Getting out of Saigon How a 27-year-old American banker saved 113 Vietnamese civilians

In this stirring debut, White recounts his extraordinary mission rescuing civilians during the fall of South Vietnam. An American, 27-year-old White was assigned in February 1975 as an entry-level corporate banking officer at Chase Manhattan's Bangkok branch. But, as he reveals, his career took a significant turn when, two months later, he was assigned to work in Saigon. As the North Vietnamese army began to close in on the city, White was charged with the increasingly fraught task of ensuring the safety of the bank's employees. In a propulsive and suspenseful narrative, he recalls the lengths that he went to do so, battling American bureaucracy to get the branch's Vietnamese workers out of the city and past allies who were "shooting suspected deserters." With the help of diplomats running a clandestine rescue operation "behind the ambassador's back," White was able to commandeer an abandoned cargo plane and save over 100 Vietnamese lives. What he modestly refers to as his 15 minutes of fame is made more resonant by his deep humanity, as when he writes that "more than refugees, employees, staff," the people he rescued "were my families." Admirers of Antonio Mendez's Argo: How the CIA and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History will be hooked. (June)

On April 30, 1975, the long Vietnam War finally came to an end when Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell to Communist forces. A couple of weeks before that fateful day, Chase Bank sent former banker White to the city to close the branch there and help their employees get out. White's main qualifications were that he was a U.S. citizen, and he was already in the region working at the bank's branch in Bangkok, Thailand. It was clear to most that a Communist victory was both inevitable and coming soon. However, the South Vietnamese government and the U.S. embassy were not cooperative at helping people leave; they required virtually impossible to get exit visas and more. Therefore, White explored various unusual options--stealing a plane or a ship, for example--to help people escape. Ultimately, 113 employees, their families, and White were able to leave through somewhat more conventional means just four days before the city fell. VERDICT This enthralling story is highly recommended for readers specifically interested in the fall of Saigon or in memoirs generally.--Joshua Wallace

A retired banker makes his memoir debut with a unique, gripping story from the Vietnam War. As the final days of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War sputtered to their ignominious end, White, age 27, was told by his boss at Chase Manhattan that he was being transferred from Bangkok to Saigon, where his job would be to close the branch and ensure the safety of the top-level Vietnamese employees. "I had a primitive affection for Saigon," he writes, imagining that he would be "following in the footsteps of Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad." But when he arrived in April 1975, he learned that all 53 employees would be executed when the North Vietnamese took the city--not if, but when. Matters were seriously complicated by the fact that the delusional American ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, was making it nearly impossible to arrange evacuations. Lucky for the Vietnamese employees of Chase, White's "basic view was that if you thought you couldn't do something, you were probably right, whereas if you thought that you could, you stood a decent chance of pulling it off." He set his mind to getting the employees and their families--113 people--to safety, even if he had to steal a plane to do it. "I was a guy who struggled to resist an idea once it lodged in my mind," he writes. "Whether it was buying something, doing something, going somewhere, or drinking something, I was anxious until I bought it, did it, went there, or drank it." As he chronicles how he built his rescue plan and navigated the streets of the city with a briefcase containing a revolver and $25,000 in cash, White's persona seems like something out of a Terry Southern or Ian Fleming novel--as does his writing. White tells his inspiring story with wit, panache, humility, and a captivating sense of time and place. A fantastic read. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.