The ending of the Vietnam war was punctuated with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Several weeks prior to the North Vietnamese advance into the capital of South Vietnam, operations to evacuate American and South Vietnamese were already underway, beginning with a trickle of families in March and culminating in Operation Frequent Wind, the largest helicopter evacuation on record. All told, tens of thousands of citizens were evacuated from the area, with emotions running higher as time and space grew shorter.

The above photograph shows an American official punching a Vietnamese man in an effort to pry him from the doorway of an already overloaded airplane trying to depart from a tarmac in Nha Trang.
Photo dated c. April 1, 1975.