Loan Herndon poses for a photo with her family on a recent day outside their Mustang Island home. Standing second from right is her husband, Mark Herndon. From left are her sons, Ronald, George, Sydney and Mark. Loan was born in Vietnam. She and her mother were visiting the U.S. in 1975 when Saigon fell, concluding the Vietnam War. Loan has lived in the U.S. ever since. Thursday, April 30, is the 45th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Staff photo by Dan Parker
In 1975, a 5-year-old girl named Loan went with her mother on what they thought would be just a short wartime visit to America from their native Vietnam.
They were in for an awful shock.
At the time, South Vietnam was a lot closer to falling to its enemies than they’d realized. Before they could get back home, South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, fell to the North Vietnamese. Thursday, April 30, marks the 45th anniversary of the North Vietnamese march into Saigon.
Loan and her mother, Anh Nguyen, were stuck. They couldn’t return to Vietnam, and their family in Vietnam couldn’t escape to America to join them.
Mother and daughter were forced to immediately begin new lives in the United States with little more than the clothes on their backs.
It’s been quite an odyssey for the two these past 45 years. Today, Anh lives in Houston, and Loan (pronounced “Lawn”) lives on Mustang Island, just outside the Port Aransas city limits.
They are naturalized U.S. citizens.
Loan Herndon of Mustang Island is a native of Vietnam who, with her mother, unexpectedly took up residence in the United States immediately after the Vietnam War ended in 1975. Loan, about 5 years old, is holding a doll in this family photo. Her mother is seated at left. The photo was shot in the home of relatives in Savannah, Ga. Loan’s uncle, Charlie Glover, is seated at right with his sons, Vinh, 6, and Hanh, 8. Glover married Loan’s great aunt, a Vietnam native, while he was a member of the U.S. military serving in Vietnam. Courtesy photo
It was a wrenching experience to be separated from close relatives and begin anew in a country they never had even visited before.
But, to this day, Loan is glad that she and her mother didn’t get back to Saigon before it fell.
“Definitely, you wouldn’t want to be living in Vietnam at that time, so whatever happened, it was for the good,” Loan said.
Many South Vietnamese citizens were put in prison and re-education camps. Food became scarce for many. Possessions were confiscated by the war’s victors.
“No one who got out would wish any differently,” she said. “We could have died over there.”
Today, Loan has a good life on Mustang Island.
“I look at my husband and children, and I’m so grateful, it makes me want to cry,” she said. “It’s unbelievable that my path would even cross with my husband, much less have my four beautiful children. It is fate and destiny.”
Life in Vietnam
Today, Loan Herndon is a Mustang Island resident. A little more than 45 years ago, she was a little girl living in Vietnam. In this photo, 4-year-old Loan, seated at right on the table, poses for a photo with her grandparents, Dinh and Ho Nguyen, and her cousin, Young Nguyen, on Young’s first birthday on a day in the early 1970s in Vietnam. Ho was a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese army. Within a couple of years after this photo was taken, Loan and her mother were living in the United States. Courtesy photo
Loan was born in Saigon in 1969.
Her father, Qua Le-ba, was a college student studying economics. Her mother was a homemaker.
Loan said she remembers having a happy home life with her parents in Saigon. Also living in her home were her maternal grandparents, Dinh and Ho Nguyen; and Loan’s mother’s sisters, Hanh and Hao Nguyen.
While Loan doesn’t remember witnessing combat up close, she recalls hearing what she believes today were the sounds of battle on the outskirts of Saigon.
“A lot of noise,” she said. “Everyone said it was fireworks. But, looking back, I think it was bombs.”
At one point, her grandfather – a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese military – told his relatives that things were looking grim for South Vietnam.
“He warned my family: ‘Look, this war is not going good, and so maybe we might need to leave the country,’ ” Loan said. “The family said, ‘No way, that’s not happening.’ But my mother said, ‘Why don’t we go visit my auntie and just visit and see what America is like? Just go visit.’ ”
Loan’s mother’s aunt, Betty Glover, lived in Savannah, Georgia. She was a Vietnamese native who had married a member of the U.S. Air Force. He brought her to the U.S. to live in the mid-1960s.
But Loan’s grandmother was against the idea of Loan traveling to the U.S., even though it was just supposed to be for a short visit.
Loan’s mother “almost didn’t take me, because my grandmother didn’t want me to travel so far at a young age,” she said.
Loan, too, didn’t want to go. She was close to her grandmother and didn’t want to be away from her.
But, leave, they did. It was the spring of 1975.
“I remember the plane ride over was really scary,” Loan said. “I’d never been on a plane, and it was just a really long flight.”
Loa believes she and her mother had been in Savannah for less than a week when they learned that Saigon was falling to the enemy.
“I just remember a lot of crying all the time – praying and crying,” she said. “I remember thinking I’d never see my grandmother again.”
With the North Vietnamese in charge, the men in Loan’s family – along with thousands of other South Vietnamese – were being put into re-education camps and prison.
Starting over
Loan and her mother ended up living with her auntie’s family for several years. They had to rebuild their lives, starting with almost nothing.
“We only had a couple of weeks’ worth of clothing, no pictures, nothing,” she said.
