Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's resignation and flight to Taiwan

Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's resignation and flight to Taiwan mark a political exit unfolding in parallel with the scramble to choose who would be evacuated from Saigon. The narrator treats the resignation as almost incidental; the harder question is which names can be carried out and which will be left behind.

Resignation amid the evacuation preparations

Later that day, Thiệu resigned. The narrator had expected the president to abandon the country weeks earlier and spared him barely a thought, continuing to work on the evacuee list. The General, usually fastidious and quick to make hard decisions, delegated that task to the narrator while attending meetings at the Joint General Staff compound, reading interrogation reports, and calling confidants about how to hold Saigon while preparing to abandon it.

The list made evacuation a matter of individual selection rather than a general rescue. As the narrator worked through the nocturnal hours at the villa, he listened to American Radio Service on a Sony, with songs by the Temptations, Janis Joplin, and Marvin Gaye playing as he crossed out names. Each stroke felt to him like a death sentence. The president's resignation coincided with this labor, but the narrator's attention remained on the people whose chances of escape depended on the list.

Secret departure for Taiwan

A few nights after the resignation, Thiệu secretly fled for Taiwan. Claude drove him to the airport and noticed that the president's unusually heavy suitcases clanked with something metallic. Claude presumed they contained a substantial share of the nation's gold; the account presents this as suspicion, not confirmed knowledge.

The next morning Claude told the narrator that their plane would leave in two days. The report links the president's departure to the imminent evacuation without suggesting that Thiệu traveled on the General's plane. His exit is recounted through Claude's observation and the narrator's preparations, rather than as a scene witnessed directly by the narrator.

Political exit and unequal escape

The episode sets the departing president's suspected wealth against the constrained choices facing the General's staff. While Thiệu left secretly with suitcases that may have carried national gold, the narrator had to decide which officers would be included on the evacuation list. He chose a colonel, a major, another captain, and two lieutenants, reserving seats for himself and for Bon, Bon's wife, and their child. The General accepted that this selection would leave behind senior officers with substantial knowledge of, and culpability in, the Special Branch's work.

Thiệu's resignation and flight therefore form part of a broader collapse in which departure is possible for some but never assured for all. His escape is brief in the narration, yet its timing sharpens the contrast between a president leaving the country and the narrator's painstaking attempt to make a limited evacuation list serve as a form of rescue.