Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 464 - What Was Saigon Like After The Fall? - Claudia Krich

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464 - What Was Saigon Like After The Fall? - Claudia Krich · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Welcome to the podcast.
0:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Today I have Claudia, I'm going to say that I get quite a rich.
0:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I like it so much.
0:13
[SPEAKER_03]: What?
0:14
[SPEAKER_03]: What?
0:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I'm speaking of twice.
0:17
[SPEAKER_03]: This is the second time we've done this.
0:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And my job is really to make you feel comfortable talking about your wonderful book.
0:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's,
0:29
[SPEAKER_03]: a beautiful journey that you took and it's not often that we see people who are able to articulate an English staying past 1975 to 2030 because that date was a big date in our
0:58
[SPEAKER_03]: or I've never ran into me like people that had that journey to stay back, it has that milk carton exploration date of that country, right?
1:09
[SPEAKER_03]: That's like, how I, you know, it's a bad description, but that's what comes to mind is that you stayed back, it has that exploration date that we were all,
1:21
[SPEAKER_03]: evacuated or a lot of the people that were working in the American side government was were out.
1:29
[SPEAKER_03]: But you decide to stay.
1:30
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're here to talk about that.
1:32
[SPEAKER_03]: We're here to talk about your book.
1:33
[SPEAKER_03]: We're here to talk about the experiences.
1:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And as we went through, it's all over.
1:39
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, please mention the title, you take over on this place.
1:44
[SPEAKER_00]: You have one right here.
1:45
[SPEAKER_00]: I have one right here.
1:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Those are the state of Vietnam diary.
1:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I didn't mention the title in the first time that we recorded it, but, you know, I'm carried away in an explaining who you are.
1:56
[SPEAKER_03]: But I just, I just read the document.
1:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, very true.
1:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, it was the time of the moment.
2:01
[SPEAKER_03]: It was the state behind of Vietnam diary.
2:03
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, no behind.
2:04
[SPEAKER_00]: No, we can't.
2:06
[SPEAKER_00]: just those who stayed.
2:07
[SPEAKER_00]: No, because actually the publisher wanted those who stayed behind, and I thought, well, a lot of people didn't stay behind, they simply stayed.
2:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, meaning they didn't try to leave and get left behind, they stayed, including me.
2:24
[SPEAKER_03]: That's an important distinction, and I don't even know why I said behind, because I clearly just read the title of the first time right now, but it's a great way to open up this conversation, because you have very specific viewpoints about even just the way you just corrected me
2:52
[SPEAKER_03]: The Vietnamese, the country Vietnam, after the fall of Saigon.
2:57
[SPEAKER_03]: So let's start with what brought you to Vietnam in first place?
3:02
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
3:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I first went with the American Friends Service Committee at Quaker Sponsored Organization in March of 1973.
3:19
[SPEAKER_00]: In the Paris Peace Awards had been signed in December of 1972, and War was declared over, and Kissinger and Lady Tau had gotten the Nobel Peace Prize, which
3:35
[SPEAKER_00]: made up time refused.
3:37
[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, it wasn't over.
3:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It's definitely worth it.
3:41
[SPEAKER_03]: That's the craziest thing because in my mind, like kids, my age and their 50s, kids.
3:47
[SPEAKER_03]: We think the war was like raging from the 60s all the way up to 1975.
3:54
[SPEAKER_03]: And for you and your mind, you're like, oh, the war's over in 1972.
3:57
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to get on a plane.
3:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm going to do some work and in Vietnam.
4:01
[SPEAKER_00]: that.
4:02
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't last long.
4:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I got there and immediately knew it was not over, but the American troops were gone.
4:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So I never saw American soldiers, but they some had become contractors and or some were flying airplanes.
4:18
[SPEAKER_00]: I spoke to somebody just recently who had been flying an airplane for the military, for the American military until 73.
4:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he started flying for the CIA,
4:32
[SPEAKER_00]: sing skills.
4:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, but, but there were a number of American ground troops.
4:37
[SPEAKER_00]: That was different, but there was still plenty of bombing shooting and obviously both sides in the south were still fighting.
4:47
[SPEAKER_00]: The South Vietnamese and the so-called Vietnam that to be more neutral, we call the front of the National Liberation Front.
4:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, so we had the war is still going on.
5:01
[SPEAKER_03]: We're going to find out in the next hour how you really feel about the Vietnamese, the CIA, the American government, the Vietnamese government.
5:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So I want to preface that because what I'm about to ask you are these questions.
5:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It's important to, you know, for me is constantly thinking about
5:27
[SPEAKER_03]: the families that lost the people that lost lives.
5:31
[SPEAKER_03]: But at the same time, there's this other perspective from a white woman who stay behind.
5:38
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe, you know, I'll just call out like the privilege of being able to stay behind is a thing that we have to like account for in the stories that we're about to ask and talk about.
5:48
[SPEAKER_03]: But at the same time, it's like, wait, if we don't allow for this perspective that you have,
5:58
[SPEAKER_03]: what all the sides to this story looks like.
