40 years: A brief remembrance of the Fall of Saigon

April 30, 2015, marks the 40th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. I was not alive then, but the figment of it swirled around my life nonetheless, mostly in the form of a movie and a book.I was ten years old when I was allowed to watch my first rated R movies: The Terminator and Platoon. I remember crying a lot during Platoon and not understanding why. I knew nothing of the war, nothing of the life in Vietnam. I didn’t dare look over at my father. I wonder now if maybe I didn’t want to catch him crying, too, but I don’t remember hearing anything from his side of the sofa. Instead, I fixated upon the blue glow of the television dancing between us.I didn’t cry when I flipped through the full-paged photographs of the Time Life book, but the visuals were just as vivid. There was one of the naked girl (Phan Thi Kim Phuc, now residing in Canada) wailing while running towards camera. There was the grimy-faced American soldier (Larry Wayne Chaffin, age 19 at the time, from St. Louis) with the words “war is hell” tucked into his helmet. And there was the one with a Vietnamese man (Nguyen Ngoc Loan, South Vietnamese National Police Chief who later moved to Virginia and opened a pizza shop) pointing a gun at another tearful man (Nguyen Van Lem, executed on a Saigon street in 1968).I wasn't there, but the memories of the memories live in me. These are perhaps the only indirect connections, besides my family, I'll ever have to the Fall of Saigon. The generations following mine will remember even less. But out of respect for my parents and my heritage, I will not forget.