When Naja Pham Lockwood was seven years old, she stole a plastic water canteen from another little girl as she boarded a US Navy ship. It was 1975, and her family was one of many fleeing Vietnam following the fall of Saigon.
“I need for you to run over to that girl and take her water canteen. She’s not going to make it,” Lockwood remembered her father telling her. “You need to survive.”
Lockwood and her family made it to Massachusetts as refugees that July, and they settled in Worcester. She brought her history with her and that was valuable when she wrote her bachelor’s thesis at Boston University on Ho Chi Minh and the politics of modern-day Vietnam.
“Maybe because there were no Vietnamese around me, I really searched for my identity on so many levels,” she said. As a student, she volunteered in Cambridge at the Phillips Brooks House Association. Now living in Utah, Lockwood works with the governor to support refugees.
Fifty years, two degrees, and two successful careers in investment banking and film production later, Lockwood has directed her own film, which explores the consequences of the Vietnam War for survivors and the refugee experience for emigrants now living in America.
“Đất lành, chim đậu (On healing land, birds perch),” which was screened on April 27 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library as part of the Vietnamese community’s Black April commemoration, centers narratively on Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph, “Saigon Execution.” It depicts Nguyễn Ngọc Loan shooting Viet Cong captain Nguyễn Văn Lém in the head during the 1968 Tet offensive, in which Viet Cong soldiers launched multiple attacks on South Vietnamese civilians and troops.
The first time Lockwood saw the photo as a young girl, she couldn’t sleep for weeks. “Every year during the fall of Vietnam … that photo would be shown on television,” she said. “I had the entire room lit up while I was sleeping.”
Her father, who had worked in intelligence for USAID, would sit her down and tell her stories to reassure her that the photo had a happy ending. He told her the Viet Cong captain, Văn Lém, had murdered most of a family earlier in the day before the photo was taken, but one of the children had survived and made his way to the United States – Huan Nguyen, who much later became the first Vietnamese American to achieve the rank of rear admiral in the US Navy.
“All throughout my life, I thought about the photo,” Lockwood said. “I thought about the people involved.”
She began tracking down and setting up interviews with the children of the two men featured in “Saigon Execution” roughly a year ago. She also interviewed Huan because she wanted to focus on the trauma and pain that survivors of the war continually suffer from, and on the journey he and the soldiers’ children took to move forward from Adams’s photo.
“This event is more than a remembrance. It is a celebration of who we are and all we have achieved,” Huan said in a recorded statement before the film began. “Today’s reflections are not just memories of the past. They are bridges between generations.”
Throughout the film, Huan reflects on his survivor’s guilt and the continuing pain and loss from the war. Although the children’s fathers were on different sides of the war, June, the general’s daughter, dealt with questions about her father being a “killer” as a child growing up in the US, while Loan and Thong Nguyễn faced the same dilemma with Huan’s story, whose family members their father allegedly killed.
“At the end of the day, there are no winners in war. All sides lose,” Lockwood said. She was compelled to create the film 10 years ago because of the “tremendous trauma” she witnessed during the 40th anniversary.
“Refugees didn’t have time to even focus to heal, because they were so busy just trying to survive,” Lockwood said. “I think it’s this generation, their children, who are telling their stories.”
Following the film screening, there was a panel discussion with Lockwood, community organizer Kevin Lam, and faculty member Vũ Diễm Hương moderated by Linh-Phương Vũ, co-director of 1975: A Vietnamese Diaspora Commemoration Initiative, which organized the event. There was also the opportunity for audience questions.
Chhenlee Ly, 31, asked how he could tell his parents’ stories as a second-generation immigrant. His father was a refugee fleeing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and his mother and grandmother emigrated from Vietnam in the 1970s as refugees. His wife had mentioned the screening and suggested they go.
“Honestly, I wasn’t even going to ask any questions or anything,” Ly said. He had choked up when he stood up to speak, and tears were still in his eyes. “I wonder if I should ask more.”
Many who attended the screening said they hoped to start investigating their own family histories and learn more about their parents’ stories. Margot Delogne, whose father died in Vietnam during the war, now runs the 2 Sides Project, a nonprofit that organizes trips overseas for children whose fathers died on both sides of the war.
“I actually didn’t read carefully what the film was about,” Delogne said. “The thing about this war and thinking you’re the only one who is impacted by it, when you start looking out of yourself and asking questions … there’s much more to the story.”
Lockwood hopes she can continue to tell stories that look past known history and delve deeper into stories of heritage. The name of the film, “Đất lành, chim đậu” derives from a Vietnamese proverb that states that “birds, like humans, will live in peace and in fertile land, and they will settle there when the land is peaceful.” At the end of the film, Huan invokes the proverb to express the journey to reconcile his past with the rest of his life.
“I’m really interested in stories about, how do we move beyond war, as children of war?” Lockwood asked. “I think it’s just part of my DNA.”
This story is part of a partnership between the Dorchester Reporter and the Boston University Department of Journalism.