Community Stories: The 50th Anniversary of The End of the Vietnam War
/Tung Nguyen
I remember that on April 29th, 1975, my parents, brother (4 years old) and I (10) rushed from the American embassy to the Saigon docks looking for a way to escape. My father was separated from us. My mother (38) found a barge that was leaving soon. She grabbed our hands and took a literal leap of faith. We floated at sea for 3 days. My most precious possession was a plastic bottle someone gave me that I used to refill with water for my family. Late on April 30th, as the rain fell onto hundreds of us huddled together, some men wept. That was how I found out that South Vietnam had ceased to exist. A U.S.naval ship picked us up, and now we were huddled together with thousands of people. Someone said to my mother, I saw your husband on this ship too. And despite being hungry and wet, I was happy.
Stephanie Doan
My family fled Vietnam and communism after the fall of Saigon 50 years ago. They left everything behind and now, my parents have built a new life that has afforded my brother and I opportunities my parents could have only dreamed of in Vietnam. I learned about the significance of April 30th through my college’s VSA. Every year we would paint a section of a wall to commemorate the fall of Saigon, learn about the history and what being Vietnamese American in the 21st century meant. Every year in April, I reflect on the sacrifices, the pain, the suffering the Vietnamese diaspora endured, but also I cherish the new opportunities and the communities the Vietnamese diaspora has built. We are fighters, we are dreamers, Cảm ơn bố mẹ.
Kim Nguyen
As the only person in my family to be born in America and not in Vietnam, I didn’t journey with them from there to here. But in forging their path they have given me everything I need to lead mine.
My brother Duy is born ten days before the fall of Saigón, and by the time he reaches his one month milestone my father is forced into a reeducation camp. When he is released two years later, my parents start their plans to escape, and my mother births my brother Binh. From this I see that no matter what happens in between, family is the beginning and family is the end.
Baby Binh drinks powdered milk mixed with water, commodities that my parents stretch as thinly as they can, and that eventually coat his stomach thick with dysentery. My grandmother, worried he’ll die at sea, advises my parents to leave him behind. They refuse, knowing that his death is possible elsewhere but certain there in Vietnam. From this, I see the power of grasping for anything that is more than nothing.
On their first attempt to escape, a storm forces my parents and their four sons to turn around and they’re met with gunfire back at shore. They leave again a week later, giving time only for those who blacklisted them to forget their faces, not enough time for them to forget their fear. From this I see that bravery can be twice lived, in the face of the unknowable and the knowable.
When the person trusted to navigate their boat gets them lost at sea, the passengers steer themselves toward any source of light. Perceiving any disruption of dark as a sign of life, they cling to this sole compass. From this I see that when maps are missing, we make our own landmarks.
Light then finds my family, in the form of a German oil supply ship. Though the captain is hesitant to take the refugees on board, the crew insists that they can’t leave them to die. From this I see how the weight of a collective conscience can surmount individual doubt.
My family is carried to Malaysia, flown to Germany and ultimately sponsored to America. Their relatives disperse and disappear. One brother is killed in front of his wife and children by pirates on their escape from Vietnam. His family now lives in Australia. Another brother joins the Viet Minh army that fights against French colonization and dissolves into the Viet Cong army, and he doesn’t resurface until decades after the war. His family remains in Northern Vietnam, the place where my parents are born, a homeland to where they have never returned. Other parts of their families live in Germany, Canada, and all across the United States. From this, and from events like today, I see how blood and life connect us through so many spaces.
In Vietnam my mother and father are teachers; she of history and literature, and he of calculus and physics. In America, after working several different jobs, they save up to manage a wine and liquor store, knowing nothing about alcohol or business. Working fourteen hours a day seven days a week, they put their four Vietnam born sons and American born daughter through college. From this I see how a mastery of numbers and letters cultivates education and careers, even when you have to give up your own. And how my parents, who never teach in a school again, teach me the most important things in life by living their present for our future.
Even as I see so much from my family’s narrative, I know that it's still only by proxy. I myself can never imagine facing such fear, sitting in such darkness, and risking all life. More than anything else, this story and all those shared today remind me how little we can really know of another person’s fight and how much we benefit from every person’s story. Every pocket of perspective guides me to live a life of gratitude and purpose, thankful for everything that people have done to get us here and working to pay forward even a sliver of that immeasurable gift.
Cathy Lam
There was chaos after chaos, but I can't remember any of the somber crying faces. Has that trauma suppressed all of these moments still to this day? All I remembered was in the darkness of early dawn of April 22 on the C-134 transport plane, we left. My mom held my 1-yr-old brother on her lap and the 2-yr-old and 3-yr-old clung to her sides. I remembered the seat belts, the shoulder belts, and my 10-yr-old sister throwing up. My mom had her sister with her, with her six children and five unaccompanied minors. Facing the unthinkable future, people just handed over their children to anyone. Could I do that? In the meantime, my father decided at the last minute to try to convince more family members to leave. We were reunited with him a few days later.
We finally arrived in Guam.
The next crucial moment that I can vaguely remember is the announcement of the Fall of Saigon at the outdoor theater - the sadness sank in for all the adults.
The five unaccompanied minors, not understanding any English, boarded the planes by themselves to various refugee camps in the US mainland to reunite with their parents. We stayed behind as my father volunteered to be a camp manager at Camp Asan for 3 more months.
That is all I remember of the most crucial moments. I was 12 years old.
