In the spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese took control of Saigon and the United States began frantically evacuating tens of thousands of South Vietnamese. Overnight, Camp Pendleton in Southern California was transformed into a makeshift refugee camp. The Marines had 36 hours to set up tents, toilets and showers before refugees started arriving.

That first wave included two teenage sisters, Evelyn and Jessica Kheo. They settled in nearby San Diego, but hadn’t been back to the base in 42 years. I got a chance to take a tour with them.

Driving through the gate of the base, nothing looks very familiar to Jessica and Evelyn. We’re at the northernmost part of Camp Pendleton, miles from the beach. It’s dry and hot. There's scrubby grass and dusty canyons.

Evelyn was just 14 when her family arrived here. Jessica, who was 16, remembers being nervous when their plane landed at the military airport.

“We were kind of scared -- worried how people would treat us outside, because we knew about the anti-war movement,” Jessica said. “We were walking into a situation where people have protested before and you didn’t know what was going to happen.”

But they got on a bus from the airport, and she remembers civilians in the streets waving at them, smiling.

There’s a lot of nervous laughter as these two women -- now in their 50s -- try to remember what it was like to be vulnerable teenagers leaving their comfortable home in Saigon to start over in a new country.

Jessica and Evelyn came from a well-to-do family in Vietnam. They spoke French and wore fashionable dresses and barrettes in their hair. They were sheltered teenagers -- their mother hardly let them out of her sight. So coming to Camp Pendleton felt like an adventure.

“It looked pretty to me,” Jessica said. “I never camped before so it was kind of like camping. I'm sure my mom was not happy, but for me it was fun.”

Their mother was nervous about having her young daughters around so many military men in uniform. But Jessica and Evelyn remember the Marines as kind and gentle young men working to help the refugees. A base nurse treated their sister for asthma with great tenderness. The Marines shared scratchy blankets and clothes.

“It was May, but it was cold for us, coming from Vietnam,” Evelyn said.

“Yeah, we had to wear the army jacket. If you’re a kid, it’s all the way down to your ankles,” Jessica said.

One time, Evelyn said, a Marine even came running out of the base health clinic to give her and her friend a box of maxi-pads. They were mortified, but touched by the gesture.

“Actually, it was a pretty good gift at the time,” she said.

“There was one Marine guy,” she said. “I think he served in Vietnam and then he learned how to eat fish sauce. So, in a way for him to connect with the refugees, he would walk around in his pocket with this little fish sauce. And then whenever he wanted to maybe flirt with some young lady, or be friendly with the kids, he would pull it out. ‘I got the fish sauce!’ He would even say that in Vietnamese!”

But for all their funny stories about their teenage adventures, Jessica also recalls the pain of watching adults in the camp traumatized by the war.

"There was a woman who saved the (leftover) rice.  She would spread out a newspaper and dry the rice out outside of her tent every day. And I saw some GI walk by and he made a face like, ‘What's going on?’ But because we went through the war, we still have worries about not having food."

Meeting a Marine Who Helped Evacuate Refugees

Camp Talega, the section of Camp Pendleton that once housed the refugees, is dusty and hot. Helicopters hover above, and Marines in fatigues walk past metal quonset huts. It’s hard to tell there was once a refugee camp here. There are few signs or placards.

But we’re given a tour by Phillip Nguyen, a civilian who works on the base maintaining many of the facilities. He, too, first came through Camp Pendleton as a refugee. Turns out, he stayed in the same section as the Kheo sisters: Camp 5.

Nguyen introduces us to a retired Marine, Michael Duren, who helped maintain the refugee camp during the war. He was also in Saigon helping refugees onto helicopters back in 1975.

"If you got out before Saigon, you got out before the rush,” he tells the sisters, who left a week before the city fell to Communist forces.

“It was still a war going on,” Duren recalls, explaining that North Vietnamese troops were firing on fleeing South Vietnamese and on the U.S. troops trying to get them out of the country.

“We were still being assaulted. So just pack them into helicopters was our main concern. We weren’t thinking how many we could get in; just get them in. It was a fast-moving operation. You didn’t have a lot of time to think. You just had to move. Get them in, get the helicopters out."

“There is trauma in the whole experience of being evacuated from Vietnam,” says Evelyn. “I think that's why it was very hard for us, and for the longest time we never talked much about the experience.”

There was also a sense of guilt, she says, that her family had the means to get out by airplane, and get out early, compared to the “boat people” who came from Vietnam later, risking drowning and an uncertain future on rickety vessels.

Hopscotch and Daydreams

We wander for a while among World War II quonset huts, which also served as the mess hall and medical clinic for the refugees. Then, we finally reach Camp 5, one of eight clusters of tents on the northern part of the base. This was the place the Kheo family called home in 1975.  Today, it’s just a dry meadow at the bottom of a steep hill.

Evelyn ambles through the dry grass and looks around thoughtfully.

"If this is truly Camp 5, then I'm pretty sure that we're right around this bend. Because I remember that's where our tent was and that's where I played hopscotch every day in front of the tent,” she says.

She also remembers a giant tree, where she used to lie down and stare up at the sky, daydreaming.

She can’t find that exact tree, but she and her sister head to the shade of another massive oak, and take out a scrapbook. Photos and letters as thin as onion skin are carefully pasted to the pages. Some show the return address, in graceful handwriting: Camp Talega, Camp 5, Section 6, Tent 4. These are letters the Kheo sisters’ father wrote to another sister in France, explaining that they had arrived at Camp Pendleton and were waiting for a sponsor.

On one page of the scrapbook, there’s a photograph of their family -- in a newspaper article about how churches in the U.S. were helping the new refugees.

The nervous laughter has waned, and I ask these two sisters how they feel, standing in this overgrown meadow that once served as their home, at the beginning of their new life in California.

“I think this is truly a land of opportunity,” Evelyn says. “Every country has its good and bad. But I think this country is very paradoxical. We create war with everybody. But then we also help people the most. So it's such a conflicting thing, in a way. But I am grateful for my experience for being evacuated to this country."

For Jessica, it ultimately meant she was allowed to live a life of her own creation.

“I felt bad that the war had to end with us losing,” she says. “But in the meantime, I couldn't wait to get out of the country [Vietnam] because that was always my dream. I did not like being submissive.  I had a problem with that. Because I was a tomboy. Here, they would call me a feminist. I did not like the culture over there. So when I got here, yes, I did have cultural shock, but I accepted it.  Without the war, I don't think I would be able to come to the U.S.”

Jessica and Evelyn’s family stayed at Camp Pendleton for about a month. They left when a San Diego family agreed to sponsor them. They’ve made their home here -- Evelyn became a school guidance counselor and Jessica a first-grade teacher.

Hearing that, Duren's face erupts into a huge smile. He’s thrilled that refugees like the ones he helped load onto helicopters 42 years ago have gone on to become successful, like Evelyn and Jessica.

“I’m elated,” he says. “I mean they came over here and they made best of the best. They had an attitude of, 'I have an opportunity to do something and I’m gonna do something'. And they did. And they started a great career, a career that helps others. It's like they were helped. So they’re paying it forward now.”

“We were very fortunate to get to Camp Pendleton,” says Jessica. “And still have time to play hopscotch and just lie down under a tree and dream.”