Saving American Families During the Fall of Saigon
After his childhood in Ohio and service in the Peace Corps in Nepal, Peter Tomsen joined the Foreign Service and played a pivotal role in the evacuation of Americans after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. As the Vietnam War drew to a close and North Vietnamese forces rapidly advanced toward the capital, the U.S. government began covert operations to evacuate American citizens and Vietnamese partners who had worked alongside U.S. soldiers and diplomats. Tomsen, with a deep personal connection to Vietnam and a commitment to public service, took extraordinary steps to help bring hundreds to safety.
Tomsen first went to Vietnam to serve in the Civil Operations and Revolutionary/Rural Development Support (CORDS) program, an effort to to support rural communities in opposing the communist insurgency. After leaving Vietnam in 1970, Tomsen was reassigned to India, where he lived with his wife, Kim Dung Nguyen, a Saigon native he had met while learning Vietnamese in Washington, DC. As the situation in Vietnam deteriorated in early 1975, Tomsen realized that Nguyen’s parents and family members in Saigon were in grave danger. Despite State Department directives discouraging Americans from returning to Vietnam, Tomsen managed to win permission for a three-day visit, using a visa from a prior trip.
Arriving back in Saigon in April 1975, Tomsen found chaos. U.S. Embassy staff were overwhelmed, working around the clock to evacuate Americans and vulnerable Vietnamese civilians. Tomsen immediately joined the efforts, becoming part of a multi-pronged, covert effort to quietly evacuate as many Americans and their relatives as possible without causing panic.
“I was basically a driver,” he recalled. “And lucky to be one of those in the small group covertly implementing the evacuation on the ground. I sensed that Ambassador Martin and DCM Lehmann were keeping details of the evacuation very close hold. So I did not ask for details.” Thomsen processed paperwork, navigated bureaucratic hurdles, and personally transported more than 100 evacuees. One big obstacle was U.S. immigration policy requiring Vietnamese relatives to have financial sponsors in the United States. With little time to locate real sponsors, Tomsen and others filled in fake names just to get people out.
“I was basically a driver. And lucky to be one of those in the small group covertly implementing the evacuation on the ground. I sensed that [the] Ambassador…[was] keeping details of the evacuation very close hold. So I did not ask for details.”
Peter Tomsen
The home of Tomsen’s in-laws became an impromptu staging area for those preparing to flee. Word spread quickly, and crowds gathered outside, desperate for a chance to escape. With the help of a van borrowed from the Embassy bearing official U.S. markings and thus less likely to be stopped by authorities, Tomsen began ferrying dozens of people to secret safe houses and evacuation halls before taking them to the airport.
His mission culminated on April 23, when he drove more than one hundred refugees, including his wife’s family and other relatives of American citizens, to the airport. From there, he and the evacuees boarded U.S. Air Force flights to Guam and the Philippines before being transferred to the continental United States. The fall of Saigon on April 30 marked the end of the Vietnam War, but the evacuations that preceded it remain among the most profound examples of American diplomatic resolve. Over 60,000 Vietnamese civilians and 6,000 Americans were evacuated in just a few weeks. For Tomsen, it was more than a diplomatic operation—it was a personal mission that tested the limits of courage, loyalty, and quick thinking under pressure. He later became U.S. Ambassador to Armenia and Special Envoy to Afghanistan, but his heroic actions during the fall of Saigon remain a defining chapter in his career.
See more in part 1 and part 2 of Peter Tomsen’s oral history.
