Troops showed their gratitude with money. The band members walked away from most gigs with more money in tips than what the clubs paid them. They gave all their earnings to their mother and, eventually, the CBC Band made enough to allow her to quit her job on the naval base.

“She had worked hard enough for us,” Bich Loan said.

It was war that brought the CBC Band success and financial security, but Bich Loan remembers that she and her brothers were too young to understand the complexities of the conflict. They wondered why Vietnamese were fighting each other, and why Americans had joined in, but that was the extent of their thoughts about it, she said. Everyone seemed to come together and enjoy the show when the CBC Band played, so why did they go off and fight afterward? Couldn’t rock ’n’ roll music stop a war?

Perhaps not, but it could raise money for Vietnamese soldiers and war widows. In 1970, the CBC Band helped form Vietnam’s first rock ’n’ roll festival to raise money for military families. The Saigon government sanctioned the event, and Jo Marcel, a Vietnamese singer turned local nightclub owner and music producer whose given name was Vu Ngoc Tong, promoted it.

In the end, the band was a casualty of war, too. Tung Linh received his draft notice in 1973, and he entered boot camp for six months of training. But his mother did what she could to help her son play music, which was what made him happy. She paid a handsome bribe to a high-ranking officer to secure her son’s release from the army, arguing that she was old and needed him at home, and in any case, two older sons had already served in the navy.

Yet normalcy proved elusive, as Tung Linh worried that he was constantly under police surveillance. When he drove his Honda to the market or around town and had to pass through security checkpoints, the guards always asked him why, given his young age, he wasn’t in the army. Military officers began harassing Hoang Thi Nga because they suspected she had bought his release. Worried that the army might call for him again, his mother enlisted the help of some American and Canadian concert tour managers to organize a CBC Band world tour to get the band out of Vietnam. The promoters planned an 18-month tour, and the siblings figured they’d return home after it ended. Hoang Thi Nga cried when she said goodbye to her children.

While the band was on the road, Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Bich Loan and the other band members were asleep in Tibet when it happened; when they woke up and heard the news, they cried. They took refuge in a monastery and tried to figure out what to do. Their mother was still in Saigon.