In the summer of 1977, Leonard Woodcock had become the chief of the U.S. liaison office in Peking, Sec of State Cyrus Vance visited Beijing in August, a month later. Vance said US would recognize PRC as sole legal government and let defense treaty with Taiwan lapse, but some US personnel would have to remain in Taiwan under an informal arrangement. Not rejected out of hand by the Chinese. News story that followed claimed China showed unexpected flexibility in talks. Deng outraged. This stalled normalization effort. Was opening shot in fight over China policy between head of the NSC Brzezinski and the State Department. Brzezinski may have been the source of the leak to the press.
End of year Brzezinski increasingly proponent of normalization with China. As a counter to Moscow. China invited him in early November of 1977, invitation. February 1978, B meet with Han Xu several times, acting chief of Chinese liaison office in Washington. May, 1978, B to Beijing with entourage. Desired security cooperation with China to counter Russia. Brought with him "gifts" that were certain to impress.
Vietnam attacked Kampuchea [Cambodia] and in two weeks, at Christmas, drove from power China's only ally in Southesast Asia, the Khmer Rouge, genocidal policies. Summer 1978 expelled from Vietnam the overseas Chinese. June, 1978, began unpublicized bombing of Cambodia. As many as thirty sorties a day. November 1, Le Duan landed in Moscow with five members of the Soviet Politburo to greet him. November 3, signed 25 year treaty of friendship & cooperation. Article Six, insurance for Vietnam against Chinese attack. "If either side is attacked or exposed to the threat of attack, the two signatory powers will immediately confer with each other in order to remove this threat and take appropriate and effective steps to safeguard the peace and security of both countries." Soviet navy and air forces in Vietnam soon after.
Beijing conference on November 11 to December 15, watershed in Chinese politics. Zhao Ziyang brought in now as secretary-general of the party Central Committee.
As prepared for war, Deng cited US military intelligence estimates of Soviet troops strength along Chinese border. Said attack would not interrupt China's Four Modernizations, and said that even if 70 percent of war objectives achieve, the 30 percent failure would serve as stimulus for military improvement.
Vietnam attacks on December 24, 1978. January 6 crossed Mekong at Neak Luong January 7, Phnom Penh liberated.
End of January, 225,000 troops along border of Vietnam. December 15, normalize relations with China. Saturday, February 17, attack at 26 points along the border. March 5, had occupied Lang San and gateway to Red River delta. Same day announced would withdraw. A sixteen day "pedagogical war"
Out of the unfortunate costly experience of that brief conflict, the Chinese were able to form a cooperative and partly clandestine military relationship with the United States. The relationship was forged, at first, during the visit of National. Security Adviser Brzezinski and his entourage to Beijing in May, 1978. Then it was confirmed upon Deng Xiaoping's visit to the United States in January, 1979, when indicated to President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser that China planned to move militarily against the Vietnamese. Publicly, the Carter administration sought to distance itself from supporting the military actions of the Chinese. Carter was concerned about upsetting the progress toward a Salt II agreement with the Soviet Union, and so acted with extreme caution publicly so as not to upset the delicate negotiations with the Soviet Union. But Brzezinski was pleased by the prospect of the Chinese punishing the Vietnamese, and had difficulty concealing his delight.
First, not only was Deng not advised not to make the undertaking, but he was secretly offered American help in the enterprise.
During Brzezinski's visit, secret American information was shown to the Chinese. Satellite photographs, classified estimates of Soviet strength and so on. The Chinese were amazed by the openness of the Americans in this regard, who gave them absolutely everything they wanted. Brzezinski promised more, always more. And he asked almost nothing in return. The Chinese became at that time the beneficiaries of American largess thanks to American attitudes toward the Soviet Union, strangely enough, and Soviet hegeminism in Africa and in Southeast Asia.
Within the Carter Administration, Brzezinski had become the most outspoken proponent of normalization of relations with The People's Republic of China as a counterbalance to Moscow. In the fall of 1977, the Chinese government extended an invitation to Brzezinski to visit Beijing. He met several times for private discussions with Han Xu, the acting chief of the Chinese liaison office in Washington in February 1978, and in May flew to China with his carefully selected entourage.
Brzezinski came bearing gifts and the Chinese were delighted, on the one hand, and almost disbelieving on the other. "Eventually, we would cultivate American friends. Some of them were overseas Chinese. And none of these were party members. I recall asking about this. 'How can we trust them if they are not party members?' I asked my immediate superior. He laughed. 'There is no need for that, he said.' They serve the party and its objectives better than most members.' The reason I recall that statement at this point is that Mr. Brzezinski certainly fell into that category. By his policies, his enthusiastic cooperation and his help, he served the party better than most of those who were members. It was almost too good to be true."
Brzezinski, self-righteous individual who was marked deeply by the Soviet Union's policy toward his native Poland, wanted cooperation with China to counter the Soviet Union. Brought with him "gifts" that were certain to impress the Chinese. Samuel Huntington, an NSC staff member, shared with the Chinese hosts a top secret NSA assessment -- Presidential Review Memorandum 10 --of the current world situation, especially with regard to the Soviet power. This was impressive, the Chinese felt.
Brzezinski then confided that the American regulations concerning sale of "dual use" technology to China would be relaxed soon and that the US would no longer oppose arms sales by its alliance partners to China. Accompanying Brzenzski on the trip was Benjamin Huberman, assistant to the President's science and technology adviser, and Morton Abramowitz, deputy assistant sec of defense for international security. A senior Chinese defense official met separately with Abramowitz. The American, who spoke Mandarin, gave a dazzling presentation for more than one hour, of highly classified material dealing with the deployment of Soviet forces along the Chinese border. This sharing of intelligence at the defense ministry level impressed the Chinese. Abramovitz also provided Chinese information about Soviet strategic weapons. But as his final surprise, he pulled from his briefcase a sheaf of top secret reconnaissance photographs of Soviet military installations and armor facing China. Huberman also spoke separately with Chinese defense officials concerning Sino-American cooperation in science and technology and brought up the possibility of a secret joint venture to monitor Soviet nuclear and missile testing sites. Brzezinski also offered the Chinese "eyes and ears of the West." US also agreed that the US would set up, install, man, equip and service series of SIGINT(signal intelligence) stations along Sino-Soviet border.
"Zbig was trying to tantalize the Chinese" by "giving them hints that they could expect a lot more from us," one member of the delegation remarked later. Another. William Gleysteen, wrote a memo attacking Brzezinski's tactics. The NSA adviser, he said, had raised Chinese expectations of obtaining American support that hadn't been approved or discussed at the highest levels of the US government. Brzezinski, in his traditional manner, ignored the memo. And he did deliver on his promises to the Chinese, as we shall see.
Two days later Deng Xiaoping arrived in Bangkok. Denounced Soviet "hegemonists" Deng suggested in private that "Phnom Penh will fall." Suggested didn't like policies of Pol Pot, but would not allow strategic area to fall to Vietnam. Several days later in Singapore, spoke to leaders there. "These ungrateful people must be punished. We gave them $20 billion of aid, Chinese sweat, and blood and look what happened." When Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew asked him how he would punish them, he said, "We have ways and means."
At that time the Paracel Islands,( Xi Sia) the Chinese had captured them in 1974 and we were building on those islands now, a short airstrip. And the islands were still at that time in the hands of the navy and the responsibility of the navy. And so at that time a Soviet Task force, a very formidable one, all of a sudden headed into the South China Sea towards the Paracel Islands, like a show of force against us. And the navy had to prepare itself for this because all of the major warships, like the destroyers, they were all concentrated in the North, near Liushan and Tsingtao and all we had in the area were lighter ships like frigates, and these were the only things that we had at that time.
So at that time, the South China Sea navy was put on alert, and the Soviets responded on the Sea to show us that they were loyal to their friends. So the Navy was extremely concerned. So there were immediate reinforcements of the fighter forces from the Naval air arm. Emergency measures were taken in the South near Hainan Island, and all of the forces in the light forces were concentrated and put on red alert. The torpedo boats, what was so funny is that they were missile boats, not torpedoes, they were missile boats, each capable of firing four, China had only one kind, but hundreds of them, they were for this missile boat, because of the limited range, they were forced, to maintain a force at sea close to the Paracels, these boats, they made a sortee out to a certain range then stayed there for about half an hour and returned. The range was short. So they were then rotated in that area. But they could not stay there in the battle zone for long, and once they the missile boats patrolled another group left port to replace them and so when they were low on fuel they were replaced by boats both from the Paracels and Hainan. And at that time the General Commander and the political commissar of the navy were called to the South from Beijing. This was it. They were ready for a fight with the Soviets. The destroyers, meanwhile, were called from the North, but it took them a time to get there, after the Russians had converge don the islands. And so it was the missile boats and the submarines that had to defend the islands, along with fighter cover and frigates. The navy thought this was enough to protect the islands, but there was still a concentration of Soviet forces with not only destroyers but also cruisers heavily armed with missiles, and they were very apprehensive of this. This task force was without an aircraft carrier. Only surface vessels approaching the Paracels. And the frigates were there, too. Because the range was limited, and so they stayed for half an hour and then returned to port. They were there day and night to defend the islands. We were also receiving intelligence from the US on the movements of the Soviet fleet.
But at that time, there was a fortuitous coincidence, in that behind the Soviet surface group, an American task force followed the Soviets at a great distance, followed by an aircraft carrier, the Coral Sea. [CVA 43], I remember the number was. The Soviets were aware of that, of course.
What happened is that the Americans were following them, and they knew that the Chinese navy was vulnerable at that time. The Russians knew they could knock out the Chinese navy but at a cost, a big cost. The Soviets were superior in fire power, but they had fewer ships, but higher in tonnage. So once they lost one ship that would be a big loss for them. We didn't know, whatever the reason, as they approached the Paracels, they suddenly changed course, they made a sharp turn to the East and left the zone. What a surprise, and then the Americans quietly departed too behind them.
So our navy was extremely relieved at that time, seeing the Soviets gone. My God, we thought. This was to be the only Soviet response against the Chinese for the Vietnam invasion and now it had been terminated. The fleet came, probably from the Indian Ocean. They were there. The planned this sailing for some time and had planned well for it. They showed their force perhaps to impress the Vietnamese and to scare the Chinese. The Chinese navy figured out that what the Russians probably wanted to do was to shell the island and scare us and make us think that there would be more to come if they didn't withdraw from Vietnam. But they were surprised, suddenly, to find that the Chinese was working, it almost seemed, in coordination with the American navy. We saw all of this on radar and they saw the Americans behind them on radar.
There was no concern at that time, keep in mind, with what the Khmer Rouge were doing to their own people in Cambodia. None at all. No matter how brutal. They were friends to China. That is the only thing we cared about. They wanted to see their friends in power. As to what they do in power, with power, well that is the internal affair of a foreign country. That should by no means be interfered with by an outside power. China included. What you do is your own business. So long as you are my friend, that is important. And by that time, too, China felt somewhat ashamed, as far as I saw it, because they knew that the Navy was not strong enough, and they were unable to support the Khmer Rouge when they were under fire. So they just hate the Vietnamese for that. We were proven to be helpless. We saw the Vietnamese occupy everything. So we had to do something.
This included detachments of the Seventh Fleet being sent into the South China Sea as a counterbalance to the Soviet fleet that came there And during the war, they sent an American naval battle group to the Gulf of Tonkin in order to protect Chinese naval forces on the Paracel Islands. They also arranged for secret delivery to the Chinese navy of two much- needed Mark 46 torpedoes, that the we badly needed for their fleet in order to effectively confront the forces of the soviet union." The Chinese hoped to reverse manufacture similar models from the American models. This proved impossible and in the mid-1980s, China began buying Mark-46s from the US.
During the conflict, also, the Iranian revolution and the fall of the Shah(He fled from Tehran on January 16) and the American public and the American media seemed riveted to Iran rather than to Southeast Asia and events occurring there. Of critical importance in the shifting relationship with Iran was the fact that America lost important listening posts to spy on the Soviet Union and watch the deployment of soviet missiles. The secret posts at Bihshahr and Kabkan in northern Iran. Kabkan as the most important listening post the US operated for monitoring Russian missile and space launch activity. The United States CIA carefully monitored Soviet missile and space activities from those posts. The Bihshahr stationed closed in December, 1978, but the Kapkan site operated until Iranian employees mutinied, demanded backpay and held the American technicians stationed there captive. A special ransom was eventually paid to the employees, the American CIA employees were flown out and the post fell into the hands of the local Iranians. As a result, the Carter administration was then shopping around for a new site to monitor Soviet activities. The friendship and secret alliance forged with the Chinese provided the opportunity to establish that new site after the war with Vietnam. The needs of the Chinese and the Americans suddenly against the Soviet Union, a common enemy, helped forge an unlikely and sometimes embarrassing alliance. and secret alliance. The Chinese were able to make another deal with the Carter administration, offering to set up a new listening post in Northwest China at a secret outpost just outside Urumchi. The project, called Project 851 by the Chinese, began in 1980 with construction on the site in Xinjiang province close to Tian Mountain "Sky Mountain". It involves American software and Hardware, about 100 personnel from the NSA and an equal number of Chinese military personnel who occupy the post with the Americans and have been trained to use American spy materials. This post, 851, had been over the years, absolutely uninterrupted by the domestic situation in China. As the Chinese say of the post, "politics is politics and busines is business." They look on the 851 project as a business propostion.
