The Guns May Be Silent But for Some, There Is No Cease-Fire

Bich Minh Nguyen left Vietnam in the spring of 1975. Her sister was 2. She was 8 months old. Her father was trying to get out of Saigon before the communists came.

"Everyone in Saigon knew the war was lost, and to stay meant being sent to re-education camps, or worse. The neighbors spoke of executions and what the Communists would do to their children; they talked of people vanished and tortured," she wrote in her memoir, "Stealing Buddha's Dinner."

Her father received word that the Americans were airlifting children out of the country in Operation Babylift. Two thousand children were flown away. But the first flight crashed, she wrote. And her father decided there must be another way, though time was running out.

"All around us people were running, dropping suitcases and clothes, trying to flag down cars," she wrote. Desperation, repeated over and over in war. "A full panic had hit the city, the kind that sent people racing after airplanes on the runway, that made people offer their babies to departing American soldiers."

They escaped Saigon on a boat and sailed to the Philippines, then transferred to a U.S. ship heading for Guam. From there, they flew to Arkansas, then on to Grand Rapids, Mich. Landing in a foreign world.

All of Nguyen's thoughts of war are shaped through her father. "He talked about it very rarely," she says.

She sees war's wounds on him. "He fought in the South Vietnamese army. He had three brothers. One was killed," she says. "We had to leave my mother behind." Her father had to make a quick decision to get his family out of Saigon and her mother did not know that they had left. (Her mother survived.)

"It is a story I've seen and heard in so many other families: how it tears families apart and results in many years of separation. . . . Part of moving forward is not looking back."

Nguyen lives in Chicago and teaches at Purdue University. She speaks of "how privileged most of us are as Americans."

She is 33, the age of her father when he left Vietnam. But in her Americanness, she cannot fathom a war like the one she escaped.

"What if one day I had to get up and leave every single thing behind," she says. "And I had to leave this country by boat and find some way to get out because if I didn't I would go to a concentration camp. It is hard to imagine."

It is war.