Firecrackers in Saigon: Beyond Tet

The Tet Offensive

In the fall of 1967, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) began a heavy bombing of Khe Sanh, which drew many troops away from Saigon to defend Khe Sanh. In previous years, both sides had agreed to a truce on the Tet holiday to allow soldiers to return and celebrate the holiday; this had been the case for the 1968 Tet celebration as well, but on January 30, 1968, Radio Saigon announced a cancellation to the Tet truce that the National Liberation Front (NLF) and PAVN had agreed to with the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) weeks before.

"You got on the rooftop and you saw—you saw action. And then at night, sometimes you see flares. And you see [them]—they shoot them in the sky—you [see] the tracers. You see all these lights..."

Hải Nguyễn was approximately twelve years old when the National Liberation Front and the People's Army of Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive (1968). While the celebration of the Tet Holiday—the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration—seemed to begin innocuously with firecrackers, radio and television broadcasts soon recalled soldiers such as Hải's brother and brother-in-law back to their stations. Hải and his father temporarily self-evacuated to a relative's residence in District 1 of Saigon, where it was supposedly safer, while his mother and sister stayed in their townhouse and opened it to other citizens seeking shelter. He did not know that the U.S. Embassy, the Radio Saigon station, and several other strategic locations were all attacked to varying levels of effectiveness. Historians such as Nghia M. Vo have corroborated accounts of Vietnamese people taking shelter and ARVN soldiers driving out enemy forces. From the rooftop of their their temporary residence in District 1,  Hải saw fire and smoke in addition to hearing the sounds of fighting. Because he and his family had already prepared a substantial amount food for the Tet celebration, they managed to survive. Like many other observers of the war, this was Hải's first experience with wartime in such close proximity. 

According to Vo, there was a significant boost in nationalist movements such as military volunteers and anti-corruption measures after the attack. However, Hải and his family remained uninvolved from the family; his involvement of the military was still minimal, save for one specific incident where Hải's motorbike was taken away because it had floral designs perhaps reminiscent of the U.S. anti-war and hippie movement at the time. Regardless of specific incidences with military and police forces, he often reflected on the mood of the atmosphere, noting that one should no be out at certain hours.  

The following excerpt is from 00:06:34 to 0:10:45 in the full interview.

Education in Wartime

"I don't know how he had access, but he had access to [an] American textbook. So then, I took those bookkeeping classes I think when I was fifteen [or] sixteen, and I really enjoyed it. And the book was wonderful; usually, when we would see American textbooks, you could smell the paper and that was fresh in my memory."

Hải Nguyễn attended Lasalle Taberd Saigon during his childhood, a French Catholic school located in District 1 of Saigon. Currently, it is now the Trần Đại Nghĩa Specialist High School, but the alumni of Lasalle Taberd Saigon have set up a memorial website. Continual updates and a detailed archive, specifically one account written in English titled Memories of Taberd Saigon High School details a very keen sense of nostalgia recognize the diaspora of students as a result of the postwar effort. Hải noted that he had seen this website before, though he did not comment on it other than saying that students of this school would typically go overseas for their college education. The school is now the Trần Đại Nghĩa Specialist High School. 

In addition to being a competitive school, wartime loomed over his education. During the Tet Offensive, for example, school was cancelled from about February of 1968 until September of the 1968, the beginning of the next school year. In the interview, he recounts that occasionally, students in his class would not return in the next year, because—as he would later find out—they had been drafted to fight for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam at the age of eighteen. After completing his education here and graduating from this school, he left to attend a university in Paris, France.

According to a Hungarian diplomat's account in Vo's Saigon: A History, being drafted by Hà Nội was essentially permanent, and there was draft resistance in the People's Republic of Viet Nam (PRVN) as well.  Whichever side youth were growing up in, they did not shy away from avoiding wartime obligations mandated by the government—for Hải in the RVN, it was school.

The following excerpt is from 00:11:47 to 00:17:34 in the full interview.

Family During and After the War

While Hải's parents were not directly affiliated with wartime activities, they—like many other families in Saigon as described in other oral history interviews—participated in the war effort somehow. One of his relatives went to a military academy, which Hải presumed to be for volunteers. His brother and brother-in-law (married to his sister) were soldiers, and they had been on active duty during the Tet Offensive.  In 2014, Jonathan Shin interviewed Alex Luu, who had been a refugee during the fall of Saigon at the age of eight. This interview was part of the Vietnamese American Oral History Project in 2014. His recollection of his flight from Saigon corroborates what Hải tells us from an outside perspective—people clinging onto helicopters, leaving behind family members, being fortunate enough to have connections with Americans. 

"People [were] fighting to get on the ship, the plane; and they had no relationship with the Americans or anybody [for the matter]. I kind of [pauses] basically lost hope after that. And I said, 'Okay, I’m on my own now.'"

When he left to attend university in Paris, he wrote letters to his family in Saigon, but he lost contact with them in the chaos of the postwar. For a while, he was unsure of whether his family had survived. When he found out that his family had indeed made it out and was in California, he had initially tried to get a tourist visa to visit, but was denied due to the tenuous sociopolitical atmosphere at the time.  He finally reunited with his family in his father's last moments and has stayed in California ever since. According the data compiled by Elijah Alperin and Jeanne Batalova, who wrote Vietnamese Immigrants in the United States for the Migration Policy Institute, very few Vietnamese immigrants would have been granted residence in the United States due to familial relations in the immediate years after the official end of the Viet Nam War. 

The following excerpt is from 01:09:19 to 01:14:22 in the full interview.

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