Vietnamese Father Answers American Son

By Andrew Lam/PNS

As Communist tanks rolled into the city of Saigon early on the evening of April 30, 1975, my father, Thi Quang Lam — a lieutenant general in the South Vietnamese Army — boarded a naval ship with a few hundred other Vietnamese officials and their families and headed out to sea. Nearing the Philippines, where they would ask U.S. authorities for asylum, he put away his army uniform, changed into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and tossed his gun into the water.

I was not there. I had left two days earlier with the rest of the family in a C-130 cargo plane full of panicked refugees heading for Guam. But for years I regarded the moment when my father jettisoned his gun into the sea as a kind of historical marker — the beginning of his exile and my beginning with America.

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