“We just need to stay together,” my oldest brother Nguyên said. “If we leave, we leave together. If we die, we die together.” On the evening of April 29, 1975, he decided that we – his parents, brother, sisters and their spouses, nieces and nephews and his son – would all leave Saìgòn, Việtnam together. 

Nguyên, or Cậu Hai as my kids called him, had been a colonel in the South Việtnamese Army and was working as the security adviser to the South Việtnamese Prime Minister Nguyễn Bá Cẩn. In the days before April 29, Cậu Hai and his military contacts tracked the movement of the North Việtnamese. They marked off on a map, in red ink, the places the North Việtnamese had taken over. By the morning of April 29, red marks surrounded Saìgòn as the city became the North Việtnamese’s main target.

As rocket explosions grew closer and closer to Cậu Hai’s home in the outskirts of Saìgòn where he had gathered all of us only a couple of days earlier, the adults packed whatever necessities we could into small bags. Then, twelve adults and eight children under the age of ten, climbed into a van and sedan and left Cậu Hai’s home. None of us asked where we were going.

Cậu Hai led our little caravan with his army-issued Jeep to Saìgòn Harbor ten miles away. Cậu Hai hoped that we could board a tanker ship at the harbor and escape Saìgòn before it fell completely to the advancing North Việtnamese army. But when we arrived at the harbor, all the ships had already left. There we were, twelve adults and eight children surrounded by hundreds of people, many of them ready to loot or rob us.  

In the midst of that wild scene, a soldier who had once been under Cậu Hai’s command miraculously found us. He led us to another location in the harbor where a single remaining tanker ship named Trường Hải was readying to pull away from the dock. We hurried out of our cars, taking as many of our carefully packed bags as we could, and ran to the ship. 

We made it to the tanker ship to find one of the ship’s officers pointing his gun at us, fearing in all the chaos that we were pirates. Cậu Hai assured the panicked officer that the adults and children following him were not pirates. We managed to get all the kids and most of the adults across the narrow plank onto the ship while my other brother Cậu Bẩy and sister Dì Năm ran back to the cars to try to grab more bags. 

But before Cậu Bẩy and Dì Năm could get back to the boat with any bags of food or clothing, the officer suddenly began pulling away from the dock and the narrow plank connecting the dock to the ship dropped into the water. Cậu Hai quickly pulled out his handgun, pointed it at the officer and ordered him to stop the boat, allowing Cậu Bẩy and Dì Năm to jump from the dock onto the ship, leaving behind all of the bags that they had managed to grab.

The ship left Saìgòn Harbor at six o’clock the evening of April 29, 1975. No lights were allowed and we tried to keep the children silent as the North Việtnamese overtook Saìgòn and fired more and more rockets at the escaping ships. About an hour from shore, those rockets hit two ships – one in front and one behind us – killing the families on board.

As the night wore on, we made it further away from the shore and further away from the rockets. The further away we got from the shore and the rockets, the more relief we felt. And the moment we learned the ship had crossed into international waters, a massive sense of relief washed over all of us. 

We were together, safe and alive. At least for the moment. 

We still didn’t know where we were going. We didn’t know what would happen to our country. We didn’t know if we would ever go back home – to our houses, to our dogs, to the rest of our family and friends. And that was heartbreaking.

Throughout that first sleepless night, my children just wanted to go home. My 2-year-old daughter Uyên cried all night. She cried for her dog. She cried for her babysitter. She cried until I almost gave her a little phenobarbital that we had managed to grab from my mom’s pharmacy, but my sister Chị Ba was able to calm her down.

The next morning April 30, 1975 at 10 am, surrounded by the silence of the ocean, the news came over the radio to the ship that Saìgòn had fallen. The North Việtnamese occupied the presidential palace in Saìgòn and controlled the radio station. At that moment, our hearts stopped beating. We were together, safe and alive, but we realized that we could never go back home.

On May 1, 1975, we arrived in Singapore but with no identity and no nationality. The Singapore government considered us “illegal immigrants.” They knew that the U.S. government was building refugee camps in Guam and they knew that more small boats and ships with more people like us would soon be arriving, so they wouldn’t let us disembark.

Even if Singapore allowed us entry into their country, the ship’s captain had a different agenda. He wanted to sail to Australia but needed more food and oil to make the trip. So he kept us as hostages, demanding food and oil from Singapore. His plan didn’t quite work. 

In exchange for food, water, and oil, the Singapore authorities forced our ship’s captain to take on an additional 300 people from other ships and boats that had arrived in the port. Our tanker ship, Trường Hải, became the first ship under Operation Thunderstorm, an operation code named by the Singapore government to look after refugees, and was ordered to sail to the refugee camps in Guam.

On May 10, 1975, we left Singapore waters. With 300 other people of all different ages, we packed ourselves into the ship – lying, sitting or standing next to each other. We lived off of sardines and rice which the Singapore government had supplied us with in large amounts. We sailed through dangerous coral. We weathered rainstorms, strong winds and waves.

