South Vietnam

The gig: David Tran, 68, founded hot sauce company Huy Fong Foods Inc. in Chinatown in 1980 and a few years later introduced Sriracha sauce to the U.S. His Sriracha, a version of a hot sauce originating in Si Racha, Thailand, quickly spread through the San Gabriel Valley and eventually the nation. The fiery red concoction in the clear bottle with the distinctive green cap and rooster logo has since gone mainstream: Google "Sriracha" and you'll find such things as cookbooks, water bottles, iPhone cases and T-shirts.

Re "The Vietnam syndrome," Opinion, May 5 Frank Snepp, a former CIA analyst who was in Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975, worries that we may not have learned the lessons of our war in that country. He may have missed the most important lesson. Vietnam today is a small country that represents no great threat to the United States or its allies. The collapse of South Vietnam didn't lead to falling dominoes or global disaster. We should ponder this outcome when we hear warnings of doom about our withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan or our refusal to intervene in Syria.

The war was still raging that day 15 years ago when Vietnamese nuns heard the cries of a baby boy stuffed in a garbage can and took him inside their orphanage to raise. Today, Nguyen Thanh Binh, the son of a black American who went home and a Vietnamese mother who abandoned him, shares the plight of thousands of Amerasian youths languishing in the decay of Vietnam, desperately trying to get out and find their fathers. "My circumstances are miserable," says Lam Anh Hong, 18, whose mother gave her away to a relative.

One girl gasps as the grainy black-and-white footage rolls: Women are screaming, thrusting their babies at soldiers boarding a helicopter. In the next scene, hundreds of refugees packed in the belly of a rickety boat rock in the ocean, desperately trying to flee their homeland after the fall of Saigon. Gathered in a Garden Grove office, young adults who grew up in the shadow of war watch the images, only tasting the horrors their parents and relatives endured when South Vietnam fell to Communist forces 38 years ago. For many in immigrant communities like Orange County's Little Saigon, the memory of April 30 - "Black April" to those who lived through it - has been passed on only through photographs, stories or rough video clips.

Almost 15 years have passed since a North Vietnamese army tank forced the gate of Saigon's Independence Palace, signaling the defeat of South Vietnam and the unification of the two countries under communism. Today, the sound of war still faintly reverberates throughout Saigon, now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City, where the Communist victory is tainted by what is, for many, a futile quest for prosperity. "Could it be that quite a few things here really haven't changed all that much?"

A bill in the General Assembly promoting the flag of the former South Vietnam died in a subcommittee after federal officials warned lawmakers that it could damage relations between the U.S. and Vietnam. The measure sparked concern among U.S. and Vietnamese officials after it passed the state House of Delegates last month. State Department officials urged several legislators to kill the bill.

The former commander-in-chief of the South Vietnamese Army and former president of the Republic of Vietnam, Gen. Nguyen Khanh, is scheduled to address the Orange County Forum, a public affairs organization. His talk, titled "The Economic War for Vietnam," is expected to focus on the possibility of Vietnam becoming a colony of China if the United States does not immediately invest in its economy. Khanh was born in South Vietnam in 1927.

Robert W. "Blowtorch Bob" Komer, 78, Army and CIA veteran sent to South Vietnam in 1967 to run the pacification program. That program, described as the battle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, ran parallel to the U.S. military effort. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had named Komer a year earlier as a presidential assistant to energize the shooting war, also gave him the pacification post. William E.

One of the most arresting images from the last days of the Vietnam War shows an unruly crowd rushing the door of a plane in Nha Trang, a rural seaside city north of Saigon. The focal point of the photograph is a balding, middle-aged American who is landing a jab to the head of a Vietnamese man desperate to board. The American is all grim determination; his jaw is clenched as he lunges right, extending his arm like a ramrod into the face of the intruder.

Frederick E. Nolting Jr., 78, a career diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. Nolting joined the U.S. Department of State in 1946 and then entered the foreign service. Before being sent to Saigon, he was a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Paris, deputy U.S. representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and alternate U.S. representative to the Atlantic Council. President John F. Kennedy named him ambassador to South Vietnam in April, 1961.