Deng stated that if China achieved 70 percent of its objective, that would be all right, since the 30 percent would be a stimulus to make military improvements.
Deng's visit to Washington. Tip O'Neill compared the Vietnamese in Cambodia as the Japanese in Manchuria.
February 17 attack, artillery opening up. A sixteen day "pedagogical war". Begins with tremendous artillery barrage. From distance, American reporter wrote, sounded like B52 attack. strike. But on once occasion the barrage lasted twenty minutes rather than usual minute for an American bombing run. 85,000 Chinese troops cross the border, supported by armor, at 26 points.
Delivery of photographs. The NSA satellite photographs were delivered to the Chinese. While the naval crisis going on in the south, when virtually all general commanders of navy dispatched to Xisa and Paracel islands to supervise naval operations, while at this same time, in Beijing, in western suburb, on road called the Fuxing Road, in western suburb, located at the naval compound, while a high six story building, colored yellow, everything inside marbeled, on the second floor is communications intelligence and naval operations divisions of the naval headquarters. In the charting room of the operations room, the officers roaming about, carrying the latest information about the movements of the US task force and the approaching Soviet task force that was detected by the Chinese navy's own monitoring posts on the southern coast line as well as the pictures forwarded to the naval operations by the third department of the General Staff. because it was the third department that was actually the one that was receiving directly the pictures. From the US defense attache and his staff, situated in Beijing. these were directly received through special deciphering technologies of the demodulation devices for the high resolution photographs taken by the US Black Birds that were actually watching the movements of the soviet fleet and the ground troops in formation along the Sino Soviet border. at that time China was extremely concerned about the possible soviet retaliation against the northern movements of these troops. In the US embassy, the major compound, first floor, to the right.
Mark 46s. after they were picked up, by fishermen, instantly reported to the navy, and they dispatched divers to supervise the salvage operation and they successfully got the two torpedoes out. this operation labeled in significance as the rescue operation that they had in 1969 when China was having war with soviet union in Heilongjiang Province. Because t that time a Soviet T62 tank after it was hit by Chinese military forces, it sank into the iced river of Wusuli River. This tank sank through the ice and sank to the bottom. China had major operation of rescuing this tank, because it sank on the China side of the river. but the Soviet detected the Chinese movements, knowing that they wanted to recover it. so the soviets kept shelling the surface of the water and the area, wanted to sink it further and destroy it, race against time, and China raced to pull it out. the navy dispatched special divers in the freezing water and successfully got it out with a long cable, these people later cited for heroism since it so cold, impossible for them stay in for more than few minutes./ Later studied and placed in the Beijing military museum, nicknamed it "Turtle Shell(Wu Gwei ke). The recovery of the Mark 46 was ranked in significance with the getting of the T 62 from the soviet union.
Studied the Mark 46 torpedoes. Took them apart, disassembled them, and while then sent different parts to different research instituted for study purposes, enabled the Chinese research institutes that belonged to CSSC(China State Shipbulding Corporation) and to successfully make their own copies of the Mark 46. They made these for study and then test fired them in special testing pool in a suburb of Kunming. A very nice pool, specially for acoustic testing purposes, once you throw a stone in it, in the monitoring screen you can see a reflection of the sound and the graphics, perfect acoustical lab. Used it to test these Mark 46 copies, only to find that everything looked exactly the same with what they captured except for the performance. So it took 2 more years to get perfect copy, why all the parts looked the same but could not achieve same level of performance that Mark 46 should have. So the research project continued, until China officially obtained the Mark 46 later 1987. From the US.
Later in those negotiations room of the Systematic Engineering Division of the CSSC, which is not far from pretty close to the naval compound, and the American friends gave the technical introductions of the Mark 46, advanced version. And the Chinese top experts questioned the American specialists about the possible modifications of the Mark 46 used by the US navy compared to the earlier versions. what revolutionary advances had the US made. The Am experts said that not at all. But actually the Chinese top experts on the China side of the table, could hardly hold their laughter, since they knew the truth, they knew that the Americans were lying, they knew what changes had been made. But the Americans there never knew how Chines knew that. These experts were from the sales department of the Mark 46 manufacturer.
After the 1979 war against Vietnam, Deng was absolutetly convinced that the Chinese military needed modernization. Later he specifically pointed out that defense modernization priorities should be given to the Navy, Airforce and Second Artillery corps. And so ever since then this above mentioned services have been actively engaged in foreign advanced technology and weaponry introduction into the PLA. And in order to make sure that nothing goes wrong on the diplomatic front, no spies or secret information, the top national security ministry assigned one agent to each military service, to supervise the operation and security aspect of the operation,dealing with foreigners. To make sure nothing went wrong, they are to be both reliable and trustworthy and competent, have to know the technological aspects of what goes on. Same time have to be trustworthy and loyal. And the one sent to the navy was a female, her name is and she happened to always go the extra mile in her work.(go on from there)(tape at home).
[The Chinese war with Vietnam, in February, 1979, was an unusually bloody confrontation. The Chinese may have lost, in one month of fighting in Vietnam, nearly as many men as the Americans lost in nearly a decade of fighting in Vietnam. Chinese statistics on the war are, however, notoriously unreliable.
Out of the unfortunate costly experience of that brief conflict, the Chinese were able to form a cooperative and partly clandestine military relationship with the United States. The relationship was forged, at first, during Deng Xiaoping's visit to the United States in January, 1979, when indicated to President Jimmy Carter and his National Security Advisor that China planned to move militarily against the Vietnamese. Publicly, the Carter administration sought to distance itself from supporting the military actions of the Chinese. Privately and secretly, they offered critical aid to the Chinese. And during the war, they sent an American naval battle group to the Gulf of Tonkin in order to protect Chinese naval forces on the Paracel Islands. They arranged for secret delivery to the Chinese navy of two much needed Mark 46 torpedoes, that the Chinese badly needed for their submarine fleet in order to effectively confront the forces of the soviet union. The Chinese hoped to reverse manufacture similar models from the American models. This proved impossible and in the mid-1980s, China began buying Mark-46s from the US.
During the conflict, also, the Iranian students seized the American Embassy in Teheran and American press and public was transfixed by actions there. Of critical importance in the shifting relationship with Iran was the fact that America lost important listening posts to spy on the Soviet Union and watch the deployment of soviet missiles. The Chinese were able to make another deal with the Carter administration, offering to set up a new listening post in Northwest China at a secret outpost just outside Urumchi. The project, called Project 851, involves American software and Hardware, about 100 personnel from the NSA and an equal number of Chinese military personnel who occupy the post with the Americans and have been trained to use American spy materials. This post, 851, had been over the years, absolutely uninterrupted by the domestic situation in China. As the Chinese say of the post, "politics is politics and busines is business." They look on the 851 project as a business propostion.
PROJECT 851
uniform with the Chinese military officers working in uniform with Chinese military officials. You have the army intelligence people in uniform, because of the mutual agreement between the two countries. Because of a mutual agreement between the two countries, they were allowed to operate in China, for intelligence purposes. I am talking about a special intelligence gathering complex in North China, in the Northwest with Americans in uniform, and the common enemy at this station is the late Soviet Union. And a lot of the English speaking Chinese officers in that complex, where is this post.(XXXX).The problem in terms of myself, as to who knows where it is? I am crossing the border ]
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Nguyen Ngoc Tien: The Fall of Kontum
Nguyen Ngoc Tien.
With the loss of Ban Me Thuot, on the 10th of March, 1975, Kontum was shaken up and a lot of people from Kontum decided to evacuate to Pleiku. Pleiku was the place that people from Kontum moved to. I left Kontum by land and I moved to Pleiku but actually I wanted to go to Nha Trang, but Route 7 was not open at that time so I got stuck at Pleiku. After the majority of Kontum people evacuated and there was only a small number of army officers and the mayor of Kontum who stayed behind, and route 7 was the only route to Saigon from the highlands, and it was blockaded atthat time. My family and I lived in Kontum for 15 years. Since 1960 until the time we evacuated. And around that 1975 I was a governmental worker, I was the finance chief of the town.
I was extremely surprised by what happened, because I thought that they would hit Kontum first and that they would try to overcome Kontum first, and then they went ahead and took over Ban Me Thuot, and by doing that they cut the highlands in half, and it was such a surprise.
On and after the 10th of March, people of Kontum started to evacuate, and my family didn't leave Kontum until the 15th of March, and we drove by car to Pleiku, and at Pleiku, my family tried to find a means to go to Qui Nhon, and so they rented a helicopter to fly to Qui Nhon. But I stayed in Pleiku. Why did I make the decision to leave? Because we could not coexist with the communists. We were free people and they were communists. And I knew that we could not coexist, and besides I was a governmental worker, they would not leave me alone, so I had to go, we had to leave.
Kontum was never overrun by the Communists in 1972, there was some heavy fighting then but they never even got close to the town. The only time it fell into the hands of the communists was in 1975. I was in the convoy of tears at the time but I was to the rear of the convoy, and that is why I got captured, whereas a number of people were lucky enough to get away and to move on.
Let me describe for you a little bit about the convoy of tears. You know there were a lot of people, and people were mixed up in terms of ordinary citizens and military personnel. You would have civilians taking a ride on the tanks driven by the military people, and then you would have military people of different units trying to get a ride with the infantry branch, especially the rangers, they tried to hitch a ride with infantrymen. And along the way, many people die d. Just common people died. And a lot of military people died during that trip also. Especially the rangers. They committed suicide a lot. They did it so easily -- like by hanging themselves. Like the trees, they were not even real tall. With the branches close to the ground, but they just hanged themselves in the trees. And it was such a sorrowful sight when we saw them hanging in the trees. It was such a sorrowful sight.
We were moving along in the convoy of tears and we were being fired at by the communists and because of the intense firing I moved from the convoy and ran into the forest. And they got me there.
I was captured on the 19th of March. I was about 30 or 40 kilometers from Pleiku, on the road to Phu Bon. Cheo Reo is part of Phu Bon. You know what happened? The army that captured me, they were under the direction of Van Tien Dung, because they came from the North, they were not guerrillas or the National Liberation Front people, they were northern soldiers who were sent south. I was lucky that they came from the North, I attribute that to luck. So my life didn't end there. Because if they came from the South Since they were from the North they just kept you as prisoners, but from the South, they would have killed me off right away. I was together with just civilians and it was a large group, and they considered me as just a civilian. I was scared, but I didn't think I would die in their hands then because I was mixed in with the civilians. There were a lot of people that they captured and they made us work for them by carrying things, as they moved southward. I did not see them shoot anybody, but I saw a lot of people dying along the way. A lot.
They said, "Well brothers, where do you want to go, now that we have liberated you all?" They said we should stay and not try to leave. The soldiers of the Northern Army were very young and I thought that only the higher ups knew what was going on. The soldiers didn't They didn't have a lot of education or sophistication.
The people they captured around me were just lowland people like us. The soldiers they didn't know anything, what they tried to tell us ws that they recited what they had been told. They didn't know anything else. They just told us what they had been told.
They tied me up in the beginning, one morning, for half a day or something like that. Then they untied me so I could help carry their stuff. Not everyone had to help them carry their stuff. Why did they have a lot of stuff to be carried, anyway? They used us on an as needed basis, whoever was around at the time they wanted to have something to carry, they asked. But they didn't have a lot of stuff for us to carry. They fed us, one handful of rice and some salt, and that was it. How long was I kept prisoner, about two months.
I remember there was one particular person from Kontum who had worked in the post office. And now he was a cadre for the Communists. But only a few of the people of Kontum turned out to be Communists. It wasn't anything important, because before 1975 they were just regular nonsignificant employees in the government.
I didn't think we would be able to regain control because by that time everything was out of order. And the situation was so chaotic and there was no leadership at all. After the departure of General Ngo Quang Truong then General Cam took over and then he also left and they designated a Col. to take over and then this person took off, and another person was designated to lead the military, it was just a succession of people leaving their posts. There was mass chaos and nothing could be done. I didn't think we would regain the region or that we could fight back effectively. General Pham Van Phu was in command in the area at the time, not General Truong.
When Saigon fell I was in jail. I was a prisoner. Before the fall of Saigon I and other prisoners had high hopes that Saigon would not fall so that there would be an exchange of prisoners, and when we heard that Saigon fell, it just killed our hopes and despair set in.
I was first a prisoner in Phu Bon and then they returned me to Kontum. It wasn't a real prison, it was just a makeshift prison camp, with a wire fence to close us in in a particular area. During the time that I was a prisoner, my family was in Qui Nhon and when they released me they said to me that since I had no criminal records, and no anti-people activities, they temporarily released me. But they said that because at that time I did not tell them that I worked for the former goernment.
I knew before we got separated, when they left Pleiku, I thought then that they were in Qui Nhon. I was held in Phu Bon and that is where they released me. I was ordered to return to Kontum, but I escaped, and instead of going to Kontum I dressed as a civilian and took and made a detour and went to Saigon instead.
How did I do it? By car. So, in Saigon, I had no idea what to do. I was unfamiliar with Saigon and didn't know anything about it. I wanted to add one point. I was captured on the 19th of March, 1975, and then on the 20th of March they also captured a number of generals and colonels and high important people from the police department from the Kontum area. I recognized one colonel from my area and another colonel from the Ban Me Thuot area. That night, the same day, the 20th of March, they put these people together with us. But that same night they then took these people away. They only released me, but they didn't release these officers. The assistant commander of MR II, General Dam, and the Cols who were also acting mayors of Kontum and Ban Me Thuot, Col. Mayor of Ban Me Thuot was Col. Luat and a number of Cols and other high ranking officers. They were taken away at night and I didn't see them again.
