- [Anchor] Afghanistan's government has fallen to Islamist militants who make up the Taliban, and the frenzy for Afghan citizens and diplomats trying to escape the country today reached a fever pitch.

(crowd yelling and screams) - [Reporter] Afghanistan's President Ashraf Ghani has left the country.

(yelling in arabic) The situation on the ground is changing fast with more and more provincial capitals falling to the forces of the Taliban.

(gunshots) (plane engines whirring) - [Ghulam] August 15, that was a day that is gonna stay with me my whole life.

(speaking in Pashto) (speaking in Pashto) - [Navid] There was a huge sense of panic.

Every day I was on the phone, every day I was trying to coordinate something.

- [Aneelah] It's just been a heartbreaking and devastating to see the withdrawal and the way that that was handled in such complete disregard for the lives of everyday Afghans living in Afghanistan.

It almost seemed like you couldn't plan it worse.

Like if you had tried to have this evacuation be done in a worse way, it almost seemed like difficult to imagine how that would've been.

- [Nam Loc Nguyen] I myself cry when I see the last plane out of Kabul Airport.

That's me, I was on that plane.

I look at the Afghanis crying when they come to the US or on the plane or couldn't get out.

I look at that, the tear of my family's in there.

(sad music) - [Announcer] South Vietnam now is under communist control.

Early today, the communists entered Saigon in force.

South Vietnamese president, Duong Van Minh, so-called Big Minh, just two days in office, surrendered his government unconditionally.

- [Nam Loc Nguyen] Saigon would be in chaos.

We don't know what going on.

- [Thu-Van Nguyen] That day.

That's it.

They coming, the communists are coming.

We have to leave, we have to leave.

- [My-Linh Thai] 1975, by the international standards, it marked the end of Vietnam War, but it also marked the beginning of my family being broken apart.

- [British Reporter] Saigon, April the 30th, eight o'clock.

The last American helicopter on the roof of the American embassy prepares to lift off the last of the evacuees fleeing before the advancing communist armies.

- [Ghulam] I had personally never thought America's gonna leave like that.

(gun shots) I never thought, I could never even imagine in my whole life.

- [Nam Loc Nguyen] We thought that we may lose, but not only me, but even the US government, they didn't expect that we are gonna be collapsed that fast.

We all feel betrayed by the US.

- [Thanh Tan] What is the feeling when you know that your country is basically gone?

(speaking Pashto) - One of my kid asked me like, why you guys are crying?

Who's died?

Is somebody dead back home?

We couldn't answer, like what should we tell them?

That we lost our country?

All the hope for 20 years, sacrifices.

Everything is gone.

- [Thanh Tan] Watching this refugee crisis unfold has had a profound impact on me.

It feels personal.

I'm a child of Vietnamese refugees and while I was born years after the war in Olympia, Washington, I've seen the lingering effects of trauma on my community and I've wondered; how has that trauma been passed down to me?

No one talked about the horrors they'd survived to get here but I always sensed something under the surface.

To this day, I'm still trying to fill in the blanks of my family story in an attempt to find some meaning out of the suffering and the loss they endured when they faced an impossible choice; to flee with no guarantee of safety, or to stay and suffer an even worse fate.

When Kabul fell and tens of thousands of Afghans fled just as the Vietnamese did nearly 50 years ago.

My journey took aim at a new question.

What can we learn from the past in order to help refugees today?

A place to start looking for answers was within my home state of Washington.

- It was in 1975.

I remember that Governor Jerry Brown, he panicking when refugee arrived and settled in California because that's the place that the most Vietnamese refugee want to resettle.

I think over 30,000 of them.

Then he said that it's enough, it's enough.

We wanna close the door on California.

Then Governor Dan Evans in Washington, he opened the door.

- I was furious, here were people who were being driven from their home country, had no place to go and we were trying to reject them.

That didn't make sense.

- [Ralph Munro] I came over the Hill, Camp Pendleton and I saw this just huge encampment of tents.

I just couldn't believe it.

I talked to the commanding officer and I said we're interested learning more about resettlement of some of these folks.

And he looked at me and said, you want these people?

Yeah, we do.

- [Dan Evans] Opening the door to people who needed an open door but also recognizing that here was an opportunity to welcome people who could add real strength to our society.

And so that's a win in more than one way.

- [Thanh Tan] One of the first to benefit from Governor Evans invitation is Thu-Van Nguyen who was evacuated with her family in the waning days of the Vietnam War when she was still a teenager.

- Then Camp Pendleton, and then we in Spokane.

We were supposed to leave the camp.

You have to be resettle or go somewhere, get out of the camp.

- [Thu-Van] How we get to Spokane, of all of this place in America is incredible.

That's why I never left Washington.

Washington is my home.

People in Washington, they always open their arm.

They understand, yes, we'll help you.

- [Thanh Tan] With five decades of refugee resettlement experience behind us, you would think that this country would be well equipped to handle a crisis of a similar magnitude.

And yet the entire system was caught flatfooted again when the US made a hasty exit from Afghanistan evacuating the lucky few and leaving behind countless allies.

- [Aneelah] It breaks my heart that we have to keep seeing these stories that I wish Vietnam would've been the last time that we had had to have that kind of experience.

And to recognize that we actually have the power to change these systems, to prevent these kind of scenarios in the first place because these are human made disasters.

If they're human made disasters, we can have human made solutions.

- [Announcer] Next in this five part series, the story of soldiers who fought alongside US forces and the consequences of that allyship - [Announcer] Refuge After War is made possible by the generous support of Cair Wa.