Our mom was ten when the US pulled out of Vietnam in 1975. For Americans, this was the end of a highly divisive war. For our parents, they knew the fighting would eventually come to an end, but their was little hope for a peaceful life afterward. This was just the beginning of when their lives were turned upside down.
“Before we left [our house], you heard the news that the American soldiers, the president, everybody left. So my parents they knew. They knew they’d lose the war. We packed our clothes and prepared for months. They listened to the news all the time. We packed our clothes and prepared for it. If something happened, you grab your suitcase and go.”
As soon as the last Americans left, the Communists* moved into Saigon, fighting the South Vietnamese Army just two miles away from her home in Hu Duc, on a bridge overlooking her house. They had to leave.
“I remember the night we left. You could hear the shooting so close. My mom and dad went outside and looked at the bridge. You could see guns firing and flashing everywhere, bombs. So they knew. All the rich people in the neighborhood had already left. Somebody, I don’t know who it was, came and knocked on our door, 'You have to leave, you cannot stay here.'"
The bridge taking them outside of the city was turned into a battlefield, forcing her family to leave through the Saigon river. They took a boat to her brother’s in-laws, and stayed for a week before coming back to the house.
“My mom went inside first. She had a feeling someone had died in there. So she went to look around, and we kind of tagged along behind her. But there was nothing — just the food they ate and the mess they left. [Southern soldiers] destroyed the house. They used that house to shoot out of, so you would see bullets in the house and outside in the yard. Trash was everywhere. All the chickens we had, they killed them and they ate them.
“We didn’t have electricity for a month, maybe longer than that.
“We were so scared because we knew dead bodies were everywhere. At night I couldn’t sleep, all I thought about were dead bodies. My parents’ house was built on a big piece of land, and surrounding us were rice fields. A lot of dead bodies were out there. Bodies were outside our yard, too. You could literally reach over and touch them.
"Finally we got electricity back. It took awhile to get back to normal again. It took around six months. The people in the neighborhood further in, the poor people, they go fishing and they go catch shrimp out in the fields. Usually the come and they sell it to my mom and dad...[afterward] we couldn’t eat any fish or shrimp because they ate the dead bodies out there.
“Government officials came and picked up the bodies that were on the ground, in the yard, on the roads and bridge. But in the rice fields, it took them awhile to get out that way. So fish and shrimp ate them. The communists would hide in the rice fields, too. They would come out and shoot the Southern soldiers. It was scary and it was gross. I still remember, though. You come home and there are dead bodies everywhere.”
*Though the Viet Cong were technically defeated during the Tet Offensive in 1968, remaining VC troops were integrated into the North Vietnamese Army. For our parents, all communists troops were referred to as Viet Cong (as it literally translates to "Vietnamese Communists"). For ease of understanding in this post, we've just referred to Viet Cong as communists, rather than the NVA.