The End and the Beginning

I have told this story many times.  My late wife told this story more times than me.  But recent events have brought it back to full light.

I must tell it again.

I shall begin with a few nights ago when, fairly early in the evening, I watched the last episode of The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns.  The last episode brought me solidly to tears.  Much of the footage and many of the interviews dealt with the last hours the Americans occupied the U.S. Embassy in Saigon as the South Vietnamese government fell on April 30, 1975.  That is a story I know well because Uyen, my late wife, then pregnant with my step-daughter, was there, attempting to flee the country.  In 2009, she and I and our daughter returned to the Embassy, but that is another story.

Uyen was Vietnamese.  She and her Vietnamese husband had good reason to flee as South Vietnam fell to the communists.  He had worked closely with an American firm building a highway where they lived near Dalat in the Central Highlands.  That firm, oddly enough, was a rather small civil engineering company, Morrison-Maierle, form Helena, Montana.  Again, another story for another time.

Uyen and her husband arrived at the U.S. Embassy on April 30, 1975, only to find U.S soldiers pushing hopeful refugees away from one of the last choppers to land on the roof there.  A chaotic din of voices filled the air.  As a last hopeless gesture, one of the solders called out to a huddle of panicked people trying to reach the chopper, including Uyen, telling them they might catch a helicopter at the airport.

By the time Uyen and her husband arrived at the airport only four helicopters remained spooling-up in grassy field near the tarmac.

The last four choppers evacuating the city.

Fearful citizens were streaming into the airport from the surrounding districts and countryside as the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese soldiers pushing in.  Angry coils of smoke rose from various points around the city.  South Vietnamese soldiers were stripping off their uniforms so they would not be identified as such.  Standing at the edge of the tarmac, pregnant, clutching in her hand a suitcase filled with photographs, keepsakes, and the last of her clothing, Uyen realized she had but one chance.  She pitched her suitcase into some tall grass nearby, kicked off her shoes, and she and her husband ran as fast as they could to reach the nearest helicopter.

Miraculously, they reached the chopper.  Once there, American soldiers pulled them onboard.  Within only a few moments, the chopper began thumping against the damp air.  The machine gradually ascended into a stunning red sunset with layers like the petals of a rose.  But below, in the city Uyen had come to love, the streets seethed with chaos and destruction.  Bombs sparkled against the coming night as the chopper whisked away from Uyen’s homeland, her mother, her family, the highways thronging with traffic and bikes, the coastal mountains, and Mekong Delta.

The chopper slipped out across the South China Sea, where the water shifted in color, turning from aquamarine to cobalt.  Somewhere, the machine landed on a ship surrounded by many other ships.

Uyen stepped onto the deck of that ship barefoot, pregnant, and having in her possession only a few pieces of jewelry and a swatch of cloth covered with Chinese writing that a soothsayer assured would bring her good luck.    And from this oil and salt smelling ship began a new life.

There is more than one story to be told from this point.

There is the story of a girl born in Helena, Montana.

And there is a place where our stories became one.

There are endings, too.

Mitchell Hegman