School Supplies and the Art of Wartime Evacuation

My family’s escape in the final days of the Việt Nam war

by Brian Thao Nguyen Gunney

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School Supplies

In March of 1975, I was in the fourth grade at Long Vân Elementary School in Nha Trang. After school, I lingered around my mother’s club-style restaurant on Nha Trang Airbase. Our family lived on the base, in Camp Phi Dũng, once headquarters to US Special Forces in Việt Nam. Just outside the sanctuary of my childhood was a war that had killed millions, defeated the French imperialists and worn out even the mighty United States of America.

I lived in a safety bubble. In the afternoons six days a week, I rode home on the back of Mom’s motorcycle, my arms wrapped around her slender waist. I was in school uniform: blue shorts and white shirt. She wore Jackie O sunglasses and rode one-handed. The family’s meal, in a four-level tiffin carrier that she packed at the restaurant, dangled from her free hand. The guards at the base’s gate knew us. Mom was married to VNAF (South Việtnamese Air Force) Major Nguyễn Đức Luân, the deputy commander for enlisted and officers basic training. I often rode in Dad’s jungle-green army Jeep to the restaurant. He’d turn onto the huge dirt lot with extra speed, shut off the engine and coast through a big arc to the far corner, where the restaurant sat by the barracks complex.

I was surrounded by military life. My school was for military children. At home, I liked talking with the soldiers and watching them train. At the restaurant, I listened to music that we played on the reel-to-reel for the servicemen. Songs of war, loss, love and loneliness, rang out in the familiar voices of Khánh Ly, Hoàng Oanh, and other singers with household names. The music cemented the nation’s collective wartime consciousness. It gave us a way to share and acknowledge feelings that were hard to put into words. At nine years old, I couldn’t grasp the heartache of love, but I understood the pain and sorrow of war, though neither love nor war had penetrated my safety bubble.

That year, I began to distinguish myself academically, well enough for my normally reserved mother to remark about it, like it was a funny coincidence.  I received an award of brand new school supplies in a shiny vinyl case to take to class. It was the first time I had received formal recognition for anything.

Beyond our view, another transformation was taking shape. After a decade of attrition warfare, attacks and counterattacks, maneuvers in the jungles and at negotiations, Communist North Việtnam was preparing an ambitious new offensive. Their goal was to set conditions for a general offensive that would capture the South in the coming year.

If only it had taken that long, our country might have had a chance for a better outcome.

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Retreat from Nha Trang

War had been in the news all my life, so when TV and radio announcers reported on some fighting, it seemed normal to me. Fighting escalated in 1968—the Tết Offensive. I was a toddler then. As I grew up, the words “Tết Mậu Thân” settled heavily into the nation’s lexicon. Fighting escalated again in 1972, and the words “Mùa Hè Đỏ Lửa,” or “The Summer of Fire,” were added. Those words weren’t just names for the war’s raging episodes. They were the echoes of chaos, shattered lives, pain and loss.

In March 1975, after easily driving the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Việt Nam—our side) from Buôn Ma Thuột, Communist forces took a large swath of the central highlands. But for the string of central-coast cities that included Nha Trang, the country was cut in two. The Communists advanced on the provinces up by the demilitarized zone, threatening Huế, the ancient imperial capital, and Đà Nẵng, the country’s second biggest city.

The offensive wasn’t targeting Nha Trang yet, but my overprotective mother wanted to stay well ahead of the fighting. She decided to take her children to the safety of Sài Gòn, the capital in the south.

There were good reasons to fear another Communist takeover. During the Tết Offensive, Communist forces had systematically massacred thousands of civilians in Huế. Now, the attacked areas bled streams of refugees, clogging the roads that the attackers hadn’t already blocked.

Mom wanted to evacuate by boat. Her anxiety around airplanes came from two unfortunate personal experiences: a gear-up landing and a wound from a friendly A-1 attack plane on a strafing run. She went to the docks to book space on a south bound ship, and saw one arriving from Đà Nẵng. It was packed with army and marine deserters and desperate civilians. Bodies of dead children were being dropped overboard.

We would fly to Sài Gòn instead. I was likely happy about that—I loved being in and around aircraft.

My sister, the oldest child, was in sixth grade, and her entrance exam for middle school was coming up in Nha Trang. Feeling optimistic that the city would hold, at least for a while, Mom left her sons with her in-laws in Sài Gòn and flew with her daughter back to Nha Trang for the exam.

