- The Fall of Saigon in late April of 1975 really represents the culmination of a Vietnamese civil war that began in 1945.

(gentle music) - What the French do is they actually end up dividing the country into three parts.

So you have Tonkin in the north.

You have Annam in Central Vietnam, and Cochinchina, and they arbitrarily sort of pit these parts of the country against each other.

The country in 1954 is temporarily divided at the 17th parallel, and that's where you really see this divide to try to create a North Vietnam and a South Vietnam, and this idea that an independent, non-communist South Vietnam can stand on its own.

And the United States takes that and runs with it after 1954, and so those geographical divisions, they're there all along.

(propeller whirring) - By the time the Americans deploy combat troops to Vietnam in '65, the Vietnamese themselves have been at war with each other, among each other, for the better part of 20 years.

So a civil war that begins in 1945, which then gets kind of amplified by French efforts at recolonizing Vietnam, will then culminate on the 30th of April, 1975.

For some, the end of that conflict, April 30th, represented a positive development as it ended, and it ended that conflict on terms that were favorable to one side, namely the communists and those who sympathized with them.

But then for those on the other side, that same day represented a great tragedy.

(gentle music) Everyone botched the peace.

We end up seeing a peace that's incredibly messy, incredibly tragic, and which will fundamentally victimize the Vietnamese people themselves.

- The Fall of Saigon in April of 1975 did not end the Vietnam War.

- Hundreds of thousands there who wanted to get out of the country and ultimately are going to get out of the country as the so-called boat people, and then eventually going to be brought in in a more orderly fashion to the United States.

The impact for the South Vietnamese is, of course, they've lost what they perceived as an independent country that they were trying to build, and then have had to flee and try to build a new life in the United States and many other areas.

- And that's why we now have a very sizable Vietnamese community in California and in countless other parts of the U.S. and the Western world.

But it's such a tragic story.

I mean, to me, that's the thing with the Vietnam War, right?

It's the tragedy that keeps on giving.

I mean, and to this day, I mean, it's not over.

I mean, the animosities linger among everyone, and it's sad.

It's really, really sad.

- There is a competition at its core over what it means to be Vietnamese in the modern era.

And this conflict and struggle over identity is, again, something that could not be decided by outside foreign forces.

These questions over what it meant to be Vietnamese had to be answered by the Vietnamese themselves.

What does it mean to be Vietnamese?

Does it mean something different to be Vietnamese American than it means to be Vietnamese?

Does it mean something to be a non-communist Vietnamese American versus a communist Vietnamese today?

And those struggles are continuing to happen, not in Vietnam, but here in the United States.

After April of 1975, that state no longer exists.

What does that mean for you?

What does that mean for your identity and your family's identity moving forward?

(gentle somber music)