Black April plus 50 years
It took two years for Amy Nguyen, her parents and her 10 siblings to escape Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. (Photos provided)CHARLOTTE — As the 50th anniversary year of the Fall of Saigon draws to a close this April 30, a couple, Amy and Long Nguyen from Our Lady of Assumption Church, recalled their harrowing escape from the Communist regime in North Vietnam.
The couple met at Our Lady of Assumption Church in Charlotte in the 90s. Coincidentally, they both worked as mechanical engineers at IBM and both fled Saigon.
“Every time we have Black April, I thank God to be able to live freely in America,” said Amy Nguyen. “It is a day to remember and a day to thank God for saving us. We lost our country, but we didn’t lose our faith. It was a miracle. Now, I know even in our darkest journey God is always with us.”
The couple separately witnessed the terror of war but now carries a lighter load through their shared faith.
They tell their stories, representing the estimated 8,000 registered Vietnamese parishioners sprinkled across the diocese’s 93 parishes, but primarily centered at two Vietnamese churches, St. Joseph in Charlotte and Holy Family Mission in Greensboro. Many of these parishioners, now over the age of 50, arrived in the United States with their own tales from Saigon.
The couple continues to tell their stories for the next generation – their three children – and for the victims who perished, unable to tell theirs.
“During that time, we only depended on God. We were just like the Israelites exiled from Egypt, just like the Holy Family,” Amy Nguyen said. “The whole journey, I had God with me, and no doubt with His help, Mary, and all the angels and saints, we are here today in this freedom country.”
Long Nguyen
Long Nguyen turned 23 the week of the Fall of Saigon in 1975, a week that would forever change the trajectory of his life.
He was in seminary, preparing to make his vows, but as tensions increased, his religious order instead started plotting an evacuation.
The order secretly purchased a boat, bought a plane and hired a pilot, and secured a vehicle to get them there.
Long didn’t know what was happening but obeyed his superior when he was instructed to drive designated religious from Saigon to port Vũng Tàu a few days before Saigon fell.
“I went back and forth. They told me what to do, and I just followed,” Long said. “We were told to pack light. I thought we were coming back. But we left forever that day.”
The plan was to escape by plane, but the pilot took off with the plane and the money without them. With the North Vietnamese forces closing in, Long was left with a small boat he didn’t know how to drive.
On April 30, when the radio signal from President Dương Văn Minh commanded South Vietnam to drop all weapons and surrender to the North, he knew it was go-time.
“If we were to stay there, we would be arrested. They would hunt everyone, especially the religious education teachers, and take them to reeducation camps to die,” he said.
“Everything was just like a movie. While we sailed from the shore… there were shots above our heads. And a mortar fell right on the area we were in. It was unreal.”
With no experience, Long and his fellow brothers tried to navigate the boat packed with 52 nuns and priests.
“The boat was small. We just had enough space for us to sit. But there were no seats or chairs, so we sat on the floor,” Long said.
The engine was leaking, and there was no drinking water.
“There was rain, and people used their ponchos to gather water,” he said. “Nobody could eat anything because of the waves. People, even myself, got seasick.”
By noon, they all agreed to head east. They didn’t have a map but had a small compass and knew the Philippines were to the east—about 800 miles away.
“It was so scary. Imagine if the engine died. There would be no one out there to help. It is just the open sea. But we just prayed and hoped we would land somewhere,” Long said.
The first night they sailed until exhaustion hit and then anchored the boat until morning.
The next day they saw helicopters and followed them.
On day three, they saw a barge that could hold about 2,000 people.
“At that point we knew we would be saved,” Long said. “We were so fortunate.”
They rode alongside the larger vessel as they were pulled onto it, one at a time by a rope.
“On the boat, since so many priests were available, they said a Mass of Thanksgiving, which was unbelievable and joyful,” Long recalled.
They met a missionary from another order on the boat.
“He gave each of us $5. This was the first time we ever got to touch the green dollar,” he said. “We were almost the last group on the boat but the first to be cleared in the Philippines to board a plane to the U.S.”
From there, they boarded a C-141 U.S. Air Force cargo plane. By this point the only belongings Long had were the T-shirt and shorts he was wearing. His shoes were forever lost at sea.
Amy Nguyen
Amy was a teenager during the Fall of Saigon. Her father was a businessman, and though they were not Catholic, she and her 10 siblings attended Catholic school.
She remembers April 29, 1975, the day the nuns contacted parents to get their children out of the school. A chauffeur picked them up as her parents worked fast to arrange for the family to leave by boat. But, on April 30, their escape failed.
