Posted on 04/30/2018 1:07:13 PM PDT by BBell
After three decades of bloodshed, Vietnam’s civil war abruptly ended 43 years ago today, on April 30, 1975. The events surrounding this date are seared into the minds of every Vietnamese person of a certain age.
I was not yet four years old, but these are some of my earliest memories. There was no longer a North and South Vietnam divided at the 17th parallel, only the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
Days before, the radio inside our house in Saigon had been ticking off provinces that had fallen into North Vietnamese hands: some of them the hometowns of my relatives. As rumors of gory revenge preceded the communists’ advance, thousands of people abandoned their homes and fled to any place that was still free. Many, including my aunts, with husbands away fighting in the South Vietnamese Army, ended up at our house.
The presence of so many visitors had the feel of Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. But for this reunion, the mood was far from celebratory. I recall hearing the word hoa binh, meaning peace, sprinkled in conversations. My father explained that it meant the end of fighting and soldiers on both sides could go home. “For you, there would be no more hiding under the counters and staircases,” he said to me.
I could not wait for hoa binh, the inspiration for the name of my father, Hoa, and one of his brothers, Binh. Its concept was the eternal dream in a land that seemed to have been forever besieged by war. I imagined peace would magically stanch the flow of white-clad mourners passing by our house. For some time, the mourning ritual of relatives and friends accompanying the deceased on foot to the burial site had become increasingly frequent. From inside our house, my siblings and I could make out the sobs and shuffling of footsteps. We would rush out to catch a glimpse of the framed picture of the deceased leading the procession. The face staring out of the frame was almost always that of a young man.
As the North Vietnamese Army closed in on South Vietnam’s capital city, a panic overtook its streets, culminating in madness on April 29, one day before its collapse. Saigon was flooded with people scrambling wildly, as if fleeing an unseen monster. Older siblings carried younger ones on their back as parents lugged bags. Alongside them all, South Vietnamese soldiers frantically tore off their uniforms. Some people fled on bicycles piled high with their belongings while others pushed carts.
No one bothered to pick up anything that was dropped. The streets were littered with shoes, clothes, and luggage, with broken bicycles and cars that had run out of gas, their doors still open. In the chaos, I heard a loud explosion. I saw a man slumped in a pool of blood as swirls of smoke and dust rose from his body. My father explained that everyone, terrified of the communists, was trying to get out of the country.
On April 30, the North Vietnamese tanks crashed into the gates of Independence Palace, home to the president of South Vietnam. The chaos of the previous day transformed into an eerie quiet. All around us, radios blasted an endless message loop: “dau hang khong dieu kien!” (“Surrender without conditions!”) The urgency in the announcer’s voice was unmistakable, even if I did not entirely understand what the command meant.
From our balcony, my older siblings and I looked down to the streets at the long line of tanks lumbering past our house. Flying from radio antennas were billowing flags, bright red with a yellow star at the center, the symbol of the Communist Party. Trucks followed the tanks. Dangling from the sides were uniformed soldiers in bush hats and sandals cut from recycled tires. Some looked not much older than many of the teenage boys in our neighborhood.
Crowds lining the street waved flags while chanting, “Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh! Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh!”
I was fascinated by the parade and its deliverance of hoa binh, but to my parents it must have felt very different.
Communists are a persistent bunch too. They masquerade as ‘socialists’ just waiting for the right time to come. They can lie low for years just waiting for the opportunity to show their true colors. Nasty bunch.
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