6:01
[SPEAKER_03]: And I value what you talk about in your book.
6:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And I value the perspective that you have, the neutral perspective that you have, that oftentimes families of where I come from, it's very hard to stay neutral to the things that you like experience.
6:19
[SPEAKER_01]: So we're more absolutely, yeah.
6:23
[SPEAKER_01]: Then, there's that a question.
6:25
[SPEAKER_03]: No, it was my closet.
6:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm on a neutrality, and I'm trying to make you feel more comfortable about the question to do about that, because this is- I agree, it is super important, not my-
6:40
[SPEAKER_00]: creating this book was not to tell anybody we did anything wrong.
6:46
[SPEAKER_00]: The well-except may before the historians who had left out this part of the story.
6:51
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a piece of history.
6:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just what happened.
6:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was the only one who kept a diary.
6:57
[SPEAKER_00]: So I was there in 1975, and I kept a diary, and I turned it into a book.
7:05
[SPEAKER_00]: It's for people who are interested in knowing that, you know, and it was too painful to find out that there was no blood bath.
7:14
[SPEAKER_00]: That's life, I mean, they're actually was no blood bath immediately after the change of the government we're sort of skipping ahead.
7:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we also fled from our town.
7:26
[SPEAKER_00]: We were, oh, I didn't get that far.
7:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So we were running a large physical civilian rehabilitation center when Huang Ai in Central Vietnam.
7:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had 55 Vietnamese staff and sticks of us plus two more in Saigon on our running it.
7:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We always wanted to turn it over to the government, but the government wouldn't.
7:49
[SPEAKER_00]: take over responsibility or pay salaries.
7:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So we actually ran it until 1975 when the new government took it over.
7:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's still running today.
8:00
[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, in 70, so in 74, beginning of 75, the different provinces were starting to, as you said, fall.
8:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And the government, for the first time, the country looked like it was going to like the Americans were going to lose and the south of the means were going to lose.
8:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And the Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese were going to win.
8:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And obviously this caused a tremendous chaos and fear and people were terrified and running.
8:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And just like the big evacuation from Saigon, that happened in miniature from all the
8:45
[SPEAKER_00]: just before that.
8:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So we, as you have read in my book, we've decided we'd stay in Huang Ai because we felt pretty safe and then we thought, well, we don't have a bomb shelter and what would it be like for our if some if we went to a friends and it's
9:05
[SPEAKER_00]: then maybe the North Vietnamese came, and they found Americans with local Vietnamese.
9:13
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what would that mean?
9:14
[SPEAKER_00]: We weren't sure.
9:15
[SPEAKER_00]: We had no way of knowing it would really be safe.
9:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So eventually after about two days, we fled from Guangnai to Saigon.
9:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But then we felt really foolish, because four days after we left,
9:30
[SPEAKER_00]: the change over did occur completely peacefully.
9:35
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it wasn't a takeover.
9:37
[SPEAKER_00]: The local officials fled, and it was nobody there, and the new officials came in.
9:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And to go over, but we had left.
9:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So we felt kind of ashamed that we had left.
9:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So, gone.
9:53
[SPEAKER_03]: If anyone picks up the book, they can actually read the details of what happened a few days before April 30th, always have April 30th, you can see your journal entries.
10:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And what exactly happened to the evacuation and the movement that you and your team, your husband and you move into SIGON and we can read the facts but what we can't do,
10:21
[SPEAKER_03]: in the book is Ashu about how you feel about this idea that when everybody left, when the government, the US government left, there was no blood that.
10:36
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's like the biggest tool line for me.
10:38
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no blood that.
10:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, there's no blood that.
10:45
[SPEAKER_03]: There's no, there was no harm, there was no,
10:49
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, this promise of killing and shooting.
10:53
[SPEAKER_03]: It just sounded like tanks rolled in and young men from the north, where people, I mean, there's pictures of you taking pictures with these young men from the north, these communists that were coming in.
11:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Why is that distinction so important for history?
11:16
[SPEAKER_03]: meaning why why why why the peaceful sort of take over of the communist of Saigon, you know, why is that such a big, you know, distinction in your sort of your communication to okay, well, you know, they made a
11:35
[SPEAKER_00]: a big one but I understand the North Vietnamese and the Provisional Revolutionary Government that's South Vietnamese made a very intentional effort to reunite and to not
11:53
[SPEAKER_00]: not have this bloodbath.
11:56
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted the people on their side.
11:58
[SPEAKER_00]: They actually believed they had the people on their side.
12:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, they did have many.
12:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And they wanted to start over to have reconciliation.
12:08
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a stated and a real goal.
12:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, they didn't have the power to make that happen everywhere.
12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were not vindictive or re-vengeful.
12:21
[SPEAKER_00]: think that was because they figured with the it means you know these are our brothers and our sisters and our family members the Americans know the story but they were gone so they didn't really view the rest of the country the Vietnamese as their enemy and most of the big wigs had indeed left the military had left the government had left the Americans had left
12:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was no, the bloodbath idea was never defined.
