The fall of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos to communist armies in 1975 caused a massive outpouring of refugees from these nations. This work focuses on the refugee crisis and the American aid workers--a colorful crew of malcontents and mavericks drawn from the State Department, military, USAID, CIA, and the Peace Corps--who took on the task of helping those most impacted by the Vietnam War. Experts in Southeast Asia, its languages, cultures and people, they saved hundreds of thousands of lives. They were the very antithesis of the "Ugly American."

For half a century (ever since the Japanese invasion of 1942), much of Southeast Asia has been racked by war. In the last 20 years alone, some three million people fled their homes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. This book is their story. It is also the story of the international community's response. Spearheading this was the United Nations agency responsible, UNHCR. It pioneered innovations like the Orderly Departure Programme, anti-piracy and rescue-at-sea efforts, and later on, ambitious reintegration projects for returnees. Today the camps in Southeast Asia are closed. Half a million people have returned home. Over two million have started new lives in the United States, Canada, Australia and France. This compelling book is the history of this modern exodus. It also takes stock and poses important questions. How did the flight of refugees and international response evolve? How do we measure the achievements and the failures of that international effort? What has been the legacy in Asia itself? And what lessons can be drawn for use in other refugee situations around the world?

This poignant collection of oral histories tells the stories of nine Laotians, four Cambodians and nine Vietnamese: what their lives were like before 1975, what happened after the Communist takeover that made them decide to flee their native countries, and how they escaped. The storytellers (housewife, Amerasian child, schoolteacher, government clerk, military officer, security agent, Buddhist monk, artist) create a broad and moving picture of the new realities of contemporary Indochina.

Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refuge(es) examines how the Vietnam War has continued to serve as a stage for the shoring up of American imperialist adventure and for the (re)production of American and Vietnamese American identities. Focusing on the politics of war memory and commemoration, this book retheorizes the connections among history, memory, and power and refashions the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and refugee studies not around the narratives of American exceptionalism, immigration, and transnationalism but around the crucial issues of war, race, and violence—and the history and memories that are forged in the aftermath of war. At the same time, the book moves decisively away from the “damage-centered” approach that pathologizes loss and trauma by detailing how first- and second-generation Vietnamese have created alternative memories and epistemologies that challenge the established public narratives of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people. Explicitly interdisciplinary, Body Counts moves between the humanities and social sciences, drawing on historical, ethnographic, cultural, and virtual evidence in order to illuminate the places where Vietnamese refugees have managed to conjure up social, public, and collective remembering.

After the Americans withdrew from the Vietnam War, their Indochinese allies faced imprisonment, torture and death under communist regimes. The Tai Dam, an ethnic group from northern Vietnam, campaigned for sanctuary, writing letters to 30 U.S. governors in 1975. Only Robert D. Ray of Iowa agreed to help. Ray created an agency to relocate the Tai Dam, advocated for the greater admission of "boat people" fleeing Vietnam, launched a Cambodian relief program that generated $540,000, and lobbied for the Refugee Act of 1980. Interviews with 30+ refugees and officials inform this study, which also chronicles how the Tai Dam adapted to life in the Midwest and the Iowans' divided response.

The biggest diaspora in Vietnamese history occurred between 1975 and 1992, when more than two million people fled by boat to escape North Vietnam's oppressive communist regime. Before this well-known exodus from Vietnam's shores, however, there was a massive population shift within the country. In 1954, one million fled from north to south to escape war, famine, and the communist land reform campaign. Many of these refugees went on to flee Vietnam altogether in the 1970s and 1980s, and the experiences of 1954 influenced the later diaspora in other ways as well. This book reassesses the causes and dynamics of the 1975-92 diaspora. It begins with a discussion of Vietnam from 1939 to 1954, then looks closely at the 1954 "Operation Exodus" and the subsequent resettlements. From here the focus turns to the later events that drove hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee their homeland in 1975 and the years that followed. Planning for escape, choosing routes, facing pirates at sea, and surviving the refugee camps are among the many topics covered. Stories of individual escapees are provided throughout. The book closes with a look at the struggles and achievements of the resettled Vietnamese.

The fall of Saigon in April 1975 resulted in the largest and most ambitious refugee resettlement effort in Canada’s history. Running on Empty presents the challenges and successes of this bold refugee resettlement program. It traces the actions of a few dozen men and women who travelled to seventy remote refugee camps, worked long days in humid conditions, subsisted on dried noodles and green tea, and sometimes slept on their worktables while rats scurried around them – all in order to resettle thousands of people displaced by war and oppression. After initially accepting 7,000 refugees from camps in Guam, Hong Kong, and military bases in the US in 1975, Canada passed the 1976 Immigration Act to establish new refugee procedures and introduce private refugee sponsorship. In July of 1979, the federal government under Prime Minister Joe Clark announced that Canada would accept an unprecedented 50,000 refugees – later increased to 60,000 – more than half of whom would be sponsored by ordinary Canadians. Running on Empty presents gripping first-hand accounts of the government officials tasked with selecting refugees from eight different countries, receiving and matching them with sponsors, and helping churches, civic organizations, and groups of neighbours to receive and integrate the newcomers in cities, towns, and rural communities across Canada. Timely and inspiring, Running on Empty offers essential lessons for governments, organizations, and individuals trying to come to grips with refugee crises in the twenty-first century.

Riveting stories by refugees who fled Vietnam.

Vietnamese refugees fleeing the fall of South Vietnam faced a paradox. The same guilt-ridden America that only reluctantly accepted them expected, and rewarded, expressions of gratitude for their rescue. Meanwhile, their status as refugees ”as opposed to willing immigrants ”profoundly influenced their cultural identity. Phuong Tran Nguyen examines the phenomenon of refugee nationalism among Vietnamese Americans in Southern California. Here, the residents of Little Saigon keep alive nostalgia for the old regime and, by extension, their claim to a lost statehood. Their refugee nationalism is less a refusal to assimilate than a mode of becoming, in essence, a distinct group of refugee Americans. Nguyen examines the factors that encouraged them to adopt this identity. His analysis also moves beyond the familiar rescue narrative to chart the intimate yet contentious relationship these Vietnamese Americans have with their adopted homeland. Nguyen sets their plight within the context of the Cold War, an era when Americans sought to atone for broken promises but also saw themselves as providing a sanctuary for people everywhere fleeing communism.

Very little has been written about the U.S. Navy in Vietnam in the immediate post-Korean War era, nor has the magnitude of American participation in the resettlement of Vietnam refugees following the 1954 Geneva Conference been explored. Beginning in the fall of 1954, U.S. Navy ships, as a part of Task Force 90, helped to relocate thousands of displaced North Vietnamese to South Vietnam following the separation of the nation at the 17th parallel. What those sailors accomplished during the three hundred days of Operation Passage to Freedom forever changed the lives of more than 310,000 Vietnamese who traveled on their ships. In Operation Passage to Freedom Ronald B. Frankum, Jr. recounts the events surrounding this enormous humanitarian evacuation that was the American military's first major involvement with the Vietnamese people. Based on archival research and interviews with more than forty sailors who participated in Task Force 90, Operation Passage to Freedom illuminates a mission that has been all but forgotten and also explores how the initial humanitarian involvement of the United States in Vietnam eventually led to massive military involvement in the 1960s and 1970s.