Article: After accepting surrender, North Viet officer heads to exile in Paris.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

On the morning of April 30, 1975, Bui Tin stepped into history "accidentally."

Then a North Vietnamese colonel, Tin maintains that he was the one who accepted the unconditional surrender from South Vietnam's last president, Gen. Duong Van "Big" Minh.

The highest-ranking officer on one of the first three T-54 tanks that crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon that day, Tin was charged with accepting Minh's surrender and witnessing the fall of the government of South Vietnam.

He was not a field commander, but rather an editor for Quan Doi Nhan Dan, the North Vietnamese military newspaper. He had been filing dispatches from ...

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