On April 29, 1975, Dutch photographer Hubert Van Es took an iconic photograph of events unfolding on the rooftop of 22 Gia Long Street in Saigon, South Vietnam (Figure 1). In the preceding two months, North Vietnamese troops had captured (or, depending on one’s perspective, liberated) vast swaths of South Vietnamese territory in a stunningly successful military offensive. The next day, communist forces crashed through the gates at the presidential palace and raised their colors in a vivid display of Hanoi’s victory. Van Es’s snapshot captures one frame in this larger moment of systemic change: the chaotic and humiliating American evacuation of South Vietnam. That the last Americans frantically evacuated by helicopter dramatized the extent to which the United States failed to impose its will in Vietnam, despite preponderate economic, military, and geopolitical power.