"Escape from Saigon - a Novel"

The Worcester Sunday Telegram: 'Escape from Saigon’ captures War’s end."

“No one ever tells you when the last plane leaves,” ~ Escape from Saigon

Review by Ann Connery Frantz, Correspondent for The Worcester Sunday Telegram

Dick Pirozzolo and fellow Vietnam vet Michael Morris joined forces to write a novel about the final moments of the devastating war. Titled “Escape from Saigon,” it creates fictional characters in very real events — soldiers, civilians and news correspondents trying to cope with the crumbling of the last stronghold before the U.S. evacuated personnel, Americans and Vietnamese sympathizers and the Viet Cong took over the city and signaled the conflict’s end.

Though each of them moved into careers after their return in 1975 - Pirozzolo to journalism, working for the Telegram & Gazette’s Southbridge and Webster news bureaus, and then to public relations and writing, and Morris to writing and editing as a journalist - they met as writers and formed an idea. Pirozzolo, a captain in the Air Force, often worked with the press corps there. “Around the mid-’90s, a movement started to recognize Vietnam and to reconcile with Vietnam. I’ve returned there a number of times, writing about the current state of affairs.” Some of his articles appeared in the Boston Herald and on the op-ed pages of the Washington Times.

“I started working with Mike,” Pirozzolo said. “We wrote two books about home building together. We were both veterans, and we talked about maybe someday doing something about Vietnam.” They realized pretty quickly, though, that a definitive history would be better left to the historians. And, he said, “we would be 90 before that was done. So we settled on the very last 30 days of the war and structured the book day by day, with flashbacks to play with time a little, give readers a chance to see what it was like to live in Saigon before the war, to be a journalist there for 10 years.”

Younger Americans never experienced the first televised war, in which daily videos and newscasts brought slaughtered civilians and soldiers into American homes each evening, terrifying parents and changing many Americans’ minds about the ambiguous jungle war being fought thousands of miles away. It was a horrific, unwinnable war, killing 60,000 U.S. soldiers and countless more civilians and Vietnamese soldiers.

In April 1975, the war was finally collapsing as North Vietnamese troops moved into the last stronghold, Saigon. The city’s fall would end any hope for South Vietnam. As conquering troops moved in, thousands of U.S. personnel and civilians who had worked with them sought to flee rather than be slaughtered by the North Vietnamese. They flooded the U.S. embassy and other departure points, filling military planes and helicopters.

This is where “Escape from Saigon” is set.  

They tell the story through the lives of war correspondents Sam Esposito and Lisette Vo, sandwiched between a terse narrative about the final decline of opposition to the north. Sam returns to Vietnam as a Washington, D.C., newspaper correspondent after the Kennedy assassination, wanting to get away from the U.S. He’s remained there for 13 years. Lisette is half-French, half-Vietnamese, and American, working for a broadcast news company. “She portends the rise of women in the media,” Pirozzolo said. They remain until the bitter end because of their work. “They’re journalists,” Pirozzolo said. Read More

"Letting Go." Reflections on the 42nd anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War

The Rev. Sarah Robbins-Cole, Pastor of St. Michaels Episcopal Church in Holliston, Mass. and Protestant Chaplain of Wellesley College

Earlier last week, I was chatting with Sarah—my friend and neighbor—who is otherwise known as The Rev. Sarah Robbins Cole. She told me she was working on her sermon for Easter Sunday the theme was letting go. I suppose the idea is there cannot be rebirth without letting go of those things that tie us to the past.

"Any thoughts?" she inquired. 

An apt subject as April 30th approaches— the 42nd anniversary of the end of the Vietnam! This was also a chance to plug "Escape from Saigon - a Novel," so I mentioned how "letting go" is a theme running throughout the story.  The struggle with letting go is voiced by Billy Freda, the high school friend, who has to let go of the moment he scored the winning point in the championship game, US Ambassador Graham Martin who cannot let go of South Vietnam that had become intertwined with his identity, the reporters who devoted their youth to covering the war and have to find a new life elsewhere, and of course, the two Vietnam veterans who wrote the book—myself and Michael Morris, who saw combat in the Vietnam War as a young soldier in 1967.

Here is what The Rev. Sarah Robbins-Cole, Rector of St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Holliston, Massachusetts told her congregation about letting go on Easter Sunday Morning 2017.

 Easter 2017

Marie Kondo of the book The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing is perhaps one of the best known books that has come our way from the field of decluttering and home organization. If you have not read the book, the basic premise of the book is to get rid of things that do not spark joy. Marie Kondo recommends taking out every item you own, in a particular sequence, and touching each item, and if it does not spark joy – out it goes. She has other helpful hints such as not buying more specialized storage containers to hold yet more clutter, and folding your clothes, for example your shirts, in a way that finding a shirt is as easy as flicking through record albums – because they all are standing on end.

