picturesofwar:

“Mobs of Vietnamese people scale the wall of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam, trying to get to the helicopter pickup zone, just before the end of the Vietnam War on April 29, 1975.”

(AP Photo/Neal Ulevich)

One of the stories my parents told me of the days Saigon was occupied by the north Vietnamese was about what happened when the people came down. Apparently the Northern government had been telling its people that the southerners were hopelessly poor, and brutally exploited by the Americans and the southern government. The northern civilians came down with rice to donate to their poor starving new fellow citizens.

And discovered that the southerners were hardly starving at all.

I don’t know how accurate this story is. Like all things from the Vietnam War among the diaspora, it’s also just as possible this was propaganda too. Historical record in Vietnam itself is also notoriously lacking.

Regardless, Vietnamese around the world of the older generation consider today to be the black day that they lost the country.