Review — HONORABLE EXIT by Thurston Clarke (Tunisia)
Honorable Exit: How A Few Brave Americans Risked All To Save Our Vietnamese Allies at the End of the War e by Thurston Clarke (Tunisia 1968) Doubleday Publisher April 30, 2019 448 pages $30.00 (hardback), $14.99 (Kindle) Reviewed by Tony Zurlo (Nigeria 1965-66) • In wars we expect to read about heroes in combat. In Honorable Exit Thurston Clarke’s mines the depth of emotion that drove dozens of Americans in Vietnam to acts of heroism by risking life and careers to find ways to evacuate South Vietnamese who had connections with Americans and who would have been imprisoned or killed by the North Vietnamese. Clarke tells the story of A Few Brave Americans who during the last weeks of April 1975 smuggled 130,000 Vietnamese co-workers, secretaries, orphans, families — anyone who might become victims of North Vietnamese revenge through the perilous streets of Saigon and other cities. Don’t let the subtitle fool . . .
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The title of this book is somewhat unfortunate: There was very little "honorable" about the American exit of Vietnam in…