GETTING OUT OF SAIGON

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.