- Sad with my country.

- Sadness in the loss of a motherland or a country.

- There were definite traumas in terms of, you know, the loss of country, the exile, the confusion.

(somber music) The impact of the fall of Saigon, and my parents told me the full story of, you know, the day of and we were at Tan Son Nhut Airport.

At the time, it was just me.

I was only 18 months old.

It was my mom, my dad, and me, and kind of they're, you know, running through the airfield and there's bombs and explosions and trying to leave.

And getting on the C-130 to get out of the airport, and like, cramped space, and seeing other planes, you know, explode in the air.

So there's a lot of vivid memories for my parents in that way.

- I remember being at the airport at Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon back then.

I remember it was a gray, drizzly day with myself, five years old, and my three younger siblings.

I remember (helicopters whooshing) loud noises of gunfire, shooting, lots of screaming and yelling, and lots of Vietnamese refugees like myself sitting at the tarmac of the airport.

We weren't inside the airport.

We were on the runway.

And I recall these big, black, loud helicopters.

They were called Chinooks, and they had these double rotors.

Real loud, we had no ear protection.

Very windy because of the propellers, so we just had no protection underneath that.

And I saw large black helicopters flying in front of us and landing several hundred feet away.

I saw the back of the helicopter would go down the ramp, and then I watched like people running into these helicopters, Vietnamese.

And the helicopter, the ramp would go up, it would take off.

And then another helicopter would land, really loud, really windy.

And eventually, we were told it was our turn to run.

And I ran toward the big black helicopter, the Chinook, and not sure I was making it there, 'cause the propeller was so strong for a five-year-old trying to run toward the helicopter.

- We see a lot of people run away, and we want to run too because we know we will loss everything.

We run at (speaking in a foreign language), and we see the boat, and we get in there with the boat, 502 boat, yeah.

That boat yet run two cycle, very, very slow.

- There were definite traumas in terms of, you know, the loss of country, the exile, the confusion, not knowing where you're gonna land.

My grandmother, my (speaking in a foreign language), my mother's mother, she didn't know what happened.

So after the war, she thought that we were dead.

So you know, not knowing what happened to your children, your grandchild, my mother and father being disconnected in terms of communication.

I think throughout that time period, there's a lot of sense of worry, anxiety.

- We have no clue where we're going.

I just saw water.

(helicopter whooshing) And we landed on the USS Midway.

It was clear as yesterday.

It's hard to forget these moments.

And when we landed on the Midway, (helicopters whooshing) we got off.

Lots of refugees, lots of people standing around on top of the Midway.

And so I saw helicopters getting off, pilots getting off, and I stood there and watched people push these helicopters overboard into the ocean, I guess to make space for either other helicopters or other planes to land.

But right in front of me, there was these helicopters just going overboard to the ocean.

It was quite an experience.

(somber music) - For some folks, there's some hidden pain around that day and the loss.

- The weight of leaving family behind is still heavy in the hearts of my parents.

- That's something that I think every family has to grapple with in terms of loss and who got to come and who couldn't come.

(somber music continues)