They Are All My Family - by John P Riordan (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In the chaotic final days of the Vietnam War in April 1975, as Americans fled and their Vietnamese allies and employees prepared for the worst, John Riordan, the assistant manager of Citibank's Saigon branch, succeeded in rescuing 105 Vietnamese. They were his 33 Vietnamese staff members and their families. Unable to secure exit papers for the employees, Citibank [had] ordered Riordan to leave the country alone. Safe in Hong Kong, Riordan could not imagine leaving behind his employees and defied instructions from his superiors not to return to Saigon"--

Book Synopsis

Published for the fortieth anniversary of the final days of the Vietnam War, this is the suspenseful and moving tale of how John Riordan, an assistant manager of Citibank's Saigon branch, devised a daring plan to save 106 Vietnamese from the dangers of the Communist takeover.

Riordan -- who had served in the US Army after the Tet Offensive and had left the military behind for a career in international banking -- was not the type to take dramatic action, but once the North Vietnamese Army closed in on Saigon in April 1975 and it was clear that Riordan's Vietnamese colleagues and their families would be stranded in a city teetering on total collapse, he knew he could not leave them behind. Defying the objections of his superiors and going against the official policy of the United States, Riordan went back into Saigon to save them.

In fifteen harrowing trips to Saigon's airport, he maneuvered through the bureaucratic shambles, claiming that the Vietnamese were his wife and scores of children. It was a ruse that, at times, veered close to failure, yet against all odds, the improbable plan succeeded. At great risk, the Vietnamese left their lives behind to start anew in the United States, and now John is known to his grateful Vietnamese colleagues and hundreds of their American descendants as Papa.

They Are All My Family is a vivid narrative of one man's ingenious strategy which transformed a time of enormous peril into a display of extraordinary courage. Reflecting on those fateful days in this account, John Riordan's modest heroism provides a striking contrast to America's ignominious retreat from the decade of conflict.

Review Quotes

"A nail-biting account of one man's quiet heroism in the face of impossible odds."-Kirkus Reviews

"The book provides lots of details, replete with lots of reconstructed quotes, of Riordan's against-the-odds mission. And it has a string of happy endings--a rare and good thing for a book about the American war in Vietnam."-VVA Veteran

"John Riordan is a quiet, gentle man who defied his bosses and in many ways his own nature when he rescued 106 of his Vietnamese colleagues and their families in the closing days of South Vietnam's collapse. He did it in a plot so devious and ingenious, I doubt even Graham Greene could have thought it up. Now he is telling the story in a book masterfully written with verve and heart. So hats off to John Riordan for his astonishing act of derring-do and for writing a great book." -Lesley Stahl, correspondent for 60 Minutes

"John Riordan has provided a moving testament to the redeeming power of human decency even in one of the darkest chapters of American history. Bravo for what he accomplished and for this riveting book." -Craig R. Whitney, former Vietnam bureau chief of The New York Times

About the Author

John Riordan is a former vice president of Citibank. He served in the US Army, landing in Vietnam at the end of the 1968 Tet Offensive, and then went on to a career at Citibank, with a focus on the bank's branches in East Asia. Riordan now owns and runs an environmental farm in Wisconsin.

Monique Brinson Demery earned an MA in East Asia Regional Studies from Harvard University and is the author of Finding the Dragon Lady: The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu. She lives in Chicago.