Architect Overseas Was Stuck in Saigon

Frederick Gulden, 86, an architect who was dubbed "the last American in Vietnam" when he was stranded in the country for 15 months after the U.S. military withdrew, died of complications from esophageal cancer April 4 at George Washington University Hospital. He lived in Alexandria.

Mr. Gulden had established a Saigon office for the architectural firm DeLeuw Cather International in 1972, after two years with the U.S. Agency for International Development. The then-53-year-old architect, who had been designing an ammunition dump for the South Vietnamese government, got word that the government's collapse was imminent. On April 18, 1975, he went to Bangkok to persuade higher-level people in his company to close the Saigon office. He returned to Saigon four days later to try to evacuate the firm's Vietnamese employees.

On the advice of U.S. government officials, he put most of the employees on barges to be evacuated by river. He and several others were to be flown out, but when he arrived at the American Embassy on April 30, the last flight had just left. A British television correspondent found him on the roof with 200 Vietnamese and asked why he was still there.

"I think I'm the last American in Vietnam," he said, according to a 1987 interview in Veteran, a monthly magazine of the Vietnam Veterans of America.

He wasn't, but he was among the last. About 60 U.S. civilians remained, including journalists, social workers and American men married to Vietnamese women. A dozen were allowed to leave during the summer of 1975, but on Aug. 15, the exits stopped, after the United States voted against the entry of Vietnam into the United Nations. For the next year, 49 Americans and their dependents were stuck.

"I lived in a penthouse apartment and was never harassed in any way," Mr. Gulden told a Washington Post reporter Aug. 2, 1975, when he was suddenly and unexpectedly released. Two other Americans had been held in prison during that period.

Although he always had enough to eat, "conditions in Saigon are difficult and getting worse," he told The Post on the day of his release.

"It's not a very nice place there these days," he told the New York Times. "The authorities are sending people out to the countryside with no support, no food. There's malaria everywhere. They're dying like flies and there's practically no Western medicines."

Frederick Neil Gulden was born in Minneapolis and served in the Army in the United States during World War II. After the war, he graduated from the University of Illinois. He worked for a variety of architectural firms and for the U.S. government, on projects in Pakistan, Thailand and Egypt.

Less than a decade after he left Vietnam, he was embroiled in a controversy over the construction of a U.S. ambassador's residence in Cairo, where he was the project manager. The nearly completed building was declared uninhabitable because of construction problems and eventually was sold to a Kuwaiti firm. Sudden surges in voltage, common on the Cairo electrical grid, fried the microchips in the lighting system. Plumbing was installed without pressure testing, which resulted in leaks. Conduits of electrical wiring rusted before the building was completed, and drainage pipes, vents and ducts had to be rebuilt.

Mr. Gulden, an employee of the State Department's Foreign Buildings Operations, was replaced and was transferred to the Washington area, where he lived the rest of his life. Alfred L. Atherton Jr., the U.S. ambassador, defended him, telling the New York Times in 1984 that Mr. Gulden was overworked, with more than 10 projects to supervise. Mr. Gulden sued over the job loss, alleging that his warnings about problems with the original design and local contractors were ignored. The case was settled two years later, with a statement from the director general of the Foreign Service noting that Mr. Gulden's integrity and honesty were not in question. He retired in 1986.

Survivors include his wife of 25 years, Sherifa Gulden.