Recalling the Fall of Saigon 50 years later with a refugee family’s story and a Veterans Breakfast Club event

Linh Nguyen can’t recall her family’s flight from Vietnam before Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Just a baby, she left with her parents and two sisters on her grandfather’s fishing boat packed with 70 people that a U.S. ship rescued.

The Castle Shannon resident has told her family’s story several times, most recently at the Veterans Breakfast Club’s Vietnam Veterans Day recognition last month at the Heinz History Center. She does so on behalf of her parents, especially her mother, and for another reason: “I am so glad that the U.S. got involved, or I wouldn’t be here. My life would be totally different. We count our blessings for sure.”

North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, on that date 50 years ago, bringing about the unconditional surrender of the South Vietnamese government and reunifying Vietnam under communist rule. The VBC will commemorate the anniversary and the war’s official ending on Monday, sharing stories such as the Nguyens’ and from Vietnamese and American veterans in an online event. It will be streamed via Zoom, Facebook and YouTube.

The event will also feature author and historian Jay Veith of Delaware, who has researched the war extensively.

VBC Executive Director Todd DePastino explained on the website how the events unfolded. In early 1975, North Vietnam launched the Spring Offensive, a massive military campaign aimed at defeating South Vietnam. U.S. forces had largely withdrawn after the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to ensure peace and political resolution. However, fighting resumed almost immediately, and by March 1975, North Vietnamese forces began sweeping through the Central Highlands with little resistance.

By mid-April, the North Vietnamese Army had surrounded Saigon. Panic gripped the city. More than 2 million residents — government officials, soldiers and civilians — feared brutal retribution from communist forces. The U.S., which had drastically reduced its presence in Vietnam, prepared to evacuate remaining American personnel and as many South Vietnamese allies as possible.

The evacuation was code-named Operation Frequent Wind. It began in earnest on April 29 as NVA shelling closed Tan Son Nhut Airport. U.S. Marine and Air America helicopters shuttled people from the U.S. Embassy and other buildings to ships offshore in the South China Sea. Scenes of desperate Vietnamese civilians scaling embassy walls, clinging to departing helicopters and crowding onto rooftops became iconic images of the war’s chaotic end, DePastino wrote.

During the final days, U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin remained in denial, delaying evacuation and worsening the chaos. Only about 7,000 Vietnamese were airlifted out in time. Tens of thousands more were left behind.

Back to the Nguyen family: Ngoc, the father, was serving in the South Vietnamese military. The mother, Thanh, then 25, had been reading about the war and feared her family would be broken up or lost. So she concocted a plan.

“She had to get [Ngoc] a leave of absence so he could leave the country,” Linh Nguyen said. “She told his commanding officer that his dad was on his deathbed. He had to take care of all the arrangements. He’s the oldest of his siblings, and in Vietnamese tradition, he was supposed to be in charge. She kept a cool head, the way she tells the story.”

The officer granted the leave to the 29-year-old just a few weeks before Saigon fell. The Nguyens and their three daughters — Nuong, 7, Van, 3, and Linh, 1 — joined her grandfather, aunts and uncles and some of the fishing crew and took off for the sea.

Linh Nguyen said she learned of the mass exodus and the chaos from her parents’ stories. After the rescue, they were sent to the Philippines for a week, then Guam for a month. Her mother was sick and malnourished, and because she was breastfed, Linh had become ill on the boat.

“They wanted to ship just me to the U.S. because they didn’t have the medical supplies,” Linh Nguyen said. “Mom said all of us or none of us.  She prayed that I would recover, and I did recover. She took the gamble and kept us all together.”

Like many other refugees, the Nguyens landed in the Fort Indiantown Gap resettlement center in Pennsylvania. It was one of four — the others in Camp Pendleton in California, Fort Chafee in Arkansas and Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. For eight months in 1975, Fort Indiantown Gap housed more than 20,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, according to a 2017 PennLive article.

The government asked for sponsors, and the U.S. Catholic Conference and other religions and organizations around the country answered the “desperate need” call. Resurrection Church in West Mifflin became the first in the Pittsburgh region, according to a 1975 Pittsburgh Catholic article. Three other parishes agreed to help, including the Church of the Resurrection in Brookline, which is now part of the Saint Teresa of Kolkata Parish.  

While the family stayed at the resettlement camp, Thanh Nguyen found out she had a great-uncle in Pittsburgh who worked for the government and spoke English and Vietnamese. He brought them here, and the Brookline church agreed to help.

Robert and Ruth Slinskey became the family’s sponsors. He was a pressman and president of Pittsburgh Newspaper Printing Pressmen’s Local 9, and she was the church organist. Linh Nguyen said she called them “my American grandparents.”

The family first lived in a church-owned house on Creedmore Avenue, just two doors down from the church. The children attended Resurrection Catholic School.

