Saigon Rent Is a $64,000 Question for U.S. Courts

Tran Hung Ngu is persistent.

Ill and injured from beatings, he escaped a Communist prison camp in Vietnam in 1979, only to find himself fighting for his life again. The fishing boat he was on sank, forcing him to tread ocean water for two hours until a German ship rescued him.

Although still disabled and nearly blind from the prison camp beatings, the former director of food distribution for South Vietnam now passes his time meticulously arranging bonsai gardens in large pots in the backyard of his Fullerton home.

Statute of Limitations

And, in a battle he has yet to win, Ngu has been dunning the U.S. government for more than four years, demanding payment of at least $63,984 for back rent on land he contends he leased to the U.S. Defense Department during the Vietnam War.

So far, he has encountered more red tape in the federal bureaucracy than Muscovites would expect to see in a May Day parade.

The government, for instance, is ignoring the more than four years he spent in the Communist labor camp and insisting that a statute of limitations bars any claim for rent due more than six years before he filed his claim in 1980.

“I hope to get my money, because I want to improve my life, do something with my life,” Ngu, 58, said in a recent interview. “For half century, I live in (Vietnam) but not in freedom.”

Last month, after four years of frustration, he filed suit in the U.S. Claims Court in Washington, D. C., seeking the original back rent and an additional $383,904 for the period between May, 1975, and June, 1980, for the government’s failure to cancel the lease, even though American troops left Vietnam in April, 1975.

Ngu’s attorneys, Ronald G. Bakal and Clifford Barry of Beverly Hills, said they believe U.S. State Department efforts to secure the release of as many as 10,000 political prisoners for resettlement in the United States will probably bring a host of claims for unpaid rents and other money such as wages allegedly owed South Vietnamese employed by the federal government during the war.

Ngu, they say, was arrested a few days after American troops pulled out, not because he was a high-ranking South Vietnamese official, but because he had helped the American war effort by leasing his land to the U.S. government.

Vietnamese refugees in Southern California also believe many political prisoners have claims outstanding against the United States. But Tran Son Ha, a leader in the release and resettlement effort, said few of them will have enough evidence to prove their claims.

“After the collapse of South Vietnam, the South Vietnamese destroyed all documents relating to the U.S. so they wouldn’t be connected to the U.S. by the Communists,” Ha said.

Federal officials, meantime, said they do not expect more claims from anyone released from the prison camps. Further claims, they said, would likely be rejected under the six-year statute of limitations.

Ngu plans to challenge that time limit, however.

No separate records have been kept on the number of claims filed by South Vietnamese nationals for back rent or wages, said John Ellifritz, assistant chief for payment in the General Accounting Office’s claims-adjudication branch.

“There may have been dozens of claims filed in the mid-1970s, but since about 1980 there have been maybe a half-dozen,” Ellifritz said.

Ngu’s case is unusual, his attorneys say, because the United States has found some documentation that the government did lease land from him. But no one has come up with a copy of the lease, which the government is demanding before payment can be made.

Warehouse Was Locked

University-trained in agricultural business, Ngu rose through government ranks in Vietnam and, after the country was partitioned in 1954, became South Vietnam’s director of logistics for the Food Administration Department.

He also owned a warehouse on about five acres along the Saigon River, on the Saigon-Bienhoa Highway outside Saigon, the former South Vietnamese capital renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

It was that property he leased to the Defense Attache Office (DAO), at what his lawyers said was one-half the official exchange rate, a bargain for the United States.

The property was used as military surplus depot, Ngu said, and he was never allowed on the property to see what was kept in the warehouse.

Payments were to be made every three months, and the DAO was to give 30 days’ notice of termination, Ngu said in letters to various federal officials.

Vouchers unearthed by the General Accounting Office and the Army Corps of Engineers show that Ngu was paid rent at least twice. One check for $12,024 covered a full year, ending Aug. 31, 1973, and another check for $2,062 was for three months, ending Feb. 28, 1974. The exchange rate was more than seven times less than what Ngu said was agreed upon.

Ngu said he had expected to find a check waiting for him when he returned April 22, 1975, from a long trip to the northern part of South Vietnam, where he was arranging food supplies for refugees.

Instead, he said, he found that the DAO had left Saigon.

After his arrest, he was thrown into a prison camp about 12 miles outside Saigon, where he was severely beaten, he said. He lost 80% of his vision and, after he escaped, found that he had diabetes and problems with his liver, pancreas and intestines.

‘I hope to get my money, because I want to do something with my life.’ Ngu escaped when his captors took him to an eye doctor in Saigon. His wife, Bach Nhat Nguyen, now 55, bought passage on a fishing boat, one of many that carried refugees into international waters.

The couple and their son, Viet Tran, now 21, and daughter, Trang Tran, now 12, were crowded in with about 100 other refugees, Ngu said. More than 60 miles out, the boat sank.

Ngu figures that about 70 of the passengers were lost. His wife, who was holding onto their daughter, was saved by his son, he said.

“I was sick,” he said. “I swim two hours in sea. Five more minutes (before being rescued)and I sunk.”

After a short stop in Hong Kong and a stay in Stuttgart, Germany, for surgery and other medical attention, Ngu brought his family to Orange County to stay with his son by a previous marriage, whose mother had died in 1957.

Ngu sent his first demand for payment to then-Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in August, 1980. The Army Corps of Engineers acknowledged receipt of it in December and began, with the General Accounting Office, the long process of investigating and denying the claim.

“I think somebody looked at it and didn’t look at it close enough,” said GAO’s Ellifritz. “After looking at it again, it didn’t seem to be barred completely by the (six-year) statute of limitations.”

Ngu’s lawyers say the statute of limitations should be waived for the time he was imprisoned. But that is something a court will have to decide, said Robert Giertz, a Justice Department trial lawyer assigned to the case.

Even if he successfully challenges the statute of limitations and overcomes the paucity of records, Ngu may score an empty victory because the lease called for payment in South Vietnamese piasters, a currency that is now worthless.

How long he can continue the fight also is on Ngu’s mind. Although he is “happy to be alive in freedom,” he says his injuries and illnesses have made him an “old man, a very, very tired man.”