Ten days after the war in Ukraine broke out, I received a text from my longtime Vietnamese-American friend, Hieu. I knew her feeling immediately — sinking deeply with despair and grief. For nights we had both lain awake, thinking of families fleeing in crossfire and rubble, the way ours once fled into the dark. Our conversations stayed with me, quiet but insistent, and they carried me toward writing her story for the 51st anniversary of the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.
It was December of 1971. My family was stationed in Da Nang, a coastal town that was the military stronghold of the U.S. presence in the Vietnam War. The town pulsated with the constant roar of American aircraft. My father, a colonel in the South Vietnamese Army, had just been posted there with me, the youngest of all his children. My mother and several of my other siblings were waiting to join us from Nha Trang.
One day, my uncle Tho arrived unexpectedly from the coastal town of Nha Trang, carrying his 1-year-old son, Bi. His wife had just given birth to their second child and stayed behind. His visit was brief but warm, threaded with a kind of laughter that felt borrowed from another life. On his last night, my father offered his car and driver to take them to the Da Nang Air Base the next morning. My uncle accepted. My eldest brother was supposed to accompany them, but overslept.
The next day, Uncle Tho settled into the backseat with his son while Mr. Han, the driver, took his place behind the wheel. I watched from the front yard, standing a distance from my nanny, Mrs. Quê. When Mr. Han saw my father step outside to join them, he turned the key in the ignition.
Then the world split open.
A blast, sharp and deafening, tore through the air as a bomb packed with nails and shrapnel detonated. The force threw my father backward and onto the ground before he could reach the jeep. Flames rose, black smoke twisting upward like something alive. I screamed. Even now, the memory arrives distinct and complete: Mr. Han crawling across the dirt, burned and barely conscious; my nanny collapsing, struck by metal. She died shortly afterward.
My uncle and young cousin were rushed to the hospital. For hours, doctors tried to remove the countless shards of metal designed to inflict maximum suffering. Their injuries were too grave. The bomb had been engineered not just to kill but to break the spirit. It was a form of terror aimed at military families, where the wound would echo longest.
The bomb wasn’t meant just for my father. It takes from every corner of human life and humanity.
Mr. Han had taken the jeep out earlier that day, unaware the Vietcong had planted a bomb in the back compartment of my father’s seat.
It took my aunt’s husband and son, who remained a lifelong widower as she raised a newborn girl alone in America. It took my sweet beloved cousin, whom I still remember pushing on our swing. It took Mother Quê from her young son and Mr. Han from his loved ones.
My father lamented thereafter, “I loathe war. I despise war. I hope and pray that war will never revisit our beloved land.”
We live as Americans now, but we carry the past with us so that our children may never have to experience the horrors of what we have lived through.