The desire to hold on and to accumulate is as old as time and man. Perhaps it’s because we falsely equate accumulation with security. If I just hang on to clothes, household items, food, photos, books, I will never be in want. Who knows? I might need one of these things later.

Or we mistakenly believe that if we throw things away or recycle them – somehow we won’t remember or value what that item represented.

Or sometimes what is harder is we hold on to emotions and memories - something that has hurt us deeply. Maybe you are holding onto a grudge, or an imaginary contract with someone (that is, unless they do x, I will not forgive, move on, or be nice, etc.,). And somehow letting go would be to admit defeat.

When people have asked me this week what I am preaching on this week – and I tell them that I am working on a sermon about letting go – it has been interesting to hear people’s response.

When I told my neighbor Dick Pirozzolo, who has just published the book, Escape from Saigon - a Novel this year, he said, “funny you should say that”. He is himself a Vietnam Vet, but he said in his research and during his book tour, while he has encountered many veterans who live full and rich lives, he also said that he has met a fair number of veterans who live and breathe their days in Vietnam every day—even though the end of this month will mark the 42nd anniversary of the ending of that war. “After all,” Dick commented, “you are 19 years old, your friends are all back home working in a shoe store, and you are in a strange country, surrounded by people speaking a foreign language, and you are getting shot at.”

But he said, the problem is that what happens to some of us is that we get stuck at 19. Our entire identity is formed around being a Vietnam Veteran and that does not allow a new identity to form. Our lives are dedicated to remembering that time – from the stories we share to the social media platforms we belong to and contribute to.

Another friend of mine, who works with students, said to me, “that is such an important message” because she finds that some of her students cling to ideas, ideologies, and identities in ways that are unhealthy because they perpetuate their sense of being powerless victims in a hostile world.

Or another friend talked about a woman she knew who was the team mom of a volleyball team – and she did everything – she organized uniforms, social events, coaches gifts, the booster club – but at the end of her son’s junior year, at the end of season party, when he was not elected captain by his peers for the following year, she was absolutely devastated. She refused to talk to anyone for the rest of the party and her son never played volleyball again – so attached was she to the idea of her son being captain.

I am sure we all have examples from our own lives - elderly parents who cling to the idea of unrealistic independence, or children who can’t seem to quite realize they have actually reached adulthood, a parent who cannot let go of their adult children, etc., etc.

The subject of letting go is not just a superficial self-help issue. They are deep spiritual concerns – which come to the very heart of our gospel lesson for this morning. Jesus tells Mary – do not hold on to me. Literally – do not cling to me as I am now. I am yet to ascend to the Father. Jesus is telling her that she must not cling to him because his time on earth is done. And why that is important is that first of all, after the crucifixion they can’t just go back to the way things were – and secondly, the ascension is necessary so that the work of Jesus will no longer be constrained to his little corner of Israel – but will spread to the four corners of the earth.

And it’s not just the idea of the physically present Jesus she is going to have to let go of. If she wants to share in that resurrected life of new life and rebirth – she is going to have to let go of everything that is holding her back – she may have to let go of her anger at the Romans for crucifying Jesus, she may have to have to let go of her feelings of resentment at the disciples for handing Jesus over, betraying Jesus, and falling asleep while Jesus was praying when he very clearly asked them to stay awake. She may have to let go of her bitterness toward a world that allows an innocent man to die. She may have to let go of her wrath toward her own people for their maleficent fickleness – who on Palm Sunday lauded Jesus as King – and then jeered Jesus just a few days later when he really needed them.

But let me be clear - there is a big difference between letting go and forgetting. Letting go – means having a willingness to move forward, to not be stuck in the muck and mire of past wrongs. Forgetting is pretty near impossible, and forgiving can be a very long process indeed.

What we celebrate today is the resurrection. We celebrate that when one thing ends – and when we let go and give it to God, and trust that God will do something good and meaningful and life-giving to that of which we let go – we too will live the resurrected life.

God invites us to new life each and every moment of our lives – not to cling to the past – but to be engaged in our lives right here and right now. It is just as Joseph Campbell, the preeminent expert in comparative mythology and religion who wrote: We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.


 Along with being coauthor of "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" set during the final days of America's "first television war," Dick Pirozzolo is managing director of Pirozzolo Company Public Relations, an international communication firm based in Boston, Massachusetts.

 

Refugee Ban, Middle East Wars Have Americans Looking to Vietnam War For Answers

Americans—many of whom know the Vietnam War only through stories told by their parents  and grandparents—are looking back at that painful conflict to understand our contemporary foreign entanglements, veterans issues, the media, and especially the refugee ban as a painful shift in how our nation now treats the most vulnerable victims of war.