“Thank God we were not arrested. We left at 3:00 in the morning to get the boat. We were on the sea for one day and saw no one – nothing, just us,” she said. “There was no food and no drink, so the captain took us back to port, and we snuck home.”
In a desperate act of survival, her parents obtained fake documentation saying they each had a spouse who resided in France. This “False Marriage” ploy was a common but dangerous way to obtain exit visas.
It took two years for their paperwork to get approved, and the time in between was marked by fear and anxiety.
“Those two years were very scary because the surrounding Communists were all watching us,” she said.
Once approved, her father took four children and her mother seven, as they separately made their way to their French “spouses.”
The day of their escape, her communist neighbor followed them onboard the plane.
“When I saw him, my heart dropped to the floor. I thought, ‘We are going to die today.’ He said, ‘I know who you are and where you are going. If you have any money, you need to give it to me,’” she recalled. “We gave him all the money we had and safely landed in Thailand. That is the day my parents vowed that if we were able to escape the Communist regime, the whole family would convert to Catholicism."
They arrived in France in 1977, and the entire 13-member family reunited and converted to Catholicism.
“I believe that God saved us, and the only thing that I was able to bring with me from home was the prayers and faith that helped us through the hard times,” she said. “We believe the faith kept us alive, and God carried us the whole time.”
From 1975 to 1995 various sources say as many as three million people fled Vietnam and neighboring Laos and Cambodia, by land, air and predominantly sea, earning them the nickname “boat people.” More than 2.5 million were resettled around the world, with about 800,000 ending up in the United States, according to the American Immigration Council. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees estimates that between 200,000 and 250,000 boat people died at sea.
Kien Tong – Holy Family Church in Greensboro
Kien Tong was a South Vietnamese officer when Saigon fell. He was captured there and taken to a re-education camp.
“They put me in a jail for 10 years,” he said. “Lots of people died in these camps, mostly of starvation and disease.”
There was little food and much physical labor. He ate bugs to fend off hunger at a camp in the middle of the jungle, where he toiled the days away, cutting down trees. The prisoners even constructed their own huts.
Although death and disease were all around, he prayed and kept his faith and hope in God.
After 10 years, he was released and reunited with his wife but knew he could not live for long under the North Vietnamese Communist regime. They escaped from Vietnam by boat, sailing to Hong Kong.
The makeshift boat and the 15 passengers on it, including Tong and his wife, were on the open sea through perilous weather. The winds and rain made the boat dip and sway through the waves. During one storm, Tong was certain the boat would flip. He stood and raised his rosary beads to the heavens and begged God to save them, praying for Mary’s intercession. The seas calmed for three hours.
Subsequently a typhoon came, which actually steered the boat into the coast of Hong Kong.
“The boat broke in half at the shore,” said Tong.
The couple was received into a closed refugee camp in 1989, where they stayed for two years until being bused to the Philippines. From there, the United States accepted the couple in through the refugee program, at which time they went to Texas and eventually moved to Greensboro.
The couple has one son; he is 32 and works in Charlotte.
Vince Pham – Holy Family Church in Greensboro
Pham was 14-years-old during the Fall of Saigon and tried to escape the country three times from 1975 to 1981
As a teenager, he remembers a country with little freedom and even less food.
“In my country, you would go to sleep hungry, and you would just have your prayers,” he said. “Everything was fake. I had to say and do things to please them, not knowing if I would live until the next day, because if they don’t like you, they will take you away at night, and you’d never be heard from again. The Communists did not have any God. They were their own god.”
He tried to escape by boat but was arrested and sent to jail, not knowing when he would be released. In jail, he was given little food and had to sleep on dirt floors while he was chained to other prisoners.
“You had to do and say exactly what they wanted you to say and do, whatever they wanted to please them, and if they didn’t like you in the night,” he said. “They will come, and they will find you and take you and kill you.”
When he was released, like so many, he made his final escape by boat.
“We didn’t have a compass, so we looked to the stars and the moon and made a guess,” he said.
He was on a small boat with 41 people for six days and six nights.
“We knew once we got to a free country like Hong Kong, Indonesia or Malaysia that the government would come and interview us to see if we could seek freedom in the United States,” he said.
Pham arrived in Malaysia and was interviewed, ultimately seeking refuge in the United States. He got married and has children of his own. They all attend Holy Family Church in Greensboro.
— Lisa M Geraci. Photos provided