50 years ago, my fate was sealed

In the spring of 1996, I set my sights on Vietnam. I was about to graduate from college with a degree in creative writing, and I wasn’t sure what one was supposed to do with that credential, other than gather experience and attempt, in some form or another, to translate that experience into words. All I knew was that Vietnam and the United States had recently re-established diplomatic relations, making a move to Southeast Asia logistically easier, and that I really, really liked Vietnamese food.

Well, I knew one more thing: that moving to Vietnam would shock anyone even slightly older than me. I had grown up in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and could see, swirling through pop culture and politics, not to mention in the faces of elementary school classmates who’d fled not just Vietnam but Cambodia, how that conflict had shaped the world I lived in. Now, officially an adult with a diploma, I had a chance to see the place where it had all begun, stripped of its Hollywood sheen and the rhetoric of politicians.

So I went, to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, and taught English for a bit before turning to journalism, and over the course of a single year, I made friends—both locals and expatriates, many of whom I’m close with to this day—and I learned to eat new foods and ride a moped, and I spent a lot of time on my own listening to the five CDs I owned, and I figured out, in general, how to get around and how to get along.

I’ve written about these experiences in depth before, so I won’t get into them here, but since today marks the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War—on April 30, 1975, a Wednesday just like today—I find myself reflecting on the strange ways that history winds up determining our lives. Maybe I should capitalize that: how History determines our lives in unusual ways, for I’m talking about the big events, the ones that we learn about in school and that can seem so iconic, so deeply documented, so set in stone that it’s hard to imagine that they still possess little tendrils of causation that reach out to tickle our fates.

So here it is: Fifty years ago, the soldiers of North Vietnam rolled into Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and took full, final control of the entire country after a war that had lasted nearly two decades. Americans fled in planes and helicopters, along with thousands of Vietnamese, including many of my future friends and their families.

I was precisely nine months old. My parents and I were living on Thoreau Street in Concord, Massachusetts, and my dad was working on his first book. I was on the verge of taking my first steps.

For hundreds of thousands of other people, that day was an obvious marker of a time before and a time after—of a history lost and a future unknown. For them, the drama was potent, too visceral and immediate to even be acknowledged as “drama.” For those who fled, the world-historical moment meant life or death. For me, it was another day in a diaper in New England.

Frankly, I feel a little weird talking about how the end of the war changed my life, when that change pales in comparison with what refugees went through, not to mention the 58,000 Americans and the millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians whose lives ended in the years of fighting. But still, April 30 was a day that mattered not just to them but to everybody, even little baby Matt, as its repercussions rippled out across the surface of the earth and down the years to touch everyone in some way. Everything that happened because of that day created the world that would send me to Vietnam in August 1996, and turn me into the person I am today. And I am not the only one who can say this.

Could I trace the moment farther back than April 30? To Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s nefarious plan to extend and expand the war under the pretense of bringing peace? To the Tonkin Gulf Incident or the battle of Dien Bien Phu? All of those are likely candidates, but none has quite the decisive singularity of April 30—one day on which the future cleaved from the past.

For me, it’s hard to think of another date in the next 21 years that could have had the same impact on my life. The events of 1989—the Tiananmen Square protests and the fall of the Berlin Wall—and the end of the Soviet Union two years later surely shaped history in a way that made my eventual move to Vietnam more likely, and that absolutely enabled many of my friends to move to Moscow, Prague, and Budapest in the 1990s. But for my own personal narrative, those are secondary dates, in part because they don’t really feel like dates. The Tiananmen protests may have come to a head on June 4, but they’d been building for days before the climax and cloudy dénouement; ditto the demise of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, at least as I remember observing them, on TV, as a teenager. April 30, by contrast, was a moment of contrast: That morning, a country existed, if tenuously; the next morning, it was no more.

Here’s what I appreciate about that binary: clarity and compactness. There are many things we can and will argue about the Vietnam War, but we can at least pinpoint that date. We can look at it and understand it and hold it in our heads comfortably as we mull what led up to it and what took place afterwards.

Not so with many of the events of the 21st century. Yes, we have September 11 and January 6 and October 7 and that second week of March 2020 when Covid shut the world down, but the others that shaped us in ways equally grand remain nebulous. The dot-com crash, the endless Iraq/Afghanistan war, the financial crisis of 2008–9: I lived through them, was keenly aware of the news every single day, and yet I couldn’t tell you with any precision when they began and when they ended. Honestly, it seems like they never really ended. We’re still living through big moments, capitalized History, that never resolve themselves long enough to give us, the survivors, a chance to catch our breath, pen a red X through the date on the wall calendar, and lope forward and onward.

Does it feel like that for the older generation that actually experienced the Vietnam War’s end? Is it still going on for them, the bitter struggles of today just the decades-long encore of firefights in Pleiku and conniving in Paris? Is April 30 only April 30 for those of us who were born too late to truly remember it? Does history really just refer to the things we can’t remember ourselves?

Anyway, this is what I’m going to do today: Dig through my own chain of memory back to a day I can’t recall, breathe deeply, and imagine a future Wednesday when the loathsome history we’re now enduring becomes just another red X we can safely put behind us. I hope it won’t take another 50 years. 🪨🪨🪨

Read a Previous Attempt: That Time I Took My Wife and Kids to Saigon