In my parents’ minds, our relocation was temporary and normal. Their childhoods in the volatile rural Quảng Nam province were plagued with fighting, first against the French, then against the Communists. Evacuations were a part of life. For Mom, it was more common than grade promotions. She was fifteen before she finished third grade. Getting to this exam would give her first born the educational continuity that she herself was denied.

Nha Trang’s fate, however, defied my parents’ estimates. On March 31, the last ARVN paratrooper battalion was broken 20 miles from the city. President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, a former general, unexpectedly and rapidly pulled his forces back. Even the Americans, who had a consular office in the city, weren’t told.

The supposed aim of the withdrawal was to regroup and protect the southern parts of the country. The operation was orderly. No planes were captured, a stark improvement over previous base losses. But the move, like previous ones, panicked the population. Civilian evacuation was snarled by the familiar crowding and chaos. Nha Trang and the central coast were abandoned.

My sister did not take her exam.

By the time she and Mom departed Nha Trang again, the city was becoming another Đà Nẵng, full of desperate, panicking citizens. My mom and sister left on a military transport with the base personnel, then in Sài Gòn’s relative calm, Mom stumbled and fell while exiting the plane. The crowd behind her couldn’t stop in time to avoid her. Her injuries might have been minor, had she not been four months pregnant.

In Sài Gòn, my dad was reassigned to Tân Sơn Nhất Airbase, where he had once worked on the base’s defense. There were still recruits to train and instructor positions to fill. He dutifully reported to work, riding the two miles to the base on a black motorcycle of unknown ownership. Our vehicles were in Nha Trang, awaiting our return.

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Enemies Up Close

Having been wrong about Nha Trang, Dad now looked for information outside official sources. At Tân Sơn Nhất, he kept his eyes and ears open. The airbase was the headquarters and command and control center of the VNAF. From Dad’s contacts in the military intelligence community, where he had spent part of his career, he could learn which bases had been lost or given up on, which officials had left the country and the status and disposition of combat forces.

He also had a source within the enemy itself.

Our extended family was a microcosm of Việt Nam—divided. Growing up, my father hated French colonial rule and its racist laws. As a youth, he had participated in the anti-imperial activities of the Việt Minh, the insurgency led by Hồ Chí Minh. Though allied with the US against Imperial Japan during WWII, this nationalist group eventually evolved into a Communist organization. My dad left, but not everyone in his or Mom’s family did. While Dad, his brother and some of their nephews fought for the South, Mom’s younger sister covertly helped the Communists, for which she was imprisoned for three years. Mom’s brother disappeared after being detained by a group linked to his own government. They might have thought that he had some connection to the Communists, but there was no due process. In Đà Nẵng, my mom’s older sister regularly housed one of the young men who planned the March attack on the city. In Sài Gòn, my dad’s aunt was known to him as pro-Communist.

Dad visited his aunt at her home. She was his mother’s sister, and he had lived with her for two years in his teens, when his own village was unsafe to return to. We knew her as “Bà̀ Nội Xi Măng,” or “Grandma Cement,” because of her business. She let Dad listen in on a gathering of Việt Cộng operatives (Communist guerrillas in the South). They were discussing and planning for the anticipated push into the capital. From what he heard, Dad estimated that the North could have some 200,000 men in 22 divisions for the attack on Sài Gòn. That was substantially more than US intelligence had estimated, and the US didn’t think that the South would outlast April.

I don’t know why Grandma Cement let Dad listen in. Perhaps to demonstrate her important position in the Việt Cộng organization. She was devoted to her cause. After Việt Nam was divided by the 1954 Geneva Accords, she went north to live under the Communists. They sent her back south to make money to help the guerrilla efforts, which she probably did well through the cement business. She believed she had enough influence to protect my dad after the Communist victory, and she offered him protection to convince him to stay in Việt Nam. It was certain that she would try to protect my dad, but not so certain that she would succeed.

At home, Mom knew her injury was bad. It didn’t cause her much pain, but she bled and believed she had miscarried. We children were told that she wasn’t going to have a baby after all. My sister heard whispering among the adults, but I sensed no elevated concern, so my life went on as usual.

While the grown-ups followed the news, formed plans and worried, I swung in our hammock, bathed in the warm rain and played. My little brother and I joined the neighborhood kids in hide-and-seek, tag, king-of-the-hill and marbles. In some games, the losers had to give the winners piggy-back rides. We carried each other around, laughing boisterously, while beyond the horizon, our nation was collapsing piece by piece.

