It is tough to come up with the word to describe what Carolyn Hoang is feeling. A dictionary would be helpful, and Carolyn packed seven of them for this unusual trip.

But the dictionaries are lost now. It remains to be seen what else will be. It is April 30, 1975, and Carolyn’s homeland of South Vietnam has been lost. The capital city of Saigon has fallen to the North Vietnamese Army.

In 1975, Lawrence resident Carolyn Hoang fled Vietnam with her family shortly before Saigon fell to North Vietnam. She is pictured with a dress that she brought with her, one that she eventually wore on her wedding day and one of her few possessions to make the trip when she was only 19 years old.

Right now, Carolyn is on a barge in the South China Sea. Her dictionaries and other luggage are on an adjacent ship that had ferried Carolyn and her 11 other family members from the Saigon shore. She tells her father she is going to go back on the ship for a moment to get the dictionaries. He says no. He’ll do it. Carolyn is 19 years old, so she argues. If you have a teenager, you know the feeling. But hopefully there are no teenagers today with the feeling that weighs on Carolyn.

“I’m thinking he can’t go,” Carolyn says. “In my mind, I said, if I die, it is OK, but if my father dies, no one will lead us anywhere.”

•••

It started 40 days earlier. The banging on the front door of their home in Da Nang. Her father’s loud voice saying “we have to go now, we have to go now.” Carolyn’s father was Kham Cong Hoang, a captain in the South Vietnamese Army. He was a commander at the base in Da Nang, and he had learned that the remaining American “advisers” were being pulled out of the country.

When the Americans were leaving, it was time for everyone else to go too.

Carolyn grabbed her still wet school uniform from the wash, and her dictionaries too. Running from the communists wasn’t the only thing on her mind. She was a senior in high school, and she was studying for her national tests, an exam that must be taken to gain admittance to a university.

“I thought I would be back somehow,” Carolyn says. “I thought life would go on.”

Carolyn remembers the chaos increasing the closer they got to the military base. Long lines of cars of other military families seeking to leave. Most of them, though, didn’t have a captain in the car. She remembers her father getting out of the car with pistol in hand, asking a guard “this is how you do your job?”

A path was cleared for Carolyn and her family.

•••

Carolyn stood at the rail of a Phillipine destroyer that was evacuating her family and others to the capital city of Saigon, a safe haven because it was farther south and away from the front lines. Her father wasn’t on the ship. He was on shore, dressed in full combat gear, with grenades hanging from a belt, a rifle slung over a shoulder.

“I saw my father’s silhouette in the background of the early morning dawn,” Carolyn wrote in a recent set of memoirs. “His image etched deep in my brain. I’m still seeing it clearly today.”

Her father promised Carolyn that he would meet up with them in Saigon. They stayed with an uncle there, just outside the city. Days turned into weeks without any sign of her father. Then, one day, a sound of a small engine.

“We were sitting in front of the building, and he showed up on his motorcycle,” Carolyn says. “He just looked at us and smiled. That is all he did. He was just so calm. I could tell he didn’t want to cry.”

But soon it became apparent that Saigon was no safe haven. Carolyn remembers when she realized they were leaving and wouldn’t return.

“I saw my father dismiss all his people from his unit,” Caroyln says. “He said ‘you are on your own now. They opened up the supply room and divided it equally.”

Carolyn’s dreams of somehow staying had died by now.

“I told my father I want us to run until we have nowhere else to run,” Carolyn wrote. “My father said that he would rather have us all die together with a hand grenade than being captured by the enemy. I went to sleep with peace.”

•••

A ship from the U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet eventually rescued Carolyn and her family off that barge in the South China Sea. When that ship pulled ashore at Subic Bay in the Philippines, the Red Cross greeted the Vietnamese refugees with a wedge of apple and can of Coke.

“It was like food from heaven,” Carolyn says.

While at Subic Bay, there was much talk about what refugee camp they wanted to go to in America. All Vietnamese had the same answer, Carolyn says: California.

“It was 100 percent California,” Carolyn says. “We knew the U.S. pretty well. We knew Pennsylvania was a place for steel. We knew Ohio was a place for coal. We knew California was a place for good weather.”

There was also time for other matters in the Philippines, like reflection.

“While we were running, you couldn’t think about what was happening behind you,” Carolyn says. “You just charged ahead. My thought was I had to survive. We had to stay together. When we got to the Philippines, that’s when you started to realize who didn’t make the trip.”

Eventually, Carolyn and her family would arrive at a refugee camp at Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania. From there, they would end up moving to the small community of Storm Lake, Iowa.

How did they end up there?

Well, one answer is that Saint Mark Lutheran Church of Storm Lake sponsored all 11 members of Carolyn’s family. They provided the family with a four-bedroom house to get settled in America.

That’s one answer. Carolyn has another for how her family arrived there: “the kindness of American people.”

•••

It has been 40 years since Saigon fell. Carolyn has thought about it a lot lately.

“When we were leaving Vietnam, we thought we were the unfortunate ones,” Carolyn says. “But as we got out of the country and saw we were going to survive, we realized we were the blessed ones.”

The family has done well. Today, Carolyn is a web developer for Blue Cross & Blue Shield. She’s lived in Lawrence since 1980, with her husband, Abbas Rezayazdi. They have two grown children.

Carolyn’s siblings have done well too. One is a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. One is a medical doctor. Three have MBAs, and four have bachelor’s degrees.

Her parents ended up settling in the Portland, Ore., area, where her father was part of a successful janitorial services company. He did well for himself, even taking a vacation to Europe. Carolyn’s mother went on the trip too. Her mother — who grew up in northern Vietnam and escaped the communists in 1952 — enjoyed the trip. But when her plane landed in America, she disembarked and kissed the American soil.

“You work hard here, you have a good life,” Carolyn says.

There is a word for the emotion Carolyn is having today. She doesn’t need a dictionary to express it.

“Thank you,” she says. “I just want to say thank you, America.”

— Each Sunday, Lawhorn’s Lawrence focuses on the people, places or past of Lawrence and the surrounding area. If you have a story idea, send it to Chad at clawhorn@ljworld.com.