I stayed in Saigon from 1975 until 1983. I worked at different jobs in Saigon trying to hide my identity so I would not be returned to Kontum. I always had an idea of leaving and was looking for a way out of the country. So in 1980 I left my children leave Vietnam, my wife and I did not leave until 1983. They left by boat and ten days later we got news of their whereabouts. Their boat was rescued by a Norwegian ship, and it took them to Japan where they stayed for seven months and then they were resettled in the US. Of course I was afraid of being sent to a reeducation camp or to the New Economic Zones. So every morning I left the house, as though I were going to work or to run a business. So that the special police force of the neighborhood would not become suspicious of my status. I didn't see any Americans after 1975.
There was corruption in the South. The North had lived a harsh, spartan life style, and now they came into contact with material things, and so they wanted things. Another thing was that they started to bicker among themselves because of jealousy, and some had good jobs and some didn't and so on. There were conflicts among the Northerners and there was pressure from family members from the Communist officers who returned South because now their families wanted special favors and special things and they complained to their relatives. People wanted material things from relatives in the Northern Army. And so the officials became corrupted very easily, and now it became a natural thing for them to take bribes, it was just an open thing and everybody knows about it. I feared being captured or dying and so I waited to leave the country. But then there came a time in 1980 when I had to make up my mind and sacrifice for my three children to get the chance to leave. They were lucky they left when they did and they made it. And so then I continued to plan for myself and my spouses escape. So we went back to the same organizer and we left and made it to and we didn't have to abort the attempts. We only tried once and we made it like our children.
The organizer of the trip was somebody that we knew and he had organized many trips already, the one including that our children took. It was safe and we were not worried that we would not lose money or anything. He organized around 13 trips and only one or two didn't work out, we were told, and it was due mainly to bad weather. He didn't swindle people out of their money. We trusted him.
I attribute my family's luck, getting out safely. There were many people who had to try many times, 10 times or more and they got cheated out of their money. We were really lucky. We landed in Indonesia. There was a 4 day and 3 night trip. We took a long course and avoided Thai pirates. We were then sponsored by Hanh, or relatives, and with the help of the USCC.
America. As I landed in San Francisco, on the 13 of June 1984, I started feeling freedom, this sense of being free and I felt that this was a big country and that my life, my family and I, our lives, would be safe.
Even though American is a big and strong country, I always think of Vietnam. Life in Vietnam was much slower and you don't have that many worries. But then again, one cannot live with the communists because of their political ideas.
We have lots of freedom in this country. It would have been nice to lead the life style of Vietnam but then I cannot live together with the Communists.
What should I tel my children and grandchildren. Right now we speak Vietnamese at home and I try to instill some Vietnamese ideas in my children. We practice the customs of Vietnam. here at home. The older three know, and we don't have to worry about them losing their roots. The young ones we try to to teach the teaching of the traditions and the customs, and we want them, and we try to help them maintain their Asian roots.
We live in America and our children are touched by this culture. When they are out of school they move out on their own, so they will have to tell their own children about Vietnam. But if we lived together I would tell my grandchildren about Vietnam. But I am afraid they will not live here. I would tell them if I could that even if Vietnam was a small country, life there was nice and things were nice and you didn't have a lot of worries. I would also tell them about the changes after 1975 and the ruling of the communists and how life became so disruptive and chaotic. But I don't think that they would ever want to return to Vietnam. Only the old people would want to go back when the communists are gone.
What is the cause for the loss of Vietnam. There are three: 1. the Vietnamese system was so corrupt, from top to bottom, and a lot of corruption was going on. 2). the aid of the American government, when they gave us at a distance aid, they did not give things that we could use, raw materials, things we needed. They only gave us tangible things, that could be used then and there. So when there was a cut in assistance, things started to shake. 3. the way the people grouped themselves after the death of president Diem. I see that there started to be different parties and gangs, people drifted into different groups, and they did not do they were not united after that. They were in different competing groups, there was no unity in the country after that time.
The use of illegal drugs. I knew that from time to time there were drug arrests. But when I was in Saigon, I would see a lot of young people shooting up right there in public, but then when they got arrested, that didn't deter them. After 1975 I saw people dying from not having drugs, they just dropped dead on the streets, like that, because they didn't have drugs to satisfy their cravings.
What did I think of General Nguyen Van Toan. On his skills as a leader, there were rumors about him. I didn't think his being relieved from his post was due to his involvement in the use of illegal substances. But it was to my mind with the issue of girls, too many females. I met General Phu only two times, when he came to meetings. He was still young then. At the time he came up for the meetings was when things started to happen. I heard no rumors about him and heard he had a good character.
I grew up in the Central Region, in Quang Nam, and after 1947 I moved to Saigon for schooling. In 1960, when I graduated I was assigned to a post in Kontum, and that's where I lived until things happened in 1975.
Often now I dream about Vietnam. At night I would have dreams that I was back at my work place or on my way home. I dream about Vietnam all the time. There will never be a day when I don't dream about Vietnam. Never ever.
I worry about the third generation here in America, they will be like the American kids. and I don't like that.
With the loss of Ban Me Thuot, on the 10th of March, 1975, Kontum was shaken up and a lot of people from Kontum decided to evacuate to Pleiku. Pleiku was the place that people from Kontum moved to. I left Kontum by land and I moved to Pleiku but actually I wanted to go to Nha Trang, but Route 7 was not open at that time so I got stuck at Pleiku. After the majority of Kontum people evacuated and there was only a small number of army officers and the mayor of Kontum who stayed behind, and route 7 was the only route to Saigon from the highlands, and it was blockaded atthat time. My family and I lived in Kontum for 15 years. Since 1960 until the time we evacuated. And around that 1975 I was a governmental worker, I was the finance chief of the town.
I was extremely surprised by what happened, because I thought that they would hit Kontum first and that they would try to overcome Kontum first, and then they went ahead and took over Ban Me Thuot, and by doing that they cut the highlands in half, and it was such a surprise.
On and after the 10th of March, people of Kontum started to evacuate, and my family didn't leave Kontum until the 15th of March, and we drove by car to Pleiku, and at Pleiku, my family tried to find a means to go to Qui Nhon, and so they rented a helicopter to fly to Qui Nhon. But I stayed in Pleiku. Why did I make the decision to leave? Because we could not coexist with the communists. We were free people and they were communists. And I knew that we could not coexist, and besides I was a governmental worker, they would not leave me alone, so I had to go, we had to leave.
Kontum was never overrun by the Communists in 1972, there was some heavy fighting then but they never even got close to the town. The only time it fell into the hands of the communists was in 1975. I was in the convoy of tears at the time but I was to the rear of the convoy, and that is why I got captured, whereas a number of people were lucky enough to get away and to move on.
Let me describe for you a little bit about the convoy of tears. You know there were a lot of people, and people were mixed up in terms of ordinary citizens and military personnel. You would have civilians taking a ride on the tanks driven by the military people, and then you would have military people of different units trying to get a ride with the infantry branch, especially the rangers, they tried to hitch a ride with infantrymen. And along the way, many people die d. Just common people died. And a lot of military people died during that trip also. Especially the rangers. They committed suicide a lot. They did it so easily -- like by hanging themselves. Like the trees, they were not even real tall. With the branches close to the ground, but they just hanged themselves in the trees. And it was such a sorrowful sight when we saw them hanging in the trees. It was such a sorrowful sight.
We were moving along in the convoy of tears and we were being fired at by the communists and because of the intense firing I moved from the convoy and ran into the forest. And they got me there.
I was captured on the 19th of March. I was about 30 or 40 kilometers from Pleiku, on the road to Phu Bon. Cheo Reo is part of Phu Bon. You know what happened? The army that captured me, they were under the direction of Van Tien Dung, because they came from the North, they were not guerrillas or the National Liberation Front people, they were northern soldiers who were sent south. I was lucky that they came from the North, I attribute that to luck. So my life didn't end there. Because if they came from the South Since they were from the North they just kept you as prisoners, but from the South, they would have killed me off right away. I was together with just civilians and it was a large group, and they considered me as just a civilian. I was scared, but I didn't think I would die in their hands then because I was mixed in with the civilians. There were a lot of people that they captured and they made us work for them by carrying things, as they moved southward. I did not see them shoot anybody, but I saw a lot of people dying along the way. A lot.
They said, "Well brothers, where do you want to go, now that we have liberated you all?" They said we should stay and not try to leave. The soldiers of the Northern Army were very young and I thought that only the higher ups knew what was going on. The soldiers didn't They didn't have a lot of education or sophistication.
The people they captured around me were just lowland people like us. The soldiers they didn't know anything, what they tried to tell us ws that they recited what they had been told. They didn't know anything else. They just told us what they had been told.
They tied me up in the beginning, one morning, for half a day or something like that. Then they untied me so I could help carry their stuff. Not everyone had to help them carry their stuff. Why did they have a lot of stuff to be carried, anyway? They used us on an as needed basis, whoever was around at the time they wanted to have something to carry, they asked. But they didn't have a lot of stuff for us to carry. They fed us, one handful of rice and some salt, and that was it. How long was I kept prisoner, about two months.
I remember there was one particular person from Kontum who had worked in the post office. And now he was a cadre for the Communists. But only a few of the people of Kontum turned out to be Communists. It wasn't anything important, because before 1975 they were just regular nonsignificant employees in the government.
I didn't think we would be able to regain control because by that time everything was out of order. And the situation was so chaotic and there was no leadership at all. After the departure of General Ngo Quang Truong then General Cam took over and then he also left and they designated a Col. to take over and then this person took off, and another person was designated to lead the military, it was just a succession of people leaving their posts. There was mass chaos and nothing could be done. I didn't think we would regain the region or that we could fight back effectively. General Pham Van Phu was in command in the area at the time, not General Truong.
When Saigon fell I was in jail. I was a prisoner. Before the fall of Saigon I and other prisoners had high hopes that Saigon would not fall so that there would be an exchange of prisoners, and when we heard that Saigon fell, it just killed our hopes and despair set in.
I was first a prisoner in Phu Bon and then they returned me to Kontum. It wasn't a real prison, it was just a makeshift prison camp, with a wire fence to close us in in a particular area. During the time that I was a prisoner, my family was in Qui Nhon and when they released me they said to me that since I had no criminal records, and no anti-people activities, they temporarily released me. But they said that because at that time I did not tell them that I worked for the former goernment.
I knew before we got separated, when they left Pleiku, I thought then that they were in Qui Nhon. I was held in Phu Bon and that is where they released me. I was ordered to return to Kontum, but I escaped, and instead of going to Kontum I dressed as a civilian and took and made a detour and went to Saigon instead.
How did I do it? By car. So, in Saigon, I had no idea what to do. I was unfamiliar with Saigon and didn't know anything about it. I wanted to add one point. I was captured on the 19th of March, 1975, and then on the 20th of March they also captured a number of generals and colonels and high important people from the police department from the Kontum area. I recognized one colonel from my area and another colonel from the Ban Me Thuot area. That night, the same day, the 20th of March, they put these people together with us. But that same night they then took these people away. They only released me, but they didn't release these officers. The assistant commander of MR II, General Dam, and the Cols who were also acting mayors of Kontum and Ban Me Thuot, Col. Mayor of Ban Me Thuot was Col. Luat and a number of Cols and other high ranking officers. They were taken away at night and I didn't see them again.
I stayed in Saigon from 1975 until 1983. I worked at different jobs in Saigon trying to hide my identity so I would not be returned to Kontum. I always had an idea of leaving and was looking for a way out of the country. So in 1980 I left my children leave Vietnam, my wife and I did not leave until 1983. They left by boat and ten days later we got news of their whereabouts. Their boat was rescued by a Norwegian ship, and it took them to Japan where they stayed for seven months and then they were resettled in the US. Of course I was afraid of being sent to a reeducation camp or to the New Economic Zones. So every morning I left the house, as though I were going to work or to run a business. So that the special police force of the neighborhood would not become suspicious of my status. I didn't see any Americans after 1975.
There was corruption in the South. The North had lived a harsh, spartan life style, and now they came into contact with material things, and so they wanted things. Another thing was that they started to bicker among themselves because of jealousy, and some had good jobs and some didn't and so on. There were conflicts among the Northerners and there was pressure from family members from the Communist officers who returned South because now their families wanted special favors and special things and they complained to their relatives. People wanted material things from relatives in the Northern Army. And so the officials became corrupted very easily, and now it became a natural thing for them to take bribes, it was just an open thing and everybody knows about it. I feared being captured or dying and so I waited to leave the country. But then there came a time in 1980 when I had to make up my mind and sacrifice for my three children to get the chance to leave. They were lucky they left when they did and they made it. And so then I continued to plan for myself and my spouses escape. So we went back to the same organizer and we left and made it to and we didn't have to abort the attempts. We only tried once and we made it like our children.
The organizer of the trip was somebody that we knew and he had organized many trips already, the one including that our children took. It was safe and we were not worried that we would not lose money or anything. He organized around 13 trips and only one or two didn't work out, we were told, and it was due mainly to bad weather. He didn't swindle people out of their money. We trusted him.