12:52
[SPEAKER_00]: It was just propaganda, right?
12:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, what did it mean?
12:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
12:57
[SPEAKER_03]: They were going to be USA.
12:59
[SPEAKER_00]: From the US side, like, what could it possibly have really been?
13:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Line up all the civilians wearing nail polish and shoot them?
13:07
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what it seemed like.
13:09
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think that there is one really big problem.
13:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think what you're saying is amazing, I think that the government wanted to reunite, because you hear it over and over, that they wanted to reunite the people and make it seem like a friendly sort of all right.
13:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's North and South get back together.
13:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the problem, and I think that I've heard this from older party members in Instagram, post, and stuff like that, the biggest one of the biggest mistakes was rounding up.
13:43
[SPEAKER_03]: former military people into these camps and the treatment of these people was severe.
13:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that that, if that didn't happen, I think when I add up what you're saying in from your book and if that didn't happen, if the camps didn't happen, I think that the, and I love talking about this today because
14:09
[SPEAKER_03]: When I hear you talk about this peaceful transition, but then I hear about the camps and I hear about the admission of sort of the guilt that the party feels from the treatment of the former military US military involvement Vietnamese officers.
14:27
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, if that didn't happen, I think we wouldn't have this major sort of like hurt in the Vietnamese community.
14:34
[SPEAKER_03]: Because I mean, your account is so beautiful to hear, but then at the same time, there's this other door on the outside.
14:40
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the other thing that didn't happen, that would have made change history after World War II, and I think after World War I,
14:49
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a call.
14:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, we brought Germany and Japan.
14:55
[SPEAKER_00]: We invested humaniously in Germany and Italy and Spain.
15:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And we lifted the economy.
15:03
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not this thing.
15:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But we didn't do that again.
15:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And instead, we boycott, we didn't embargo.
15:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did you happen?
15:11
[SPEAKER_00]: That's so cradly.
15:13
[SPEAKER_00]: resentment.
15:14
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, but had that not happened, had the channels been opened, then I think everything inside Vietnam would have been less in a vacuum and would have been more open to the world, to international knowledge, information.
15:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, those camps that happened after I was left, so I have no expert on the camps, but the low people, the much lower level office worker people, as you've read in my book, they went for maybe a week and only for a few hours, it all depended on your level.
15:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It also depended on where, for example, somebody in Denang might have been treated very differently.
16:06
[SPEAKER_00]: from somebody in.
16:07
[SPEAKER_01]: Right.
16:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So I got it.
16:10
[SPEAKER_00]: That was it was not a powerful centralized government for a while.
16:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It took, you know, over a year, even to get that thing, to get that incorporated into one government.
16:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it was very poor.
16:26
[SPEAKER_00]: There allowed loose ends.
16:27
[SPEAKER_00]: There were people who were
16:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And they suffered in these reeducation camps, but I might add they weren't executed, or at least they I'm sure some were, but in World War II, they were executed and in many ways they are.
16:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm not saying that that made them noble or good.
16:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just these things happen and it's terrible for the people who suffered it and as we both know, lots of people left even
17:00
[SPEAKER_00]: the war ended.
17:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The initial euphoria is what my book is about and it was there.
17:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Those first few months of peace and being able to see relatives and go back and forth to the north which they hadn't been able to do for 20 years and meet family members.
17:19
[SPEAKER_00]: They hadn't seen for 20 years.
17:20
[SPEAKER_00]: That was very exciting.
17:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what was happening, and soldiers, not having to be soldiers.
17:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe being becoming students, that was all the good stuff of the war ending.
17:36
[SPEAKER_00]: There was good stuff, there was bad stuff.
17:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, I think that the United States could have brought Vietnam
17:44
[SPEAKER_00]: into a friendlier position much, much, much earlier.
17:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, suddenly, we're best buddies and Trump is building a golf course in the outside of Hanoi.
17:55
[SPEAKER_00]: You can believe that makes you wonder.
17:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but it does.
18:00
[SPEAKER_03]: And this whole thing that you brought with the whole embargo, like, why did we have a U.S. oven embargo in Vietnam, whereas Japan and Germany did not.
18:11
[SPEAKER_03]: We weren't dropping the A-Bahman on Japan.
18:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's like severe attack.
18:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Or maybe it wasn't the guilt of this nuclear attack that we had to give them repatriation or funding to rebuild their economy.
18:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Even more Germany, but I think Germany was, I guess I'm quite a pessimist or a cynic.
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: We wanted to control, we wanted to control Germany.
18:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And we had to split that control with our ally, the Soviet Union at the time.
18:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So those were the political games, but either way, West Germany ended up rich and and faired much better after World War II than East Germany, because we invested.
19:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And we could have invested in Vietnam.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: The other side of that coin is a continued colonialism, which we definitely didn't want,
19:09
[SPEAKER_00]: At that time, after the end of the war, definitely did not want any American aid, any American interference, any American anything.
19:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And you got it.
19:19
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm gonna have to push back on that.
19:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
19:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
19:23
[SPEAKER_03]: I actually interviewed somebody a few years ago on the Canadian side.
19:28
[SPEAKER_03]: And she said that right after the war in June, so April was April 30, but by June,
19:36
[SPEAKER_03]: the government, the Jimmy's Communist government was reaching out to the West to say, okay, let's figure out how we can get the MIAs and the POWs, all that record straight, and we could get some money back to you or they were trying to figure all of this out.
19:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So there was like negotiations that were happening behind Canada sent a delegation to figure out how to fix the, because they weren't dire straits with the economy.
20:04
[SPEAKER_00]: actually said the candidate or a private candidate.
20:09
[SPEAKER_03]: But she said that the US was also like they were negotiating in the back, back rooms.
20:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So you know, all of the, I bring that up because I think all of these perspectives, right, you're perspective that lawyer, that I interview perspective, all of these perspectives make up a very messy that.
20:30
[SPEAKER_03]: of storytelling.
20:33
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that there's so many details and angles to these stories and it takes me into this idea that as an American, you've seen a lot of changes throughout the years that you've been living as an American.
20:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Things are never what they really seem now.
20:56
[SPEAKER_03]: When I talk to people like you, it's like we think that it's a hot mess and the world was in chaos when the Americans pulled out.
21:04
[SPEAKER_03]: But in actuality, you're telling me that there was this new Fourier.
21:09
[SPEAKER_03]: It was like a different, a really different story.
21:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Like a party.
21:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I was gonna add, of course, you are right about that continued negotiations, especially for remains,
21:23
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the right word for that.
21:25
[SPEAKER_00]: POW remains rich.
21:26
[SPEAKER_00]: They were a priority for America, obviously.
21:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Definitely not the top of the list for Vietnam.
21:35
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's like, I think anywhere, when there's peace versus war, peace is more...
21:43
[SPEAKER_00]: It's nicer, that's a...
21:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry, terribly silly thing to say.
21:46
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, wait, wait.
21:47
[SPEAKER_03]: Why's that silly?
21:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually, well, immediately I can see the other side of that.
21:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Wait a minute, there was still scared.
21:53
[SPEAKER_00]: The people in the houses.
21:54
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not happy.
21:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They were angry blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
21:57
[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.
21:58
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure people were in their houses still scared.
22:01
[SPEAKER_00]: But from day one, they realized that these soldiers walking around town,
22:08
[SPEAKER_00]: were unarmed.
22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: They were intentionally unarmed.
22:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were there.
22:12
[SPEAKER_00]: You can see in my book a picture of them on a truck in the middle of a great big traffic jam.
22:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody was shooting anybody anymore.
22:22
[SPEAKER_00]: There were incidents of crime, but it was just vastly safer.
22:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And wouldn't we today like to live in a safer country?
22:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I would.
22:36
[SPEAKER_00]: were a bit more control over the violence.
22:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's that.
22:43
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a good feature.
22:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Like on that, you know, back then the American soldiers were drafted.
22:52
[SPEAKER_00]: That's when Trump dot out of the draft by having his so-called bone spurs.
22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you've got this combination of Vietnamese with different political outlooks and a huge number of Vietnamese, the same as Americans in anybody else, with no political outlook.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to run in.
23:12
[SPEAKER_00]: They really were not thinking a lot about pro-com and the Santa Communist pro-American, anti-American, that wasn't at the top of the list.
23:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And the American soldiers who were there pretty quickly realized that they couldn't see
23:28
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't tell of Vietnamese from a Vietnamese.
23:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, what are you going to do?
23:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Use their shirts or hats or shoes.
23:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So it was, and there were no big buildings to bomb like in Europe, no big cities to bomb, like in Japan, except for Saigon.
23:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So what was the point of all that?
23:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's important to look back and say that,
23:56
[SPEAKER_00]: What is forever really accomplished besides changing boundaries and killing people?
24:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
24:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But very cynical.
24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Sorry about that.
24:07
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
24:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Look, I agree with you.
24:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I agree.
24:12
[SPEAKER_03]: What was the point of it all?
24:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, when you really think about this, you know, what millions of lives lost on both sides, unaccounted for?
24:22
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to share this with you.
24:24
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw a short film called Mealai on PBS.
24:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Good film for the most part.
24:32
[SPEAKER_00]: One thing really struck me.
24:34
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the American military people said, the commies in their little huts, they knew where the land mines were, but they wouldn't tell us.
24:44
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the most absurd thing I've ever heard of because,
24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: millions of people have been killed stepping on landmines.
24:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Our patients were killed and most of them, a lot of them, children, stepping on landmines, which land a landmine somewhere, you don't find it again.
25:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet even that documentary allowed it to be stated that these villagers, these innocent people, somehow knew where the landmine was were.
