It was an overcast morning Wednesday in Westminster, much like it was 50 years ago to the day in Saigon, when the South Vietnamese capital fell to communist forces and the last American troops left the city with as many allies as they could evacuate.

Doan Hoang Curtis was just a toddler on April 30, 1975, when she was airlifted with her mother from the Defense Attaché Office in Saigon to the U.S.S. Hancock, which was waiting for evacuees in the Gulf of Thailand.

Curtis arrived at Wednesday’s commemorative event in Westminster holding the baby dress she wore on her emergency flight out of Vietnam 50 years ago — a delicate white gown with a ruffled neckline and small embroidered flowers in orange, yellow, green, blue and red.

Such an innocent dress with such a haunting story.

“All I remember from that entire week was how terrified I was to get in that helicopter,” Curtis said. “I wasn’t quite 3 years old, but that became a defining moment in my life.”

Alongside her on Wednesday stood several U.S. Marine Corps veterans involved in extricating U.S. officials and allies from the DAO building and the U.S. Embassy onto the U.S.S. Hancock.

They might’ve saved Curtis’s life.

U.S. forces evacuated more than 7,000 people from Saigon in the final two days of the war in a mission known as Operation Frequent Wind.

Walter Sweeney, a Marine Corps corporal, evacuated people from the DAO building and then processed refugees on the U.S.S. Hancock.

“All these years gone by, and I had never met anyone we got out,” Sweeney said. “Then, I met Doan and her mother. It’s just such a beautiful thing to see the lives they have made.”

Curtis became a documentary filmmaker. Her latest project, “Turning Point: The Vietnam War,” is a five-episode series about the fall of Saigon that’s now streaming on Netflix.

Her success has given Sweeney some solace from what otherwise was a harrowing chapter of his life.

“We lost two of our own at the DAO building on April 29, Cpl. Charlie McMahon and Lance Cpl. Darwin Judge,” Sweeney said. “Meeting Doan and her mother gives meaning to what we did — and especially what they sacrificed.”

Retired Col. Steve Hasty, then a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps who served alongside Sweeney, McMahon and Judge, also found comfort in Wednesday’s event, where hundreds of community members gathered to pay tribute to South Vietnamese and American veterans.

“This is the welcome home we never got in 1975,” Hasty said.

Today, Westminster is the center of the largest Vietnamese community in the United States, and every year it commemorates the fall of Saigon in 1975, remembered by Vietnamese Americans as Black April.

“April 30, 1975, for so many of us, is not just a date on the calendar,” said Councilmember Amy Phan West, the child of Vietnamese refugees. “It is a date that changed our lives forever.”

City Manager Christine Cordon, also the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, noted the 50th anniversary was “especially monumental” with the commemoration happening in Little Saigon, the heart of the community built by the tens of thousands of refugees who found themselves in Southern California.

Those gathered at Sid Goldstein Freedom Park near City Hall remembered the lives lost in the war, but also expressed gratitude for the lives rebuilt in the United States.

“We honor the hundreds of thousands who died so that the Vietnamese people could reach Westminster and write new chapters in the Vietnamese American story,” said Mayor Chi Charlie Nguyen, who was among the many refugees who risked the open ocean on small boats to leave Vietnam. “We cannot forget their service.”

During the ceremony, veterans hoisted canopy-sized South Vietnamese and American flags as they sang the anthem of the former South Vietnam and the Star Spangled Banner.

A flame was lit in a cauldron at an altar built at the base of the park’s permanent Vietnam War memorial to “honor the sacrifice of all the people lost in the last days of the war,” said Henry Le, a South Vietnam Air Force pilot who, after fleeing to the U.S. as a refugee, served 17 years in the U.S. Navy.

“I joined the U.S. Navy because, even though we failed to save Vietnam from communism, I still believed in this country’s ability to maintain peace around the world,” Le said.

Thomas Ho, a retired radiologist from La Palma, was 17 at the time of the fall of Saigon and escaped the country by boat about five years later.

His father, a South Vietnamese government official, died after three years imprisoned by communist forces after the war.

“My family was shattered by the war,” he said. “I still have a brother and a sister in Vietnam.”

Ho said he was filled with “mixed feelings” on Wednesday morning.

“Looking back, I’m very sad about that time in my family’s life,” he said, “but I’m very grateful to the American government for allowing me to start a new life, a better life here.”