Linh’s father started out working in landscaping and later secured a job in Wholey’s wholesale department. Both parents attended English as a Second Language classes at the Connelly School, but her mother stayed home to take care of her young daughter.

They learned lots of things — like how to use a flush toilet, something they had not experienced in Vietnam — and the community assisted them. The nuns would leave baked goods, and the neighbors placed canned goods on their porch. “The community helped us transition to the culture, the American way,” Nguyen said.

The family grew to eight children – six girls and two boys who now range in age from 29 to 56 this year. They lived in several Brookline houses, later moving to Castle Shannon.

A carpenter, Linh Nguyen can’t read or write Vietnamese but can speak it and still does all the translating and paperwork for her parents.

She believes their story humanizes the war, and telling it lets her thank the veterans who sacrificed as they saved lives, many more beyond her family.

“It’s a generation now,” Linh Nguyen said. “Not just my parents and myself and my children. [Today there are] 21 grandkids and two great-grandchildren. When it comes down to it, it’s family,” she explained.  “… That is what I want the veterans to know — our appreciation.”

She took a trip to Fort Indiantown Gap a few weeks ago. She didn’t find a registry there — noting that a number of historical items have been destroyed — but looked at photos of houses where refugees lived and perused copies of a newsletter published in Vietnamese and English for the former residents.

Back in Vietnam, Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, and the South Vietnamese government ceased to exist. Tens of thousands of former South Vietnamese officials, military officers and intellectuals were sent to re-education camps. A mass exodus of refugees began — many fled by boat, leading to the “boat people” crisis in the late 1970s and 1980s, DePastino wrote.

The Fall of Saigon was not just a military collapse, he explained, but also a symbol of the United States’ failure to achieve its objectives in Vietnam despite years of fighting, enormous casualties and massive financial investment. It left a deep scar on American foreign policy and military planning and redefined how the U.S. approached future conflicts.

Veith has written four books on Vietnam, the most recent in 2021. A Pennsylvania native who graduated from Penn State and served in the U.S. Army, he worked in sales and management before retiring in 2023. He has devoted himself to his books and research for more than 30 years. He completed a doctorate in history from Australia’s Monash University and has been active in supporting identifying remains of POWs and missing soldiers, testifying before Congress about it.

He said most of the histography and books written about the war are American-centric and seldom discuss the South Vietnamese military. Much of that reports on the issues that afflicted those forces. As DePastino wrote in the event description, “Because it was riddled with corruption, low morale and logistical failures, it crumbled quickly.”

Veith said he believes historians need “to acknowledge the good things they did, not just castigate them.” He explained that the “South Vietnamese units themselves changed over time as the U.S. units did over time. Any military has good units and bad units.”

Veith said in spring 1975 the South Vietnamese army tried to defend Saigon but was badly outnumbered. The communists pulled off an impressive movement of troops and supplies on both sides of the city. He disputed that the South Vietnamese army just collapsed.

Veith interviewed many Vietnamese in his research. In his talks he likes to quote a deputy NVA commander about the war’s end: “For those people who claim that we took Saigon without breaking a light bulb, meaning [there was] no fighting in the city, they should pick up a shovel and help bury our dead.”

Veith knows the South Vietnamese who fought to the end and refused to abandon their troops paid a heavy price. In a 2012 interview with the Washington Independent, he said about five generals committed suicide, as did many lower ranking men and officers. Veith said he interviewed an airborne battalion commander defending Tan Son Nhut airbase who didn’t leave and spent 10 years in prison for that decision. He ate cockroaches to stay alive.

A journalist who reported for the top Saigon newspaper and became Veith’s friend told a similar story. “He had seen the communists come into other places when he was in the north,” Veith said. “The Americans said to him, ‘Get out of here. It won’t be good for you.’  He refused. He wanted to see if the communists would keep their promises. He didn’t run away [because] he had other journalist friends who couldn’t get out like he could. He spent 13 years in prison.”

Those re-education camps and the tales of rape and abuse of fleeing refugees on the boat escapes he has heard are two horrific results of the war, Veith added.

The question of U.S. involvement and support of current wars and past military actions — notably Iraq and Afghanistan — has been debated intensely. Veith believes the U.S. military has not learned much from the Vietnam War. “The American military claims it pays a lot of attention to its history,” he said. “Quite frankly, that can be challenged.”

Right now decisions have been made that bear out his stance. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the Trump administration has told its senior diplomats in Vietnam not to take part in events marking the anniversary.

Four U.S. officials who insisted on anonymity to describe sensitive diplomatic decision-making said that Washington had recently directed senior diplomats — including Marc Knapper, the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam — to stay away from activities tied to the anniversary on April 30.

Veterans returning to Vietnam have also been told they’re on their own, for public discussions they organize on war and reconciliation and anniversary events, the article stated. 

To watch Monday’s Veterans Breakfast Club event, follow this link: https://veteransbreakfastclub.org/event/the-fall-of-saigon-50-years-later/.