Vietnam War: 40 years later, the fall of Saigon remains an endless abyss of sorrow for some

Like many second-generation Vietnamese-Americans, Stephanie Hoang grew up knowing better than to ask her mother about her experiences during the Vietnam War.

Decades after fleeing her homeland by boat, Chan Sen still has difficulty talking about Vietnam without crying. So for her four daughters, the country and the conflict that shaped the rest of Sen’s life was always shrouded in mystery.

“It’s very painful for her,” Hoang said. “She would always gloss over it when I asked her for details. Her mindset is that she came to America for a better life, and she didn’t want her children to hear those depressing stories.”

As the war’s vast diaspora marks the 40th anniversary of Saigon’s fall Thursday, the country that was lost on April 30, 1975, would be unrecognizable to Sen, who settled in Oakland, learned to speak English, studied to become a child development instructor and built a life for her family in America.

Hoang was so fully assimilated that she couldn’t speak Vietnamese until she visited the country for the first time as a UC Berkeley student last year. While she was there, Hoang found out that two out of three people in Vietnam are too young to have any direct memory of the fighting. For them, the war is long over.

But for the older generation of Vietnamese in the U.S., the fall of Saigon, today Ho Chi Minh City, remains an abyss of endless sorrow.

It isn’t only an aging flotilla of boat people that remains rooted in the past.

Rich Paddock, part of the Marine Corps detail assigned to guard the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, was among the last Americans to leave during the chaotic retreat that brought to an end his country’s greatest military debacle. Now a real estate appraiser in Modesto, Paddock said he had no desire to ever go back. He stopped mentioning his experience there when people at his next posting physically turned away from him when he began talking about Vietnam.

“People who fought that war remain traumatized by it, so they remain stuck at this border they cannot cross,” said Andrew Lam, an essayist who has written extensively about his flight from Saigon to Milpitas as a child. Lam’s father was a general in the South Vietnamese army, so as his country collapsed, the family was flown to safety on an American C-130 transport.

On one of several return visits to what is now the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Lam encountered an American in his 60s on the plane. “He asked me, ‘Do they still hate us?’ ” recalls Lam, a visiting professor this semester at San Jose State University. “As if America was the preoccupation of their mindset. I said, ‘No, they don’t hate you. They want to be you.’ “

His father, Thi Quang Lam, escaped later than the rest of the family, and for a month his wife and children didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. “He’s the only one in the family who refuses to go home,” Andrew Lam says. “He will not return until the communists are gone. For him, Vietnam is memory, and history runs backward, not forward.”

Since the war ended, history has run mostly forward in Vietnam, often relentlessly. After a decade of political recriminations, during which hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who fought against the North Vietnamese communists and Viet Cong guerrillas were sent to brutal “re-education camps,” the late 1980s brought an opening to global markets. By 1995, Vietnam had formally normalized relations with the U.S., even opening a consulate in San Francisco. As the country’s economy boomed, so did its population, roughly tripling since 1975.

In this country, Vietnam veterans made up a disproportionate part of the homeless population, and deconstructing an imagined “Vietnam syndrome” became a favorite intellectual conceit. “Is Iraq another Vietnam? Is Afghanistan another Vietnam?” Lam asks, echoing headlines he’s seen in American newspapers. “It becomes a metaphor for loss or tragedy. It’s not the Vietnam of today — young and full of hope.”

That’s a very different country than the one Paddock found when he was posted to the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as a gangly 21-year-old. In the days leading to Saigon’s surrender, his job was to disarm anybody who entered the embassy grounds. The weapons cache eventually came up to his waist, and included everything from Thompson and Swedish “K” submachine guns to pearl-handled pistols.

But that was nothing compared to the ordnance he saw on the afternoon of April 28 as he stood on the embassy roof, burning the last of the embassy’s classified papers. North Vietnamese forces had captured 20 fully fueled A6 Intruder jets in Da Nang, and the pilots flew them down and bombed the Tan Son Nhut air base. One of the planes broke off, and Paddock watched as it bore down on him, finally dropping a bomb a quarter-mile away. The pilot then turned toward the presidential palace.

“When he flew past the palace, it looked like someone had taken a bedsheet, dyed it red and jerked it out of the ground,” Paddock recalled. “That’s how much anti-aircraft fire came out of the ground.”

It was a war Paddock knew quite well because his father, Hugh Paddock, was among the first Marines sent to Vietnam in 1967, when he fought in the battle of Khe Sanh as a 43-year-old first sergeant. Both he and his wife served in World War II.

“I was raised to be very patriotic,” Rich Paddock said. “But when my father came home from Vietnam, he was extremely bitter because the war was being run from Washington, D.C. So when I got there, I already had the viewpoint that this was a really screwy situation.”

The evacuation of American and South Vietnamese personnel from Saigon would form the final heartbreaking chapter of the American nightmare there, as Ambassador Graham Martin stubbornly refused to mount a massive airlift until after communist forces had cratered the runways at Tan Son Nhut with an artillery barrage on the morning of April 29.

Hien Do was 14 when an uncle came to his home in the middle of the night, just before the airport closed, and told the family to pack and get ready to leave. His father, Hanh Duc Do, had been the right-hand man to a South Vietnamese general, making the family particularly vulnerable to reprisal under a communist regime. As Hien, his mother and two sisters boarded a C-130, they had no idea where they were going.

The only possession he was allowed to bring was a book containing his stamp collection, in which he wrote, “This is the most painful memory I have.” After arriving at Camp Pendleton, Do’s family of four had difficulty finding sponsors, so it was eventually split up and parceled out to three different families.

When his mother had enough money to reassemble the family, they lived in an apartment complex with five other Vietnamese refugee families in one of Los Angeles’ seediest neighborhoods. Do’s uncle would spend 13 years in a forced-labor camp after the war, and almost all of the men in the apartment building had left behind wives and children. “We would get together to eat, and they would get drunk,” Do said. “And they would cry because their kids and wives were back in Vietnam. Overnight they lost everything. The younger generation may not understand the pain and tribulations that their parents and grandparents went through. Now what they see is a country that’s prosperous and open.”

Miki Nguyen’s father, too, refused to return to Vietnam before he died two years ago, though it would have been difficult for him to contrive a homecoming to compare with his exit in 1975. A pilot in the South Vietnamese air force, Ba Nguyen commandeered the colossus of the chopper fleet, a CH-47 Chinook, scooped up his family in the midst of the U.S. military’s belated helicopter airlift, and flew toward the USS Kirk in the South China Sea. His wife dropped their 6-month-old daughter to the ship’s deck, where she was caught by a sailor. Then 6-year-old Miki jumped about 15 feet to the deck.

When his whole family was safely onboard the Kirk, Ba Nguyen hovered above the water for nearly 10 minutes while he removed his flight suit, then rolled the Chinook to the right as he dove from the aircraft, the massive rotors exploding into the sea like shrapnel.

For as long as he lived, when Ba Nguyen got together with his comrades from the South Vietnamese military, he wore his uniform and told his story proudly. “I think my dad talked about it because he knew what he did was pretty badass,” said Miki Nguyen, 46, who often visits aunts and uncles in San Jose — where more Vietnamese live than in any city outside Vietnam.

His father settled in Seattle and went to work as an electronics technician for Boeing — the company that built the Chinook — after the war.

Miki Nguyen has returned to Vietnam several times, and while he suspects there won’t be any more Black April observances 20 years from now, he has not forgotten what happened there.

“I think the Vietnamese community wants to move on, wants to forget about it,” he said. “I get that. But what a missed opportunity not to pause, however painful it may be, and reflect on what happened.”

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at twitter.com/BruceNewmanTwit.