Fifty years – half a century since the last helicopters lifted off from Saigon. To us now, it seems as far away in time and nearly as pointless as the Western Front, as I noted in another reminiscence some years ago.

Platoon seems as much of a relic as Journey’s End, the image of a helicopter hovering over jungle with All Along the Watchtower on the soundtrack an image as archaic as doughboys with puttees and soup-plate helmets, marching along and singing Mademoiselle from Armentieres.

In that summer, I was a college student, volunteering with a small volunteer refugee resettlement in the far distant Los Angeles suburb where I lived with my family then. Our Lutheran church banded together with a couple of other local churches, the Lions’ Club and a handful of volunteers to sponsor Vietnamese refugees. We thought, by pulling in all our resources that we could manage an extended family of up to 25 members, adults and children, as we had been given to understand that was where the need was greatest: sponsors for large families. In their infinite wisdom, Lutheran Social Services at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas (which location was one of the holding camps for Vietnamese refugees in that year) sent us three small family groups and four single young men. We had just enough in our collected funds to rent a small house and two apartments – the single young men were farmed out to families. One of the young men, named Kiet, who turned out to be just barely 18, went to our family and lived with us for more than a year. (His maternal uncle was resettled in Houston with his family, and Kiet eventually went to live with them.)

All of our sponsored families and the young single boys had stories of how they escaped. The youngest of the four was a younger son from a prosperous family; they scraped together the funds and documents to send him out of the collapsing country by commercial air, wanting one of their family to be safe and out of what was expected to be a bloodbath by the victorious North Vietnamese. Another was an enlisted tech in the Viet Air Force; he and others from his unit were all evacuated out on a Viet Air Force transport to Thailand, and then to the Philippines and on to the United States.

Kiet had the most hairbreadth escape. He was also a Viet Air Force enlisted man; a security policeman, on duty at Tan Son Nhut, assigned with his fellows to work crowd control – on the very last day that fixed wing aircraft could operate as the North Vietnamese had begun shelling the runway. Only helicopters could take off from Tan Son Nhut then – and in the rush of the panicked crowd, Kiet was carried off his feet and shoved up against the door of one of those helicopters. On an impulse – as he always insisted that he hadn’t planned to escape – he threw away his weapon and got in. The helicopter staggered into the air, hideously overloaded with frantic people – and barely made it to the USS Hancock. One of the first humorous remarks that I ever heard from Kiet was when all of us were watching a Jacques Cousteau special on underwater archeology. With a grin, Kiet said that he knew exactly where there were a great many helicopters on the bottom of the sea.

There were so many helicopters coming out to the Hancock and trying to land that the American crew could only throw them overboard, as soon as they were emptied of people. Clear the flight deck, and there were five more overburdened helicopters running on fumes, desperate to land on the Hancock’s flight deck.

The family that I knew best because the husband and wife spoke English well were the Tran family: Xuan-An and Hai. They brought pictures of where they lived in the highlands in a town called Dalat; snaps of cool, misty green pines and gardens of rhododendrons, and a horizon of mountains. Eventually, they had to flee Dalat for Saigon, where their youngest daughter was born, and Xuan-An’s mother came to live with them. Hai had left Hanoi as a teenager when the Communists took over there, his family being well to do, part Chinese, and immensely scholarly. He worked as a librarian for the USIS, and Xuan-An as a teacher of English and sciences. They were on the Embassy list of Vietnamese citizens to be evacuated in the spring of 1975, with their four children, aged 12 to 2 years old. They were still waiting at their home, for someone to come fetch them. Perhaps someone from the Embassy might have come for them eventually, but Xuan-An’s brother who was the captain of a Vietnamese coastal patrol vessel came to their house after dark, instead.

He had sent his crewmen all to fetch their families, they were going to make a run for safety out to sea, and he came to get his and Xuan-An’s mother, who would later be known to us as Grandmother. He was horrified to find his sister and brother-in-law and the children still there. He urged them to come with him straight away, and not wait any longer for rescue. They came away with only what the adults could carry, in small packs the size of student’s books. The youngest daughter was a toddler and had to be carried herself. The motor launch was a hundred feet long, and there were a hundred people crammed onto it, carrying them out to an American cargo ship, the Pioneer Contender, which waited with other American rescuers, just beyond the horizon.

