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Both of our parents were born in Hanoi (Hà-Nội),
an ancient, capital city in
the
northern part of
Vietnam.
Their ancestors were
mandarins, affluent merchants, and esteemed civil servants.
My
paternal grandfather was working as a civil engineer, and my
maternal
grandfather held the position of Lieutenant Treasurer of the French Protectorate
of Tonkin (northern administrative section of Vietnam).
In 1954, the French were forced to withdraw their colonial
rule from Vietnam after their devastating defeat at the
epic
battle of Điện-Biên-Phủ. To end the war between the
French and the Viet Minh (communist Vietnamese), the
Geneva Conference
on Indochina's Final Declaration divided Vietnam into 2 sections
at the 17th parallel: North Vietnam under Communist rule and South Vietnam
under non-Communist rule.
So that partition would not become
permanent, the conference declaration also called for
national elections in 1956 to reunify the country.
To avoid the Communist regime, both of our parents'
families were among the hundreds of thousands of northern
Vietnamese to emigrate to the South.
In 1956, the president of South Vietnam
refused to hold the scheduled national elections, and fighting started between
the North and the South.
This brutal civil war continued for a
quarter of a century and kept my parents' families from ever returning to their
homeland.
Our dad met
our mom in the southern coastal resort city of Nha-Trang in 1959
and married her on
November 8, 1960. They
took residence in the heavily guarded Navy
officers' compound (cư-xá sĩ-quan hải-quân) in
the southern capital city of Saigon (Sài-Gòn). Mom gave birth to
me
(Ðỗ-Tuấn) then
Alice
(Bội-Ngọc),
Pauline
(Thiên-Nga),
Chuck
(Ðỗ-Tú), and
Albert
(Ðỗ-Tùng).
Mom and Dad
pampered and tried their best to shelter us children from the horrors of
the
Vietnam War,
but even then, our naïve minds could not be kept
oblivious to the omnipresent wartime dangers. As
part of their terrorizing tactics, the communist forces regularly fired surface-to-air missiles (SAM)
into the air to fall indiscriminately toward the capital Saigon. One
night, a bombardment struck our
next-door-neighbors' house. It killed and injured several of their family
members. Mom said that she could never forget the sound of sirens erupting
then wailing
throughout the city that night and the whizzing sound of that missile tearing
through the air before impact. That incidence -- a frightening reminder
that no one in Vietnam, at a battlefront or in the capital's guarded area, was
beyond the war's reach of death and destruction -- was so traumatizing that even
after living in the peaceful USA, for the first few years, my heart still skipped a
beat every time I heard a loud explosion for its cause used to be the violence
of munitions
instead of the innocence of firework or car trouble. The horrors and
brutalities of war should not be forgotten too easily.
We lived in Saigon continuously until the fall
of the
Republic of Vietnam in April 1975. With the help of my Dad's
American friends, our family took refuge from the communists by flights to the
Philippines, to Guam, then to the United States.
After arriving in US, we made
our home in New Jersey until
relocating to California in 1978.
Albert was reluctantly left in New
Jersey with our maternal grandparents at their insistence.
Dad passed away in May 1982 due to liver cancer
and was
buried in Rose Hills Memorial Park, California.
In 1983,
our maternal grandparents came to live
with our family, and we were
reunited with Albert.
Alice married her husband,
Mai
Bùi, in
July 1987. Chuck married his wife,
Nancy
Wistrick, in
October 1996. Pauline married her husband,
Tony
Farnham, in
November 2000.
Albert married his wife,
Teresa Nakai, in May 2004.
Alice gave birth to
Melody in 1994 then
Sabrina in 1997.
Those two
girls are our Mom's only official grandchildren so far.