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Losing Ground

A week into April, two-thirds of the South was under Communist control. Three weeks in, half of the provincial capitals had been lost. It wasn’t just territory. The Americans had trained South Việtnamese forces to fight the best way they knew how, with generous air support. But the US was gone, and the VNAF was never more than a shadow of US air power. Now, a few weeks into the offensive, airbases at Pleiku, Kon Tum, Đà Nẵng, Nha Trang, Phù Cát, Cam Ranh, Phan Rang and Tuy Hòa were in enemy hands. Only four remained.

In Xuân Lộc, 40 miles east of Sài Gòn, the ARVN’s fierce resistance gave the South a glimmer of hope. The Communists adapted. They turned their guns on Biên Hoà, the airbase closest to Xuân Lộc. Biên Hoà’s air support operations stopped. On April 21, the ARVN resistance was overwhelmed. Survivors of the battle retreated to Sài Gòn, swelling the population of armed men and the tension in the capital.

At 8 p.m. that day, President Thiệu resigned. In his speech, he blamed the US for allowing Communist forces to remain in the South in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords and criticized our weary ally for not helping in the current crisis. On April 25, he fled to Taiwan.

Dad believed that Biên Hoà, the South’s largest airbase, 15 miles northeast of Sài Gòn, was critical to holding the capital’s defense. “If we lose Biên Hoà, we lose Sài Gòn,” he predicted. On April 27, Biên Hoà fell.

Despite that, the need to abandon the country was never clear or definitive to Dad. After estimating the daunting enemy force advancing on the capital, after the Americans declined to intervene, after they refused to send further military aid, even after Biên Hoà fell—somehow, there was still hope. Maybe we could fall back and hold Cần Thơ. Perhaps second guessing oneself was natural when facing the unimaginable.

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Preparing for the Worst

Dad wasn’t 100% sure that the South would fall. He thought it was about 95 to 99%. But that was enough to prepare for the worst.

His biggest fear was falling into the hands of the Communists, where he would be tortured and executed. He had heard many stories about their coercive methods. When he was a young man, they had tried to recruit him, but he left and joined the VNAF. His fifteen years in the service left a record that would make him a tempting target for retribution. He had worked in intelligence, writing reconnaissance reports for directing airstrikes. He had spent nine months at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, learning base defense from the Americans. He had been close to a US Army interpreter named Ken. When Ken married a Việtnamese woman, Mom and Dad stood in for his parents, signing the marriage certificate.

Major Nguyễn Đức Luân would choose death over capture, for himself and his family. Mom knew that the family of a VNAF officer would suffer under the Communists, but she had mixed feelings about leaving. To keep her from entertaining any thought of staying back, Dad told her he would shoot us all, then himself, rather than letting the Communists have us.

Urging Mom to go, Dad’s mother said, “If you’re going to die, it’s better to die on the road than to spill your blood in your own home.” Her advice may seem short on empathy, but it reflected something in the Việtnamese cultural character—at least in how we saw ourselves. We could talk of the horrors of our miserable war with simultaneous empathy and detachment. The poet Trịnh Công Sơn captured this stoicism in songs that recalled bomb blasts, gunfire, limp bodies and lost futures in upbeat anthems of resilience. In the end, Mom decided that her place was with Dad.

Although she didn’t test his threat, she knew he was serious about taking his own life. On his behalf, she talked to her cousin Hồ, a pharmacist in Sài Gòn. Dad wanted a pill to end his life should he get caught alive. Hồ refused. He didn’t think the Communists would be that bad. (Years later, Hồ would risk capture and a perilous sea voyage on his family’s own escape journey.)

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“Wartime Fleeing”

The Việtnamese phrase for civilian wartime evacuation is “chạy giặc.” Literally, it means “wartime fleeing.” But those urgent words obscured the most important step. My parents knew that an evacuation was not just a mad dash to safety. Growing up around so much fighting had taught them that far more critical than fleeing was planning.

Food, fares and bribes required money. South Việtnamese currency was unreliable, and probably worthless should the issuing government collapse. US currency would reveal our allegiance should we be searched by the Communists. My parents bought jewelry with the money, including Dad’s last paycheck, dated April 1, 1975.

To protect the relatives we would leave behind—and ourselves should we get caught—my parents destroyed all traces they had of Dad’s military career and his trip to America. Burning was easiest, but superstition held that if you burned a photograph, bad things would happen to the people in it. My parents tore up the photographs and submerged them in a pail of water. I found the pail in the cement-paved yard behind my grandparents’ storefront one evening. Under a darkening sky, I watched the flimsy black-and-white film float off the backings, carrying ghostly distorted images of my dad, in uniform and in America. The paper was discarded, and the film went down the drain with the water.