Anonymous
Fifty Years Ago, “Liberation Day” Was Anything But
The so-called “Liberation Day” 50 years ago was not exactly April 30th for me.
For my family — and for many people across Central Vietnam — it began much earlier, in March, when hundreds of thousands people fled south in a desperate rush, by any means they could find. My family went to port city of Đà Nẵng, clinging to the hope that somehow we could make it safely to Saigon. But instead, we were trapped there, helpless and terrified.
Finally, we managed to climb onto a crowded barge heading south. I don’t remember how many days we spent on that nightmare of a journey — only the hunger, the thirst, the fear. There was no food, no water. Day after day, people around us died — from starvation, from thirst, from sickness.
I will never forget the paralyzing horror of watching a mother sob voicelessly as she emptied her suitcase — once filled with cherished clothes and keepsakes — to make space for the tiny, lifeless body of her baby.
One day, the rain came. My parents squeezed rainwater from a thin, lightly soaked blanket to keep us from dying of thirst. That rain saved us, but it also left my brothers and me sick, our small bodies wracked with diarrhea.
Somehow — by a miracle — we survived. We made it to Cam Ranh, where a large ship carried us to Vũng Tàu, and then a bus took us to Saigon.
Weeks later, we children began to sense that something serious was happening. The once noisy playground on a university campus — where we lived alongside other refugees from outside Saigon — grew eerily quiet, as all the kids, including us, were kept indoors, inside the classrooms that had become our shelters. Strange new words soon began to drift into my ears: giải phóng (liberation), cách mạng (revolution), thống nhất (reunification), ngụy (puppet, traitor)…
I listened silently as my parents and relatives spoke in hushed, worried voices about the new order from cách-mạng government: all ngụy quân ngụy quyền — the Southern army and government as they named them — were being summoned to return home and report to the newly formed authorities.
They called it “Liberation Day,” but for my family, it was the day our world shattered. My father, a high school teacher who was involved with a political party in the South, was sent away to a “re-education camp” for seven long, painful years.
Left behind, my mother carried the heavy burden of raising four children — me, just seven years old, and my three little brothers, all between one and five — on her own.
Thanks to the seven long and painful years my father spent imprisoned in reeducation camps, my family was granted refugee status and a chance to start over in the United States. We worked hard, studied hard, and slowly rebuilt our lives in this new land we now call home.
On the eve of the 50th anniversary of “Liberation Day,” hearing that same phrase repeated once again by the leader of my new home country has stirred painful memories—and feels like a grim premonition of darker days yet to come.
Khanh Nguyen
On April 30th, I was in Saigon with my family. After weeks of difficult discussions, my parents had reluctantly agreed to my grandfather's plea to remain in Vietnam. He believed his family would be protected since his two eldest sons had joined the Viet Minh. Unfortunately, he was wrong. My father and uncles who served in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam were sent to re-education camps, some never to return. My father was fortunate; he was released after less than a year. I remembered being told that my uncles in the Northern Army had intervened on his behalf.
In December 1977, after three failed attempts, our family successfully escaped from Vietnam. We reached the Laem Sing refugee camp in Thailand after celebrating Christmas at sea. Our family photo in our best donated American clothes in front of our house in the camp was taken with a $20 Kodak Instamatic purchased with my father’s first money from friends and family who had escaped in 1975. I remember the time in Laem Sing as one of the happiest periods of my life, free from the daily worries that I can feel in my parents and filled with hope for the future. We arrived in the US in 1978, with my father’s time in the ARVN and re-education camp as our ticket to America.
As the 50th anniversary approaches, I feel both the familiar sadness for a lost homeland and profound gratitude - for parents who sacrificed to give my siblings and me the best lives, and for growing up in America with its abundant opportunities.
Yet recent events have awakened in me a long dormant sense of dread—that feeling of uncontrollable global forces threatening loved ones. For my parents, many decisions that transformed their lives were made far from Vietnam. Caught in global currents, my parents, like millions of Vietnamese, struggled simply to survive and protect those they could, as my uncles did for my father, and my parents for us.
Unlike my parents, I am fortunate to be an American, so the events unfolding are not out of my control. I have a hand on the levers of democracy that will shape my children’s future, and I intend to exercise these levers vigorously. Beyond our material comfort, this privilege of having a direct say in my family’s future is the greatest gift from my parents, from our escape almost 50 years ago.
Victoria Nguyen
My existence here in the United States is rooted in events that began decades ago, culminating in a pivotal moment: the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975. I wasn’t alive then, but on this 50th anniversary, I think of my family—those who endured the atrocities of war and made the difficult decision to leave the only home they had ever known.
My mother spent six months in Malaysia before eventually arriving in San Francisco, CA. The life I live today is a direct result of the sacrifices my parents made. That truth has shaped and motivated me for as long as I can remember.
As a second-generation Vietnamese American, I live in what many Asian Americans recognize as a "third culture." We grew up speaking Vietnamese at home, and English everywhere else. Code-switching became second nature.
Sometimes I feel too American to be Vietnamese, and other times, too Vietnamese to be fully American. But honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Now more than ever, I am proud of the contributions that Vietnamese Americans have made to the fabric of the United States.
I joined PIVOT to stand up for democracy and help build a better future for all Americans. I think about the world my family left behind, and I carry that history with me. It drives me to help shape an America that truly cares for all its citizens. After all, we are a nation of immigrants, and it is our differences that make us stronger, more resilient, and more uniquely American.