By FOX BUTTERFIELD with KARI HASKELL

t became the most remembered photograph of the fall of Saigon, capturing the last chaotic days of the Vietnam war, and most people believed that it showed desperate Americans crowding on to the roof of the United States Embassy to board a helicopter. That is what the picture caption usually says.





Hubert Van Es / United Press International The roof of 22 Gia Long Street, not the U.S. Embassy.

But as with much about the Vietnam war, the caption is wrong. The building is an apartment complex. The people fleeing are Vietnamese. The last helicopter left about 12 hours later.

In its way, the photograph is a metaphor for all the misunderstanding that plagued the Vietnam war. Americans, whether conservative or liberal, often imposed their own ideas on that troubling war, and that seems to be what happened with the picture, said Hubert Van Es, a United Press International photographer who took it 25 years ago, on April 29, 1975, from the roof of a hotel half a mile away.

"I put the correct caption on it," said Mr. Van Es, who now lives in Hong Kong, "but people back in the United States just took it for granted that it must be the embassy, because that was where they believed the evacuation took place."

The picture was of an apartment building for the employees of the United States Agency for International Development, its top floor reserved for the Central Intelligence Agency's deputy chief of station. The address was 22 Gia Long Street, I lived around the corner as one of the last two correspondents of The New York Times remaining in Vietnam and left later that afternoon, by chopper from Tansonnhut airbase.

In the last days, as the embassy hastily prepared for the last stage of evacuation, 22 Gia Long was chosen as one of about a dozen possible gathering places for Americans. about a half mile from the embassy. Although the famous photo was not of the Embassy roof, many Americans were evacuated by helicopter that afternoon from the parking lot at the Embassy, and later that evening from a few helicopters that continued to fly after dark from the Embassy roof.

The secret signal for the start of the evacuation was a radio broadcast saying the temperature in Saigon was "105 degrees and rising," followed by the first 30 seconds of "White Christmas."

The United States ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham A. Martin, had delayed the final evacuation in the vain hope that President Gerald Ford and Congress would rescue the collapsing South Vietnamese army. Mr. Martin assumed that the United States Air Force could use Ton Son Nhut air base to lift out the last few thousand Americans. But the rapidly advancing North Vietnamese Army wrecked that idea, shelling the base on the morning of April 29 and shooting down some South Vietnamese Air Force planes trying to take off, their wreckage littering the runway.

The C.I.A. station chief, Thomas Polgar, had a problem. The night before, he had telephoned a group of senior South Vietnamese politicians, generals and police officers who had helped the agency, telling them to gather at his house with their families for evacuation. Among them was Tran Van Don, deputy prime minister and defense minister, and a general who was chief of military communications intelligence. But by late morning, the area was no longer secure, recalled Mr. Polgar, who is now 78.

Then Mr. Polgar had an inspiration. The elevator shaft on the roof of the apartment building at 22 Gia Long Street might support a landing in an emergency.

Mr. Polgar brought in a C.I.A. employee, O. B. Harnage, to direct the Vietnamese officials and their families to Gia Long Street and have them flown out by Air America, an airline owned by the C.I.A. for its operations in Southeast Asia.

When Mr. Harnage landed on the roof in a silver Huey helicopter, some people were panicking. Some junior officers and policemen had been allowed in on condition that they use their weapons to keep a crowd milling in the street outside from storming the building.

Stationing himself next to a ladder leading onto the roof, Mr. Harnage tried to help the Vietnamese families up. But the first man who appeared, Mr. Harnage recalled, was a Korean who was hysterical and Mr. Harnage punched him out of the way to maintain order. The Huey, the workhorse of the American effort in Vietnam, normally carried about eight passengers, but Mr. Harnage jammed in as many as 15 Vietnamese, and jumped on the helicopter's skid, standing in the open doorway as it flew to Tan Son Nhut on the edge of the city.

Mr. Harnage, who was later awarded a C.I.A. medal, made four or five of these flights to the air base, where larger Navy or Air Force helicopters ferried the families to ships waiting in the South China Sea. At a time when America abandoned many Vietnamese allies and South Vietnam's military and political leaders abandoned their own country, it was a heroic act.

But one mystery remains. Is it indeed Mr. Harnage in the photograph? He believes it is. The picture, which he saw a week later in a Manila newspaper, shows a man in a white shirt and dark pants, which Mr. Harnage was wearing that day. His wife also saw the photograph. "She said she recognized me from my backside," said Mr. Harnage, who is now 75. He recalled her saying she knew him "because I was always leaving" to go somewhere on another mission.

Others say they were the ones in the picture. Mr. Polgar said he's unsure who it is. "But if Harnage says he is the man in that picture, I'll take his word for it," he said.