50 years later: Residents of Montana had to leave Vietnam in the chaos of war

Reporting by Clayton Elmore, University of Montana School of Journalism

When the Vietnam War escalated and then subsided in the 1970s, Americans who were there for a variety of reasons had to find a way out. Two Montanans – one was still a boy at the time, the other worked for the CIA – tell what it was like almost 50 years after the end of the war.

In 1975, Kurt Keith’s father flew the family from Helena to Vietnam to work. Kurt was 8 years old at the time. His father promised him a vacation, but it turned out to be one of the worst summers of his life. “I remember crying a lot with our folks and friends who were at our house because they were basically friends with us Americans and thought maybe they were going to be marked for some kind of punishment,” Keith said. “I remember thinking as a kid, ‘Oh my God, this is so unfair.'”

Charles Keith was an engineer who was sent to Vietnam during the war by his company, Morrison-Maierle. He worked on bridges and roads, many of which were blown up. When the Americans left in 1975, he knew he had to get his wife and children out too. They had been there for about seven months. They were part of not only the chaos of departure at the time, but also the national coverage of that chaos. Kurt Keith was interviewed by ABC News along with others who were trying to leave the country.

“I remember it was a very short time,” Keith said. “We had to leave Da Lat and go back to Saigon and we didn’t know what was going to happen here. So we literally each packed a suitcase, a small suitcase,” he said.

Keith, who now lives in Bozeman and works for the same company as his father, still thinks about the people he met there. Some of them worked with his family and they became really close. He says his sister learned enough Vietnamese to have an even closer relationship with him. “We had friends and I could never track anyone down,” Keith said. “I think my dad stayed in touch with the chef and her family. They tried to get people out and some of them succeeded,” he said.

His family’s evacuation was abrupt and quick. “I remember getting to the airport and seeing people from the area trying to get into the airport and being held back by military personnel,” Keith said. “They couldn’t leave, they couldn’t get on the planes that we and other Vietnamese were getting on to escape,” he said.

Keith remembers waiting for hours to board a plane that would take them safely and away from the madness. One of Keith’s last memories of Vietnam was the view from 1,000 feet in the air. “I said to my mother, ‘Oh, Mom, look, fireworks,’ and she said, ‘No, that’s artillery fire.’ Whether you were north or south, you could see those explosions,” Keith said.

Keith made it home safely, but it was an abrupt transition from beauty to chaos. His father stayed behind and came home two weeks later. Today, nearly 50 years later, Keith said he will never forget that time. “It’s just so sad that we all had to deal with so much pain and such horrible things,” he said.

Robert Rogers of Frenchtown was also in Vietnam in the 1970s. He didn’t leave during the fall of Saigon, but his departure was definitely abrupt. He was part of a five-man Air Force stealth task force. “Our operation was essentially run by the CIA. When they left, they took our operations center with them, where we kept all the files and everything else. They just took it, put it in a pile, dumped jet fuel on it, set it on fire and burned everything,” Rogers explained.

That was in 1972, and he still doesn’t know why it all happened that way. “Some information was released in 2012. But before that, we could only talk about it with the people who were involved in the operation,” Rogers said.

Rogers’ job was to track the position of North Vietnamese forces. After the operations center was destroyed, Rogers was sent home. Vietnam had been his home for two years, and then it was gone. He stayed in the Air Force to fulfill his contract, which called for him to stay with Special Forces and be sent back to the United States and then Germany for further operations.

Then he got out. Rogers traveled the world for a while, eventually settling on a ranch in Montana. Decades later, he still has questions about how the Air Force handled the disbandment of his unit. “They didn’t retire the colors or anything, they just got rid of them,” Rogers said. “We were assigned to the 56th and that was basically just for pay,” he said.

Rogers says if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t volunteer for the Air Force. But he’s glad he can finally talk about what happened to him in Vietnam and why he had to go the way he did.

“Basically, I mean, in short, that was it. It was a draft, but I volunteered.”

Fifty years ago, the Vietnam War ended and the soldiers who survived it returned home. More than 36,000 Montanans served in the war. To mark the 50th anniversary of its end, students from the University of Montana School of Journalism spoke with Vietnam veterans across the state. YPR will share their stories throughout the month. This series on the Vietnam War is supported in part by the Greater Montana Foundation.