THE SUNADY PROFILE : War Stories : The place: Saigon. The date: April 30, 1975. A moment in history brought a lifetime of memories for a Vietnamese civilian and a U.S. Marine. And for one Vet, it marked the beginning of a personal journey.

Bich Huyen Nguyen

When Bich Huyen Nguyen closes her eyes and allows her memory to drift to the last days of April, 1975, she sees painful vignettes of terrified people scrambling along the streets of Saigon, dodging thunderous, rumbling tanks. She also sees herself standing in the shallow end of a churning river, watching the last boat leave without her.

And she sees her husband pacing nervously in their house, a gun gleaming in his hand. “I’m going to kill myself,” says Lt. Col. Nguyen Van Hung, his every word a stab to his wife’s heart. “Now that the Communists are here, what other choices do I have? It’s better to die first before being put to shame.”

Nguyen slowly opens her eyes and it takes her a few seconds to return to the present and pull herself together.

“April 30, 1975, shaped all of us, the Vietnamese who live abroad,” Nguyen says softly, her brown eyes full of tears and sorrow. “I am but one of its victims.”

Nguyen is well-known in the Orange County Vietnamese community as an advocate for former Vietnamese political prisoners. Now working as a commentator for a Vietnamese-language radio program, a free-lance writer and a teacher, the 54-year-old Santa Ana resident has managed to mend the tattered fabric of her life, ripped apart by a war that ended 20 years ago today. Her husband died in a Communist re-education camp and she has raised her daughter, Diem Nguyen, by herself, first in a country where she felt oppressed and now in a foreign land.

Nguyen has rebuilt her life, as have the other 2 million Vietnamese expatriates throughout the world. Yet the memory of the days before the fall of Saigon haunts her.

It began April 29, early in the morning, when she and her husband, a South Vietnamese officer in charge of dispensing political propaganda, were heading to the country’s naval base in hope of catching a ship out of Saigon. Eight months pregnant, Nguyen didn’t want to go for fear she would slow him down. If caught, he would be persecuted because of his position with the fallen regime. But he refused to leave the country without her.

“I found myself lining up to board the boat, but because my stomach was so big, I had to go last,” Nguyen recalls one afternoon during an interview in her home.

Her husband stepped on-board but as he reached out to help her, gunfire sprayed across the water. The boat operator panicked and pulled away, leaving Nguyen to stand alone in the waves.

“I was just thinking that I was glad my husband was on his way to safety,” Nguyen says. But then, he jumped off the boat and swam back to her. The couple went home, knowing they had missed their last hope of getting out of Saigon.

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The next day, April 30, as her husband stayed inside the house, Nguyen ventured onto the street to gauge the chaos: Men, women and children were running helter-skelter, some looting stores, others burning military uniforms, more than a few trampling on the South Vietnamese red-and-yellow flags as tanks crashed into the city.

“It was such a painful thing to behold, especially (what) was being done to our flag,” Nguyen says. “No one dared to do anything but stand there and watch in silence and fear. I remember thinking, ‘This is the end.’ ”

But the problems on the street quickly faded when she returned home. There, she found her husband contemplating suicide--an “honorable” action already taken by some of his military friends and colleagues. Nguyen understood why her husband wanted to kill himself, but she couldn’t imagine raising their child alone.

“I told him, ‘If you’re going to die, then what will happen to our child? If you die, let’s all die together but you shoot me first,’ ” she recalls. Instead, they held onto each other that night and cried.

Their daughter, Diem Nguyen, was born two weeks later. In June, Hung was sent to a re-education camp. What was to be a 10-day imprisonment turned into a year, then two, then three. In 1979, Nguyen received news that her husband had died in the camp. The cause was never officially verified.

Diem never knew her father.

Eventually, Nguyen was able to get a job as a teacher. At $10 a month, the pay was barely enough to feed herself, her mother and Diem. For 15 years, she struggled in Vietnam, living on practically nothing, but always making sure Diem had whatever she needed to attend school.

In 1990, she and her daughter left the country under a government agreement with the United States to allow families of political prisoners to come to America. Nguyen did not want to leave her birthplace, but she did so in the hope that Diem would have a better future in a place where she was not considered a “false” or second-class citizen because of her father’s alliance with the South Vietnamese regime.

“Diem and I have a second chance here,” Nguyen says. “She could build a future which she would not have had in Vietnam.”

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Life here has not always been easy for Nguyen. Her English is poor and she has to juggle three jobs--teaching Vietnamese to young children in private homes, free-lancing stories to local Vietnamese-language publications and hosting two radio shows on Saturday morning--to meet the $400 monthly rent and to send Diem, now 19, to Golden West College.

“I think sacrifice is too simple a word to describe what my mom has done for me,” says Diem, a biochemistry student. “I am always aware of the fact that everything she does, she does with me in mind.”

Now, Nguyen has found a new passion: being an activist for political detainees who have had a difficult time adjusting to life in America. Community leaders credit Nguyen with being among the first to call attention to the plight of these people by writing stories about their situation and by devoting so much of her time collecting money and material goods for the detainees’ families.

Two years ago, her stories were reprinted in a book titled “Loi Cu Chang Sao Quen,” roughly translated, “The Old Ways, Never to Be Forgotten.”

“It is considered a bestseller in the community,” says Yen Do, publisher of Nguoi Viet Daily, a Westminster Vietnamese-language newspaper. “She is an inspiration to many political detainees because her work and deeds tell them someone believes in them.”

Nguyen doesn’t see herself as an activist, just a war survivor wanting to help other survivors who have been less fortunate.

“I am very poor compared to many people in the community, yet still there are people who are worse off than I,” she says. “I have enough to eat, enough to wear and after 20 years of witnessing the loss and sacrifices of my fellow Vietnamese, all that I can do is be thankful for what I have.”