"They too would like to be able to set foot on the ground where they started (in the United States), 40 years ago." "My aunts and uncles, they are all in their 80s and 90s now, a generation that is dying off,'' she said. They eventually were sponsored by a local family and built a life in Orange County, Calif. Their father, a South Vietnam Army colonel, was held in Vietnam and not allowed out for another 14 years. We don't walk around with the flag every day.''ĭuong was 18 when she arrived at Camp Pendleton in 1975 with her mother, eight younger siblings and a large extended family. "We are the symbol of the old South Vietnam. "The disappointment is, why can we not compromise?'' says Huong Duong, an internal medicine physician from Tustin, Calif. The decision has drawn strong opposition from some Vietnamese Americans who had planned to attend, and sparked an online petition drive at asking that the event continue as scheduled, without the flag, at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, 60 miles south in San Diego County. "But again, we have to hear the voices of the community first, and what they want.'' "We are all very, very sad that we couldn't make any compromises,'' says Sophie Tran, a spokeswoman for the organizing committee. government won't allow them to fly the yellow-and-red flag of the old South Vietnam while on base.
Organizers this month abruptly canceled a long-scheduled event commemorating the 40th anniversary at the California military base where tens of thousands of refugees first landed in the United States after the South Vietnam government fell April 30, 1975. Forty years after the fall of Saigon, symbols of the failed war in Vietnam survive as a painful, divisive legacy for hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Americans now living and prospering in the United States.
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