Where we would go and who might take us in were not in our evacuation plans. Escape was the only priority. Any fate would be better than falling into Communist hands.

Dad’s years in the Air Force convinced him that the pilots stood the best chance for evacuation. They had the means, and they handled the logistics. While the hordes of at-risk Việtnamese descended on the US Embassy, he bet on the pilots.

My dad was not the only one who felt that our last hope was lost with Biên Hoà. After that base fell, women and children began to show up at Tân Sơn Nhất Airbase. Dad borrowed a Jeep to fetch us. We stuffed our bare necessities into pillowcases. Pillowcases were light and inconspicuous, and you can deter theft as you rest on them. We would not be caught with overloaded carts on clogged roads like so many others had been. Even small suitcases were deemed too cumbersome.

I couldn’t bring the new school supplies I had been awarded.

We told no one where we were going, or even that we were leaving. It was safer for everybody that way. Dad’s own parents, who lived next door to us, would not know what happened to us. We climbed into the army Jeep and melted into in Sài Gòn’s nervous bustling traffic.

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Cricket Hideout

At Tân Sơn Nhất, the airbase where Dad ostensibly still ran the training, we found an unused building full of dust, sand and dirt. We swept out one corner to live in and awaited the next turn of events. The five of us slept on a thin straw mat.

My mother was still enduring the bleeding and discomfort of her miscarriage, but she kept it from us. She spent a lot of time with her prayer beads. That was unusual. I had only seen her pray at altars and on airplanes.

Unexpectedly, I found a female cricket. Cricket fighting was a popular pastime for boys my age. After a fight, the winner would raise its wings to scrape out triumphant chirps. It was thrilling, and we dreamed of having that champion cricket. Females didn’t fight, but they could give something the males couldn’t: more crickets. I envisioned an unlimited supply.

When I showed Mom my new pet, she told me to let it go. She had been praying to incarnations of the Buddha—praying for our safety and freedom. She wanted me to set the cricket free so that we, too, might find safety. Reluctantly, I did.

On the afternoon of April 28, five American-made A-37 attack jets from the captured airbases flew to Tân Sơn Nhất. Still bearing VNAF markings, they slipped past Sài Gòn’s air defense and bombed the base. Three gunships and several troop transports were destroyed on the ground before air defense could respond. The crowds that had gathered by the base’s gate asking for entry dispersed. The airbase was no longer a sanctuary; it was a target.

After the attack, the gates were locked for fear of enemy infiltration. There were personnel from lost bases posted to the Sài Gòn area. They lived anywhere they could—where they had family, in the city or in the countryside. When the gates closed, many were caught outside. My uncle, an A-37 pilot stationed at the base, happened to be in Sài Gòn. He would eventually be captured and suffer for years in a Communist re-education camp.

While washing our dinner dishes, Mom overheard a conversation. One man told another, “Make sure your family is together. They’re leaving tonight!” She told Dad. It was the evacuation he expected the pilots would conduct, but he hadn’t known when. Now, he knew.

That night—I’m not certain whether it was our first or second there—Dad came into our hideout and roused us. Time to go.

We packed the pillowcases by candlelight and climbed into the Jeep. In the early hours of April 29, Dad brought us to a C-130 Hercules cargo plane. He directed us toward a crowd of women and children boarding through the back ramp. There was no long good-bye, no discussion of when or how we would reunite, no fear shown. So, for me, there was no reason to think that we might never see Dad again.

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Côn Sơn Island

Several hundred people crammed into the belly of the Hercules, far more than it was designed for. To prevent desertions, there was a standing order to shoot down any aircraft leaving without authorization, but several planeloads of women and children were allowed to depart. We weren’t supposed to be on the plane because we weren’t a part of the pilots’ inner circle. But Dad knew some of the crew and arranged for our passage.

The plane was supposed to take us to Côn Sơn, a small island 150 miles south of Sài Gòn, then return to Tân Sơn Nhất. Soon after we were airborne, rockets from the invading army struck the airfield we had just left. The big, slow cargo plane was not going back.

In the dim light by Côn Sơn’s runway, the arrivals tried to find news of the men they had left behind and decide on their next move. Three C-130 Hercules and two C-119 Flying Boxcars had landed overnight, loaded with people. Word spread that the Boxcars had developed mechanical problems. Though we were safe for the time being, there were about a thousand of us and not enough planes to take all of us out.

