Return to Vietnam After 30 Years

Nov. 20, 2006 — -- Newsweek White House photographer Khue Bui was just a baby when his family was airlifted out of Saigon on a U.S. military helicopter one day before the South Vietnamese capital fell in April 1975.

On Sunday, Bui flew back into his hometown for the first time. Once again he traveled on a U.S. military plane, this time aboard Air Force One with President Bush.

With no memories of his short time here and only a relative's address, Bui went in search of a piece of his past.

Bui was a 1-year-old when the North Vietnamese army was approaching Saigon. On April 20, 1975, his father, a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese army, decided to move the family out of the country.

The family boarded a bus to get to Tan Son Nhut airport where it could attempt to get on a U.S. helicopter out of Saigon.

"My dad told me before he passed away that we were on a bus circling the airport trying to get onto the airport to get evacuated but the security guards weren't allowing the bus on the base or the airport and they weren't allowing any people on the airport," Bui said.

"So my dad -- I think he was carrying my brother, my mom was carrying me, we got off the bus. My dad had a backpack, which he said had some cash and gold in it. He handed it to a security guard who let the four of us onto the airport and from there once I guess you were onto the [helicopter] you were [evacuated] out."

That helicopter took the Bui family to a waiting U.S. military ship off the coast of Vietnam.

Before sunrise on Monday morning, Bui went off in a cab in search of the address stamped on the dog tag he wore as a young child fleeing the country in 1975.

The house was in the middle of the block on a long, narrow alley just off a main road in Ho Chi Minh City.

It was in a nice neighborhood filled with families and small children running around before heading off to school.

The sound of several people speaking English in their alley woke up several of the neighbors including the couple living in the house where Bui's family once lived.