40 years after the end of the Vietnam War, collections of documents and artifacts detailing the attempted mass migration from South Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon are now available digitally, thanks to a grant received by Texas Tech University's Vietnam Center and Archive.
Applications showing the process behind the Orderly Departure Program (ODP), a UN program intended to aid South Vietnamese and American collaborators escape the country's new communist crackdown after Saigon's fall - were made digital after a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHCRP).
Amy Mondt, an assistant archivist at the Vietnam Center, said the ODP created a way for South Vietnamese at risk of relocation or punishment by their North Vietnamese counterparts to safely escape the country.
"A lot of people were dying [trying to escape by boat], so they created the orderly departure program to help alleviate that problem," Mondt said. "[To] let the people get out of the country and stop this boat exodus, basically - because also, if they ended up back in Vietnam, it was illegal for them to do this. So they would get in trouble and end up in the re-education camps again. So the Orderly Departure Program files, or program itself, was basically: people could apply to leave the country, and they would fill out an application with all their information and why they wanted to leave and where they wanted to go, and certain countries agreed to take a certain number of refugees, and the US was one of them."
Aside from allowing worldwide unlimited access to the documents, the digitization grant is acting to preserve a side of the war - and the people - that was at risk of being lost.
"And in some cases, the information in these applications is like all they had of their family and their history," Mondt said. "Because so many of them, when the fall of Saigon happened, they destroyed papers, their uniforms, things like that, so they wouldn’t be retaliated against. So this documentation of their family, their history, what they did – it’s all they have left."
The digitization is being hailed as a victory for not just the Vietnam Center and Archive, said reference archivist Sheon Montgomery, but as a gain for wartime friendships and connections to be revived.
"I think it’s a very significant collection to make available," Montgomery said. "Both for the short term, and for the people who are still alive, who can maybe reconnect with friends and family, or Americans connecting with counterparts, but also just to retain access to a cultural history that would be lost because they lost. And lost their country."
A mix of South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese and American students were on hand to digitize each artifact, and Montgomery said the digitization process challenged several different perspectives among them.
"We started out with mostly Vietnamese students, currently enrolled at Tech, and so we had a mix there too," Montgomery said. "The ones that were from North Vietnam had a very different perspective on the materials they were handling, because of how they had been informed about the South. And the people involved in the conflict, as opposed to the ones who, say, came from Saigon or Hu? in the south, so they had completely different family stories coming towards the project. And so for some it was validated but for others they needed to kind of rethink things."
Digitization is on the horizon for other Vietnam Center and Archive collections, due to the success of the most recent collection welcomed to the digital sphere, which Mondt sees as a chance for greater context of the war, even four decades after its end.
"If you don’t know how the civil rights movement affected the war in Vietnam, or you don’t know how the politics in the protest movement that was going on in the US affected the soldier morale, then eventually the Vietnam war is going to be ‘that war that we lost,’ and that was it," Mondt said.
"It will be just dismissed."