I attribute my family's luck, getting out safely. There were many people who had to try many times, 10 times or more and they got cheated out of their money. We were really lucky. We landed in Indonesia. There was a 4 day and 3 night trip. We took a long course and avoided Thai pirates. We were then sponsored by Hanh, or relatives, and with the help of the USCC.
America. As I landed in San Francisco, on the 13 of June 1984, I started feeling freedom, this sense of being free and I felt that this was a big country and that my life, my family and I, our lives, would be safe.
Even though American is a big and strong country, I always think of Vietnam. Life in Vietnam was much slower and you don't have that many worries. But then again, one cannot live with the communists because of their political ideas.
We have lots of freedom in this country. It would have been nice to lead the life style of Vietnam but then I cannot live together with the Communists.
What should I tel my children and grandchildren. Right now we speak Vietnamese at home and I try to instill some Vietnamese ideas in my children. We practice the customs of Vietnam. here at home. The older three know, and we don't have to worry about them losing their roots. The young ones we try to to teach the teaching of the traditions and the customs, and we want them, and we try to help them maintain their Asian roots.
We live in America and our children are touched by this culture. When they are out of school they move out on their own, so they will have to tell their own children about Vietnam. But if we lived together I would tell my grandchildren about Vietnam. But I am afraid they will not live here. I would tell them if I could that even if Vietnam was a small country, life there was nice and things were nice and you didn't have a lot of worries. I would also tell them about the changes after 1975 and the ruling of the communists and how life became so disruptive and chaotic. But I don't think that they would ever want to return to Vietnam. Only the old people would want to go back when the communists are gone.
What is the cause for the loss of Vietnam. There are three: 1. the Vietnamese system was so corrupt, from top to bottom, and a lot of corruption was going on. 2). the aid of the American government, when they gave us at a distance aid, they did not give things that we could use, raw materials, things we needed. They only gave us tangible things, that could be used then and there. So when there was a cut in assistance, things started to shake. 3. the way the people grouped themselves after the death of president Diem. I see that there started to be different parties and gangs, people drifted into different groups, and they did not do they were not united after that. They were in different competing groups, there was no unity in the country after that time.
The use of illegal drugs. I knew that from time to time there were drug arrests. But when I was in Saigon, I would see a lot of young people shooting up right there in public, but then when they got arrested, that didn't deter them. After 1975 I saw people dying from not having drugs, they just dropped dead on the streets, like that, because they didn't have drugs to satisfy their cravings.
What did I think of General Nguyen Van Toan. On his skills as a leader, there were rumors about him. I didn't think his being relieved from his post was due to his involvement in the use of illegal substances. But it was to my mind with the issue of girls, too many females. I met General Phu only two times, when he came to meetings. He was still young then. At the time he came up for the meetings was when things started to happen. I heard no rumors about him and heard he had a good character.
I grew up in the Central Region, in Quang Nam, and after 1947 I moved to Saigon for schooling. In 1960, when I graduated I was assigned to a post in Kontum, and that's where I lived until things happened in 1975.
Often now I dream about Vietnam. At night I would have dreams that I was back at my work place or on my way home. I dream about Vietnam all the time. There will never be a day when I don't dream about Vietnam. Never ever.
I worry about the third generation here in America, they will be like the American kids. and I don't like that.
Harvey Rudisaile: The Orphans, the hospital and the fall of Saigon
HARVEY RUDISAILE.
My path to Vietnam was that I worked in the health field with the Seventh Day Adventist Church. That's where I had been working here in the states for a number of years. We had a hospital in Vietnam from the early 1930s. We had a hospital in the Saigon for quite a while, primarily for technical services and things like that. And then about the time when 72 when the US forces withdrew, they were looking for someone to contract with their field army, to provide services to all of the American interests in Vietnam and the Army left under contract with the Embassy, our hospital needed replacing, so that gave us by contract and to a place to operate our old hospital or build a new one. So we were providing services under contract, a five year contract, as well as running the same services that we had run for the Vietnamese people.
So in 1975 we were about three years into the contract. I came in the summer of 1974 to the hospital, as a hospital administrator. It had over 300 beds at that time, it was a full service hospital with intensive care and all of the services that a hospital would have right here in the states. It was run by US health care standards.
Most of the students were Vietnamese, but we did have an American ward. We did have a lot of maternity cases there. But it was a full service hospital.
The hospital was on Gia Dinh, the same street that Third Field was on, we owned a parcel of land and that's where we were building our new hospital. It was only partially complete when we had to leave, and it's still there partially completed.
My family was with me at that time and I enjoyed Saigon very much. I look back on that time as a very rewarding and interesting time. Our children were teenagers at that time. And it was good for them. It was our first opportunity to be outside the US and to be in another culture. And I think it broadened all of our points of view. It was a Third World country, a developing country, and we realized that the whole world did not revolve around the United States.
We went there on a Three Year Commitment and we had must barely gotten into it when the whole thing fell apart.
I don't think that I ever felt in personal jeopardy at any time. But I did feel that we would not be able to continue there as Americans, somewhere, the idea started coming around the first of the year, in January.
I think we decided not to stay on if the South fell because our entire operation was American. We had American trained physicians, they wren't all Americans, some were Australians and others, but they were western trained physicians, and we had this contract with the Embassy and we were thought of as an American facility. We hoped that the hospital could continue to operate as a private hospital in the hands of the Vietnamese, and we were prepared to continue it that way. But the problem was that there were very few qualified Vietnamese physicians, after we left, to keep the hospital running. That was the biggest dilemma we had.
There was a series of events that happened, over a matter of months as the country began to fall. It became apparent that probably Saigon was going to fall as well. So we made some preparations to get our families out during that time of crisis. We started sending people out and we were kind of down to a skeleton crew in April. We were actually looking for options to try to keep the hospital running, but it none of those seemed to work out. We couldn't get enough staff, not enough physicians, who were willing to stay. Most of the Americans felt that they didn't want risk that with their families or anything like that, so we really had to come to the conclusion that we couldn't operate any more.
All of the Orphan Airlift children from the C5A crash were brought back to our hospital, all of them, both the dead and the alive.
That was April 4, 5:00 PM, Friday afternoon, Saigon time, I'll never forget that. I was downtown Saigon at the time. I carried a two way radio at the end, to stay in touch with the Mission Warden. And I heard the news start coming over that. There had been an air disaster and they were bringing them to our hospital. So I hurried back home. We were processing them all that night. We got volunteer help at that time. From sources that you wouldn't think would help us. There was a peace keeping commission, with Polish and Hungarians. They volunteered us their medical personnel, and they called us up and sent them over, they were helping us in the hospital, operating in the hospital and everything right along with our own doctors. Really very nice. We processed them all Friday night and all day Saturday and it was actually probably Sunday morning, at 2 or 3 am, that we got the last survivors medivaced out by Air force plane out of Okinawa. That was the greatest disaster when I was there, by far the greatest. Now we had a lot of other things, every so often they would bring casualties in from the Mekong, mostly mercenaries. They were trying to keep the Mekong supply lines open to Cambodia. And every so often they would bring a plane load of them in.
That has been, even in my career in health care now for over 20 some years, that has been the biggest disaster that I've ever handled.
That was still two or three weeks before the end. It started a lot of people thinking, wondering if they could get out of the country. And it was after that that many of our American personnel decided that they didn't want to stay. And it became, it was the very next Sunday, two days later, that a number our physicians came to me and said, "We have to leave." And I was getting pretty desperate to find replacements. Dr. Bruce Branson was one of the few who said, "I'll stick it out as long as you do. We'll just stay here and work," which I appreciated very much. My family was in Singapore at that time, so it took a lot of the pressure off me.
I was just there on a day to day basis at that time. Soon after that they started the evacuation flights with dependent personnel, anybody who you could convince them was some relation or dependent could get put on a list and get out. That process was going. And my plan was kind of just to play it by ear day to day and just catch the last flight out or something like that. But then I would say about ten days I am guessing a little bit on that, a few days before the final evacuation, the Chief Medical officer for the Embassy, Dr., he came to our hospital, and he wanted to be sure that we could provide services right up to the end. Even if that meant bringing a doctor and a couple of other people right over to the Embassy, with the idea being that we would be on the final evacuation list out of the Embassy. So Dr. Branson and a couple of others were prepared to provide those services to them. It turned out that when we got down to Thursday of the last week, he came back to us and said that he felt like they didn't enough personnel left but that he could handle it with his crew, and for us to go ahead and close down if we felt that was the thing to do. So we made our decision almost at the last minute. A lot of it was based on the ability to evacuate national personnel who had been associated with our hospital for quite some time. It was kind of an interesting chain of events that revolved around that C5A crash.
After that we got the attention of Lt. General Homer Smith, and he wrote us a commendation letter, and we kind of used that to go back to him and said, Look we can't keep operating, and if there is something you can do to help us evacuate our Vietnamese personnel and he gave us a authorization to make up a list of the personnel that we could evacuate on the evacuation flights, which we proceeded to do and put that together on that Thursday, and that was when we decided that we would just close the hospital.
It was a very difficult thing, very difficult, deciding who would be on that list and who would not be on it. I personally didn't get involved with it because that was too difficult.I had a Vietnamese assistant administrator and we had a church officer who was in charge of our church work there in Vietnam, and we gave them the task, and they brought in two or three other people into their council, and they actually made up the list and it had to do with those who had been associated with Americans for the longest period of time and might indeed be in jeopardy for whatever reason. The list was made up on that basis.
When these people flew out there was always the memory of the orphan crash. All of the time. When my family left after that, I got a call from them in Singapore, they had flown right over the crash site, and the plane was still there, and it was kind of an emotional thing for them. I actually left in the middle of the night and I couldn't see anything.
Maurice Baughman was left behind. He worked in the lab. He had been in the service, he had two tours of duty, he was a single man and a Christian, and he decided he could help some of the orphans out, and he came back to the country and got a job in our lab as a lab technician. And he opened he rented this house and opened it to the street children and gave them a place to live and he supported it all with what he earned from us. He had been there at least two years at the time that we had to leave. He declared right up front that he had no family and this was his life and his work and he hoped that he could continue it and he intended to stay and try. That being the case, he was the only the American and we had this contract with the American Embassy and we were leaving a few days before that closed down, so I left him in charge of the hospital, keys, bank account and whatever else was left. We had essentially though, terminated most of the Employees, paid them three months wages, transferred or discharged all of the patients, discharged them, so that there wasn't much left. But he intended to stay there at the hospital and tried to maintain it's identity until the communists came in. I never have seen him again. I did hear from him after he left Saigon. He was able to stay a few weeks. They left him there at the hospital a day or two but then they finally came in and said, "This is ours, now." And took him off to a hotel or something. He was not able to continue the hospital operation. We didn't know if he would being danger or not. You don't know what is going to happen in a situation like that. But he didn't seem to be worried. As it turned out, I guess they treated the Americans who stayed behind pretty well.
I left Tansonnhut on a C141. There were several Americans, but it was mostly Vietnamese. There were several Americans there. Most Americans were taking 25-30 Vietnamese with each passport. There were a number of Americans there, too. IN our group we had about eight Americans, and it seemed like there were three or four hundred Vietnamese in the group.
I was disappointed that we had to leave at that time. I hoped to stay there. We had enjoyed the opportunity to be there in Vietnam. We had the chance to travel a lot, while we were there. In fact, we got clear up to Hue just in March and were able to visit up there, and only a few days after we left there, they blew up the bridges and took the whole area. And we got out of that one. But we had come to enjoy the country and the people and it was a sad time for us to leave. The way the planes took off they just took off and circled, until they got altitude, until they got over the city, until they got too far out over the city, and so we didn't see very much. In fact the C141's don't have windows in them anyway. Then I went back to Singapore for reassignment. I was in Guam when I heard that Saigon had fallen.
I remember that. It came out on the headlines on the radio. I knew it was coming, we all did. It wasn't a surprise to anyone. It made me pleased that they had done it in a peaceful way, that there was not a lot of fighting and killing over the city. So I felt good about that, at least.
I knew it was inevitable around February. The reason was that there was, you can pick this up from the newsmen. There was a strategic plan from the Vietcong that got published in the Stars and Stripes, I think, and it gave almost the exact time schedule for their plans, and as you watched it develop from that time on to April, it was almost on schedule, how they were going to do and and so on. It was fascinating, interesting, to follow there plan and as they came toward Saigon.
My children want to go back to Vietnam some day. My daughter did go back to Thailand, and for a year on her own as a student missionary. But she didn't get into Vietnam. I'd love to go back.
I spent another year in the far east. I went to Japan and worked there with our hospital system and then I came back to Florida and worked there with our hospital program there and now I am in California working here, in Loma Linda at our hospital.
It was a very personal private experience. I can talk to people who had been there and we can understand each other very well, both people who were there at the end and a lot of military people. Vietnam was a very controversial subject. When we decided to go, most of our family and friends thought we were crazy to go over therein the first place. And most of them don't even understand what it was all about. So it's kind of difficult to talk about it to strangers, or people who don't have a flavor for it or an understanding. It hit people like us who had very little communication with others, for once someone is telling the story, here is what the guy that was there feels like. That was very important.
There was an American school there, through the 8th grade. And my son was in the 8th grade. My daughter was there a lot of the time, but she was in Singapore going to school most of the time.
We all enjoyed it, enormously. We stay in touch constantly with our Vietnamese friends through groups in California and in Florida. Very close friends friendships were formed that will always be there, no matter what.
