20 Years After The Fall : Recollections of five Times Orange County Edition staffers on how the Vietnam War shaped their lives. : A Ship, Stairs, the Waves; a Fleeting Memory From Childhood

Tina Nguyen, 23, Times Staff Writer

I had no idea where I was. It was nighttime and a line of sailors dotted a steel stairway connecting a polished monster of a ship to a flatboat overflowing with frightened faces.

I was passed from one sailor to another until I was aboard the ship. I remember staring down between the open metal stairs on my way up and seeing fierce waves crashing violently against the ship.

There the memory ends.

It is my only memory of the Vietnam War, a fragment I have embraced for the 20 years I have lived in this country. Only recently have I learned enough of the harrowing details of my family’s escape from Vietnam to be able to put that memory into context.

I was just shy of 3 years old when we fled the chaos of a collapsing Vietnam on April 29, 1975.

The war left many Vietnamese refugees scarred with shame and pain. It was rarely talked about, at home or in the classroom. That was certainly true in my family.

From time to time, my parents would drop tidbits of information, but whenever I tried to find out more, the discussion would end abruptly. I coiled my parents’ partially told stories around disjointed history lessons, trying to find a place for my childhood memory.

Like many immigrant families, my parents have only begun to heal from the war. Their healing began when they agreed for the first time to talk to me about their experiences as part of this assignment. Their tales have filled in the blank spaces in my consciousness.

My father, Son Van Nguyen, was a press officer at the South Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1975, compiling daily wire service reports and assisting foreign correspondents.

That was how he met Anthony Paul, a burly, 6-foot-4-inch Australian who served as Reader’s Digest’s Southeast Asia bureau chief. My father was his translator and liaison to Vietnamese officials.

They entrusted their lives to one another--picking their way through minefields and avoiding Viet Cong attacks--as they ventured through uncharted combat zones to interview military officials.

When Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge earlier in April, 1975, Paul left Vietnam for the killing fields of Cambodia. My father believed he would never see him again.

It soon became apparent that Saigon would also collapse. My father’s staff of 20 had dwindled to three. Every family in the south who had the money scrambled to get out.

We, too, were anxious to leave, but there was no money.

Our passage to freedom--and a certain sign of Saigon’s imminent fall--came when Paul unexpectedly dashed into the foreign ministry’s press bureau one day searching for my father. He had returned to wrap up the war coverage. My father was overcome.

Paul offered to help us escape, but we had to act promptly. Within hours, we packed the bare essentials. My brother, two sisters and I each carried a sack of dried noodles, a set of clothes and identification tags.

There was no time even for farewells. My grandparents stayed behind, knowing they would never see us again.

We raced down Ly Tu Trong Street to meet Paul at L’Hopital Grall. I was propped on my mother’s hip as she rushed toward an airport-bound bus surrounded by 50 international reporters.

The reporters at first refused to let us on the bus. It was too crowded. Enraged, Paul blocked the vehicle’s doors and threatened to let no one aboard unless our family was permitted to join them. The reporters relented.

En route to the airport, artillery shells hissed overhead and fell with deafening thuds. One explosion shook our bus and blackened the sky, throwing me out of my mother’s lap. I fell to the floor, and everyone else dived for cover.

At the airport, the reporters stampeded off the bus. I remained buried on the floor until Paul scooped me up. My family followed him to a U.S. helicopter headed for a U.S. ship.

My father began to weep as the aircraft lifted off. Below, refugees in hundreds of makeshift boats paddled desperately for freedom. It seemed as if thousands of people swarmed the sea, he recalls.

The chopper landed on the aircraft carrier Midway, which was scouring the seas for fleeing refugees.

The following day, April 30, Saigon was officially lost. When my father received word on the news wire announcing the end of the war, he buried his head in his hands. Clutching the paper, tears welled in his eyes, and the crowd surrounding him moaned in grief when they heard the news.

But more turmoil awaited our family.

That evening, we were to transfer to a commercial ship that would take us to a U.S. military base on Guam. To make the transfer, we had to climb down to flatboats before boarding the commercial ship via its steel stairway.

Our unsteady flatboat appeared ready to capsize in the turbulent waters. The rush to board made a dangerous situation even more perilous.

Young children and women were the first to climb the commercial ship’s stairs. My mother briskly passed me to a sailor, and thus began the one memory I had carried all of these years.

My mom and my sister were able to board after me. Meanwhile, people on the flatboat lunged forward to board the ship. The mob separated us. Before the rest of my family could climb aboard, the cable securing the larger ship’s stairway to the flatboat snapped.

The stairway was hoisted back to the ship, and we had to leave my father, my brother and my sister below on the flatboat. Two months of agony would pass before our family was reunited in a Wake Island refugee camp.

When we eventually resettled in the United States, my parents focused on rebuilding our lives. They buried the past, hoping to leave behind the pain of the war and all they had lost.

A child of war, I have known only peace. I can barely recall our flight to freedom, let alone fathom the anguish my parents endured.

Though we never discussed it, the war has always been a presence in our family. How could it be otherwise? But the 20th anniversary has served as a catalyst to break the silence. It took me 20 years to ask my parents to return to this nightmare so that I may begin to dream about revisiting this unknown birthplace, a land as much a product of war as I am.

I often wonder what would have become of me had we not escaped that day. Would I have lost my father to the Vietnamese officials? Would I be selling produce in the streets? Would I be prostituting my body to subsist? The possibilities are endless.

Just as Anthony Paul documented an era of turmoil and tragedy, I hope to record new memories of recovery for Vietnam and its people. We commemorate this anniversary not to reflect upon losses, but to bring closure to a chapter of the war.