There’s a different story for every “boat person” who escaped communist Vietnam. For one man, Binh Tran, his journey involved a boat he built with some friends.
As the last Americans pulled out of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975, the communist North Vietnamese Army and the south’s communist Viet Cong forces captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, also known as the Republic of Vietnam. The shift, now referred to as the end of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon, drastically changed the lives of the South Vietnamese people.