After a total of three weeks on the ship, we arrived on the island of Guam on May 27, 1975, still all together, safe and alive.

In yet another miracle encounter, Cậu Hai ran into another former co-worker – an American whose job it was to help people settle in refugee camps in Guam. When he saw Cậu Hai, he told Cậu Hai to quickly get the entire family on a nearby military bus and not to say a word. The bus took all of us to barracks that had been set up to house distinguished Việtnamese officials – not a family of 20 people. With the help of Cậu Hai’s friend, we lived in those barracks for about a month, instead of the sandy, windy beaches of Guam.

While we lived in those barracks, my husband would buy little treats for the kids from a food stand with dimes and nickels he had saved from his trip to the FAA school in the U.S. several years earlier. My sister Dì Năm industriously used the sardines and rice left from the ship to barter for pickled peppers and other food (we were grateful, but tired of sardines and rice by then).

During that long month, we tried to contact my younger brother and sister, hoping that we would be able to obtain visas to join them. My younger brother and sister had been living in France as international students before the war became really bad and like them, most of us had studied French in school. It would have been the ideal place for us to go. But the French government would only grant my parents visas. Only the United States was willing to accept all of us, together, as refugees. 

On June 25, 1975, we left the barracks of Guam and flew to Hawaii in a U.S. Air Force cargo plane. After a layover in Hawaii, we flew on to Florida in a commercial plane. We were safer than we had been in a long time, but we were no longer all together. 

Cậu Hai had sent his wife and all but one of his kids to Hawaii by plane before Saìgòn fell. One of his sons stayed with him and escaped with us by boat to Guam. While we were in Guam, Cậu Hai was able to locate his wife and other kids in Hawaii and so he and his son reunited with the rest of their family in Hawaii while the rest of us, now eleven adults and seven children, remained in Guam and eventually went on to Florida. 

From June 26 to July 29, 1975, we lived in a refugee camp at Eglin Air Force Base, about an hour east of Pensacola. Churches from across the United States sent representatives to the camp to help refugees like us resettle. Every day of that month, I followed Dì Năm to every desk of every church at the camp, trying to find a church and a family from a church who were willing to help us. But there were 18 people in our large family, too many for one small church family to help. And we wanted to stay together.

In late July, Dì Năm finally interviewed with Mount Olivet Lutheran Church, the only church that was willing to sponsor our entire family of 18. Mount Olivet was one of the largest Lutheran churches in Minnesota at the time. We didn’t care that we were heading to a place where there was a fourth season – bitterly cold snowy winters – that we had never experienced. 

We were together, safe and alive.

On July 30, 1975, we arrived in Minnesota, welcomed by so many people. Mount Olivet Church found us a home in Minneapolis where all 18 of us could live together and the church’s parishioners, including the Lindberg family, helped our family begin to settle in. Ten days later, Dì Năm found a job. Soon after, Cậu Bẩy, my husband, and my dad also found work together, cleaning fire-damaged homes. 

But not everyone was welcoming and helpful. Two weeks after we arrived, the next door neighbors brought us a Việtnamese Communist newspaper, telling us to go back to Việtnam. Scared for our safety, the Lindbergs helped us move to separate houses in the suburb of Bloomington where they also lived. We now lived apart, but we were together in one town and close by each other. 

Over the next 45 years, we all made our home in Bloomington. My parents and my oldest sister Chị Ba Cảnh took care of all the children so the adults could go to work and rebuild our lives. The Lindbergs and Karen Christianson made sure we all had health care and helped us to find ways, including loans, to pay for it. Our fourth child was born a year after we fled Việtnam. 

In Bloomington, we also found Nativity of Mary Catholic Church where our entire family became parishioners. Father Gilbert, Sister Colleen, and many church members – including the Halls, Pellers, Hauers, and Mary Nedry – helped our four kids and our nephews and nieces so they could all eventually attend and graduate from Nativity of Mary Catholic School.

Today, our fourth child Quốc Hương, whose name means “homeland,” lives in Minnesota with her family. My husband and I, our other daughter Uyên and her family, my sisters, brother, and many nieces and nephews also live in Minnesota. My son Duy and his family live in Washington; my oldest daughter Oanh and her family live on the East Coast. We are not together, but because of my brother Cậu Hai’s courage and sacrifice, because of my parents’ and sister’s love and care, because of Mount Olivet Lutheran Church and the generosity of so many families and individuals, we are safe and we are thriving.  

Epilogue: My family’s trip 45 years ago was a miracle trip to freedom. Every day since then, I have carried in my heart, and will do so until my last breath, a deep gratitude for that miracle. The safe and secure lives that we have, we have because of the true love and sacrifice of my brother Nguyên. Because of the countless people who helped us in the United States, my family is living the American Dream. That constant grateful feeling in my heart is my reminder to remind my kids of how we began our lives in this country as immigrants - to remind them of our responsibility to share the love and opportunities that we were given, to help the oppressed, the disadvantaged, the marginalized.