She Fled Saigon As A Child. Now She’s Seeing Parallels In Afghanistan

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Afghans sit inside a U.S. military aircraft to leave Afghanistan at the military airport in Kabul Thursday after the Taliban’s takeover of the country.





Shakib Rahmani/AFP via Getty Images



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Shakib Rahmani/AFP via Getty Images





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On April 29, 1975, South Vietnamese civilians try to scale the 14-foot wall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, trying to reach evacuation helicopters as the last Americans departed from Vietnam.





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Your father was the managing editor of a newspaper, and when you wrote this article in USA Today, it just struck my heart. «He came home and said, ‘Our world is coming to an end.’ «

As a third grader, it was all fun and games, you know. Mom was making backpacks. We’d never had backpacks. We’d never had tennis shoes, and all of a sudden she bought us tennis shoes. Then, the morning after the South Vietnamese president resigned, we were in a taxi. I’d never been in a taxi. That’s considered a luxury. We were going to the airport. I’d never been on an airplane. This is all an adventure.



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We were leaving with one of my cousin’s families and my cousin, while we were standing in line at the airport, she gathered some rocks into a bag that she put into her pocket and she said, «Vietnam’s earth. We didn’t even dare to go to the bathroom because we were afraid of losing our place in line, and what if they called our names? But finally, we got on a Pentagon C-130 cargo plane. As we were lifting off, U.S. soldiers were going around looking out the windows, and my dad asked why. They said that we had been shot at, but luckily it was nighttime, so only the wings were nicked.





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Afghans gather on a roadside near the military part of the airport in Kabul hoping to flee from Afghanistan after the Taliban’s military takeover of country.





Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images



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Is there anything you want to say to some Afghan families who are here now?

My heart is with you. This is, unfortunately, your time for your tragedy to unfold. It’s as if Washington and the Pentagon learned nothing from the fall of Saigon. They were stunned at how fast communist forces came down from the DMZ. This time their stunned about how fast Kabul fell. At least in ’75, the U.S. ambassador then pushed and begged for some semblance of an evacuation plan. Even though there were tragedies all over the place, people were being evacuated. This time, there’s nothing that you can see. It’s just horrifying. It’s just a million times worse.

Gabriel Dunatov and Melissa Gray produced and edited the audio interview. Wynne Davis produced for the web.