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Whose Vietnam War?
By NGUYEN QUI DUC
From Saigon to America
By BICH MINH NGUYEN
Our Vietnam War Never Ended
By VIET THANH NGUYEN
Room for Debate
Lessons, 40 Years After the Fall of Saigon
By NGUYEN QUI DUC
HANOI, Vietnam — Exactly 40 years ago, I left home. Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was about to be taken over by North Vietnamese soldiers and renamed Ho Chi Minh City. It was April 30, 1975. I was 17.
I was staying with my uncles, and they took me with them when they escaped. I felt shameful about being on the losing side of the war, but also relieved: The millions staying behind seemed sure to face a bloodbath at the hands of the Communists. My parents were among them: My mother was stranded in Danang, in central Vietnam, and my father, a civil servant for the southern government, had been captured during the 1968 Tet offensive and was being held prisoner somewhere in North Vietnam.
I never thought I’d see them again. But in 1984 we were reunited in California. I also never thought I’d return to Vietnam.
It took me a decade and a half, along with serious and persistent questioning, to first visit the country. It took me another decade and a half to move permanently to Hanoi — the seat of the Communist regime that had driven us away.
From Saigon to America
By BICH MINH NGUYEN
My father was 27 years old when we fled Saigon on April 29, 1975, the night before the city fell to the North Vietnamese. Like his three brothers, he had been in the South Vietnamese Army, fighting and losing in what is known in Vietnam as the American War.
On the evening of April 29, my father looked at his two young children: my sister, 2 years old, and me, 8 months old. It was late. It was our last chance. So he and my uncles and my grandmother made their decision.
They gathered us up. They filled a knapsack with clothes and food. And then we left our home for good.
To this day, my father says it was luck that got us safely to the Saigon River on motorbikes. Luck that we found our way on a boat that took us out to the open sea where an American naval ship accepted us and brought us to a refugee camp in the Philippines. Eventually we made it to the United States and settled in a small town in Michigan, starting over in a new language.
Our Vietnam War Never Ended
By VIET THANH NGUYEN
LOS ANGELES — THURSDAY, the last day of April, is the 40th anniversary of the end of my war. Americans call it the Vietnam War, and the victorious Vietnamese call it the American War. In fact, both of these names are misnomers, since the war was also fought, to great devastation, in Laos and Cambodia, a fact that Americans and Vietnamese would both rather forget.
In any case, for anyone who has lived through a war, that war needs no name. It is always and only “the war,” which is what my family and I call it. Anniversaries are the time for war stories to be told, and the stories of my family and other refugees are war stories, too. This is important, for when Americans think of war, they tend to think of men fighting “over there.” The tendency to separate war stories from immigrant stories means that most Americans don’t understand how many of the immigrants and refugees in the United States have fled from wars — many of which this country has had a hand in.
Although my family and other refugees brought our war stories with us to America, they remain largely unheard and unread, except by people like us. Compared with many of the four million Vietnamese in the diaspora, my family has been lucky. None of my relatives can be counted among the three million who died during the war, or the hundreds of thousands who disappeared at sea trying to escape by boat. But our experiences in coming to America were difficult.
Room for Debate
Lessons, 40 Years After the Fall of Saigon