Côn Sơn Island was home to a notoriously cruel prison used by the French and South Việtnamese to incarcerate political prisoners. There was a small settlement by the prison, miles from the airfield, but not enough food or water for the unexpected crowd at the airport. While most of the people went in search of food, we didn’t have to join them. We had bags of dry ramen in our pillowcases. Ramen was edible uncooked.

Mom had my 11-year-old sister stand in line to buy water before the supply ran out. I asked Mom how an island could run out of water. She said that we couldn’t drink sea water, and I recalled how terrible it tasted. I learned something.

In the morning, our family wandered into the tiny community next to the airport. We found a doctor, and Mom asked for help with the aftereffects of the miscarriage. He gave her a note requesting priority for her in the evacuation.

Mom tried to look for ways off the island while planes were still coming in. She asked anyone who came from Tân Sơn Nhất for information about my dad. It had been only hours since he had seen us off in the middle of the night, but the situation was changing fast. Finally, she found a man who recognized Dad’s name. Air Force Major Nguyễn Đức Luân, seen riding a black motorcycle on the base, he told us, was dead. A building had been hit at 9 a.m. that day. The rubble had come down on him.

I knew what this meant—it was devastating news—but I wasn’t that affected by it. I still don’t understand why not. Perhaps it was because Việtnamese culture didn’t soften death for children. Perhaps it was because many Việtnamese fathers, including mine, filled material needs for their children, not emotional needs. Maybe I was following Mom’s lead, figuring that if she wasn’t crying, things weren’t that bad. Maybe it was because my parents had often gone away and always come back. Somehow, I believed my dad would come back again. Maybe it was all those things.

We spent the night on the floor of some room, in the space defined by our thin straw mat, surrounded by other refugees. In Sài Gòn, Operation Frequent Wind was in full swing. The evacuation was captured in an iconic photo of a helicopter on an apartment rooftop with a string of people filing up a ladder to it. By morning, my mother had decided on her next move. Her reason for running was because her place was with Dad. Now, that reason was gone. She would return to Sài Gòn. We wouldn’t have our country, but at least we’d have Mom’s family.

Still free from the burden of searching for food, we set out to find a way back. The runway stretched from shore to shore across the flat neck of the island. At the western end, Mom tried to buy a ride back from some men with boats. The coast was 50 miles of open ocean from the island. They asked for more money than we had and would not take us all the way to Sài Gòn.

That morning of April 30, 1975, no one but the Communists wanted into Sài Gòn. Their howitzers had been pounding Tân Sơn Nhất since we left, killing two US Marines and ending fixed-wing flights. Airplane carcasses burned on the ground. US Ambassador Graham Martin, who had stubbornly delayed evacuations for fear of panic, departed at last. Operation Frequent Wind ended at 7:53 a.m, when 11 Marine Security Guards—the last American troops—left from atop the US embassy. The heroic, but ultimately incomplete, evacuation left hundreds of at-risk Việtnamese still awaiting their promised flights. Pandemonium and exaltation both spread in the capital. Communist soldiers had fought their way into Tân Sơn Nhất. North Việtnamese tanks rolled through the capital, challenged only by a few dedicated elements of the South’s shattered forces. At 11:30 a.m., the tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace. Sài Gòn surrendered.

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Hitching a Ride

We wandered around Côn Sơn’s airfield and ran into Major Tân, a friend of Dad’s. Mom asked if he knew of any way back. She told him what had happened to Dad.

“When did this happen?” he asked.

“Yesterday morning.”

“What time?”

“Nine o’clock.”

“Nine? Oh, that couldn’t be Luân. I talked to him at ten.”

Mom was relieved, and the childish faith I had in my dad’s return remained intact. But it made getting off the island even more urgent.

We spotted a Huey utility helicopter with its rotors spinning and approached. The pilot was heading out to the US Navy Task Force 76, a fleet of ships receiving evacuees in the waters off Sài Gòn. She showed the pilot her doctor’s note and begged him to take her and her children off the island. He was sympathetic, but the Huey was too crowded. He promised to return after dropping off his passengers.

We backed off. He left. We waited, but he never returned. Years later, I saw news photos of helicopters being pushed overboard the Task Force 76 ships and wondered if that Huey had joined the chopper graveyard at the bottom of the ocean.