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In March 10, 1975, the
North
Vietnam's communist military began their offense by attacking the highland
city of Ban-Me-Thuot (Ban-Mê-Thuột). The defeat of Ban-Me-Thuot and the
consequent, disastrous military withdrawals from other highland areas led to the
South's quick losses of other cities. By mid-April 1975, the enemy forces
was rapidly approaching Saigon, the capital city of the
Republic of Vietnam,
where our family lived. The fall of South Vietnam was impending, and
my father was deeply worried about the
safety of
our family. Realizing that his influential
military position would put us in grave danger when country fell,
Dad made a pact with his
American friends, the US military advisers, to
have us
evacuated from Vietnam. He promised them that he would stay with the republic until its very last day in exchange for flight arrangements
for Mom and us kids to the US.
April 21, 1975, South Vietnamese President Thiệu's
resignation signaled the point of no return. On April 22, 1975, my Dad
left the house in the morning as usual but suddenly came home a few hours later
highly agitated. Informed by one of our domestic helpers that my mother
had already left the house to manage our
restaurant business,
my dad sent his chauffeur, Mr. Ba; his aide, Mr. Tân; and my maternal
uncles (uncle Bảo
and his younger brother,
uncle Trí
had taken refuge at our home for a few weeks) to fetch Mom.
After Mr. Tân had assured her that he would stay at the restaurant in her place,
my mom immediately returned home with Mr. Ba and uncle Trí.
My dad was
anxiously waiting, and he told Mom that the time had arrived. We were
asked to make a quick change in travel plan: To select and take only the
light items, one small carry-on per person, from the many
hefty suitcases that we had already prepared for
the long trip. Being a sentimental person, my mom chose
to bring with us the family
photos, many of which are now posted on this web site, instead of the more
commercially valuable items -- I am still
grateful for Mom's visionary choice
because, in retrospect, we could and had earn material assets again but would
never be able to regenerate those family photos and their associated memories. We had
moments to make the luggage adjustments then were whisked to the city airport,
Tan-Son-Nhut (Tân-Sơn-Nhứt). My maternal uncles Bảo and Trí were permitted
to come with our family. We arrived at the airport about 10:30 A.M. and
started the travel paperwork to the Philippines. While we were waiting for
our flight, Dad procured additional seats and went back to Saigon to look for
our other relatives. He returned in a couple of hours with my maternal
grandparents and
paternal
uncle Sơn's family. My father returned to his duty as a Vietnamese Navy captain
after his family departed Saigon at 6:45 P.M. on a US military air transport.
April 22, 1975, 9:00 P.M., we arrived at the US's Clark Bay base in the Philippines. We stayed there for about a week then were flown to
the island of
Guam. We stayed at Guam for about a month then were flown to Hawaii.
We only stayed at Hawaii for a couple of day for paperwork processing then were flown to
Camp Pendleton, California.
At Camp Pendleton, uncle Sơn contacted paternal
aunt Jessica's family who
were US citizens.
Aunt Jess and her husband, uncle Bob,
sponsored us out of the camp, and two days later, we flew to Washington, D.C., to meet
their family.
On
April 30, 1975, the Republic of Vietnam's capital city, Saigon,
fell. My dad contacted my maternal
uncle-in-law
Quý who was a Navy lieutenant-commander and instructed him to take Dad's
place in leading the rest of my maternal relatives to the Vietnamese Navy's
Bach-Dang (Bạch-Ðằng) harbor where the naval evacuation would be executed.
Dad then contacted the US Navy by secured, military radio channel and identified
himself with a secret code to acquire the US evacuation pick-up location.
A helicopter brought my father to a US's 7th Fleet ship stationing in the South
China Sea to begin his journey to America. April 30, 1975,
was the end of the Vietnam War and of the Republic of Vietnam; nowadays, that
fateful day is often referred to as Black April
by many Vietnamese communities worldwide.
Dad could not contact his family until ... [ ...To be continued]
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Copyright © 2001-2008 NguyendoFamily.com . All rights reserved.
Email:
Tuan@NguyendoFamily.com
Home Page:
http://www.NguyendoFamily.com
Last Revised:
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
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