Hero Relives `Last Flight Out' Just Before '75 Fall Of Saigon

WASHINGTON - My Lai. Napalm. Nixon. For many Americans, such are the memories of the Vietnam War - memories largely devoid of heroes or heroism.

Yet, as did the wars that came before it, the conflict in Southeast Asia did have heroes. Dan Hood was one.

Hood, a Pan Am World Airways pilot who lives in Carnation, was honored over the weekend in the nation's capital by some of the people he helped - dozens of Vietnamese who fled their country on the last commercial flight out before the communists captured Saigon.

The reunion was organized in connection with the first screening of a made-for-television movie about the incident, titled ``Last Flight Out.''

In 1975, Hood was a flight engineer on a Pan Am jet based in Seattle. He also volunteered for the Seventh-day Adventist Church adoption service.

As part of that volunteer work, Hood was helping evacuate orphans from South Vietnam in April 1975 as their country was falling to troops from the North. Hood and a former college roommate who was working as a surgeon ferried children out on medical flights, using fake casts and imitation blood to evade questions.

As the nation's collapse neared, medical flights stopped, and it became clear there would be only one more commercial flight, on April 25.

Hood and Allan Topping, a Pan Am station manager, made sure that more than 100 orphans - as well as Vietnamese employees of Pan Am and their families, who faced certain reprisal from the North Vietnamese - were on that Boeing 747.

In the case of one 5-year-old boy, Hood did much more than that.

The boy's mother asked Hood to take her son, fearing that he would be persecuted by the North Vietnamese because he was half-Korean.

Hood became attached to the boy, and adopted him. Kevin Hood, now 20, attends Bellevue Community College.

He was one of the more than 100 people in attendance Saturday night as the NBC movie was shown. Others with Washington state connections included Len Ramsey of Thurston County, who escaped with her brother and lived with Hood for six months after coming to the United States, and Tony Anderson, who was adopted by Walter and Jeannette Anderson of Bellingham and who will graduate in June from Auburn Academy.

There is some poetic license in the film, which is scheduled to be broadcast nationally May 22. A fictionalized State Department employee helps get other civilians out. A Lockheed L-1011 takes the place of the 747.

Still, Hood said: ``I was happy with the content. It was factual and real. When I saw the pictures of the part where Kevin's mother gave him to me and told me to take him, it was a very emotional scene. I have never seen a more poignant example of a mother's love, and it brought back all the memories and emotions of the time.''

Hood, who already had two daughters in the U.S., said: ``I had no intention of adopting anyone. I was just there to help. But when his mother was pleading, begging . . . I felt an obligation when she put him in my hands.''

That emotion was recaptured Saturday night. Actor Richard Crenna, who stars in the film, held a handkerchief as he watched it. Pan Am officials said they had tried for years to sell a producer on the idea. Only now, they said, is the U.S. ready for this kind of story about Vietnam.