The wave of interest in a 40-year-old war that divided our nation and defined a generation accounts for the popularity of current literary offerings on Vietnam—among them “The Sympathizer,” “Tribe,” and the just published, “Escape from Saigon  - a Novel."  In addition these and other books, there has been a recent spate of films, TV documentaries and theatrical productions over the past year that shed light on a war that ended abruptly on April 30, 1975.

Vietnam War refugee Viet Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “The Sympathizer,” shines a harsh light on conflicted foreign allegiances and an America-centric view of foreign conflicts. The “Sympathizer” stands up as an allegory for today’s new hyper nationalism and fear of the other.  Nguyen’s companion book of 2015,  “The Refugees” further examines the subtle complexities and conflicts of leaving ones native country for a new home in America.

Though not strictly a Vietnam War book, “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging,” by Sebastian Junger, examines the plight of returning combat veterans by likening the military to tribal societies where individuals share loyalty, a common purpose and depend on one another for survival. Junger argues that post traumatic stress may stem partly from the loss of community veterans face as they try to adjust to civilian life. When a 22-year-old Army sergeant, who has made life-and-death decisions as leader of a four man-squad in combat, comes home to be surrounded by people who know nothing of his experience the loneliness sets in and becomes overwhelming.

Published in January of 2017, “Escape from Saigon - a Novel” by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo looks at how the Vietnam War shaped contemporary American attitudes in a fast-paced fictional account that compresses the action into the final 30 days of that three-decades-long conflict and put the endgame in context through flashbacks, old news accounts and barroom ramblings about political decisions made in the 1950s that set the stage for war.

The novel recounts the events of April 1975 through the lives of ordinary people most affected by the fighting and political bungling of the powerful they encounter. In addition to Vietnamese and American civilians there are journalists, French expatriates, US Embassy staffers and CIA operatives, all seeking escape by any means possible as the North Vietnamese Army tightens its stranglehold on Saigon—a city once known as the Paris of the Orient. Indeed, the final scenes of “Escape” recount the courage of hordes of Vietnamese refugees and the aviators and sailors who helped them in the biggest air-sea rescue in history, and an America that welcomed them with open arms.

The story is as much about the war as it is about the evolution of media, with much of the plot being about the journalists who covered what was dubbed America’s first television war.  Correspondents back then devoted their youth to covering Vietnam, often for a decade or more and shaped public opinion through vivid, nearly simultaneous TV pictures of battles and newspaper exposés on the Pentagon Papers and My Lai Massacre. “Escape’s” Lisette Vo, NBS-TV’s first Vietnamese-American war correspondent, foreshadows the rise of women in journalism and the advent of 24/7 cable news, while the hard hitting Sam Esposito of The Washington Legend rips into three presidents—especially Dick Nixon—with investigative reports that changed the course of history.

Access to news and information was fairly limited in 1975. There were only three networks. Their anchors were trusted, larger-than-life figures Americans invited into their living rooms. The evening news was appointment TV and we all watched and read essentially the same news—a far cry from today’s media environment with fragmented cable TV audiences and fake Internet news outlets. The technology has improved, but with it Americans lost its sense of community.

In addition to the several books on the Vietnam War, Miss Saigon will be reprised at The Broadway in March and simulcast to local movie theaters in HD to reach a large nationwide audience. Lana Noone’s new play, “Children of the April Rain” about Operation Babylift, the ill-fated evacuation of mixed heritage children during the last days of the Vietnam War is opening around the country. Rory Kennedy’s film "Last Days in Vietnam" and Ken Burns latest PBS-TV documentary "The Vietnam War" add to the contemporary offerings on the subject.

 “Escape from Saigon - a Novel” by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo was published in January of 2017 by Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY, 264 pages and lists at $24.95. Further information and an excerpt are available at: www.escsapefromsaigon.com 

 

BoomerCafe features "Escape from Saigon"

BoomerCafe just published an excerpt from "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo.

The novel takes place during the last 30 days of a war that divided a nation and defined a generation. Of the many things that shaped our baby boomer generation, the war in Vietnam is principal. Which makes it worth some reflection, which is what Dick Pirozzolo of Wellesley, Massachusetts, and Michael Morris of Savannah, Georgia, have done in the new novel they have co-authored.

It is “Escape from Saigon,” the story of April, 1975, the final month of the war. They tell their story through the lives of those caught in the besieged city.

In this BoomerCafe excerpt we meet Lisette Vo an American television network’s first Vietnamese-American correspondent. Lisette has entered the war correspondents' unofficial headquarters—L'Petit Bistrot—after covering an Operation Babylift plane crash that killed 78 orphans when she meets Sam Esposito, the hard-hitting reporter from The Washington Legend.

