Their families fled Vietnam. Now they're helping Afghan refugees in America

SEATTLE — Thuy Do couldn't look away from the devastating clip playing on a loop on television news — hundreds of Afghans running alongside a massive U.S. Air Force cargo plane, desperately trying to flee their home country. The frantic frowns felt so familiar, reminding her of images of refugees packed onto helicopters to escape Vietnam more than four decades earlier.

So during the summer, Do, a doctor in her late 30s whose family left Vietnam when she was a girl and resettled in Seattle, sat down in her living room with her husband and talked about how they could help.

"We just knew we had to do something," she said, reflecting on the initial shock of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August. "This is a time for us to give back."

Many time zones away, past jagged mountain ranges and the vast Pacific Ocean, Abdul Matin Qadiri settled into a corner inside Hamid Karzai International Airport, where he and his wife and their four children would spend two nights waiting anxiously for an evacuation flight. As soon as word had begun to spread of the Taliban entering Kabul, the nation's capital, Qadiri, who had worked alongside the U.S. military as a mechanic, decided to flee as soon as possible.

"It was life or death," said