Fall of Kabul evokes memories of Saigon evacuation

Thao-Nguyen Le was not able to stop thinking about Afghanistan.

For Le, whose father was imprisoned by the Communist government of Vietnam after the United States withdrew from Saigon in 1975, images of Afghans attempting to flee the country are triggered. People were seen hanging from a military cargo plane, scaling walls topped with barbed wire and cluttering the airport tarmac. Watching the news at her home in Paris made Le feel despair, heartbreak and anger as it brought up painful memories of her childhood in post-war Vietnam.

Born in 1983 in Dalat, a tourist destination about 190 miles northeast of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), Le grew up in poverty, begging money from loved ones and relying on neighbors for money. oil to cook family food. After being labeled a traitor for fighting alongside the Americans in the war, his father struggled to find work. In addition to his imprisonment after the fall of Saigon, he was captured a second time after Le was born while attempting to flee Vietnam by boat. Now, as she follows the news from Afghanistan, Le worries about the fate of those who may be left behind like her family was 46 years ago.

“I think about my family, what they went through … and I think what will happen in Afghanistan [is] is going to be so, even worse than I can imagine, ”Le told BuzzFeed News. “I mean the worst part is they get killed, but I think being rejected by society, being mistreated by the people who come to power, I don’t know if it’s much better.”

In the days following the Taliban’s capture of Kabul, President Joe Biden and his administration have defended their handling of the US troop withdrawal as they prepare to end a 20-year war, dismissing comparisons with the fall of Saigon in 1975. But to Vietnamese refugees and their families, the chaos and potential ramifications of this moment strike them strangely familiar.

“For me, seeing footage of Saigon falling and then it was so eerily similar,” said Cammie P., who grew up in British Columbia after her parents fled Vietnam in the 1980s. “C it’s just this desperation and seeing people doing all they can to leave because their house is pretty much finished. “

As North Vietnamese forces moved closer to Saigon during the last days of the Vietnam War in late April 1975, the United States evacuated thousands of American and Vietnamese civilians by helicopter, with tense scenes captured in the media coverage watched. worldwide. Tens of thousands of other Vietnamese then fled by boat and plane. Over the next two decades, hundreds of thousands more left the country to escape the economic crisis brought on by the war and the Communist regime that followed, seeking refuge in the United States and elsewhere. In their desperation, some died at sea.

Hang Nguyen Mac’s father, Sam, had deserted the North Vietnamese army in the early 1950s and knew that if captured by Communist forces he would likely be sent to a prison camp or killed. So when Mac’s family heard that the Viet Cong were coming to Saigon, they quickly made plans to leave. On April 30, 1975, when the city fell to the North Vietnamese, the family of six and more than a dozen extended family members boarded a ship out of the country.

Mac, now 60 and living in Southern California, told BuzzFeed News about footage from Kabul showing Afghans “wrapped like canned tuna” inside a US military plane for s ‘escape.

“This is how we were on the ship,” said Mac, who was 14 at the time.

Mac recalled that she was responsible for making sure her 7-year-old sister and two nieces, aged 3 and 4, made it out of town. As the crowd surrounded the ship, she grabbed the wrists of her sister and nieces and jumped aboard. They only wore the clothes on their backs with gold sewn into their pants to use as barter for safe passage to the United States.

As she walked the streets of Saigon with her parents in the final days before their escape, the smell of gunpowder lingered in the hot air. Children were screaming and people were rushing around town with frantic looks on their faces.

Mac said at the time that she was scared, but when she saw the chaos at Kabul airport this week, she thought she was lucky.

“Yes, we were scared, but we were not in danger. They are, ”she said. “I’m afraid for them.

After taking control of Kabul, the Taliban leadership pledged to respect women’s rights and forgive those who fought them, but Afghans have already faced violence. Many doubt that the regime will give up its notoriously repressive ways. More than 20,000 Afghans who have assisted the U.S. military and tens of thousands of their family members qualified for special immigrant visas to the United States, but were left stuck in a processing backlog from this year. With the takeover of power by the Taliban, many civilians fear being punished or killed. Evacuation flights from Kabul are underway, but only for people whose papers are in order and who can get to the airport.

“Desperation is much more serious and of course it is especially for women and young girls and children,” Mac said.

The fall of Afghanistan happened much faster than US officials anticipated, but Americans of Vietnamese descent who felt that the United States had also abandoned their families decades ago said that this was not a sufficient excuse not to do more to evacuate their allies sooner.

“We haven’t learned our lesson in Vietnam,” said Sonny Phan, who was studying at the University of Kansas in April 1975 and lost communication with his family after the fall of Saigon. “I don’t think anyone sat down and prepared an escape plan at all.”

Phan finally learned just before Christmas in 1975 that his parents, siblings, and siblings were alive. They had decided not to escape Vietnam for fear that they would be separated at sea. Years later, Phan, now 69, learned of how they struggled to find food and sold the Levi jeans he sent them from America to survive.

“It was a very difficult life,” Phan said, but they persevered.

Le, whose family eventually immigrated to the United States in 1993 as part of a program for prisoners in prison camps, said that despite building a better life in the United States, his father did not was still not psychologically recovered from his experiences after the Americans left Saigon.

When they first heard about the program that allowed them to relocate, he didn’t believe it was real. When offered promotions to his job as an assembly line worker in Seattle, he figured his bosses were trying to trick him into doing more work. When Le’s mother tried to convince him that they should buy a house, he worried that it would be taken away from him.

“He never recovered from being abandoned,” Le said.

In a Twitter thread About her family’s experience and her concerns for Afghans, Le wrote that even though she identifies as an American of Vietnamese descent, she must carry “the dichotomy that America is both [her] savior and [her] aggressor.”

“Without being able to come to America, I don’t think I would be where I am right now,” said Le, who now works for a New York-based tech company. “Maybe I’ll be like a prostitute somewhere in Vietnam or be somewhere on the streets and in poverty. I don’t think I could have been where I am right now.

But at the same time, she wonders if her family would have been forced to leave their country if the United States had not become involved in the war.

“I don’t know what would have happened,” she said.

Now, Vietnamese refugees are hoping that the United States and other countries will take in as many Afghans as possible and give them the opportunity to start from scratch.

“They need the same things my family did when we came here,” said Thuy Kim, who immigrated to Alabama at the age of 2 in 1991. “Of course, the circumstances are a little different. It’s a different war, it’s a different time, but I think the most compelling commonality is that they are also humans, and most of all they need our support as humans.