Why was this Vietnamese employee of USAID in South Vietnam offered this deal by the Americans before the fall of Saigon: leave the country with only his unmarried children, or take a payment of 1 million dong and stay in the country?

by gqn

From page 5 of this transcript from the Vietnamese American Oral History Project at UC Irvine

Lich-Su

I haven't heard of this, and I can only offer you a couple pieces of information. It's possible the speaker is slightly mixed up. US organizations were offering a sort of severance pay (or back pay, vacation pay, etc still owed) to their local employees in April 1975. They either received dollars or could exchange up to 2,000 USD worth of Vietnamese dong then, or at a later point if the office had run out of cash. In early March 1975, 2,000 USD was equivalent to about 1.4 million dong.