We gave up and found a plane in the process of being boarded. A crewman told Mom that the flight was for servicemen and their families only. We couldn’t prove who we were. Dad wasn’t with us, and we had destroyed all evidence of his military career. Mom pleaded, but the man wouldn’t budge.

The third aircraft we approached was a Hercules with its back ramp closed and all four engines running. The crew door was by the front wheels. It opened by swinging downward to lower a short staircase to the ground. Mom placed us a safe distance from the whirring propellers and went to the door. She called up to someone inside. We watched her talk to a crewman, though we couldn’t hear a thing over the engine noise. She handed him her doctor’s note, and they continued talking. Then she ascended the steps. The crewman pulled the door up by its cable, and the plane was sealed shut.

Somehow, I was not worried. It was as if Mom had just gone inside the house and let the door close behind her. She would come out again—or call us in. My parents had left many times before, and they had always returned. Mom was talking to the crew. They only closed the door to keep out the noise. Good Việtnamese children did what they were told, and Mom told us to wait. We waited while the engines rumbled and the propellers spun at their blinding speed—and the seconds stretched into minutes.

As I naively expected, the plane didn’t move. The crew door cracked out of its frame and swung down to reveal my mom holding its cable. She waved us forward and the three of us ran to her. Once we were aboard, she pulled the door up and sealed it shut.

It turned out that the crewman knew Dad, again from Tân Sơn Nhất Airbase. He wanted to help but wasn’t allowed to let anyone else on. Bringing on an entire family would draw too much attention, so he allowed only Mom. He quickly showed her how to work the door. She was to let him finish his work and join the cockpit crew, then open it to let us on. “But only the children—NOTHING ELSE!” No problem. We forgot the pillowcases when we ran to her.

We wedged ourselves onto the cold, crowded metal floor in the dim cargo hold. Grateful to the kind crewman, Mom offered him our water. The crew drank it all. Once airborne, the refugees cheered. A man threw a big wad of money into the air. Việtnamese bills floated down like confetti, and no one collected them. Mom began her prayers.

The next day, the Communists sent a team to Côn Sơn Island to liberate their comrades still jailed at the infamous prison. There were more evacuees on that island than could leave by planes.  I wonder what became of those left behind.

Our plane rounded the southern tip of Việtnam on its way to U-Tapao Airbase in Thailand. After we landed, olive-green buses whisked us away. Through the window, I marveled at the parked planes.

U-Tapao was an American airbase where, from 1967 to 1972, the long, heavy B-52 bombers had departed for their sorties over Việtnam. I was close enough to make out their tail guns! Among these giants, I recognized F-5s, the sleek fighter jets that America had given us. On their tails, where the red-striped gold flags normally were, there were now fuzzy beige rectangles. Somehow, I knew that our nation’s flag was under that fresh paint, and that no fighter jet would ever again bear that flag. The hasty paint job made me realize what all the news on the radio and TV couldn’t help me to even conceive—that our nation was gone.

The buses dropped us off away from the airfield, and we filed along a walkway next to nondescript buildings. Uniformed servicemen lined the walkway, scanning the arrival stream. Not American, not Thai: Việtnamese. They were calm for soldiers who had just lost everything they were fighting for. The guy at the front recognized us. It was my dad.

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Pilot Exodus

A piece of normality came back to us. U-Tapao was just another base in the life of our family. This was just my dad coming back after some time away. There was no exclamation or jubilation. Our separation, our reunion and our multiple relocations had always been normal. Years later, I would ask Mom if she was happy to see Dad. She answered, “Of course.” At the time, though, I had no idea how narrowly we had averted a very different and difficult future.

Filling Dad in on our journey, Mom told him how she had believed he was dead, until she luckily ran into Major Tân who had talked to her husband and knew for sure he was still alive. Otherwise, she would have gone back to Sài Gòn.

Dad said, “I didn’t talk with Tân.”

It turned out that Major Tân had lied to my mom. His reason must have been that he thought going back to Sài Gòn was a terrible idea. Dad sure thought so. We’d never know why the other man who Mom met on Côn Sơn thought that Dad had been killed. But confusion was nothing new in war.

Shortly after Dad had seen us off at Tân Sơn Nhất, the airfield came under intense rocket and artillery attack. Dad heeded his instinct that the pilots were his best chance for escape, even as the North Việtnamese methodically brought their artillery shells down on the remaining aircraft. That morning, as periodic volleys of artillery shells exploded, he kept company with an airplane crew that he knew from his days working the base defense. They were awaiting orders, unaware that earlier, General Trần Văn Minh, the VNAF’s top Commander since 1967, had quietly fled with his staff.

