The day the Communist forces swept into Saigon was a long day for everybody in the shocked, astonished, and relieved city that we are told may now be renamed after Ho Chi Minh.

Since then foreigners, including the 117 newsmen who stayed, have been able to move about freely. Foreign property that is occupied has been respected but unoccupied property has been requisitioned. The looted British Embassy at one time had a company of North Vietnamese soldiers billeted there. The inside was a dreadful mess but I was able to rescue the Union Jack, draped over the spiked gate by looters.
Sergeant Bui Van Don, who had been sent to guard the building, was so tired that every now and again his head would drop forward until it touched the table. Then he would rub his eyes furiously, smile, hitch up his AK-47 and look around to make sure that the building was still intact. Twenty-one years old, born at Thai Binh in North Vietnam, he had been two and a half years in the South with a sapper unit. Crew-cut, stocky, sun-tanned, he looked as tough and enduring as one expects Communist soldiers to be.
Sergeant DonÕs day had begun in the small hours of the morning in wooded country near Phu Lam just outside Saigon to the south. His unit had been resting since staging a commando attack on a communications centre in Phu Lam the week before. Then, he said, ÒThe major told us this was the day we were going to attack  Saigon. He said this was the day we had all been waiting for. We were going to attack whatever happened but he hoped there would be a surrender. If there was no surrender we had to attack only military targets and take care not to kill or hurt ordinary people.Ó The sergeantÕs assigned target had been one of the installations at the presidential palace, he claimed sleepily, and hanging from his American webbing belt were the bombs he would have used if he had had to Ñ oblong home-made looking packages of explosive tied up with reed fibre and with white string fuses. Sergeant Don grinned, said ÒVictoryÓ several times, and shook my hand, then set to dozing again.
But there was nothing home-made about the rest of the army that burst into Saigon that morning. The tanks came first, roaring in from the north-east after pancaking the flimsy last barricade of private cars pushed across the road near the Newport Bridge. The big T-54s moved fast, whipping along the road amid amazingly near-normal civilian traffic, and they must have reached the Independence Palace within an hour of getting the final signal to advance. Infantry in Chinese-made trucks poured in afterwards towing artillery camouflaged with branches, captured jeeps, Russian-made armoured personnel carriers.
The most striking characteristic of the young boys abroad, although they waved 
and smiled readily, was their shyness. Approached by the curious citizens of Saigon Ñ who converged on them in their thousands Ñ they would look down at their boots and embarrassedly fiddle with the muzzles of their AK-47s. Once they realised they were celebrities, the bolder spirits talked more freely.
After that first incredible moment at the palace when the lead tank bashed through the front gates at speed while President Minh Ñ unshaven and, some say, weeping Ñ waited, the day unrolled from scene to scene like a speeded-up film. Minh, who had tried and failed to get something more than mere surrender, soon went away with Communist officers and his Prime Minister, Vu Van Mauy. Then the palace guard put up a final show of resistance and in the park in front of the palace, where by that time a good battalion of infantry and several tanks were positioned, we saw a little bit of the last skirmish of the Vietnam war. One or two mortar rounds dropped in the square and a solitary machine-gun opened up. A vast volume of fire was dropped on whoever it was who had decided to fight to the death.
After a while it was over, and the briefly frightened civilians were once again chatting with the smiling soldiers in the park. Later they scooped up the bodies and the scattered limbs from the little road at the corner of the palace, the flies already buzzing over the fragmented corpses.
When they saw the first tank hardly anybody could believe what was happening. I told a colleague it had to be a South Vietnamese tank showing the other sideÕs flag. But then the realisation dawned. There had to be a first tank, just as there had to be a first tank in Paris in 1944. And then in they came, waving and grinning. The men who had won the longest war in the twentieth century, and won it outright. And after a while they dismounted and fell to smoking. Everyone stared at them in a totally curious way that will never be repeatedÉ
If one was looking for symbols on this fantastic day they were all around. Scattered near the Continental Hotel were thousands of the claim forms the Americans used in the days of their war to compensate villagers for innocent deaths or damage to livestock or crops caused by US troops. They had dropped out of some looted filing cabinet from the Brinks Hotel.
A boy who used to sell the Stars and Stripes, the American army newspaper, outside one of the big hotels capered about in excitement waving a radio aerial he had probably wrenched off one of the many abandoned American cars. ÒOh, GI, go home now,Ó he cried in English.
There was and still is fear in the city. Middle-class people are worried and the worst off of all are the many who tried to leave who were on the American evacuation lists and who waited at the Embassy or the other pick-up points and saw the last helicopters go without them. They were miserably heading for home early in the morning with their suitcases and bundles. The children, dressed in their best clothes to go to America, were smeared and stained and tearful, and the parents were grim-faced.
There was no great slaughter, but it was not a bloodless day. Soldiers of both sides died in the early morning battles before the surrender, and civilians were killed on the edges of the city. At the French military hospital three Communist soldiers had been put in a side ward. One had just had his leg amputated Ñ surely a dreadful thing on liberation day.
And something should be said about the other army, the one that vanished in just two months leaving hardly a trace except the debris in the streets of Saigon that spoke surrender more eloquently than any truce. Army boots and uniforms, upturned machine-guns, belts of ammunition, walkie-talkie sets were thrown in the streets. Most of the Saigon soldiers went home, although a few chose to fight, and a handful chose suicide.
The Saigon soldiers went home throwing coloured smoke bombs as they went, straggling lines of men. Yet they too had a certain dignity and some of them had fought for a long time, and fought well. And there is no dishonour in surrender when there is nothing to fight for any more.
At the Independence Palace General Minh and Senator Vu Van Mau, President and Prime Minister of South Vietnam for thirty-six hours sat down to a dinner of rice and North Vietnamese ration canned beef with the victorious generals, and North Vietnamese television cameramen recorded the scene. It was a long, long day that began with the departure of the last Americans throwing tear gas on the crowds of disappointed and angry Vietnamese at the Embassy as the last chopper rose from the roof, followed by MinhÕs miserable surrender speech, the final disintegration of the Saigon army, the roar of the Communist lead tanks, the ÒbattleÓ at the palace, the swift imposition of order and control, the crowds of curious, relieved, and happy people Ñ and ended with Sergeant Bui Van Don nodding off at his post.
The next day, May Day, there was no 
victory parade, although there were a few demonstrations. ÒIt will be work as usual,Ó a Communist cadre told me.
But nothing will ever be Òas usualÓ in Saigon again. Thirty years were wiped out on Wednesday, 30 April, and now the city begins again where it left off in 1945.