Juan Jose Valdez, Last Marine Out of Saigon, Dies at 88 [View all]
Juan Jose Valdez, the last American serviceman to leave Vietnam, who was lifted by helicopter from a U.S. Embassy rooftop in Saigon in April 1975 after assisting thousands of evacuees during the fall of that city, in the chaotic and, for Americans, humiliating final chapter of the Vietnam War, died on Feb. 15 at his home in Tucson, Ariz. He was 88.
The cause was pneumonia, his son Anthony said
Master Gunnery Sgt. Valdez was the senior noncommissioned officer in a detail of Marine security guards at the American Embassy, a last outpost of U.S. power in what was then South Vietnam.
In March 1975, the Communists of North Vietnam broke a cease-fire negotiated two years earlier and launched a large-scale invasion of the South. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese who had fought alongside or aided the Americans sought to flee the country.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/04/us/politics/juan-jose-valdez-dead.html
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