This book is a collection of stories that portray life as it is lived today under the shadow of the repressive and corrupt communist regime that now rules in Vietnam. The characters who live in these pages represent many levels of social class in the early 21st century in Vietnam.The stories illuminate the hardships and the soul-crushing routine of day-to-day life in a society governed by bullying bureaucrats and petty apparatchiks. The reader will meet orphaned children who wander the streets—selling newspapers or lottery tickets, collecting rubbish in exchange for a few spoonfuls of rice. There are stories of honest and patriotic intellectuals who have lost their way in a world that does not value their accomplishments. There are also sympathetic communists who now question their ideology and want to find a better way, but they cannot act for fear of economic hardship and even imprisonment. Another story addresses the issue of young women who have become victims of human trafficking, sold like cattle to rich foreigners. The title story, “The Rain still Falls in Saigon,” describes the return of an expatriate to her native land and her feelings of nostalgia and sadness as she surveys her homeland from an outsider’s perspective. All of the stories reflect the tears that the Vietnamese people have been crying for their country for more than 65 years.Doug BurkeEditor-at-large

CBS camera-man Mike Marriott was on the last plane to escape from Danang before it fell in the spring of 1975. The scene was pure chaos: thousands of panic-stricken Vietnamese storming the airliner, soldiers shooting women and children to get aboard first, refugees being trampled to death. Marriott remembers standing at the door of the aft stairway, which was gaping open as the plane took off. "There were five Vietnamese below me on the steps. As the nose of the aircraft came up, because of the force and speed of the aircraft, the Vietnamese began to fall off. One guy managed to hang on for a while, but at about 600 feet he let go and just floated off--just like a skydiver.... What was going through my head was, I've got to survive this, and at the same time, I've got to capture this on film. This is the start of the fall of a country. This country is gone. This is history, right here and now." In Tears Before the Rain, a stunning oral history of the fall of South Vietnam, Larry Engelmann has gathered together the testimony of seventy eyewitnesses (both American and Vietnamese) who, like Mike Marriott, capture the feel of history "right here and now." We hear the voices of nurses, pilots, television and print media figures, the American Ambassador Graham Martin, the CIA station chief Thomas Polgar, Vietnamese generals, Amerasian children, even Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers. Through this extraordinary range of perspectives, we experience first-hand the final weeks before Saigon collapsed, from President Thieu's cataclysmic withdrawal from Pleiku and Kontum, (Colonel Le Khac Ly, put in command of the withdrawal, recalls receiving the order: "I opened my eyes large, large, large. I thought I wasn't hearing clearly") to the last-minute airlift of Americans from the embassy courtyard and roof ("I remember when the bird ascended," says Stuart Herrington, who left on one of the last helicopters, "It banked, and there was the Embassy, the parking lot, the street lights. And the silence"). Touching, heroic, harrowing, and utterly unforgettable, these dramatic narratives illuminate one of the central events of modern history. "It was like being at Waterloo," concludes Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes. "It was so important, so historical. And today it is still very obvious that we Americans have not recovered from Vietnam....Nothing else in my lifetime was as important as that--as important as Vietnam."

A memoir by a former Vietnamese refugee who became a U.S. Marine, Quang Pham’s A Sense of Duty is an affecting story of fate, hope, and the aftermath of the most divisive war the United States has ever fought. This heartfelt salute to the spirit of America is also the account of the author’s reunion with his long-absent father, Hoa Pham, himself a devoted officer who saw combat firsthand as a South Vietnamese fighter pilot. Hoa’s revelations about his wartime experience leave Quang even more conflicted about his service in the Marines in the first Gulf War, and after years of struggling to reconnect with each other and the homeland they left behind, the two set out on a final, profound quest—to make sense of the war in Vietnam. Tracing Quang Pham’s uniquely spirited yet agonizing journey from his experiences as an uprooted refugee to his becoming a combat aviator, A Sense of Duty reveals the turmoil of a family torn apart and reunited by the fortunes of war. It is an American journey like no other.

"A Sense of Duty" explores the inner conflicts of a young man caught in the often contradictory forces of national identity, loyalty, truth and trust in the aftermath of America's most divisive war.

This is my experience in the early Vietnam War as a non-combat soldier in the United States Air Force. It is about a very special and secret aircraft that I was involved in the early set-up of the project called The Patricia Lynn Project. It will cover my experiences throughout the year and those of the aircraft I worked on during the year. It also covers the people I worked with and for during that year. It will cover the battle damage to the aircraft and many experiences as told by the pilots. It also tells of my experiences in the country of Vietnam, including my own leisure time. It tells detailed information about the special modifications of the aircraft and the importance of the aircraft in the entire Vietnam War.

Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.