NOTE:
The Saigon Adventist Hospital or US Army 3rd Field Hospital was an Adventist hospital in Saigon. It was a private hospital, formerly operated by the United States Army before being given to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The hospital was operated by the Loma Linda University School of Medicine and performed the only open heart surgery operation in Vietnam at the time. The hospital was a former mansion converted to facilitate 38 hospital beds.
More than 410 employees and church workers escaped before the Fall of Saigon. However, thousands of members and many pastors and teachers and other employees remained behind in Vietnam. The remaining members reorganized the work in Vietnam. Some of these members lost their lives while some were forced into re-education camps. Many of the workers could not move or travel from one area to another without permission. Most of the churches were shut down, and all the schools were closed.
Harvey Rudisaile lives today in Maine.
FROM THE ADVENTIST MAGAZINE 'THE MESSENGER' SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1974
The new Saigon Adventist Hospital administra-
tor, Mr. Harvey Rudisaile, started his career as a
music teacher, but also comes with a wide back-
ground of experience in business and administration.
He has worked as a business manager, accountant,
and assistant comptroller of Adventist institutions in
California, and most recently as assistant administra-
tor of the large Hinsdale Sanitarium in Chicago. He
is joined by his wife, Carol, and two children:
Harvey, 13, and Yvonne, 15, a student at Far
Eastern Academy.
We are happy to welcome these new workers
to our Southeast Asia Union family.
My path to Vietnam was that I worked in the health field with the Seventh Day Adventist Church. That's where I had been working here in the states for a number of years. We had a hospital in Vietnam from the early 1930s. We had a hospital in the Saigon for quite a while, primarily for technical services and things like that. And then about the time when 72 when the US forces withdrew, they were looking for someone to contract with their field army, to provide services to all of the American interests in Vietnam and the Army left under contract with the Embassy, our hospital needed replacing, so that gave us by contract and to a place to operate our old hospital or build a new one. So we were providing services under contract, a five year contract, as well as running the same services that we had run for the Vietnamese people.
So in 1975 we were about three years into the contract. I came in the summer of 1974 to the hospital, as a hospital administrator. It had over 300 beds at that time, it was a full service hospital with intensive care and all of the services that a hospital would have right here in the states. It was run by US health care standards.
Most of the students were Vietnamese, but we did have an American ward. We did have a lot of maternity cases there. But it was a full service hospital.
The hospital was on Gia Dinh, the same street that Third Field was on, we owned a parcel of land and that's where we were building our new hospital. It was only partially complete when we had to leave, and it's still there partially completed.
My family was with me at that time and I enjoyed Saigon very much. I look back on that time as a very rewarding and interesting time. Our children were teenagers at that time. And it was good for them. It was our first opportunity to be outside the US and to be in another culture. And I think it broadened all of our points of view. It was a Third World country, a developing country, and we realized that the whole world did not revolve around the United States.
We went there on a Three Year Commitment and we had must barely gotten into it when the whole thing fell apart.
I don't think that I ever felt in personal jeopardy at any time. But I did feel that we would not be able to continue there as Americans, somewhere, the idea started coming around the first of the year, in January.
I think we decided not to stay on if the South fell because our entire operation was American. We had American trained physicians, they wren't all Americans, some were Australians and others, but they were western trained physicians, and we had this contract with the Embassy and we were thought of as an American facility. We hoped that the hospital could continue to operate as a private hospital in the hands of the Vietnamese, and we were prepared to continue it that way. But the problem was that there were very few qualified Vietnamese physicians, after we left, to keep the hospital running. That was the biggest dilemma we had.
There was a series of events that happened, over a matter of months as the country began to fall. It became apparent that probably Saigon was going to fall as well. So we made some preparations to get our families out during that time of crisis. We started sending people out and we were kind of down to a skeleton crew in April. We were actually looking for options to try to keep the hospital running, but it none of those seemed to work out. We couldn't get enough staff, not enough physicians, who were willing to stay. Most of the Americans felt that they didn't want risk that with their families or anything like that, so we really had to come to the conclusion that we couldn't operate any more.
All of the Orphan Airlift children from the C5A crash were brought back to our hospital, all of them, both the dead and the alive.
That was April 4, 5:00 PM, Friday afternoon, Saigon time, I'll never forget that. I was downtown Saigon at the time. I carried a two way radio at the end, to stay in touch with the Mission Warden. And I heard the news start coming over that. There had been an air disaster and they were bringing them to our hospital. So I hurried back home. We were processing them all that night. We got volunteer help at that time. From sources that you wouldn't think would help us. There was a peace keeping commission, with Polish and Hungarians. They volunteered us their medical personnel, and they called us up and sent them over, they were helping us in the hospital, operating in the hospital and everything right along with our own doctors. Really very nice. We processed them all Friday night and all day Saturday and it was actually probably Sunday morning, at 2 or 3 am, that we got the last survivors medivaced out by Air force plane out of Okinawa. That was the greatest disaster when I was there, by far the greatest. Now we had a lot of other things, every so often they would bring casualties in from the Mekong, mostly mercenaries. They were trying to keep the Mekong supply lines open to Cambodia. And every so often they would bring a plane load of them in.
That has been, even in my career in health care now for over 20 some years, that has been the biggest disaster that I've ever handled.
That was still two or three weeks before the end. It started a lot of people thinking, wondering if they could get out of the country. And it was after that that many of our American personnel decided that they didn't want to stay. And it became, it was the very next Sunday, two days later, that a number our physicians came to me and said, "We have to leave." And I was getting pretty desperate to find replacements. Dr. Bruce Branson was one of the few who said, "I'll stick it out as long as you do. We'll just stay here and work," which I appreciated very much. My family was in Singapore at that time, so it took a lot of the pressure off me.
I was just there on a day to day basis at that time. Soon after that they started the evacuation flights with dependent personnel, anybody who you could convince them was some relation or dependent could get put on a list and get out. That process was going. And my plan was kind of just to play it by ear day to day and just catch the last flight out or something like that. But then I would say about ten days I am guessing a little bit on that, a few days before the final evacuation, the Chief Medical officer for the Embassy, Dr., he came to our hospital, and he wanted to be sure that we could provide services right up to the end. Even if that meant bringing a doctor and a couple of other people right over to the Embassy, with the idea being that we would be on the final evacuation list out of the Embassy. So Dr. Branson and a couple of others were prepared to provide those services to them. It turned out that when we got down to Thursday of the last week, he came back to us and said that he felt like they didn't enough personnel left but that he could handle it with his crew, and for us to go ahead and close down if we felt that was the thing to do. So we made our decision almost at the last minute. A lot of it was based on the ability to evacuate national personnel who had been associated with our hospital for quite some time. It was kind of an interesting chain of events that revolved around that C5A crash.
After that we got the attention of Lt. General Homer Smith, and he wrote us a commendation letter, and we kind of used that to go back to him and said, Look we can't keep operating, and if there is something you can do to help us evacuate our Vietnamese personnel and he gave us a authorization to make up a list of the personnel that we could evacuate on the evacuation flights, which we proceeded to do and put that together on that Thursday, and that was when we decided that we would just close the hospital.
It was a very difficult thing, very difficult, deciding who would be on that list and who would not be on it. I personally didn't get involved with it because that was too difficult.I had a Vietnamese assistant administrator and we had a church officer who was in charge of our church work there in Vietnam, and we gave them the task, and they brought in two or three other people into their council, and they actually made up the list and it had to do with those who had been associated with Americans for the longest period of time and might indeed be in jeopardy for whatever reason. The list was made up on that basis.
When these people flew out there was always the memory of the orphan crash. All of the time. When my family left after that, I got a call from them in Singapore, they had flown right over the crash site, and the plane was still there, and it was kind of an emotional thing for them. I actually left in the middle of the night and I couldn't see anything.
Maurice Baughman was left behind. He worked in the lab. He had been in the service, he had two tours of duty, he was a single man and a Christian, and he decided he could help some of the orphans out, and he came back to the country and got a job in our lab as a lab technician. And he opened he rented this house and opened it to the street children and gave them a place to live and he supported it all with what he earned from us. He had been there at least two years at the time that we had to leave. He declared right up front that he had no family and this was his life and his work and he hoped that he could continue it and he intended to stay and try. That being the case, he was the only the American and we had this contract with the American Embassy and we were leaving a few days before that closed down, so I left him in charge of the hospital, keys, bank account and whatever else was left. We had essentially though, terminated most of the Employees, paid them three months wages, transferred or discharged all of the patients, discharged them, so that there wasn't much left. But he intended to stay there at the hospital and tried to maintain it's identity until the communists came in. I never have seen him again. I did hear from him after he left Saigon. He was able to stay a few weeks. They left him there at the hospital a day or two but then they finally came in and said, "This is ours, now." And took him off to a hotel or something. He was not able to continue the hospital operation. We didn't know if he would being danger or not. You don't know what is going to happen in a situation like that. But he didn't seem to be worried. As it turned out, I guess they treated the Americans who stayed behind pretty well.
I left Tansonnhut on a C141. There were several Americans, but it was mostly Vietnamese. There were several Americans there. Most Americans were taking 25-30 Vietnamese with each passport. There were a number of Americans there, too. IN our group we had about eight Americans, and it seemed like there were three or four hundred Vietnamese in the group.
I was disappointed that we had to leave at that time. I hoped to stay there. We had enjoyed the opportunity to be there in Vietnam. We had the chance to travel a lot, while we were there. In fact, we got clear up to Hue just in March and were able to visit up there, and only a few days after we left there, they blew up the bridges and took the whole area. And we got out of that one. But we had come to enjoy the country and the people and it was a sad time for us to leave. The way the planes took off they just took off and circled, until they got altitude, until they got over the city, until they got too far out over the city, and so we didn't see very much. In fact the C141's don't have windows in them anyway. Then I went back to Singapore for reassignment. I was in Guam when I heard that Saigon had fallen.
I remember that. It came out on the headlines on the radio. I knew it was coming, we all did. It wasn't a surprise to anyone. It made me pleased that they had done it in a peaceful way, that there was not a lot of fighting and killing over the city. So I felt good about that, at least.
I knew it was inevitable around February. The reason was that there was, you can pick this up from the newsmen. There was a strategic plan from the Vietcong that got published in the Stars and Stripes, I think, and it gave almost the exact time schedule for their plans, and as you watched it develop from that time on to April, it was almost on schedule, how they were going to do and and so on. It was fascinating, interesting, to follow there plan and as they came toward Saigon.
My children want to go back to Vietnam some day. My daughter did go back to Thailand, and for a year on her own as a student missionary. But she didn't get into Vietnam. I'd love to go back.
I spent another year in the far east. I went to Japan and worked there with our hospital system and then I came back to Florida and worked there with our hospital program there and now I am in California working here, in Loma Linda at our hospital.
It was a very personal private experience. I can talk to people who had been there and we can understand each other very well, both people who were there at the end and a lot of military people. Vietnam was a very controversial subject. When we decided to go, most of our family and friends thought we were crazy to go over therein the first place. And most of them don't even understand what it was all about. So it's kind of difficult to talk about it to strangers, or people who don't have a flavor for it or an understanding. It hit people like us who had very little communication with others, for once someone is telling the story, here is what the guy that was there feels like. That was very important.
There was an American school there, through the 8th grade. And my son was in the 8th grade. My daughter was there a lot of the time, but she was in Singapore going to school most of the time.
We all enjoyed it, enormously. We stay in touch constantly with our Vietnamese friends through groups in California and in Florida. Very close friends friendships were formed that will always be there, no matter what.
NOTE:
The Saigon Adventist Hospital or US Army 3rd Field Hospital was an Adventist hospital in Saigon. It was a private hospital, formerly operated by the United States Army before being given to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The hospital was operated by the Loma Linda University School of Medicine and performed the only open heart surgery operation in Vietnam at the time. The hospital was a former mansion converted to facilitate 38 hospital beds.
More than 410 employees and church workers escaped before the Fall of Saigon. However, thousands of members and many pastors and teachers and other employees remained behind in Vietnam. The remaining members reorganized the work in Vietnam. Some of these members lost their lives while some were forced into re-education camps. Many of the workers could not move or travel from one area to another without permission. Most of the churches were shut down, and all the schools were closed.
Harvey Rudisaile lives today in Maine.
FROM THE ADVENTIST MAGAZINE 'THE MESSENGER' SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1974
The new Saigon Adventist Hospital administra-
tor, Mr. Harvey Rudisaile, started his career as a
music teacher, but also comes with a wide back-
ground of experience in business and administration.
He has worked as a business manager, accountant,
and assistant comptroller of Adventist institutions in
California, and most recently as assistant administra-
tor of the large Hinsdale Sanitarium in Chicago. He
is joined by his wife, Carol, and two children:
Harvey, 13, and Yvonne, 15, a student at Far
Eastern Academy.
We are happy to welcome these new workers
to our Southeast Asia Union family.
Death Filled My Heart and My Head: Dam Luu
Dam Luu, Buddhist Nun.
I was born in No Vietnam in Ha Dong. My parents died when I was 10. I decided to become a nun. Nobody forced me. There was a Buddhist pagoda near where I lived. I entered the religion at the age of 10. I came south in 1952 because of an invitation from someone in Saigon. During the year there was some religious suppression movements, and it was difficult then. We had a difficult time. But the situation didn't get very bad until 1963. Then the discrimination against Buddhism became worse and we demonstrated against it.
