In a new book, Ghilain publicly recounts for the first time his story as one of the last Americans to escape Vietnam before the communists took the embassy.
Ghilain remembered a fellow Marine asking, “Are we going to receive any type of help?’’
There would be no counterattack, Snepp told them. US ground troops had pulled out, as required by the Paris Peace Accords, signed two years before, and South Vietnamese forces were in disarray across the country.
A major spoke up.
“I don’t know how it’ll end, but we’re Marines, and we’ll fight and die like Marines,’’ Ghilain recalled him saying. “We’ll defend it like the Alamo, if we have to.’’
It was then that Ghilain realized he was not in the Paris of the Far East, as his superiors promised before sending him to Saigon.
He may have been the biggest Marine at the compound, a former guard on the Medford High School football team capable of bench-pressing more than 300 pounds, but he was scared.
“I thought, ‘What the hell have I done?’ ’’ he said in a recent interview at his home in Malden, noting he had volunteered to serve in the military only a few months after the draft had ended.
Ghilain, now a 56-year-old widowed father of two who has been a patrolman with the Medford Police Department for the past 29 years, finally fled Vietnam on the second-to-last US helicopter at the end of a frenetic, 24-hour evacuation of the embassy on April 30, 1975.
The role of Ghilain and his fellow Marines in carrying out that final act of the Vietnam War, which saved thousands of locals who had helped the Americans over the years but stranded thousands of others, is chronicled for the first time in a recently released book by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin titled, “Last Men Out: The True Story of America’s Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam.’’
As he prepared this week to commemorate another Memorial Day, Ghilain recounted the trial of those last few months before the United States made its hasty exit to warships floating just over the horizon in the South China Sea.
