Fifty years have passed since American soldiers and their South Vietnamese allies fled Vietnam on what would become known as Black April – a time many in Orange County’s Vietnamese community remember as the day they lost their homeland.
Tháng Tư Đen or Black April commemorates the Fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Communist forces on April 30, 1975 after a month-long campaign into the southlands that would end the Vietnam War and start one of the largest refugee crises in history.
Kiet Huynh, a 71-year-old Garden Grove resident who fought against the communists for five years in Vietnam, said Black April anniversaries remind him of the lives lost on both sides during the war.