The act of burning oneself committed by some monks, as Buddhists, we are not allowed, by the commitment to the religion to be violent or to really express ourselves in any other means, like political or social, so in order to express the protest and to let the administration know of our disenchantment with the way the government treated Buddhism, these people burned themselves as a way to bring to dedicate their lives to their religion and to bring the point across and to bring the light of understanding to the government and to the people so that tolerance of the government could be carried out.
My main concern was with religion. I dedicated my life to Buddhism, so I did not pay attention to political events of any unfolding around the world in America or in North Vietnam with the communists.
I lived in Saigon at that time, Saigon being the capital of South Vietnam. There was nothing done to the temple where I stayed, but I believed that in remote regions and areas that they defiled the temples. I can't say for sure that 100 percent that these things happened, but I have a good sense that it happened. In the countryside in remote areas there was not a good local police force and so it was carried out by the governmental officers and local people.
I left Vietnam in 1964 and returned in 1969. I was in Germany during that period and in 1968 during the Tet invasion by the communists, I wasn't in Vietnam and so I didn't know what happened.
Thich Tri Quan. He was not the top representative of the whole Buddhist religion in Vietnam. There were many different branches of Buddhism and he was not the top leader of all of the branches in Vietnam. He only represented a certain faction of the religion with the Buddhists in Vietnam.
My feeling in 1973 when US troops left? In 1974 and 1975 trouble came to the country. I was afraid then for my life. I was afraid because the communists often professed that they do not believe in the existence of any supreme being. They are agnostic and perhaps there was one or two or a few from Buddhism that they did not touch and they took advantage of those people. But the rest of the Buddhists they would try to eradicate us. They are an agnostic people.
I decided to escape from Vietnam in 1978. As people who follow Buddhism and lead and ascetic life and a serene life, we didn't think that any government would bother us. But as the communists came in they made it difficult for us to follow our choosing. So I didn't think at that time that I could stay in Vietnam and openly practice Buddhism and so I decided to leave. The Communists didn't leave us alone to practice Buddhism.
They oppressed us. There was no freedom at all. The considered our place their place and they came and went as they pleased. And they monitored our activities day and night, 100 percent of the time, they watched us.
It was hard under the rule of the communists, visiting people became a difficult thing, especially when one was a monk. It was dangerous to visit others. it was very difficult if not unwise for the monks and the nuns to visit non-Buddhist people because they, the Communists, were suspicious of us. If we went to visit somebody outside the order, they would think that we were scheming and planning anti-government activities.
They would follow and they would, we, as nuns and monks, would visit the common people, then if we did that too often the Coms would would a surveillance and might do something to the people that we visited with, the non-religious order people. And that happened to me.
If I visited you, then they would come and visit you and question you and follow you around. So it was not good.
I was afraid of being sent to the reeducation camp or being killed. And something like that did happen to some of the monks and nuns. The communists were so smart. They did nothing on the massive scale as in Cambodia. They were much too smart for that. They would instead attack the individual. They would monitor the individuals and would wait for the right moment, when the individual would let down his guard, then they would use his faults or his weaknesses or whatever he was doing that they thought was not right, and like a sniper they would wait and shoot us down one by one --not literally -- but in the sense that they would point you out and arrest or detain you.
If somebody was against any individual, that person could lie and they would use that as an excuse to move in and to imprison you. You could be arrested upon any action that you did.
Some of the temples and pagodas were destroyed by the communists when they first came in to Saigon and South Vietnam. And some pagodas where someone had been suspected of being anti-communist, they would come in and destroy the structure. Nobody would do anything because anybody who resisted was accused of being anti-revolutionary and that would lead you to be killed.
They said they were only against the American troops and the American imperialists and the bad former people in the government working with Thieu. But if they wanted to arrest me or anybody they would say it was because of my linkage to the CIA and would say that I was a bad citizen and therefore they needed to arrest me. They would not just tell me they arrested me for a real reason, but would label me as something I was not and then they would arrest me. They played by no rules. They made up rules as they went along. How could you defend yourself if they said you worked for the CIA. They did whatever they wanted to do.
The situation became such that nobody trusted anybody else anymore. Even within the family the children could not trust the parents and the parents the children. You could be killed because of accusations that leaked out of a family talk or argument. You could speak to no one in a critical fashion. You dared not to discuss anything of importance, because if you had only a twosome, then you and somebody could say what you wanted, then there would be no witness. But three people could not carry on a conversation because then there would be a witness, two could gang up on one person that they disliked.
So silence is the golden policy in a communist government. Even if we sat here for a long time, they would ask why we had gathered and spent time together like that.
[Buddhists that were communists. My translator did not ask the nun so she did not give the answer.]
How did I leave. I under the Communists in their society, each has to worry about his or her own life. And when you wanted to leave you had to have money. I had not enough money, as a nun to escape. I left with the help of some people I knew, friends, who let me go with them. When I made up my mind to leave the country I knew it was a risky crossing, but I knew that death might wait for me in the open seas. But if I stayed I would die sooner or later, too. So it did not mater if I died at sea, in Vietnam I would have died a slow death.
Life in the US. The spiritual life here is sad, because we lost our country, and we also lost our religion. Here Buddhism is not widespread, so at the beginning I felt lost and by myself. As fare as the material life goes it is fine, I am sufficient, financially, not rich, but there is enough to live, as far as my spiritual life, I feel that we have lost a lot. In the future, step by step and year by year we will be able to rebuilt and revise the customs and religion here. When that is done, actually, I feel like I am reviving a world like that here. Especially when there is progress made in the reviving of Vietnamese culture and customs and the reviving of the religion itself.
The process of escaping was not easy. I had to lie to people to say I was visiting friends or I was going on a pilgrimage. It took a few months before I made it. I became a boat person, I left Vietnam by boat.
When I was planning to escape I had no thought of building a temple overseas, or living there for a long time, I had only the idea that at this time only death filled my head because it was risky and many people died at sea. So death filled my heart and my head. I needed though to escape and to be free.
I left in August 1978 and landed in Malaysia, I stayed there for a year, and as far as carrying on my tasks as a nun I had no means to do chanting or reading the sacred books. I was active in helping people who needed spiritual uplifting and support, I would give them that. In the camp I was in there was no temple.
But our camp was so small and I had no means to build a temple.
When I left for the US I arrived in Palo Alto, California and stayed in a Giac Minh temple there for one year and then moved to San Jose and rented a house to transform it into a pagoda, and it served as a sort of temple, and then I moved to this new location about a month ago. Duc Vien Temple is where I live now.
Perhaps one day we will be able tos ee vn again, but as to a time line and to say when, I can't say. Who knows when? For the vn outside the country, we cannot return. And those inside want to get out.
I don't think that we Vietnamese here in the US can do anything to turn the situation around in Vietnam. Anything that will happen in Vietnam will be the result of a discussion of a negotiation between the Americans and the Russians, but the Vietnamese themselves cannot really affect the situation. They can only talk about it, but they cannot actually do anything about it, the way the people mistrust each other today.
But we still hold the dream dear to our hearts and we try to keep up the fighting spirit so that one day we can return to Vietnam. But we cannot set a date or a time line, but we know that we must try to make it happen.
You know about Karmic Laws that have to do with the Cham peoples of Champa in Central Vietnam? I cannot say within the Buddhist order that issue has not been discussed or even mentioned, but I do believe in the teachings of Buddha, that whatever seeds you plant, you will receive the fruit from that seed. So perhaps it is true that President Nguyen Van Thieu was really a Cham, and that is why the Vietnamese suffer now. But I don't think that it is the only reason that we are paying for what was done in the past, for the killing off of the Chams in the 15th century. That was bad, for sure. But that was not the sole reason for the suffering of the Vietnamese people now. I did not participate in those killings centuries ago. I am a Vietnamese and because I am in this situation I must leave the country, so I share in my country's misfortunes. Perhaps in some past individual life I sowed seeds. But I can't say that the reason the Vietnamese are suffering now is because we as a collective group killed off a whole race.
As a believer in the teachings of Buddha, everything has a consequence. And a reason. Perhaps in past history, in past beings we the Vietnamese gathered some sort of bad seeds, so that is why now we are born in a country that always has some sort of fighting and is always in disharmony and is always giving us lots of things to suffer for.
So we are like people who are alcoholics. They gather together and go where they can get drinks. So perhaps in the past the Vietnamese people have done something bad, so that now we are all gathered together in a country in one place that is so harsh and that doesn't seem to have any happiness. Maybe like the American people, they are lucky to be born in this country. They do not have to suffer like us, so perhaps in their previous beings they have done something that enabled them to live in this country. It is as simple as that, the Karmic laws.
I was in Germany for 4 years. I studied sociology in Germany, it was a place to study. It was not a place to disseminate religion.
My life, my spirit, I think I have a serene inner self. Because I think that life here is nice and comparing to Vietnam it is much better, and as a Buddhist I do not have the sense of trying to cover up a sad inside with a happy outside. I am very serene and I have a good inner self and a good sense of myself. If I have things to do here, I am not pressed to do them, I am not worried about getting them done as quickly as possible because now I am aware of the limits of my capacity. I let things unfold they way that they will. I try to live in the present and I do not mourn things in the past. And I do not worry about the future. I just live for today and live for right now. And I am happy this way. it is no use to cry over spilled milk or to worry about the future. You cannot rescue the past and you cannot predict tomorrow, and there are people like that who cry constantly about lost things in the past, and who worry about the future. But I do not do it that way. I just live in the present.
We should live for all people in a country and make the world a better place to live in. We should lead a temperate life and be a useful citizen, that is what I am trying to do.
The Vietnamese people have two lives, the inner and the outer lives, and these do not match. Nothing will change until the Communists are gone.
Where did they come from. It began as a small movement. The people were satisfied with the former regime, and so they gathered together and they worked on it and they kept focusing on the bad things of the regime, and they dwelled on that, and they looked at only the bad, using that tactic they were able to regroup more people and bring people into their web of lies. I did not mean just the Thieu regime, but even back under the monarchy, it began then. Things were done slowly, so they formed groups that grew and grew.
If you look at the rich countries of the world you do not see people grouping together and clamoring for a communist government. Only when people are poor and oppressed do they lean to the communists.
when I was younger and the elders talked about how horrible the communists were, I didn't believe them. I said, look, they are only human, they cannot be that bad. They have a heart and they have a mind and they cannot be that horrendous. And that is why I did not leave in 1975. I had no contact with them yet. But after living with them for three years, I became very aware of who they were and what they really did, and that is why I left the country. They just don't have hearts.
There are the have nots and the haves. And the have nots are bigger in number. But the haves are aware of what the communists are about and who they are, so with that knowledge, they use it for their personal life and plan a safe life for themselves, but the have nots did not have that knowledge and besides they felt that they were closer to the communists because the communists talked to them and communicated with them. And so naturally they gained the people's trust and that's why it happened. If there wasn't this business of the haves and the haves nots, and if they only communicated with each other it would not have happened. So the poor developed a good coaliton with the communists. That's why it happened. As you see in poor countries around the world, in each country there is a communist party or a communist insurgency. My country is so poor right now, though, the economy is so bad, the people don't produce as much as they consume. And when you go there you will not get to the bottom of things because the feeling of mistrust poisons the air.
I was born in No Vietnam in Ha Dong. My parents died when I was 10. I decided to become a nun. Nobody forced me. There was a Buddhist pagoda near where I lived. I entered the religion at the age of 10. I came south in 1952 because of an invitation from someone in Saigon. During the year there was some religious suppression movements, and it was difficult then. We had a difficult time. But the situation didn't get very bad until 1963. Then the discrimination against Buddhism became worse and we demonstrated against it.
The act of burning oneself committed by some monks, as Buddhists, we are not allowed, by the commitment to the religion to be violent or to really express ourselves in any other means, like political or social, so in order to express the protest and to let the administration know of our disenchantment with the way the government treated Buddhism, these people burned themselves as a way to bring to dedicate their lives to their religion and to bring the point across and to bring the light of understanding to the government and to the people so that tolerance of the government could be carried out.
My main concern was with religion. I dedicated my life to Buddhism, so I did not pay attention to political events of any unfolding around the world in America or in North Vietnam with the communists.
I lived in Saigon at that time, Saigon being the capital of South Vietnam. There was nothing done to the temple where I stayed, but I believed that in remote regions and areas that they defiled the temples. I can't say for sure that 100 percent that these things happened, but I have a good sense that it happened. In the countryside in remote areas there was not a good local police force and so it was carried out by the governmental officers and local people.
I left Vietnam in 1964 and returned in 1969. I was in Germany during that period and in 1968 during the Tet invasion by the communists, I wasn't in Vietnam and so I didn't know what happened.
Thich Tri Quan. He was not the top representative of the whole Buddhist religion in Vietnam. There were many different branches of Buddhism and he was not the top leader of all of the branches in Vietnam. He only represented a certain faction of the religion with the Buddhists in Vietnam.
My feeling in 1973 when US troops left? In 1974 and 1975 trouble came to the country. I was afraid then for my life. I was afraid because the communists often professed that they do not believe in the existence of any supreme being. They are agnostic and perhaps there was one or two or a few from Buddhism that they did not touch and they took advantage of those people. But the rest of the Buddhists they would try to eradicate us. They are an agnostic people.
I decided to escape from Vietnam in 1978. As people who follow Buddhism and lead and ascetic life and a serene life, we didn't think that any government would bother us. But as the communists came in they made it difficult for us to follow our choosing. So I didn't think at that time that I could stay in Vietnam and openly practice Buddhism and so I decided to leave. The Communists didn't leave us alone to practice Buddhism.