25:19
[SPEAKER_00]: It just, it's just such a, honestly, it's racist, like there's some mystical magic to Vietnamese who can tell where landmines are, whereas we can't, anyway.
25:36
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a bigger problem with narratives, though, because that's one narrative, right?
25:45
[SPEAKER_03]: There's millions of narratives that are happening on all sides of the war.
25:50
[SPEAKER_03]: There's like extremes on both sides, and there's like different gradations of
25:57
[SPEAKER_03]: things that are happening in between.
25:59
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's hard to make sense of all of this action, all of these things that are working against people of the South and people of the North.
26:10
[SPEAKER_03]: There's all of this, like, me lie was a very black and white thing.
26:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It could be seen as a very black and white thing, used for a climate propaganda.
26:23
[SPEAKER_03]: the Vietnamese villagers lost in that area a lot of lives and it was brutality, it was just a very nasty situation.
26:33
[SPEAKER_03]: But depending on who's using that narrative, things can be manipulated in ways that can end a war almost and you think about it.
26:52
[SPEAKER_00]: meaning everybody could be considered the enemy.
26:57
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the Americans, for the South Vietnamese army, could kill anybody and say they had killed and then use it as a statistic.
27:07
[SPEAKER_00]: They had killed X number of communists many particular day.
27:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Why was there free fire zone?
27:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Because nobody could tell enemy from Allah.
27:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So just shoot anybody.
27:24
[SPEAKER_03]: If you, if you graph the amount of lives that will loss, I think up and down Vietnam, I think that is probably one of the most bloodiest regions of Vietnamese lives lost.
27:36
[SPEAKER_03]: Because of that idea of, we can't distinguish a Vietnam form or normal Vietnamese villager it.
27:43
[SPEAKER_03]: That's just wipe everybody out.
27:45
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that is exactly what happened, and how about Agent Arnch or Nae Pong?
27:51
[SPEAKER_00]: You're dropping down on the enemy.
27:53
[SPEAKER_00]: When the enemy is small villages, all over a small country.
27:58
[SPEAKER_00]: No, obviously you're just killing people.
28:01
[SPEAKER_00]: And that just creates tremendous resentment.
28:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And especially the villagers who are turned into refugees would end up being very anti-American, but, secretly, right?
28:21
[SPEAKER_00]: was tricky.
28:22
[SPEAKER_00]: After the war ended in 75, lots of people suddenly popped up and were in fact with their liberation, forces, or quadrades, or guerrillas, or ominous, or recie.
28:38
[SPEAKER_00]: But they were like my language tutor.
28:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of my little favorite anecdotes in my book is when
28:51
[SPEAKER_00]: and she was very, very anti-communist, and had always been, and it never came up.
28:57
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't really discuss it, but she would bring it up now and then, and her son was in the military and so on and so forth.
29:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, suddenly, this other person who she'd known over the years, the receptionist from our program, arrived in a tomboy from Huangai to pick up some supplies, and they encountered each other.
29:22
[SPEAKER_00]: So called Gorilla, or VCO, and have you, and the other very anti-communist, and they just laughed.
29:29
[SPEAKER_00]: We just laughed at all things of silly, but it just seemed unreal in that very moment of meeting each other again.
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, wow, that was just absurd.
29:40
[SPEAKER_00]: The enemies are Vietnamese, they're much more similar than different.
29:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was the biggest lesson learned at the end of the war.
29:50
[SPEAKER_03]: We can say, well, can you say that about Americans?
29:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Americans are just Americans, we're all the same, because that's like, no, I can't.
29:59
[SPEAKER_03]: The reason I bring that out is because the subtle differences of an outsider like you,
30:06
[SPEAKER_03]: and the differences between Vietnamese to Vietnamese, it's, and we can't see it.
30:11
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, sometimes even in Vietnamese American born, we can't see the subtle differences and because that there's so much conflict within, even like now we view like Analyze America, there's so much division and divisive feelings to people in the Midwest versus the coast.
30:31
[SPEAKER_03]: It's almost like a different country.
30:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you know, duh, of course, you know, Vietnamese culture and history go back thousands of years.
30:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And ours, a couple hundred, the cohesiveness, the respect for ancestors, so-called ancestor worship, it's very cohesive, it brings people together, the importance of your town, of your Quai Hun.
31:01
[SPEAKER_00]: These are all things that will be American culture
31:04
[SPEAKER_00]: Blacks, there's no, as you say, it's a huge, it's, um, yeah, I wish, what do we have in common pizza?
31:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's kind of hard to figure that out.
31:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, of course, Vietnam has a variety of religions, a variety of beliefs as does America.
31:27
[SPEAKER_00]: But going back to that ancestor park, respect for ancestors, respect for elders, ways of caring for children.
31:35
[SPEAKER_00]: There, you know, I won't say standard, but there are some really strong common beliefs about how to do those things.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Children, respect teachers.
31:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
31:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Things like that.
31:52
[SPEAKER_03]: We are on.
