Enjoy this lightly created embedded audio version or use the play button in the phone app (AI narrator).
Forty-nine years ago, as Black April was grinding to its final and excruciating conclusion of a country lost and America’s stunning first defeat, the psychological fates of millions stood in the balance.
The world held its breath as the end unfolded. The panorama of human entanglement was just too large to comprehend.
There were those who had volunteered to go to Vietnam.
There were those who had been drafted.
There were those who had actively protested for peace.
There were those who fled the country in search of peace.
There were those in power who advocated for the war.
There were those in power who’d been powerless to stop it.
There were those who went to Vietnam and died.
There were those who went to Vietnam and returned.
There were those who returned but were shunned.
There were those who returned but were never able to leave Vietnam behind.
There were those whose bodies were lost, killed in action.
There were those whose bodies were lost, missing in action.
There were the prisoners of war.
There were the South Vietnamese who were losing their land, the one they’d been promised by the Americans.
There were the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong who had been fighting without cease for years to secure their homeland.
There were innumerable orphans who died.
There were innumerable orphans who lived and faced an uncertain future.
There were the citizens at home in America who looked on and watched as their family members were crushed by this experience.
There were the citizens at home in America who turned away from the suffering of the family members directly affected by the war.
There were the civilian security forces, the diplomats, the contractors who served in Vietnam.
There were their spouses and significant others.
Then there were the American children who lived in Vietnam as dependents in the 50s and 60s.
And the American children who lived in Saigon as dependents during this final juncture.
And there was me, an eight-year-old who knew nothing of this. I was one of the approximately 250 civilian dependents who’d been moved to Saigon in ‘73 or ‘74 when it had “become safe again.”
As a child, I was thrust into the center of this stream of events, the multitudinous impact of the Vietnam Era upon millions and millions of people.
What does it mean to grow up in the shadow of such a circumstance but with no way to process the fact?
Katie Gibbs, a Phoenix Study Group student, wrote in 2015:
The older I get, the more I think that that day when the palace four blocks away got bombed while I was coloring on my front porch, really “effed” me up.
I was only in first grade when I was there. But I will never, ever ever be able to get the image and out of my mind: me under the bed, my mom crouched under the desk, frantically trying to call my dad at the embassy, my sister, our beloved maid and her kids, all under the bed or in the closet.
And God forbid a fighter jet flies over . . . A few days ago, some military helicopters flew really low over our house and, man, I can feel that horrible reaction once again.
I cannot talk about the bombing incident today without breaking into tears . . . God I hate crying in front of strangers.
Late in March ‘75, she and her mother and sister went to Thailand, which could have been an easy out, but they wanted to return home, to get back to their father and husband.
When they bought tickets to return to Saigon, their efforts were met with incredulity. Her mother wrote:
The booking agent thought we were crazy. That's how much things had deteriorated while we were on the road. They put us on an Air France plane on the tarmac where we waited and waited and waited.
The crayons they had given you and Anne to keep you busy while we waited to take off actually melted and curled over.
FINALLY, they took us off Air France and put us on Air Vietnam which all embassy personnel had been told to never fly. Well, how else were we to get back??
We returned to Saigon on Easter Sat. (The Easter Bunny did not come that
Easter).
By April 13, they had exited the country, though her father stayed behind as was required by his job. He spent hours upon hours helping South Vietnamese families get the paperwork together to escape as well.
Another Pheonix Study Group student, Chris de Morella, wrote:
On the way to the airport that day, I saw from our car window a man in the distance getting shot in a field, execution style, and I bet a lot of stuff like that happened that day in [Saigon].
The scene at the airport was crazy – a desperate family of well to do south Vietnamese were in the car in front of us trying, pleading, begging, to leave, until a South Vietnamese soldier forced them to back away pointing an M-16 right into the man’s face screaming at him… it was a scary moment.
Then on the way out… looking out the plane's window, as the late afternoon sunset on the Mekong delta I saw a Swiss cheese-like landscape across that entire delta. For where the sunlight hit land it was dark, but on the water, it glistened silver… then I realized that this Swiss cheese landscape was the delta churned up into a mudscape of bomb craters . . .
It was an “Oh my God” moment for me as the scale of the war’s destruction hit home in my 15 year-old brain that was already traumatized by the intense events of the day.
All 250 civilian dependents have stories like these. Stories that set us apart and also have no defined part in the legacy of the Vietnam Era. But in terms of the effect of war, that is nothing unusual. Children are often the most highly impacted and, at least historically, left with the least conscious understanding of what they’ve been through.
In late April 1975, all those tenuous lines of connection of all the many different kinds of people affected by the Vietnam War were up in the air like gossamer strands of a sticky, and often poisonous, web.
And now, nearly 50 years later, I wonder how many of them have been brought to their right and healed conclusions. How many yet need to be connected? How many tangles are still seeking to be loosed?
Half a century is a very long time but sometimes I think, it may not be quite enough time to put all of this in perspective.
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Thank you for reading. For the month of “Black April” I’ve reduced the price of my book on Amazon to just $11.99.
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Until next time,
Kat ❦
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