The gig: David Tran, 68, founded hot sauce company Huy Fong Foods Inc. in Chinatown in 1980 and a few years later introduced Sriracha sauce to the U.S. His Sriracha, a version of a hot sauce originating in Si Racha, Thailand, quickly spread through the San Gabriel Valley and eventually the nation. The fiery red concoction in the clear bottle with the distinctive green cap and rooster logo has since gone mainstream: Google "Sriracha" and you'll find such things as cookbooks, water bottles, iPhone cases and T-shirts.

Stanley Karnow, an award-winning author and journalist who combined insightful reporting with personal accounts and historical sweep in books on the Vietnam War and the Philippines and the critically acclaimed public television series that accompanied the works, died Sunday at his home in Potomac, Md. He was 87. Karnow had congestive heart failure and died in his sleep, said son Michael Karnow. A former correspondent for Time, the Washington Post and other publications, Karnow was one of the first U.S. journalists to report from Vietnam in the late 1950s, when American involvement in South Vietnam was still confined to a small group of advisors.

The eldest sibling in Vietnam's most enduring singing family, Duy Quang was known for holding audiences enthralled as he boomed out the ballads of yesteryear, many penned by his father, Pham Duy, who knew how to tug at a listener's heart with songs about folk life. So when news spread of Duy Quang's death, stores in Orange County's Little Saigon shuffled their displays to highlight his music. The performer, who had lung cancer, died Wednesday at Fountain Valley Regional Hospital and Medical Center.

Of the foreign journalists who had been alerted to a shocking political protest against South Vietnam's U.S.-supported government, only one - Malcolm Browne of the Associated Press - arrived in June 1963 to document it. His photos of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc setting himself ablaze on a Saigon street ran on front pages around the world and prompted President Kennedy to order a reevaluation of his administration's Vietnam policy. "No news picture in history has generated so much emotion as that one," Kennedy said, according to the 2006 book "Cold War Mandarin.

It was an about-face that outraged a generation displaced by war. Nguyen Cao Ky, the former South Vietnam leader known for ruthlessly defending democracy, was suddenly, at 73, rubbing shoulders with communist officials - something that seemed unthinkable to those who had fled the country during the painful days after the Vietnam War. Vietnamese Americans who had rallied around him felt betrayed, and Ky's once-revered stature in the small...

The Three Fates A Novel Linda Lê Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti New Directions: 172 pp., $15.95 paper Linda Lê is an extraordinary writer of scintillating French prose. Born in South Vietnam in 1963, she came to Paris as an adolescent and is now Vietnamese in the same way that Nabokov was Russian, writing in her adopted language with a kind of desolate grace. Still largely unknown in America, she has published a dozen books in France, including the 1997 novel "The Three Fates," which has just come out in the U.S. in a translation precisely rendered by Mark Polizzotti.

Shortly after noon on April 30, 1975, a mass of panicky Vietnamese refugees on Guam burst into tears. They had been huddling near the camp's operations center listening to the BBC. My mother was among the crowd of mostly women and elderly people. "The communists have entered Saigon. It's all over." The radio announcement quickly filtered throughout the camp. Our worst fears had been realized, for my father was still in Saigon, whereabouts unknown.

Whether through natural cataclysm, pestilence or genocide, the chronicle of history is rife with human dislocation. The Old World offered its uprooted the daunting spectre of the unknown. The new still offers America.

For decades now, the Pho Binh noodle cafe, tucked behind a tangle of parked motorcycles on Ly Chinh Thang Street, has served its trademark dish — "peace noodles." A survivor of Ho Chi Minh City's relentless real estate makeover, the seven-table eatery ladles out bowl after steaming bowl of the soup, made with strips of beef and piles of rice noodles, fresh basil and cilantro. Many of the appreciative customers are unaware of the very unpeaceful plot that unfolded long ago in the family rooms upstairs.

For more than a decade, a community group in Little Saigon has led the commemoration of the fall of Saigon, a day of reflection and unity in a place better known for its divisive politics and loud street protests. But this year, even the event marking the fall of South Vietnam to communist forces has given way to in-fighting. Members of the Vietnamese American Community of Southern California, which usually organizes the event, say the event has been stolen by an Orange County supervisor.