The Soundtrack of One Life out of 108 Billion, Entry 4: What Does the Fall of Saigon Have to Do with "That's the Way I Like It" by KC and the Sunshine Band and Central Utah?

Photo by Steve Brown: U.S.S. Midway, San Diego 2012

April 30th, 1975.  Dense gray topical skies.  Palm fronds whip every which way as helicopters touch down outside the American Embassy.  Petroleum burns black along the skyline. Panicked people run down the street, bright, silk floral print shirts, trailing them.  A mother caries a baby in her one arm, drags another child (half running, half falling) behind.  There is pushing, shoving at a white iron gate, terror in the eyes, dread for those too late.  A mother turned a way, sobs and collapses to the ground.  Men claw their way up a wall. Over all the noise is the steady rhythm of the blades.

Lan, age 9, is part of the symphony that is the Fall of Saigon.  What specific clamor wakes her up in the middle of the night while sleeping next to her little sister in the belly of an aircraft carrier on her way to a distant land, I do not know.

Reports came in from the outskirts that the North Vietnamese were moving in.  10:48  Kissinger was notified of the desire to activate "the Frequent Wind" evacuation plan.  Approved minutes later.  The radio was to play Irvin Berlin's "White Christmas," the signal for American personnel to move immediately to the evacuation points.  Technology is always at the hands of humans.  Helicopters moved in.  American service men would be the first.  South Vietnamese elite (those who would be retaliated against) had a chance if they had the money, the political ties, the luck at being at the right place at the right time.  It happened so incredibly fast.

What is her story?  What are the images that flash behind her soft eyelids kicked about during REM like silk sheets on hot humid night while she cuddles close to her little sister?

None of this I know about while playing on the merry-go-round behind the swimming pool or floating a pop can down an irrigation ditch while walking home from school.  None of this can I even imagine when my stepfather asks me if I want to drive out to the trailer park by the mushroom plant (an indoor farm) to meet the new families from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

I don't believe I saw her that day.  I could have.  There were so many.  Four cultures briefly coming together.  There was sweet tea that I'd never tasted, chicken fights (boys carrying each other on their shoulders) in the gravel lane, and delicious dishes of meat and rice that men brought out from their single-wide trailers to show hospitality.  There was lot of pointing, a lot of laughing (the only common language), a lot of saying "that number 1," meaning good, and a lot of saying "that number 10," meaning bad, and I suppose a lot of pretending too as worlds collided in a small trailer court next to an indoor mushroom farm beside a freeway in a big, western valley filled with yellow wild rye, sage brush, and black rubble-rocked extinct volcanoes.

When I do see her a few weeks before the end of third grade, I'm drawn to her beauty the way only a child can be: intently, unpretentiously, without fear or guile.  The two third-grade classes have combined, and we are watching a film about these two science guys who journey through the body. It's set up like a news cast, and they are following the spread of influenza through the blood stream. The class has seen it a couple of times, but it's our favorite.  We're on the floor, and I'm throwing pieces of paper at Lynn because I like her. The secretary walks in with three Asian kids and our teacher stops the movie.  The two boys I already know from the evening my dad took me down to the trailer court.  But I don't look at them long.  Lan is all I see. Her long black hair and dark, warm, almond shaped eyes have me.  And she dresses cool too. Tight, white bell-bottom slacks, a white t-shirt, and a silk flower-print disco shirt, untucked and unbuttoned.

This is before my body chemistry changes in seventh grade and shyness kicks in.  It's not long until we are chasing each other during recess, not long before she's at the top of the slide, swinging her hips, that silk shirt open, blowing in the breeze as she sings, "That's the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it," her long black hair swaying side to side.

All at once I get disco.

But I know nothing, absolutely nothing of what she has seen or the world she has come from.  All I know is that smile has no boundaries.

I was a child growing up in a big, western valley, almost cut off from the realities of the twentieth century, but not quite.  A human catastrophe on the other side of the world gave me a great third and fourth grade that I otherwise wouldn't have experienced, a bit of positive fallout from a war destroyed the lives of millions.

See related post:  That's the Way, Uh-huh Uh-huh, I Like It: Second-Hand Memories of the USS Midway’s Rescue of 3,000 Vietnamese Political Refugees