Around 9:30 a.m., they observed crews readying some transport planes. The slow, vulnerable aircrafts hadn’t been touched since the base came under attack. Someone must have decided to make a run for it, possibly precipitated by leaked news of their abandonment. It set the whole airfield in motion. Base personnel ignored the standing order to shoot down deserters. There was no point leaving assets on the ground to be hit or captured.

Pilots headed for any aircraft they could fly. Despite the danger of incoming artillery—or maybe spurred by it—crews prepared the planes. Dad followed his friends to a C-47 troop transport. As they rushed through the preflight checks, the pilot suddenly jumped down and dashed off.

“Not enough fuel!” he called back.

To prevent desertions, fuel had been carefully controlled. Dad and the crew piled into a pick-up truck and caught up to the pilot at another C-47. This one had enough fuel. They took it. Planes skirted airfield damage to take off. Men ran out, desperate to jump on, and some planes slowed to pick them up.

Not all scrambled planes made it out. Like that first C-47, some didn’t have enough fuel to get to safety. Some were hit. One plane left with its controls locked, an oversight in the hasty preflight checks. It crashed on take-off.

Dad estimated that maybe thirty planes out of a hundred made it out. There were no flight plans, of course. Once they got away, the crews conferred over the radio and decided to head to U-Tapao.

In the air, assured that he was out of danger, Dad thought about finding his family. He figured that if we weren’t still on Côn Sơn and if Mom hadn’t died of complications from the miscarriage, we would probably be in the Philippines or, most likely, the nearest friendly airfield, Thailand.

That evening in U-Tapao, after they had caught each other up, they listened to the news on BBC radio and learned of Sài Gòn’s surrender. One uncertainty ended and another began. What now?

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In the Care of the Americans

We ran into my mom’s uncle and my cousin. The cousin, a Huey pilot who spoke English well, interpreted for our cluster of 100 or so refugees. We were flown to a processing center on Guam. There, Mom was treated for her injuries and miscarriage. We filled out papers and received vaccinations.

After three days on Guam, we boarded the biggest, grandest plane I had ever seen, a Boeing 747. There was a second floor inside! There were windows, and I could see the ground below. The seats faced forward and had armrests, like thrones, not webbing slung between aluminum tubes on the military aircraft I was used to. Having lost a war, we went from traveling like grunts to traveling like kings. We stopped in Honolulu to refuel, and the cavernous terminal building had me enthralled. I could look right through its huge glass walls at the airport’s nightscape.

On May 5, less than a week after our escape, we arrived at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base in Southern California, one of four refugee camps the US had quickly set up. There were orderly rows of green canvas tents, each accommodating several families.

There was a green army cot, a pillow and two blankets for each person.  Two blankets, in this heat? We chuckled, “What are these Americans thinking?” But when the sun went down, we shivered and reached for those blankets. A boy in the camp bet me that he could blow smoke without smoking. Suspicious, I declined. In the morning, it was so cold that I, too, could blow “smoke” without smoking. It was a strange and fascinating world, and I tried to blow smoke rings.

Congress acted quickly. On May 23, it passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which permitted 130,000 southeast Asia refugees to enter the US. In the end, some 180,000 refugees were admitted. In the years that followed, another 402,000 boat people were added.

Refugees needed sponsors to help them get started in America. When Ken, the Army interpreter whom my parents had helped, returned to the US with his Việtnamese bride, he gave us his parents’ phone number. My parents had saved it for years. Dad reached Ken’s parents, explaining himself in the passable English he had learned at Lackland Air Force Base. He got Ken’s number and called. Ken was in college and didn’t have the means to sponsor us, but he said he would ask around.

As part of the first wave of refugees, we had no idea what the prospects were for sponsorship, even with Ken’s help. My parents considered options that appeared on bulletin boards in the camp. One potential sponsor wanted to adopt a boy. The couple had a farm and horses, which sounded to me like a lot of fun. I volunteered. My parents would have to give me up for adoption. That would leave a family of four, which might be easier to sponsor. They would think it over.

