the ramp, where the loadmaster pulls him up. The narrator then leaps aboard. The sequence makes their escape possible, but it cannot reverse what has happened to Linh and Duc.

Death confirmed on Guam

Shortly after the plane lands on Guam, an ambulance arrives for the bodies. The narrator lowers Duc onto a stretcher, then watches the medics cover him and Linh before placing them in the ambulance. The loss is shared physically and emotionally: the narrator weeps, while Bon’s grief is described as if it releases a lifetime’s worth of tears. They are taken to Camp Asan, where The General secures barracks for them, more comfortable than the tents assigned to other late arrivals.

Bon becomes catatonic on his bunk. He later remembers neither the evacuation shown on television that afternoon and the next day nor the surrounding refugee camp, where thousands of people are also heard wailing. His loss thus coincides with a mass displacement, but the scale of the crisis does not diminish the particular absence of his wife and son. For Bon, the family’s death overwhelms the immediate record of how he reached safety.

Burial and the unanswered shot

The next day, Linh and Duc are buried after spending the night in a naval morgue. The official cause of death is one bullet of unknown type. The account does not identify who fired it or which side the shot came from; that uncertainty becomes part of the aftermath. The narrator describes the bullet as continuing to turn in Bon’s mind, leaving him to face the possibility that either a friend or an enemy killed his family.

Bon wears a white mourning scarf torn from a bedsheet. Duc’s small coffin is lowered on top of Linh’s, placing mother and son in one grave. Bon throws himself into the open grave and cries out in anguish over why they died instead of him. The narrator climbs in to calm him, helps him out, and joins in covering the coffins with earth. The General, Madame, and an exhausted priest watch in silence. The burial gives the family a shared resting place, but offers no explanation for their deaths and no resolution for Bon’s grief.

Consequences for the survivors

The event leaves Bon bereaved and catatonic, and gives the narrator a direct role in carrying the family through the last moments of the evacuation and into their burial. His actions save Bon from being left behind on the runway, while the arrival on Guam confirms that escape from the attack has not meant survival for Linh and Duc. The contrast between the plane’s departure and the family’s grave defines the cost of the evacuation for the two men.

The unknown bullet also prevents the loss from being assigned cleanly to one side. Rather than closing the question, the official account preserves it, and Bon must live with the possibility that the fatal shot came from either friend or foe. In the narrative, this unresolved cause accompanies the concrete rituals of mourning: the improvised scarf, the shared grave, and the silent witnesses. Linh and Duc’s deaths remain both a family tragedy and a consequence of an evacuation conducted under fire.