They oppressed us. There was no freedom at all. The considered our place their place and they came and went as they pleased. And they monitored our activities day and night, 100 percent of the time, they watched us.
It was hard under the rule of the communists, visiting people became a difficult thing, especially when one was a monk. It was dangerous to visit others. it was very difficult if not unwise for the monks and the nuns to visit non-Buddhist people because they, the Communists, were suspicious of us. If we went to visit somebody outside the order, they would think that we were scheming and planning anti-government activities.
They would follow and they would, we, as nuns and monks, would visit the common people, then if we did that too often the Coms would would a surveillance and might do something to the people that we visited with, the non-religious order people. And that happened to me.
If I visited you, then they would come and visit you and question you and follow you around. So it was not good.
I was afraid of being sent to the reeducation camp or being killed. And something like that did happen to some of the monks and nuns. The communists were so smart. They did nothing on the massive scale as in Cambodia. They were much too smart for that. They would instead attack the individual. They would monitor the individuals and would wait for the right moment, when the individual would let down his guard, then they would use his faults or his weaknesses or whatever he was doing that they thought was not right, and like a sniper they would wait and shoot us down one by one --not literally -- but in the sense that they would point you out and arrest or detain you.
If somebody was against any individual, that person could lie and they would use that as an excuse to move in and to imprison you. You could be arrested upon any action that you did.
Some of the temples and pagodas were destroyed by the communists when they first came in to Saigon and South Vietnam. And some pagodas where someone had been suspected of being anti-communist, they would come in and destroy the structure. Nobody would do anything because anybody who resisted was accused of being anti-revolutionary and that would lead you to be killed.
They said they were only against the American troops and the American imperialists and the bad former people in the government working with Thieu. But if they wanted to arrest me or anybody they would say it was because of my linkage to the CIA and would say that I was a bad citizen and therefore they needed to arrest me. They would not just tell me they arrested me for a real reason, but would label me as something I was not and then they would arrest me. They played by no rules. They made up rules as they went along. How could you defend yourself if they said you worked for the CIA. They did whatever they wanted to do.
The situation became such that nobody trusted anybody else anymore. Even within the family the children could not trust the parents and the parents the children. You could be killed because of accusations that leaked out of a family talk or argument. You could speak to no one in a critical fashion. You dared not to discuss anything of importance, because if you had only a twosome, then you and somebody could say what you wanted, then there would be no witness. But three people could not carry on a conversation because then there would be a witness, two could gang up on one person that they disliked.
So silence is the golden policy in a communist government. Even if we sat here for a long time, they would ask why we had gathered and spent time together like that.
[Buddhists that were communists. My translator did not ask the nun so she did not give the answer.]
How did I leave. I under the Communists in their society, each has to worry about his or her own life. And when you wanted to leave you had to have money. I had not enough money, as a nun to escape. I left with the help of some people I knew, friends, who let me go with them. When I made up my mind to leave the country I knew it was a risky crossing, but I knew that death might wait for me in the open seas. But if I stayed I would die sooner or later, too. So it did not mater if I died at sea, in Vietnam I would have died a slow death.
Life in the US. The spiritual life here is sad, because we lost our country, and we also lost our religion. Here Buddhism is not widespread, so at the beginning I felt lost and by myself. As fare as the material life goes it is fine, I am sufficient, financially, not rich, but there is enough to live, as far as my spiritual life, I feel that we have lost a lot. In the future, step by step and year by year we will be able to rebuilt and revise the customs and religion here. When that is done, actually, I feel like I am reviving a world like that here. Especially when there is progress made in the reviving of Vietnamese culture and customs and the reviving of the religion itself.
The process of escaping was not easy. I had to lie to people to say I was visiting friends or I was going on a pilgrimage. It took a few months before I made it. I became a boat person, I left Vietnam by boat.
When I was planning to escape I had no thought of building a temple overseas, or living there for a long time, I had only the idea that at this time only death filled my head because it was risky and many people died at sea. So death filled my heart and my head. I needed though to escape and to be free.
I left in August 1978 and landed in Malaysia, I stayed there for a year, and as far as carrying on my tasks as a nun I had no means to do chanting or reading the sacred books. I was active in helping people who needed spiritual uplifting and support, I would give them that. In the camp I was in there was no temple.
But our camp was so small and I had no means to build a temple.
When I left for the US I arrived in Palo Alto, California and stayed in a Giac Minh temple there for one year and then moved to San Jose and rented a house to transform it into a pagoda, and it served as a sort of temple, and then I moved to this new location about a month ago. Duc Vien Temple is where I live now.
Perhaps one day we will be able tos ee vn again, but as to a time line and to say when, I can't say. Who knows when? For the vn outside the country, we cannot return. And those inside want to get out.
I don't think that we Vietnamese here in the US can do anything to turn the situation around in Vietnam. Anything that will happen in Vietnam will be the result of a discussion of a negotiation between the Americans and the Russians, but the Vietnamese themselves cannot really affect the situation. They can only talk about it, but they cannot actually do anything about it, the way the people mistrust each other today.
But we still hold the dream dear to our hearts and we try to keep up the fighting spirit so that one day we can return to Vietnam. But we cannot set a date or a time line, but we know that we must try to make it happen.
You know about Karmic Laws that have to do with the Cham peoples of Champa in Central Vietnam? I cannot say within the Buddhist order that issue has not been discussed or even mentioned, but I do believe in the teachings of Buddha, that whatever seeds you plant, you will receive the fruit from that seed. So perhaps it is true that President Nguyen Van Thieu was really a Cham, and that is why the Vietnamese suffer now. But I don't think that it is the only reason that we are paying for what was done in the past, for the killing off of the Chams in the 15th century. That was bad, for sure. But that was not the sole reason for the suffering of the Vietnamese people now. I did not participate in those killings centuries ago. I am a Vietnamese and because I am in this situation I must leave the country, so I share in my country's misfortunes. Perhaps in some past individual life I sowed seeds. But I can't say that the reason the Vietnamese are suffering now is because we as a collective group killed off a whole race.
As a believer in the teachings of Buddha, everything has a consequence. And a reason. Perhaps in past history, in past beings we the Vietnamese gathered some sort of bad seeds, so that is why now we are born in a country that always has some sort of fighting and is always in disharmony and is always giving us lots of things to suffer for.
So we are like people who are alcoholics. They gather together and go where they can get drinks. So perhaps in the past the Vietnamese people have done something bad, so that now we are all gathered together in a country in one place that is so harsh and that doesn't seem to have any happiness. Maybe like the American people, they are lucky to be born in this country. They do not have to suffer like us, so perhaps in their previous beings they have done something that enabled them to live in this country. It is as simple as that, the Karmic laws.
I was in Germany for 4 years. I studied sociology in Germany, it was a place to study. It was not a place to disseminate religion.
My life, my spirit, I think I have a serene inner self. Because I think that life here is nice and comparing to Vietnam it is much better, and as a Buddhist I do not have the sense of trying to cover up a sad inside with a happy outside. I am very serene and I have a good inner self and a good sense of myself. If I have things to do here, I am not pressed to do them, I am not worried about getting them done as quickly as possible because now I am aware of the limits of my capacity. I let things unfold they way that they will. I try to live in the present and I do not mourn things in the past. And I do not worry about the future. I just live for today and live for right now. And I am happy this way. it is no use to cry over spilled milk or to worry about the future. You cannot rescue the past and you cannot predict tomorrow, and there are people like that who cry constantly about lost things in the past, and who worry about the future. But I do not do it that way. I just live in the present.
We should live for all people in a country and make the world a better place to live in. We should lead a temperate life and be a useful citizen, that is what I am trying to do.
The Vietnamese people have two lives, the inner and the outer lives, and these do not match. Nothing will change until the Communists are gone.
Where did they come from. It began as a small movement. The people were satisfied with the former regime, and so they gathered together and they worked on it and they kept focusing on the bad things of the regime, and they dwelled on that, and they looked at only the bad, using that tactic they were able to regroup more people and bring people into their web of lies. I did not mean just the Thieu regime, but even back under the monarchy, it began then. Things were done slowly, so they formed groups that grew and grew.
If you look at the rich countries of the world you do not see people grouping together and clamoring for a communist government. Only when people are poor and oppressed do they lean to the communists.
when I was younger and the elders talked about how horrible the communists were, I didn't believe them. I said, look, they are only human, they cannot be that bad. They have a heart and they have a mind and they cannot be that horrendous. And that is why I did not leave in 1975. I had no contact with them yet. But after living with them for three years, I became very aware of who they were and what they really did, and that is why I left the country. They just don't have hearts.
There are the have nots and the haves. And the have nots are bigger in number. But the haves are aware of what the communists are about and who they are, so with that knowledge, they use it for their personal life and plan a safe life for themselves, but the have nots did not have that knowledge and besides they felt that they were closer to the communists because the communists talked to them and communicated with them. And so naturally they gained the people's trust and that's why it happened. If there wasn't this business of the haves and the haves nots, and if they only communicated with each other it would not have happened. So the poor developed a good coaliton with the communists. That's why it happened. As you see in poor countries around the world, in each country there is a communist party or a communist insurgency. My country is so poor right now, though, the economy is so bad, the people don't produce as much as they consume. And when you go there you will not get to the bottom of things because the feeling of mistrust poisons the air.
Nguyen Ngoc Bich: The South China Sea was on Fire
Nguyen Ngoc Bich. Scholar.
I was the acting chancellor of the Mekong University. It was right in Saigon. It was only the third year, may be 600 students. Because we were new.
My wife was the dean of studies there.
We were relying on the information that we had about American support of Vietnam. Everybody believed that the American presence would be a permanent one, we just relied on them.
It was unthinkable to many of us that the Americans would some day leave.
My story has a little bit to add, because I was among the very last delegations to visit the United States. We there were only two of us, one was Gregory Hung, and myself. We came here because we knew that the situation was desperate. It was the 19th of April that we came here, at the very end, the last delegation. Our information was that we knew that the Am congress was in a bad mood. They were not going to go on giving us aid. But we felt that we still had some trumps in our cards. One was the long standing promise of Lee Kong Yew that he would help us, of Singapore, a couple of years before the fall of Vietnam. He thought that the only way to defeat communism was through social programs. He promised use half a billion dollars for a housing program. Thieu sent Nha to Singapore to see if Lee Kwan Yew would be willing to lend us that money to buy weapons and gasoline. Nha went to Singapore and we came to the US to try to convince Congress to not make it public that they were not going to help us any more, since that would be too demoralizing. We said that we were willing to stake the oil that was being discovered in Vietnam, the money that was promised to us in some other forms by Saudi Arabia, a half billion to a billion dollars, to buy our oil. The same money that they offered us could buy only half the fuel that our armies and our air force needed.
Saudi Arabia promised us the money as a loan. So, we thought that if we could get Singapore and Saudi Arabian money and let Congress stay quiet about abandoning us, then maybe we could pull.
Hung and myself we came over here. We left on the 19th of April, and the first message that we got on arriving here and meeting with Tran Kim Phuong, both of us were told that there was nothing nothing that we could do to change the situation. It was really a tragic thing. We met him right at Dulles Airport, and he told us that the situation was hopeless. We did not want to believe that. So we had a huge shouting match at the airport. All three of us were shouting at each other and then we were in tears. Because of course we didn't want to shout at one another either. And the thing was that after that we went to see some people, and they also told us that it was hopeless.
Thieu resigned and the situation became meaningless, because that was why we came here. Gregory decided to stay here.
I went back to Vietnam, I was on the last civilian plane to go into Tan Son Nhut Airport and landed at 8:30 on the 26th of April I thought that the mission had failed but I should return home.
So everybody on that plane was Chinese from Hong Kong. The plane was filled with Chinese. I don't know what they were doing on the plane. I wondered about it. It was full. I thought they were either going there to invest and speculate on the fall or they were going there to try to retrieve relatives. Los Angles to Manila to Hong Kong. Three of us were not Chinese. There was an American going back for his wife and family, Nguyen Man Hung and myself.
The first thing I started thinking about was getting back out. I had a passport. There was already a lot of shooting near the airport at that time. So I made my report to the government and we then turned around and the next day, we were making our plans to leave Vietnam.
We finally left by the wharf at midnight on the 29th. We went out past Vung Tau and were finally picked up by the ship, the American Challenger. it was absolutely like hell. The capacity of the boat was 1080 people. They picked up something like 7500 people. They intended to go to Subic Bay and drop us there. But off short from Vung Tau they picked up more people. That was too many people, they proceeded directly to Wake Island.
Not many people died on the boat. The eeriest thing, at night, when the picked up people, on the 30th of April, in boats, boatloads, it was a t night, as soon as the people were picked up, boats with their lights on coming out, and then they would set fire to their boats as soon as the boarded. And all over the sea there were these eerie fires of boats burning and drifting in the Sea. And the lit up the water that night.
There was crying and yelling on board the ship. It was all unbelievable. There was a Catholic father who came on board and he was carrying a Honda trying to get on the American boat. They would not let him bring it on board. Another boat came out with some people on board, and there was a dentist and he had his dentists chair on the boat and he wanted to bring it on board. And he said, "That is the only way I can make my living." But they would not let him bring it on board.
The South China Sea was on fire that night and we watched it burning.
My wife was with me. There was a group of 27 people who came out with us.
I was the acting chancellor of the Mekong University. It was right in Saigon. It was only the third year, may be 600 students. Because we were new.
