WAR & THE REFUGEE EXPERIENCE
I Was Living in Saigon When it Fell
And now more families are going through what my family went through so many years ago BY SEAN-HABIB TU
I
t was painful to watch the events at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai airport on August 15. The chaotic scene, the people running in total panic, thousands jamming the airport trying to get out of the country, people clinging on to a U.S. Army C17 and falling as it took off. All of these images caused me to relive the day when Saigon — now Ho Chi Minh City — fell to North Vietnam’s communist regime on April 30, 1975. What should I write about while watching history repeat itself in the space of just a few decades, from the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the fall of Kabul in 2021? I began writing this article on Sept. 18, only a short month after that fateful day in the Kabul airport, but it seemed as if that particular event had almost become part of a distant past. Except for those who fought in Afghanistan and those who have escaped from war and persecution, very few Americans will pause to think about or even remember a war that happened decades ago in another distant Asian land. And perhaps only five or ten years from now, no one will think twice about the destroyed country known as Afghanistan. When the war ended in Vietnam, I was barely a teenager. Like many Saigon residents, during those last few weeks the siege and constant bombing by the North Vietnamese forces rendered us hopeless. The only way in or out of the city was through the main airport. When the battle got closer to the city, the bombing of the airport became so intense that no planes could take off or land. On the radio we heard talk of American personnel and advisors frantically leaving the country via helicopters that were landing on the U.S. Embassy’s roof. Our family friends and relatives constantly gathered in my father’s house, where they would try to predict what the
future would look like in communist-ruled Vietnam. Based on past events that had occurred in communist-ruled North Vietnam during the 1950s, we knew that many of those who had worked for the previous government, as well as intellectuals, businessmen and landowners, had perished or been disappeared without a trace. So, fear started to creep into our household and grip us — our father had worked for the South Vietnamese government. Planning for the worst should the city fall, we all hunkered down and waited for the inevitable. I ventured outside out of curiosity. Who are the North Vietnamese? What is a communist? There were a lot of thoughts in my young mind during those days. People were saying that the communists had killed millions of people in the Soviet Union as well as in the People’s Republic of China after their respective communist parties had come to power. I also learned that after Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (the future North Vietnam) on Sept. 21, 1945, the communists had killed hundreds of thousands of “enemies of the state.” Those who did not embrace their ideology went into hiding or migrated to the south, just as many Chinese had migrated to Vietnam after Mao Zedong proclaimed the PRC on Oct. 1, 1949. I gave no thought to what the communists might do to the people in Saigon. All I knew was that communist governments were very repressive, anti-intellectual and anti-religion. During those days, martial law was declared. I saw deserted streets devoid of cars and people, paper and trash flying everywhere. The only vehicles dashing back and forth were military vehicles and convoys of troop reinforcements. The officers looked nervous. There was no sign of the police or
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traffic controllers. The markets were open, but not many people were talking or smiling. Everything came to a standstill. Those were very eerie days. Saigon fell about a week later. Early that morning, I saw a lot of people rush into the street and nervously watch the convoys of North Vietnamese troops enter the city. I also dashed out to see what was going on. For the very first time I saw a train of T54 tanks speeding toward the presidential palace. Riding on them were young North Vietnamese soldiers with their AK-47s on hand. Their uniforms looked just like the photos I had once seen on a propaganda poster. The tank convoy knocked down the presidential palace’s gate and took over the grounds. The entire country was then placed in lockdown for a few days. After the government of North Vietnam declared the war over, it announced that the entire country would now be called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. In other words, the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) ceased to exist. They then began dismantling the regime in the south and running the country from the north. My family went back to our village, located about 350 miles north of Saigon. The new regime sent my father and all of the former government’s workers to reeducation camps as prisoners. We struggled to survive without him — he was released three years later. Seeing no future for himself under the communist regime, he decided to escape in 1979. I tagged along with him on the arduous journey through Cambodia and into Thailand, struggling all the way with hunger and thirst and not knowing in which country we might end up. Ultimately,
