Bay Area women recall fall of Saigon on 40th anniversary

SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) -- Thursday marks the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. A parade marking the event was held in what's now called Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam.

It commemorates the official end to the Vietnam War and America's decades-long involvement in Southeast Asia.

ABC7 News talked to two women, one in Oakland and the other in San Jose, whose lives were forever changed that day.

Minh-Tram Nguyen is a school principal at Encompass Academy in Oakland. She and her family are among the thousands of South Vietnamese refugees whose lives were forever transformed on April 30, 1975.

"Every day the work that I do is because of the fact that my family sacrificed everything so that we could have access to democracy, access to what the best of education is supposed to be," Nguyen said.

Her father, who opposed the Communist government, was sent to prison. For three years, her family waited for his release.

When that day came, they all escaped on a boat using false Chinese passports.

"Three nights, three days on the ocean, we drank, basically survived, on sugar cane juice and had what we had, the clothes on our backs," Nguyen remembered.

The family spent eight months on an island for refugees until they were allowed to come to the U.S., eventually settling in San Jose.

Thu-Thuy Truong and her family didn't wait to leave. On April 30, 1975 they ran toward the beach.

"My mom and five children, we followed her, got onto one of the fishing boats, bribed our way to get into one of the boats to go," Truong recalled.

They eventually spotted a U.S. cargo ship called Challenger. With her brother on her back, Truong jumped on board, barely able to hang on.

She and her family were lucky that day, other refugees had to stay behind.

Meanwhile, her father was one of the thousands of people in Saigon who tried to escape in a helicopter. He never could, but eventually got on a boat and three months later they were reunited in Arkansas, thanks to the American Red Cross.

Today, Truong is a Red Cross Silicon Valley board member, and also involved in a program that reunites families called Restoring Family Links.