By Yoon Won-sup
Staff Reporter
A separate document declassified with the travel ban documents also revealed that the United States denied helping Korean diplomats leave Vietnam at the end of the Vietnamese War in 1977.
Kim Chang-geun, second secretary of the Korean Embassy in Vietnam, kept a diary from April 28 to May 11 in 1975, which described difficulties he and his colleagues suffered.
Korean diplomats and people in Vietnam went to the U.S. Embassy there to get airlifted by helicopter for evacuation but were left out. The Embassies of Japan and France also refused to help them.
Korean diplomats found shelter in a French hospital, seeking to escape Vietnam. But the hospital kicked them out considering them a safety threat.
Fighting the urge to commit suicide, Kim finally bought a boat and eventually arrived in Singapore after a five-day voyage. He returned to Seoul on May 11, 1975.