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Title details for Getting Out of Saigon by Ralph White - Available

Getting Out of Saigon

How a 27-Year-Old Banker Saved 113 Vietnamese Civilians

by Ralph White
ebook
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A "captivating" (The Washington Post) true story of "courage, resolve, and determination" (The Christian Science Monitor), author Ralph White's successful effort to save nearly the entire staff of the Saigon branch of Chase Manhattan bank and their families before the city fell to the North Vietnamese Army.
In April 1975, Ralph White was asked by his boss to transfer from the Bangkok branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank to the Saigon Branch. He was tasked with closing the branch if and when it appeared that Saigon would fall to the North Vietnamese army and ensure the safety of the senior Vietnamese employees.

But when he arrived, he realized the situation in Saigon was far more perilous than he had imagined. The senior staff members there urged him to evacuate the entire staff of the branch and their families, which was far more than he was authorized to do. Quickly he realized that no one would be safe when the city fell, and it was no longer a question of whether to evacuate but how.

Getting Out of Saigon is an "edge-of-your-seat" (Oprah Daily) story of a city on the eve of destruction and the colorful characters who respond differently to impending doom. It's a remarkable account of one man's quest to save innocent lives not because he was ordered but because it was the right thing to do.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 4, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781982195199

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781982195199
      • File size: 25956 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      January 1, 2022

      New York Times best-selling authors Abrams and Fisher join forces with Gray, the young Black lawyer who served as Martin Luther King's defense attorney when King was tried for his part in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to tell the story of the trial in Alabama v. King (150,000-copy first printing). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Bissinger chronicles The Mosquito Bowl, a football game played in the Pacific theater on Christmas Eve 1944 between the 4th and 29th Marine regiments to prove which had the better players (400,000-copy first printing). In The Spy Who Knew Too Much, New York Times best-selling, Edgar Award-winning Blum recounts efforts by Tennent "Pete" Bagley--a rising CIA star accused of being a mole--to redeem his reputation by solving the disappearance of former CIA officer John Paisley and to reconcile with his daughter, who married his accuser's son (50,000-copy first printing). Associate professor of musicology at the University of Michigan, Clague reveals how The Star-Spangled Banner became the national anthem in O Say Can You Hear? Multiply honored for his many history books, Dolin returns with Rebels at Sea to chronicle the contributions of the freelance sailors--too often called profiteers or pirates--who scurried about on private vessels to help win the Revolutionary War. With The Earth Is All That Lasts, Gardner, the award-winning author of Rough Riders and To Hell on a Fast Horse, offers a dual biography of the significant Indigenous leaders Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull (50,000-copy first printing). With We Refuse To Forget, New America and PEN America fellow Gayle investigates the Creek Nation, which both enslaved Black people and accepted them as full citizens, electing the Black Creek citizen Cow Tom as chief in the mid 1800s but stripping Black Creeks of their citizenship in the 1970s. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Hoffman's Give Me Liberty profiles Cuban dissident Oswaldo Pay�, who founded the Christian Liberation Movement in 1987 to challenge Fidel Castro's Communist regime (50,000-copy first printing). Forensic anthropologist Kimmerle's We Carry Their Bones the true story of the Dozier Boys School, first brought to light in Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Nickel Boys (75,000-copy first printing). Kissinger's Leadership plumbs modern statecraft, putting forth Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon, Lee Kuan Yew, and Anwar Sadat as game-changing leaders who helped create a new world order. From a prominent family that included the tutor to China's last emperor, Li profiles her aunts Jun and Hong--separated after the Chinese Civil War, with one becoming a committed Communist and the other a committed capitalist--in Daughters of the Flower Fragrant Garden. New York Times best-selling author Mazzeo (Irena's Children) reveals that three Sisters in Resistance--a German spy, an American socialite, and Mussolini's daughter--risked their lives to hand over the secret diaries of Italy's jailed former foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, to the Allies; the diaries later figured importantly in the Nuremberg Trials (45,000-copy first printing). A Junior Research Fellowship in English at University College, Oxford, whose PhD dissertation examined how gay cruising manifests in New York poetry, Parlett explains that New York's Fire Island has figured importantly in art, literature, culture, and queer liberation over the past century (75,000-copy first printing). Author of the New York Times best-selling Writer, Sailor,...

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 28, 2022
      In this stirring debut, White recounts his extraordinary mission rescuing civilians during the fall of South Vietnam. An American, 27-year-old White was assigned in February 1975 as an entry-level corporate banking officer at Chase Manhattan’s Bangkok branch. But, as he reveals, his career took a significant turn when, two months later, he was assigned to work in Saigon. As the North Vietnamese army began to close in on the city, White was charged with the increasingly fraught task of ensuring the safety of the bank’s employees. In a propulsive and suspenseful narrative, he recalls the lengths that he went to do so, battling American bureaucracy to get the branch’s Vietnamese workers out of the city and past allies who were “shooting suspected deserters.” With the help of diplomats running a clandestine rescue operation “behind the ambassador’s back,” White was able to commandeer an abandoned cargo plane and save over 100 Vietnamese lives. What he modestly refers to as his 15 minutes of fame is made more resonant by his deep humanity, as when he writes that “more than refugees, employees, staff,” the people he rescued “were my families.” Admirers of Antonio Mendez’s Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History will be hooked.

    • Library Journal

      Starred review from March 1, 2023

      On April 30, 1975, the long Vietnam War finally came to an end when Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell to Communist forces. A couple of weeks before that fateful day, Chase Bank sent former banker White to the city to close the branch there and help their employees get out. White's main qualifications were that he was a U.S. citizen, and he was already in the region working at the bank's branch in Bangkok, Thailand. It was clear to most that a Communist victory was both inevitable and coming soon. However, the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. embassy were not cooperative at helping people leave; they required virtually impossible to get exit visas and more. Therefore, White explored various unusual options--stealing a plane or a ship, for example--to help people escape. Ultimately, 113 employees, their families, and White were able to leave through somewhat more conventional means just four days before the city fell. VERDICT This enthralling story is highly recommended for readers specifically interested in the fall of Saigon or in memoirs generally.--Joshua Wallace

      Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from January 15, 2023
      A retired banker makes his memoir debut with a unique, gripping story from the Vietnam War. As the final days of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War sputtered to their ignominious end, White, age 27, was told by his boss at Chase Manhattan that he was being transferred from Bangkok to Saigon, where his job would be to close the branch and ensure the safety of the top-level Vietnamese employees. "I had a primitive affection for Saigon," he writes, imagining that he would be "following in the footsteps of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad." But when he arrived in April 1975, he learned that all 53 employees would be executed when the North Vietnamese took the city--not if, but when. Matters were seriously complicated by the fact that the delusional American ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, was making it nearly impossible to arrange evacuations. Lucky for the Vietnamese employees of Chase, White's "basic view was that if you thought you couldn't do something, you were probably right, whereas if you thought that you could, you stood a decent chance of pulling it off." He set his mind to getting the employees and their families--113 people--to safety, even if he had to steal a plane to do it. "I was a guy who struggled to resist an idea once it lodged in my mind," he writes. "Whether it was buying something, doing something, going somewhere, or drinking something, I was anxious until I bought it, did it, went there, or drank it." As he chronicles how he built his rescue plan and navigated the streets of the city with a briefcase containing a revolver and $25,000 in cash, White's persona seems like something out of a Terry Southern or Ian Fleming novel--as does his writing. White tells his inspiring story with wit, panache, humility, and a captivating sense of time and place. A fantastic read.

      COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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