“You look like crap,” Sam exclaimed the minute he turned toward Lisette, who had taken the bar stool next to him...Continue Reading

 

Michael Morris Reflects on Ken Burns New Documentary "The Vietnam War"

 
Erik Villard and Michael Morris with Lynn Novick, coproducer "The Vietnam War"

By

Michael Morris

Coauthor of "Escape from Saigon - a Novel"

For those of us who spent a critical part of our youth in Vietnam during the war, and lived to remember it, that decade-long conflict will forever echo in our consciousness. But it’s not just the participants who were affected by it. For our entire generation, and even for those who were born after the war, Vietnam continues to ripple through our politics and day-to-day lives in subtle yet undeniably important ways.

I recently attended the New York debut screening of “The Vietnam War,” the upcoming ten-part, 18-hour documentaryby celebrated filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.

Michael Morris during his '67-'68 tour

Among the participants in the audience with me was Dr. Erik Villard, the official US Army historian at the Center of Military History. We sat through a one-hour segment excerpted from the documentary, which will air on PBS television stations this September, then had an opportunity to discuss the film with its creators.

At one point I noted that most of my generation—the generation that lived through the wartime period—had spent much of the past forty-something years trying to forget, or ignore, the historic details of the era. The Vietnam War was so difficult for all involved, whether we fought in the war or against it, that we have treated it like a bitter, painful memory better left undisturbed and unexamined. And, as a result, the generations that followed us have not had a real opportunity to learn about, and learn from, what we experienced firsthand.

So I asked Ken, “Who do you expect will want to watch this documentary now?”

Ken’s answer: “Everyone.” He went on to explain that there's more to the story surrounding the war than people today remember, and more than they ever knew. It's history, so it shouldn’t be overlooked or forgotten, either way.

I hope he’s right. Those of us who lived through those times will find much to remember in the film, both good and bad. Those who came after us will learn what it was like to watch it on the TV news every night, anxiously awaiting word of loved ones in the military, or to vicariously live through it by listening to the soldiers and civilians who struggled and fought on both sides of the conflict. From what I could see from the screening, the documentary—which took almost as long as the war itself to complete—does a  good job of presenting the war in every aspect, with historic footage never before seen and interviews of participants on all sides of the issue.

After the screening, out on the street, I gave Lynn a copy of “Escape from Saigon” and bid her and Ken goodbye with very mixed emotions. On one hand I’m looking forward to seeing the entire documentary, mainly because as a soldier there in 1967-68 I was so personally, deeply involved in the war. But I’m also a bit anxious as to how I will react when I re-immerse myself in something that, to this day, continues to linger in my thoughts and haunt my dreams.   

~ MM ~

For more on the Ken Burns and Lynn Novick  epic, visit TimesTalk videotaped conversation with the filmmakers and editor James Bennet of The New York Times: 

The series brings the war and the chaotic epoch it encompassed viscerally to life. Written by Geoffrey C. Ward it includes rarely seen, digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, revelatory audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations and more than 100 iconic musical recordings by many of the greatest artists of the era.

The film will be accompanied by an unprecedented outreach and public engagement program, providing opportunities for communities to participate in a national conversation about what happened during the Vietnam War, what went wrong and what lessons are to be learned. 

 In addition, there will be a robust interactive website and an educational initiative designed to engage teachers and students in multiple platforms.

For a conversation with Burns and Novick visit C-Span

Win Your Own FREE Copy of "Escape from Saigon - a Novel"

HOLIDAY PROMOTION

This was one of the many escape routes portrayed in "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" by Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo that chronicles the fear and desperation in Saigon during the final 30 days of the Vietnam War.

The first person who posts correct answers to all three questions in comments wins a FREE copy of this epic novel—delivered directly to you by AMAZON before the holidays—ideal gift for anyone who loves modern history, intrigue and danger in a fast read. 

                                                            What was the name of the building?
                                                            What is the street address?
                                                            Who shot this iconic photo?

Family members and employees of Skyhorse Publishing, New York and its affiliates are ineligible to participate.

Image links to "Saigon Cho Lon Then & Now" Published by Saigoneer

 

“Escape from Saigon is a sweeping saga that places you dead center in the tumultuous final days of the war in Vietnam. During this time of great uncertainty, danger and death - lines are crossed, allegiances questioned, souls collide and heroes are born. Authors Mike Morris and Dick Pirozzolo carry on the grand tradition of Michener and Clavell in that they make history come alive through rich, compelling characters in a pulsating narrative that is both timely and timeless.” 

 

~ Casey Sherman, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Finest Hours, now a major Disney motion picture,and Boston Strong