Her mother spoke only a little English, and Loan spoke none.
“I watched a lot of Sesame Street to learn English,” Loan said.
She began attending kindergarten in Savannah.
“I remember always standing out,” she said. “… Like (in) all childhoods, there was a lot of taunting (for) being different. Kind of cruel, a lot of it. But the teachers were wonderful. I got a lot of love and compassion from teachers.”
The town embraced Loan and her mother.
“They took us in, the whole community there, the churches, the school,” she said. “They realized this mother and daughter they had were basically refugees here.”
Loan learned from churches about Easter and Thanksgiving.
“Churches were really a big part of my childhood, teaching me about the American culture. … I had a very good, warm, loving childhood through the community.
Her mother was able to get jobs working as a custodian and in a school cafeteria, but she wasn’t happy.
“She was busy, working all the time, stressing,” Loan said.
They couldn’t communicate with their family back in Vietnam by phone. They exchanged letters, but Loan’s relatives in Vietnam couldn’t be open about their lives under the new regime. They always had to be mindful that their communications were likely to be monitored by the government.
Loan said her family engaged in “cautious letter writing.”
It wasn’t until years later, when some of Loan’s relatives were able to travel to America, that Loan and her mother learned the realities of what had happened to the family they left behind.
“They didn’t have enough to eat,” she said. “Their homes were all taken, their property It was just bad. To this day, that is why we don’t have any heirlooms from our lives, and that goes the same with many Vietnamese people who escaped war. They escaped with, really, nothing.”
Moving to Texas
It was in 1980, when Loan was 11 years old, that her mother decided they would move from Savannah to Houston, where there was a sizable Vietnamese population.
“It was not a good childhood,” Loan said. “It was very hard. It wasn’t like Savannah. Savannah was wonderful. But, in Houston, you’re in a bigger city, you’re in a rat race with everyone else, in a housing project with a lot of other people that escaped the war. It was really bizarre.”
In Texas, Loan’s mother made a number of entrepreneurial efforts.
One after another, she opened a few restaurants and a bar, none of which worked out.
With Vietnamese immigrant partners, she owned a bay shrimp boat in Seabrook for a time. Many Vietnamese immigrants were getting into shrimping at that time.
But shrimping didn’t work out for Loan’s mother, either.
“A lot of white boat owners felt like they were taking over, so the KKK came in,” Loan said.
Members of the Ku Klux Klan sponsored a rally and burned a cross to protest the Vietnamese presence.
Loan’s mother never had personal encounters with the KKK, but she became plenty concerned.
“My mother said that’s not a good business to be in, so she got out of it,” Loan said.
A few years after moving to Texas, Loan’s mother married an American man, James Rogers, an accountant.
“He was a wonderful man,” Loan said. “He loved my mom and loved me. He got us out of our situation and took care of us.”
Loan went to high school in Spring Branch, then attended the University of Houston for a short time. She later moved to Corpus Christi.
After two divorces, Loan married Mark, and they have been married for 18 years. Mark is president of the Gulf King shrimp company.
Loan has four sons: George, 21, who is studying engineering at Texas A&M University; Sydney, 15, and Mark Jr., 14, both Port Aransas High School students; and Ronald, 12, a sixth grader at Brundrett Middle School.
Relatives leave Vietnam
Loan does have relatives who were able to get out of Vietnam after the war was over. It just took some time for that to happen.
About 10 years after Saigon fell, Loan’s aunt, Hanh, saved enough money to pay for a spot aboard a small boat packed with others desperate to flee Vietnam, and the vessel shoved off for the Philippines. But, during the voyage, the people running the boat turned on her, threw her overboard and left her to die, Loan said.
She “washed up” on a beach and eventually made her way to a refugee camp in the Philippines, Loan said.
Loan’s mother worked to sponsor her sister so she could immigrate to the U.S., and after two years of efforts, they were reunited. That was in the early 1980s. Today, Hanh lives in Houston, just a few miles from Loan’s mother.
Other relatives were able to immigrate in the 1990s, after relations between the U.S. and Vietnam were normalized.
Loan’s father eventually moved to Toronto. He remarried. Loan has four half-siblings from that relationship, she said.
A return?
Loan, herself, never has traveled back to Vietnam. Part of that is because she’s been busy raising a family.
But she wants to visit. Maybe in a couple of years, she said.
“I feel like there’s something missing in my life – a connection, an ancestral connection,” Loan said. “I remember images. I remember a feeling. … We (all) would just like to go back to where we were when we were young. All of us feel this connection to when we were young. Nostalgic, I guess you could call it.”
Make no mistake about it, however: Loan is grateful for the life she has today on Mustang Island, she said.
“I can’t say that enough,” she said. “Just grateful. There have been so many people who have been through so many traumatic things. Not just the Vietnamese, but Americans. Veterans have been through so much, too. No one is sane after that war.”
Continuing, she said, “When I see a Vietnam vet, I say thank you to them. Their heart was in the right place. They tried to do the right thing. They are traumatized by their ordeal just as I am traumatized in my family.
“What can you say, but you’re grateful … for what this country is and what it stands for?” Loan said. “You’re not going to find a Vietnamese person who doesn’t feel that way.”
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