The Sympathizer

In two blue buses, the evacuees make their way to the airport. Through bribery and his uncanny “ability to finesse the fine line between the legal and illegal,” the narrator had arranged for passports and all the necessary paperwork for the ninety-two evacuees to flee Vietnam (21). En route to the airport, the General takes a detour to give a final salute to an American marine memorial. The narrator, looking out the bus window, recalls just the week before having a secret rendezvous with Man in a Catholic church. There, the narrator receives his new assignment from Man to observe the General and inform Man about any plotting to take back Vietnam from the Communists. Man, in his secret rendezvous with the narrator, expresses that he is confident the war will continue, even after the Fall of Saigon: “Your general isn’t the only one planning to keep on fighting. Old soldiers don’t fade away. The war’s been going on too long for them to simply stop” (29). Man also tells the narrator thatgoing forward, to avoid suspicion from the General and the Special Branch, an aunt in Paris will serve as the intermediary for communication between the narrator and Man. The narrator will send letters addressed to his “aunt” (really Man’s aunt), which will have encoded information written in invisible ink.

The buses finally make their way to the airport, which is completely mobbed with frantic people attempting to get out on a limited number of flights before the airport shuts down completely. The General’s group, however, is given priority and brought to the front of the immigration line. Bombs drop in the distance as the narrator, Bon, and his family settle into a holding area where they wait for their turn to board the plane. 

To pass the time, the narrator flirts with three prostitutes also waiting to board an evacuation plane. At nearly four in the morning, the General’s group is finally called to board, so they make their way to another set of buses bound for the tarmac, where the C-130 Hercules is waiting. Their plan is “a garbage truck with wings attached,” the narrator says, with a “big flat cargo ramp dropped down to receive us” (42). The passengers are soon stuffed into the plane, “contours of skin and flesh separating one individual from another merged, everyone forced into mandatory intimacy” (43). With everyone boarded, the plane begins to taxi down the runway when, suddenly, a deafening explosion somewhere on the tarmac sends the passengers into a frenzy. The plane’s engines are destroyed in the initial blast, rendering the plane useless.

Bombs and gunfire continue to rain down on the airport in “an apocalyptic light show that revealed the evacuees dashing for the concrete divider, stumbling and tripping along the way, suitcases forgotten” (45). Bon, his wife, and child escape the plane along with the narrator. Crouched out of sight on the tarmac, Bon and the narrator cannot tell if the Communists or anti-Communists are responsible for the bombing—each side has its reasons for wanting to bomb the airport.

When another C-130 Hercules arrives on the tarmac, the evacuees rush to stake their place on the plane, as it is clear that this will be their last chance to leave Saigon. “What remained of the armed forces at the airport was evacuating itself with whatever air mobile vehicle was at hand,” the narrator notes to himself, as he observes more than a dozen soldiers squeezed inside a quickly departing helicopter (49).

The General and his family make it safely to the C-130. The narrator does too, but when he turns to help Bon’s family onto the plane’s ramp, they are not there. That is when, about twenty meters away from the plane, the narrator sees Bon holding his wife and child’s limp bodies. Bon is “rooted by grief,” having just witnessed his family being fatally wounded by “something [that] had torn through [the toddler’s chest] and through his mother” (49). The narrator drags Bon, along with the bodies of his wife and child, onto the plane as it narrowly escapes the quickly collapsing South Vietnam.