It was Easter.
In 1975 I'm not sure if we would have gone to Mass the prior night, or on Easter Sunday itself. Probably the prior night. My father would have bought some Easter chocolates, but we wouldn't have done the Easter Egg thing. One thing about being an only child is that you grow up quickly in a lot of ways.
Our small family would have had ham for dinner and probably potatoes au gratin, out of the box of course.
Thousands of Vietnamese Catholics were on the road, hoping to escape the advancing communists.
Da Nang was completely in the hands of the NVA. The defeat there had become a rout, with only South Vietnamese Marines retaining discipline.
It was begging to dawn in the South Vietnamese government that the United States was not going to come to its aid, resulting in real anger in the South. The withdrawal that had been going on had in mind something like the Pusan Perimeter operation in the Korean War in 1950, in which the United States reversed the course of the Korean War. Geographically there were real similarities and the strategy made some sense, but only if the US was willing to reenter the war.
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