Under the Vietnam Flags

By Johnny Lac

Under the Vietnam Flags
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This was the long war that my life has walked in - a long journey that I and other people made under the Vietnam regimes, during the Vietnam War, the Terror War, and the under the forces of the Communist government. Even today, this very moment, it is unforgettably tragic to remember April 30, 1975 the day of Saigon's fall, and what followed when the War was over.
Vietcong cadres were outlawed. A violated peace engulfed the center of South Vietnam. Both the North and South Vietnamese people had poured out their blood and their treasure to fight in the war. The people in the south were compelled to come together to fight what always appeared to be overwhelming numbers from the north.
In the aftermath, an internal war out of the view of television cameras began in the South. Once known as soldiers, civil servants, intellectuals, artisans and business merchants, the communist socialist government renamed them capitalists and bourgeoisie. Property was seized. Businesses were destroyed, confiscated or nationalized. A torrent of ideological euphemisms swept over the country. Re-education camps were established for the powerful or the skilled. Thousands more were forcibly marched into so-called new economic zones in the jungle. Against the ideological tide pulling people landward, a steady stream flowed seaward. Through a black market of go-betweens, smugglers, gold, diamonds, and dank cargo holds, the stream flowed.
From 1975 to 1985, thousands set out to sea in leaking boats. Waiting off shore, pirates swarmed the unsuspecting boats. Murder and rape joined robbery as the standard ritual. Whenever pirates left, the others came. Thousands more perished. Awaiting those whosurvived the sea journey were the refugee camps. They had to wait many years before they could be resettled in the west.
However, in the era of historic Vietnam today and the future, there are big changes in peoples' lives and better life for a modern living because of doi moi plans for improving things under the Socialist Republic of Vietnam!

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