Refugee camp was fun for me, thanks to the generosity of the Americans. Marines occasionally drove an open-top Jeep through camp, throwing toys and candies out the back. Children chased after them. We ate strange food, like pancakes and cereal, in the mess tents, for free. I tasted fresh milk for the very first time. In the evenings, we watched shows projected onto a gigantic outdoor screen. I liked Rocket Man, a guy who flew by rockets strapped to his back. I learned to make a Rocket Man mask out of a styrofoam cup. A teacher taught us English through songs. In a classroom without walls or ceiling, we sang “Head and shoulders, knees and toes…”

Ken came through. A family that went to his church in Stockton, in Northern California, generously agreed to sponsor our entire group, including the two bachelors: my cousin and my mom’s uncle. On June 6, 1975, we flew to Stockton on a DC-3, the civilian version of the C-47 that had brought Dad to Thailand. We were among the first refugee families to enter American society. Major Tân, whose little lie saved us, made it out with his family as well and would eventually settle not far from us.

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Immigrant Life

The seven of us lived in a four-unit apartment building that our sponsor owned. Our one-bedroom unit had a roll-away bed and an enclosed loft above its storage space. My parents had the bedroom, my sister got the loft, the boys took the roll-away, and the bachelors slept in the living room.

Following Việtnamese custom, we set up an altar for the loved ones no longer with us. Joining my grandmother, who had died in her sleep; my aunt, who was killed by French artillery; and my uncle, who had disappeared without a trace; was the child Mom had miscarried—our family’s sole casualty.

Mom sold the diamond in her wedding ring and the jewelry we carried out of Việtnam. The pieces in the pillowcases left on Côn Sơn’s airfield were gone, but that was almost expected. Mom had kept most of the jewelry under the clothing she wore. If we had encountered bandits, they would’ve taken what was in the pillowcases, thinking that was all we had, and let us go.

We spent the cash, plus a $300 loan from our sponsors, on a used two-door Fiat 128. With a little stacking, all seven of us could fit inside. I was mortified and worried that the police would pull us over. The car shuttled the grown-ups around, allowing my parents to work multiple jobs and overtime every opportunity they got. It took my father and cousin, our best English speakers, to their computer programming courses at Delta College. When its suspension broke, we kept on driving it.

We children were left alone a lot. The renowned California public education system of that era took great care of us. My parents had always dreamed of a Western education for their children. When we weren’t in school, our strict Việtnamese upbringing kept us in line. These factors allowed my parents to work long days.

In three short months, our world had changed radically, unexpectedly and so fast that we almost couldn’t keep up. We’d had a country—war torn and misgoverned, but it was ours. Dad had plans to leave the Air Force at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, one promotion away. Mom had a restaurant and a fourth child on the way. We had relatives and friends from Huế to Sài Gòn. I had received an award of school supplies and found a female cricket.

It was a lot to give up, but we gave it little thought. Before we could mourn the things we had lost, we were running for our lives. When we stopped running, there were opportunities before us far more compelling than what we had left behind.

We were hungry for those opportunities. But we were also unprepared, missing out on some as we stumbled blindly through unfamiliar social customs and expectations. As our lives unfolded, we found our way. But we never completely stopped being who we were: refugees, immigrants and Việtnamese.

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The Art of Wartime Evacuation

My parents’ reaction to this pivotal chapter in our family history has been curiously muted. They’ve never brought up these events, or anything from their childhoods. When I asked, they said little. They neither encouraged nor discouraged me from writing this story, and they gave minimal, impassive answers when I dug for details. Yes, Mom was afraid. Dad “wouldn’t change a thing. Everything went perfectly.”

After reading this story, some people asked how my parents felt going through it all. I couldn’t find a translation for “How did you feel?” that didn’t sound unbearably dumb to me. Maybe it was our Việtnamese culture or the military upbringing that inhibited me. Finally, I posed the question in English. Independently, each of them chuckled, saying something to the effect of “We were too busy figuring out what to do to.” Neither of them said how they felt, and I didn’t press them.

My parents have never betrayed any emotion regarding their ordeal. Maybe they’re as resilient as they seem. Or maybe they’ve suppressed the worst memories of their trauma. We have always been good at looking forward and not letting the past drag us down.

Our journey was not as long, harrowing, miserable or brutal as some others’, though at times, we were just one bad move from similar fates. Luck played a role at those times—or karma, or divine intervention.

Most of the journey, however, we owed to something mundane and earthly, yet extraordinary—my parents. Their knowledge and instincts saved us. These proficiencies, they’d gained through lives routinely knocked backward by war. They had practiced the twisted art of wartime evacuation while still children, surviving event by event, each one a rehearsal for an escape they never imagined they’d have to undertake. Through all the pitfalls of the journey, the safety bubble they had created around us stayed intact. In it, they brought us—and our precious, fragile childhoods—safely to America.

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About this Story

 

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