Always take the family pictures, Xuan-An said, when she showed me the album, Anything else in the world you can get back again or something like it, but not family pictures. And jewelry. You can always sell jewelry.

It was an article of faith among the South Vietnamese fleeing Saigon in 1975 that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would treat anyone with the barest connection to the Americans and the Saigon government as brutally as they had treated civilians in Hue, when they overran that city during the 1968 Tet offensive. Those on the losing side of a vicious civil war were not inclined to trust in the magnanimity of the victors, since none had ever been demonstrated heretofore. They took their chances and whatever they could carry and fled, by boat, and by aircraft.

Grandmother had made a vow, that if all of her family escaped, and were safe, she would shave her head, and so she did: when I first met her, her hair was coming back, an inch or so long. One of Xuan-An’s pictures was of Grandmother in her youth; she was gorgeous and looked like the Dragon Lady of Terry and the Pirates fame.

In the vast mess-tent one day, a young Vietnamese man began complaining loudly about the spaghetti and meatballs being served, and a little, elderly Vietnamese woman in line behind him asked him what his name was. The young man turned out to be the son a of a high-ranking South Vietnamese officer, whereupon the elderly woman dumped her bowl of spaghetti and meatballs on his head and told them that if his father had only done his job better, then none of them would have had to be eating food like that. Xuan-an still giggled when she told me that story. I wonder if Grandmother might have been the dumper of spaghetti.

Xuan-An and Hai, with their children and Grandmother were the first of the families to be sent to us. We had spent a weekend cleaning out the tiny rental house we had found for them, and fitting it up with donated furniture, linens and kitchenware. As we were raking up and bagging desiccated dog-poop from the dusty little side yard, the owner of the house across the road came over and asked what we were doing. When we explained that we were setting up the house for Vietnamese refugees, he asked if we needed a refrigerator, and brought it across the road on a dolly when we said yes. The town was quietly, undemonstratively supportive: like the little elderly Vietnamese woman in the camp, I think a lot of local people felt that we had not done a good job, we had left a lot of good people in the lurch, and now we owed them. (Sunland-Tujunga at this time was a working-class to no-class and blue-collar sort of town – the kind of town where young men accepted the draft, rather than resisting it.)

Xuan-An and Grandmother practically cried when they first walked in, as plain and minimal as the house was. Grandmother immediately took over the housekeeping, while her son and daughter took two jobs apiece. The youngest daughter, Tao, at the age of three became Grandmother’s translator when school began in the fall for her sister and brothers. They made an interesting pair, in the local Ralph’s grocery, a tiny elderly Vietnamese woman in black loose trousers and white blouse, earnestly picking over the fresh fruits and vegetables, and Tao, barely up to Grandmother’s elbow, translating from English to Vietnamese and back again. I am not sure that Grandmother really needed a translator, after a while: she had the most elegantly expressive face and hands, and the gift of communication without language. We always knew what she was on about, and she instantly divined whatever it was we were trying to get across. Without ever learning any other English other than the word “Hello”, Grandmother also become quite fond of the soap opera General Hospital. She did all the cooking, putting the cutting board on the floor of the kitchen and dismembering a whole chicken with a cleaver the size of a machete. Occasionally, Grandmother gifted us with a jar of homemade pickled vegetables, beautifully carved slices of carrot and daikon radish, and whole tiny onions, in a brine slightly spiked with fish sauce.

Xuan-An and Hai meanwhile worked two jobs each, for a while. Like many of the 1975 Vietnamese refugees, they spoke English well, although the children did not at first. All summer, we gave them lessons, and they started in the fall at grade level. The oldest daughter would eventually go on to college, while Xuan-An and Hai bought first a car, then a house of their own, in the neighborhood where they had lived as refugees. Later, their two sons would serve in the US Army.

In the early days, Xuan-An sometimes talked of going back to Vietnam, that it would be important for the children to remember their original language, in that case. I would look at Tao and know that Tao would not remember anything but growing up in America.