My wife was the dean of studies there.
We were relying on the information that we had about American support of Vietnam. Everybody believed that the American presence would be a permanent one, we just relied on them.
It was unthinkable to many of us that the Americans would some day leave.
My story has a little bit to add, because I was among the very last delegations to visit the United States. We there were only two of us, one was Gregory Hung, and myself. We came here because we knew that the situation was desperate. It was the 19th of April that we came here, at the very end, the last delegation. Our information was that we knew that the Am congress was in a bad mood. They were not going to go on giving us aid. But we felt that we still had some trumps in our cards. One was the long standing promise of Lee Kong Yew that he would help us, of Singapore, a couple of years before the fall of Vietnam. He thought that the only way to defeat communism was through social programs. He promised use half a billion dollars for a housing program. Thieu sent Nha to Singapore to see if Lee Kwan Yew would be willing to lend us that money to buy weapons and gasoline. Nha went to Singapore and we came to the US to try to convince Congress to not make it public that they were not going to help us any more, since that would be too demoralizing. We said that we were willing to stake the oil that was being discovered in Vietnam, the money that was promised to us in some other forms by Saudi Arabia, a half billion to a billion dollars, to buy our oil. The same money that they offered us could buy only half the fuel that our armies and our air force needed.
Saudi Arabia promised us the money as a loan. So, we thought that if we could get Singapore and Saudi Arabian money and let Congress stay quiet about abandoning us, then maybe we could pull.
Hung and myself we came over here. We left on the 19th of April, and the first message that we got on arriving here and meeting with Tran Kim Phuong, both of us were told that there was nothing nothing that we could do to change the situation. It was really a tragic thing. We met him right at Dulles Airport, and he told us that the situation was hopeless. We did not want to believe that. So we had a huge shouting match at the airport. All three of us were shouting at each other and then we were in tears. Because of course we didn't want to shout at one another either. And the thing was that after that we went to see some people, and they also told us that it was hopeless.
Thieu resigned and the situation became meaningless, because that was why we came here. Gregory decided to stay here.
I went back to Vietnam, I was on the last civilian plane to go into Tan Son Nhut Airport and landed at 8:30 on the 26th of April I thought that the mission had failed but I should return home.
So everybody on that plane was Chinese from Hong Kong. The plane was filled with Chinese. I don't know what they were doing on the plane. I wondered about it. It was full. I thought they were either going there to invest and speculate on the fall or they were going there to try to retrieve relatives. Los Angles to Manila to Hong Kong. Three of us were not Chinese. There was an American going back for his wife and family, Nguyen Man Hung and myself.
The first thing I started thinking about was getting back out. I had a passport. There was already a lot of shooting near the airport at that time. So I made my report to the government and we then turned around and the next day, we were making our plans to leave Vietnam.
We finally left by the wharf at midnight on the 29th. We went out past Vung Tau and were finally picked up by the ship, the American Challenger. it was absolutely like hell. The capacity of the boat was 1080 people. They picked up something like 7500 people. They intended to go to Subic Bay and drop us there. But off short from Vung Tau they picked up more people. That was too many people, they proceeded directly to Wake Island.
Not many people died on the boat. The eeriest thing, at night, when the picked up people, on the 30th of April, in boats, boatloads, it was a t night, as soon as the people were picked up, boats with their lights on coming out, and then they would set fire to their boats as soon as the boarded. And all over the sea there were these eerie fires of boats burning and drifting in the Sea. And the lit up the water that night.
There was crying and yelling on board the ship. It was all unbelievable. There was a Catholic father who came on board and he was carrying a Honda trying to get on the American boat. They would not let him bring it on board. Another boat came out with some people on board, and there was a dentist and he had his dentists chair on the boat and he wanted to bring it on board. And he said, "That is the only way I can make my living." But they would not let him bring it on board.
The South China Sea was on fire that night and we watched it burning.
My wife was with me. There was a group of 27 people who came out with us.
Pham Duy Remembers the Fall of South Vietnam
Pham Duy, poet and singer. [1921-2013]
In 1974 I was a composer and a singer and a writer and I made living in that way.
I entertained soldiers and civilians throughout the country. I spent time with him and performed also for the American soldiers.
We never believed that the Americans would abandon us, we could not conceive of it. Not even myself. I could not foresee the defeat. You Americans send men to the moon, so how could you possibly lose in Vietnam.
It was like a bad nightmare, a bad dream. With the loss of Ban Me Thuot I saw that everything was lost.
In 1968 we won. And when Phuoc Long fell in late 1974 I thought we would win it back. But when Ban Me Thuot fell in March 1975, that was the end, as I saw it.
I envisioned after that time, a military collapse. When the communists win, for me I cannot stay around. You cannot live with them. You cannot.
I never thought it would be retaken. When they killed the French journalist, the Saigon police, they did not want the news to get out.
My own personal freedom as an artist in South Vietnam? There was not very much censorship. There was relative freedom. I was never constrained. Thieu was a corrupted man, but he was not a very good dictator.
I had traveled internationally and performed, so I had been outside of Vietnam. One day before Saigon fell I left.
As for some coalition government in the end, I had no faith in it. I knew the communists. I am sixty five years old. I spent seven years with Ho Chi Minh and with the Viet Minh in the war against the French. I left the the North in 1952 and I knew about the Communists at that time. General Giap was once my teacher. I was his student in Hanoi, I went to high school there, the Thang Long school, a private school.
He was a very intelligent man and very popular with the students. We thought he was a nationalist. But unfortunately he was a communist too. His wife was killed by the French, his former wife.
He taught us the history of Vietnam. He taught us how to love our country. Ho Chi Minh was a hero when I was young, but unfortunately he became a communist, too.
I was anti-French and anti-colonialist. But I did not agree with the communists about what to do. I saw the people's tribunals where the tried their enemies, between the proletariat and the land owner there was no middle class. More than one million people left Vietnam in 1954, the Stalinists is what made them do it. They were far more fond of the Russians than they were of the Americans, no matter what they said.
In 1954 Ho promised three things, liberty, independence and happiness. Now after 45 years we have no freedom, you cannot go from village to village without passport, we don't have independence, we depend on the Soviets. and We don't have any happiness.
In Ho's blood was the communistspirit. He was like Pham Van Dong, Pham Van Dong's mind, like the mind of Ho, stops at about 1940, all of them. Even if they become disillusioned they cannot quit. They were all on the back of the tiger.
They were evil, even more than evil.
I am now collecting the oral poetry that comes out from Vietnam. About 60 million people are unhappy there.
I left VN on the 30th of April, by American plane, out of Tan Son Nhut, I was with the last pilot who flew out of the airport.
I took one last look. We saw but we did not see anything. All the people on the plane were Vietnamese. They took us to the Philippines.
I heard of the surrender in the Philippines. The surrender saved lives and it saved Saigon. So maybe he was a hero, Duong Van Minh, the last president of South Vietnam, he did the right thing since there was no hope by then.
The South Vietnamese soldiers that I knew had good morale, even in the last hours, they were still fighting, the Airborne were fighting at the Newport Bridge, everything was falling around them and they were still fighting.
Even now after 13 years I still dream about Vietnam. How could I not. I can never get it out of my mind.
I was born in 1921 in North Vietnam. I was educated at high school and the school of art in Hanoi. I traveled widely. I have been all around the world. People in Vietnam compared me to Woody Guthrie. I studied music in Paris, I came to America three times before the end of the war.
In 1966 I came to America. The Americans did not understand what was going on. I spoke with some military officers in Washington and again in 1969. I told them that the Communists were not fighting us in Vietnam but in Washington, D. C., I said that after I saw the peace demonstrations. The war had come to America. I thought that maybe the Americans were too naive.
I think you misunderstood us and we misunderstood the free world -- the Vietnamese. We did. We did not see the war in Vietnam like a game between the great powers. We saw it as fighting between communism and freedom, and Vietnam was like the front in that conflict. And we thought that you would never abandon us, that you would fight there until the end.
I think that the assassination of Diem was a turning point. There was no good leader after him. The man who was elected our leaders, they were not prepared, they could not lead.
They were our leaders, but they were not politicians, that was the problem.
Now the Vietnamese must and will make a new life here. They will become Americans on the outside. But they will always be Vietnamese in their hearts, and they will return to Vietnam to see the country of their heritage. Their hearts will always belong to Vietnam.
What do I think motivated General Giap and the other communists. Their goals are power. Power! They have an ideology that is very good to hear, and people listen to them. But when they act, they show they are empty. Once they take over the first people to be punished are those who do not agree with them 100 percent. I know what they would have done to me, they would have killed me like a dog once they took over, so I could not stay. I had once associated with them in the North. Oh, I got to know them very well and I knew they could not let me live if they won.
In 1974 I was a composer and a singer and a writer and I made living in that way.
I entertained soldiers and civilians throughout the country. I spent time with him and performed also for the American soldiers.
We never believed that the Americans would abandon us, we could not conceive of it. Not even myself. I could not foresee the defeat. You Americans send men to the moon, so how could you possibly lose in Vietnam.
It was like a bad nightmare, a bad dream. With the loss of Ban Me Thuot I saw that everything was lost.
In 1968 we won. And when Phuoc Long fell in late 1974 I thought we would win it back. But when Ban Me Thuot fell in March 1975, that was the end, as I saw it.
I envisioned after that time, a military collapse. When the communists win, for me I cannot stay around. You cannot live with them. You cannot.
I never thought it would be retaken. When they killed the French journalist, the Saigon police, they did not want the news to get out.
My own personal freedom as an artist in South Vietnam? There was not very much censorship. There was relative freedom. I was never constrained. Thieu was a corrupted man, but he was not a very good dictator.
I had traveled internationally and performed, so I had been outside of Vietnam. One day before Saigon fell I left.
As for some coalition government in the end, I had no faith in it. I knew the communists. I am sixty five years old. I spent seven years with Ho Chi Minh and with the Viet Minh in the war against the French. I left the the North in 1952 and I knew about the Communists at that time. General Giap was once my teacher. I was his student in Hanoi, I went to high school there, the Thang Long school, a private school.
He was a very intelligent man and very popular with the students. We thought he was a nationalist. But unfortunately he was a communist too. His wife was killed by the French, his former wife.
He taught us the history of Vietnam. He taught us how to love our country. Ho Chi Minh was a hero when I was young, but unfortunately he became a communist, too.
I was anti-French and anti-colonialist. But I did not agree with the communists about what to do. I saw the people's tribunals where the tried their enemies, between the proletariat and the land owner there was no middle class. More than one million people left Vietnam in 1954, the Stalinists is what made them do it. They were far more fond of the Russians than they were of the Americans, no matter what they said.
In 1954 Ho promised three things, liberty, independence and happiness. Now after 45 years we have no freedom, you cannot go from village to village without passport, we don't have independence, we depend on the Soviets. and We don't have any happiness.
In Ho's blood was the communistspirit. He was like Pham Van Dong, Pham Van Dong's mind, like the mind of Ho, stops at about 1940, all of them. Even if they become disillusioned they cannot quit. They were all on the back of the tiger.
They were evil, even more than evil.
I am now collecting the oral poetry that comes out from Vietnam. About 60 million people are unhappy there.
I left VN on the 30th of April, by American plane, out of Tan Son Nhut, I was with the last pilot who flew out of the airport.
I took one last look. We saw but we did not see anything. All the people on the plane were Vietnamese. They took us to the Philippines.
I heard of the surrender in the Philippines. The surrender saved lives and it saved Saigon. So maybe he was a hero, Duong Van Minh, the last president of South Vietnam, he did the right thing since there was no hope by then.
The South Vietnamese soldiers that I knew had good morale, even in the last hours, they were still fighting, the Airborne were fighting at the Newport Bridge, everything was falling around them and they were still fighting.
Even now after 13 years I still dream about Vietnam. How could I not. I can never get it out of my mind.
I was born in 1921 in North Vietnam. I was educated at high school and the school of art in Hanoi. I traveled widely. I have been all around the world. People in Vietnam compared me to Woody Guthrie. I studied music in Paris, I came to America three times before the end of the war.
In 1966 I came to America. The Americans did not understand what was going on. I spoke with some military officers in Washington and again in 1969. I told them that the Communists were not fighting us in Vietnam but in Washington, D. C., I said that after I saw the peace demonstrations. The war had come to America. I thought that maybe the Americans were too naive.
I think you misunderstood us and we misunderstood the free world -- the Vietnamese. We did. We did not see the war in Vietnam like a game between the great powers. We saw it as fighting between communism and freedom, and Vietnam was like the front in that conflict. And we thought that you would never abandon us, that you would fight there until the end.
I think that the assassination of Diem was a turning point. There was no good leader after him. The man who was elected our leaders, they were not prepared, they could not lead.
They were our leaders, but they were not politicians, that was the problem.
Now the Vietnamese must and will make a new life here. They will become Americans on the outside. But they will always be Vietnamese in their hearts, and they will return to Vietnam to see the country of their heritage. Their hearts will always belong to Vietnam.
What do I think motivated General Giap and the other communists. Their goals are power. Power! They have an ideology that is very good to hear, and people listen to them. But when they act, they show they are empty. Once they take over the first people to be punished are those who do not agree with them 100 percent. I know what they would have done to me, they would have killed me like a dog once they took over, so I could not stay. I had once associated with them in the North. Oh, I got to know them very well and I knew they could not let me live if they won.
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