31:53
[SPEAKER_03]: You and I are on this spectrum of peace-loving.
31:59
[SPEAKER_03]: We do not want to see war.
32:01
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't want to see divisiveness in our country or in Vietnam, or you have a long-standing history of being on the side of peace.
32:11
[SPEAKER_03]: But as an American today, and as a modern person today, do you see any progress
32:22
[SPEAKER_01]: He's as it relates to America, or do you feel like it's the same?
32:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh boy, no, he's just so far away, who worries on the horizon.
32:37
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know how, if I mentioned what, you know, today's news, I don't know, no, no, no, it's very frightening.
32:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very upsetting.
32:48
[SPEAKER_00]: This just doesn't seem like there's,
32:51
[SPEAKER_00]: peaceful solution.
32:53
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't quite get why because I'm sure that 90% of Americans and everyone in the whole wide world wants a peaceful existence.
33:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But I really thought we were going to be there.
33:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I was an activist in the 60s.
33:11
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a reporter of Martin Luther King
33:20
[SPEAKER_00]: accepted and peaceful and, and then not, you know, then there's a backlash, and then there's a racist backlash.
33:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Are we doomed?
33:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it because there's a huge population?
33:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And we add a billion people every 10 years and as a species.
33:41
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't have space.
33:42
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're just killing ourselves as a natural encoded.
33:46
[SPEAKER_03]: program, right?
33:47
[SPEAKER_03]: I think about that's a really interesting point.
33:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
33:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
33:51
[SPEAKER_03]: It's what if it's just self-control the way that we're actual selection.
33:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Natural selection would pre-program to offer ourselves when we get too big.
34:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, doesn't it look like it.
34:04
[SPEAKER_03]: It feels like it.
34:05
[SPEAKER_03]: It makes the most natural sense.
34:10
[SPEAKER_03]: If you think about the overpopulation and
34:22
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
34:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe when we're just, uh, there's just so much crowdedness that we have to like resort to taking each other out.
34:30
[SPEAKER_03]: We have to because otherwise, um, how would the population regulate itself?
34:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
34:38
[SPEAKER_00]: That's more good.
34:39
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I'm pretty dark, pretty dark, pretty dark, pretty damn dark.
34:45
[SPEAKER_03]: Because if we were all living acres away from each other, there was no,
34:50
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, there's no way we were villagers and we were living like we did in the olden days in the 20s and, you know, 30s of American Vietnam.
34:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, everybody was like so far apart, but there were still war back in all the countries for, for, you know, millennia.
35:07
[SPEAKER_03]: There's always been more.
35:08
[SPEAKER_03]: But war is happening is when there's an awful population in a specific area of the world.
35:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So it won't be a way for us to like eliminate each other.
35:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, great, progress, terrible, you know, going back to just, we've done back and visit our friends in Tomkey, over the years, and the difference, even from 10 years before, the Big Ball size break was the big buildings, the plastic, the glass, the neon, it's stunning.
35:47
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when we were in Quang Hai 50 years ago, it was a tiny little, well, it wasn't really tiny, it was very crowded, but it was one or two stories, buildings and sort of gave you the impression of being dusty and flooding, still flooding, of course.
36:12
[SPEAKER_00]: But all this growth, how can this keep going forever?
36:16
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know, but this is a whole different topic, of course.
36:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
36:20
[SPEAKER_03]: But it's very related, because when I think about your life when you stayed after April 30th, it invokes this feeling of, for me, where I think about there was no, there was not anybody living in Psycho on after the fall of Psycho.
36:42
[SPEAKER_03]: The great thing about that, right?
36:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Interesting, very interesting.
36:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly right, that's right.
36:49
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how the Ken Burns-Linnovate documentary ended.
36:53
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just stopped, it's stopped.
36:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It said, I don't remember, quote it, somebody who said, yes, and now I'm sure there's a blood bath happening there.
37:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was it, and yeah, so it seemed as if,
37:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone was gone, the whole thing was empty.
37:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that is actually the biggest probably the best reason to have my book be published because it didn't happen.
37:21
[SPEAKER_03]: The best reason for people to read, because this is a perspective that I think Vietnamese Americans don't realize, the world did not stop when you left it.
37:34
[SPEAKER_03]: You love you at all.
37:35
[SPEAKER_03]: You did not stop when we left you at all.
37:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Because by the title, those who stayed behind.
37:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
37:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
37:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
37:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
37:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when about their daily lives, almost immediately, because what you're going to do, just in your house and not eat, you have to go out, or they did then.
38:04
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, life went on and for many people, life was better because there was no war.
38:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously, outside of Saigon, the war had always had a much for your impact in everywhere else, then in Saigon, which was much more protected and, and the war was more abstract to many people in Saigon.
38:34
[SPEAKER_03]: ended up happening.
38:35
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it's all in the book, but what ended up happening that made you decide, that all right, it's actually time to leave.
38:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, for leaving, well, we were a group of five who were still in Saigon and one in Denang, and he stayed the one in Denang was our doctor.
38:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And he actually found a place to volunteer and work.
38:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So he stayed for quite a few months
39:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Matter of fact, we, my husband and I were the first to leave.
39:05
[SPEAKER_00]: We left on July 4th.
39:07
[SPEAKER_00]: A, because we were running low on money, and we couldn't really support all of us doing nothing, and that was B, we didn't have work.
39:19
[SPEAKER_00]: We could not get back to our center, and our center was now the salaries were being paid by some of it by the government, which was fantastic.
39:27
[SPEAKER_03]: The Vietnamese government.
39:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
39:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they were medically, they focused on medicine and education at immediately originally.
39:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Getting schools back up and letting the kids to be able to take their exams, things like that.
39:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was pregnant.
39:46
[SPEAKER_00]: And having already lost a pregnancy at six months due to, I will mention German measles, because that was
39:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So all those things combined, so we were the first to move.
40:03
[SPEAKER_00]: But other people, other Americans, they were only about 12 of us, total Americans who stayed.
40:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that, I think that Dick Hughes from the Shushan Boys, I think he stayed over a year with higher member of Crackle.
40:18
[SPEAKER_03]: So let me ask you, what was it like being a white woman two months around walking around psychone after the war?
40:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, very interesting.
40:33
[SPEAKER_00]: We never stood out all that much inside the land because it was a very international city.
40:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And after the war, there were still at least 2,000 French people.
40:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, they never, they didn't leave.
40:48
[SPEAKER_00]: The French embassy encouraged the French people to stay.
40:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't think as Caucasians we stood out all that much.
40:56
[SPEAKER_00]: However, sometimes we did, and the funniest thing was that previously the street kids would follow us around and say, American women by May, by May, my aid, and just endlessly tease us that way.
41:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And now they're saying, bangah, bangah, bangah, bangah, rest you for a moment.
41:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you.
41:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So that was kind of funny.
41:19
[SPEAKER_03]: So there was like no animosity, there's no soldiers following you, there's no...
41:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely not.
41:25
[SPEAKER_00]: We were, to be honest, very unimportant.
41:32
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the major feature.
41:34
[SPEAKER_00]: We and me, especially as a woman, are completely unimportant, young white woman, just...
41:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Nobody questioned you why you guys were still there or nobody.
41:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we were, we were interviewed one day for a full day, which was very interesting.
41:57
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was not, we weren't sure that everybody had been interviewed or not.
42:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It was big city.
42:05
[SPEAKER_00]: The people who knew us knew us, you know, who were still friends.
42:08
[SPEAKER_00]: And the people who didn't know us,
42:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me try that again, the military people or the government people had no interest in us except to take pictures with us.
42:21
[SPEAKER_00]: We were curiosity.
42:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They had never met an American woman.
42:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as earlier some years before that, I had never met a Chinese person in the United States.
42:33
[SPEAKER_00]: At that time, there were no Chinese, we can believe it.
42:36
[SPEAKER_00]: So from China,
42:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we would be invited to things, we were still sort of honored or celebrity kind of, because we had stayed.
42:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And so Americans who stayed were very small, very precious commodity, I don't know.
43:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But basically we just made up our own set of our own schedules every day and went and met people
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: interviewed people and and sometimes were interviewed.
43:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But the military peasants just just it just wasn't there downtown it was there but on the streets you just saw soldiers walking around in not not not not not like your sod in the for example watching you see a Los Angeles not like that at all not heavily armed.
43:38
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's the irony in LA.
43:42
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like four city blocks of like our soldier.
43:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It's what's amazing, what's being shown on the media is not like at all what's happening in LA.
43:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think when I think about Iran, right?
43:57
[SPEAKER_03]: I think about all of the propaganda that we are made to believe about Iran.
44:05
[SPEAKER_03]: The more you start to like, really dig into where Iran is right now, it's not what we think it is from the American brain perspective, but what we've been told, Iran seems like a very dope place, it seems like a very hip place right now, it doesn't seem like it's
44:23
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't seem as heavy-handed as we are the last 20 years that led to believe.
44:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And it makes me think about Vietnam, after April 30th, it makes me think about Afghanistan.
44:34
[SPEAKER_03]: It makes me think about all of these quote-and-quote Taliban over-rand countries and all of this stuff that's.
44:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think those were saying.
44:44
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the Taliban is really evil.
44:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we look at women and girls.
44:52
[SPEAKER_00]: Matter of fact, the earthquake that said Afghanistan, just the recent earthquake.
44:58
[SPEAKER_00]: And the rescuers were not pulling out women because they're not allowed to touch women.
45:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And the hospitals were not treating women because they didn't have women doctors to treat women.
45:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, nothing compares to that.
45:13
[SPEAKER_00]: That just just flows me.
45:17
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think each case is somewhat different.
45:20
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and it goes back to all these angles and, you know, these nuances that we don't all know of.
45:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
45:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
45:30
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, I agree with you on your run.
45:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, or how about after 9.11 today is 9.11.
45:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
45:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
45:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So we had that work.
45:41
[SPEAKER_00]: The
45:43
[SPEAKER_00]: I've forgotten how many hijackers they were, but there was Saudi Arabians.
45:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Am I remembering that correctly?
45:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So what did we do?
45:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Attack Iraq.
45:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
45:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we wanted to.
45:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's me.
45:57
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't want to.
45:58
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't want to.
45:59
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't want to.
46:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Hi, but we didn't want to.
46:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Say.
46:04
[SPEAKER_00]: We, when I say, we, I mean the government.
46:06
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
46:07
[SPEAKER_00]: Not us, thank you.
46:08
[SPEAKER_03]: It was always about Iraq.
46:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It was always about Iraq, it was just an excuse, even though it was Saudi Arabians who flew their planes.
46:16
[SPEAKER_03]: I remember, I remember I had a, my cousins in the Marine Corps.
46:21
[SPEAKER_03]: He was a Marine Corps captain, and he said to me, in July, in the desert, in California, they were desertizing all of the camouflage, because we, you know, in the Marine Corps,
46:41
[SPEAKER_03]: camouflage for Vietnam and the green camouflage is 70s or mid-70s.
46:49
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, was it designation of like a regular color that we would wear as uniform?
46:53
[SPEAKER_03]: But the desert camos and the desert paint on tanks and all the transport here was starting to come in July.
47:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And he said to me, just really weird that we were getting ready to deploy to the desert in July and miss September 11th happened.
47:15
[SPEAKER_03]: And he goes, is that a conspiracy?
47:17
[SPEAKER_03]: He goes, this is just what happened.
47:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And I remember him telling me this and I was like, that is, where?
47:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Where?
47:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Go hit, go hit.
47:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Where were you, where were you deployed?
47:27
[SPEAKER_03]: No, not what you said.
47:28
[SPEAKER_03]: What was in your mind?
47:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Cousin a mind.
47:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, the Cousin has tried.
47:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it was my cousin who joined the Marine Corps
47:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And he said that they were preparing for a day war in July.
47:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, my goodness.
47:43
[SPEAKER_03]: And September 11 happens and so that can manage.
47:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is, it was convenient, was convenient.
47:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Convenient or all pre-planned, you know?
47:56
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, that's good.
47:57
[SPEAKER_03]: But I changed while I had on here, you know?
48:00
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just, we will never know.
48:04
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we will never know how these things go, right?
48:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, except looking back, maybe.
48:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe.
48:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe.
48:15
[SPEAKER_03]: It's that.
48:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's 50 years before some people learn about what happened in Saigon after the war ended.
48:26
[SPEAKER_00]: But the other side of that coin is a more optimistic one.
48:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The fact that people are even interested.
48:31
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a good thing, I think.
48:35
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I was born in 1948.
48:38
[SPEAKER_00]: World War II ended in 1945.
48:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Was I interested?
48:43
[SPEAKER_00]: No, except there are a lot of war movies.
48:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But 50 years later, Vietnam is still, the whole Vietnam War, American War in Vietnam, is still a problem.
48:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It's still on people's minds.
48:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Both American and Vietnamese.
49:00
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Americans who are there with a military,
49:05
[SPEAKER_00]: including Bob McNamara, you know, have regrets, have reconsiderations.
49:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It wasn't noble.
49:14
[SPEAKER_00]: That was the biggest problem.
49:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other problem was there was no obvious enemy.
49:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, and then via the music back on it and here those who've come to this country and other countries had their entire lives.
49:30
[SPEAKER_00]: what lifted off of their pedestals and they just they lost everything to a certain extent and had to leave their countries and start new lives as do all immigrants but they're not forgetting you know and then the next generation which I guess is you is more interested in sitting back and analyzing it and finding out how did how did this all happen what was this thing
49:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Now it's a little blip in the history.
50:01
[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing that was funny, I remember after during those couple of months after the war ended, Cambodia was beginning to be at war.
50:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And refugees were starting to come in from Cambodia into Saigon.
50:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And we were really aware of that.
50:22
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't understand what was going on exactly.
50:27
[SPEAKER_00]: I remember coming back to America and people said, well, wait a second, why would the communist Vietnamese attack the communist Cambodians and have war?
50:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they, yeah, it's not that simple.
50:44
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no, it's not simple.
50:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Communists doesn't mean enough to cover that, you know?
50:52
[SPEAKER_03]: They're different.
50:56
[SPEAKER_03]: people are not really paying attention and care.
50:58
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's the advantage of people in power because they can make a calculation.
51:03
[SPEAKER_03]: How many people really care about what we do as powerful men?
51:09
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, we can go in and do whatever we want and nobody's really going to.
51:16
[SPEAKER_03]: Nobody has the intention to remember all this in the energy to go after us.
51:25
[SPEAKER_00]: for the organization, which is what's happening right now.
51:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, if you if you thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wyn, special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wyn, Catherine Wyn, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
51:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.