Vietnamese Hold Reunion at Marine Base

By the thousands, former South Vietnamese refugees from Orange County gathered here Saturday to show off children, meet old friends and pay tribute to the U.S. Marines who took care of them in a massive tent-city evacuation center 10 years ago.

Old men in suits, ties and hats, teen-agers in designer clothes and grandchildren in their Sunday best roamed around the site of what once was a sea of 1,000 tents where more than 50,000 confused and frightened war refugees began a new life in an alien culture in the spring and summer of 1975.

On Saturday they returned to their halfway home for a sort of combination freedom rally, carnival and swap meet. A Marine Corps band played patriotic American and South Vietnamese songs. Inside the same huge tents where they once whiled away the days in wait for American sponsors, housewives sold barbecued pork and beef on a stick, ethnic dishes and ice-cold beer. Hawkers enticed kids to pitch dimes onto glass plates for prizes. And vendors sold rugs, purses, tape cassettes featuring Vietnamese singers and miniature American and South Vietnamese flags. (The Vietnamese flags were selling more briskly than the American ones, one salesman conceded.)

Young Vietnamese-American children born in this country--and some who were born on this site 10 years ago--were taken around by parents eager to show them where they spent their first weeks and months in the United States. And old women sat in groups on the ground and pored over 10-year-old photographs, trying to recall the names of the people in the pictures.

This was the first chance for many of them to gather en masse since the spring and summer of 1975, and under a glorious blue sky, the turnout far exceeded expectations.

Organizers initially anticipated that perhaps 5,000 refugees would show up for the 10th anniversary commemoration of the tent city. The gates opened at 10 a.m. and by noon the 5,000-car parking lot was filled and people were parking their cars along the road leading into Camp Cristianitos, site of the tent city.

Military police later in the day estimated the crowd at more than 30,000. Early arrivals were encouraged to leave to make room for others who were still streaming in.

Beaming Major General

“This is really beautiful, isn’t it?” said a beaming Maj. Gen. Robert E. Haebel, commanding officer of Camp Pendleton, as he looked over a sea of colorful helium balloons, American flags and the wafting smoke of barbecues.

“Everybody’s upbeat. There’s a lot of spirit and electricity here today. I feel like a surrogate parent. People have been coming up to me and pouring out their feelings and thanks for what our country did for them 10 years ago. It makes you feel good about who we are and the United States of America.”

Bien Le, the president of the Santa Ana-based Vietnamese American Mutual Assn., which coordinated the day’s activities, said he was ecstatic over the turnout.

“This makes me so happy. Ten years ago, we could not speak (English), we had no cars, we didn’t know where we would go,” Le said. “This was a different culture. So we wanted to come back today to find our tent neighbors and show how we can speak English.”

In a speech which opened the commemoration ceremony at 11 a.m., Le said the Vietnamese refugees a decade ago may have been less than thankful for the hospitality extended to them by the United States.

“Ten years ago, we Vietnamese came to this Marine Corps camp and to this new land with no more hope in our hearts for the future, and with our past only a residue of bitter ashes on the pyre of our vanquished dreams.

“Ours was a lost cause and we were lost souls squatting in the dust of our despair, among those wh had shared our battles. In our humiliation at taking flight . . . it was difficult for us to be grateful to those who gave us refuge.

“We come on the occasion of this 10th commemoration of our true freedom to pay our most humble and profound respect and gratitude to the memory of all those brave and unselfish Americans who gave up their lives in an attempt to keep the torch of their beloved liberty aflame in our land as they kept it alive in our hearts.”

The significance of the first two songs performed by the Marine band may have been lost on the former refugees if they did not know the titles to them--the traditional “This Is My Country” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.”

When “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, many in the crowd held their hands over their hearts. And, when the band next performed the national anthem of South Vietnam, someone in the crowd released a South Vietnamese flag, which was carried aloft and out of sight by helium balloons riding on the sea breeze.

The sight of the flag evoked tears. “This is probably the last time many Vietnamese will salute that flag,” said one man who said he had served in the South Vietnamese army. “Many of us fought for that flag for eight years.”

“Today is a day of mixed emotions for us,” said Van Hung Truong, a one-time air traffic controller at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport who is now a computer engineer living in Garden Grove.

“Today causes us to remember the day we left Vietnam,” Truong said. “We think of lots of people who are still over there. We are a lot happier and luckier than them. We still want the government there changed, because we cannot stand the tyranny there.

“And I worry about the future of my children in this country. In 1950, the United States was an exporter of freedom to other countries. Now, we are defending freedom and we are surrounded by Communism. Who is to say what will happen in the next 30, 50 or 100 years in this country?”

Steve Nguyen, a 28-year-old graduate engineering student attending Cal State Long Beach, said the commemoration provoked mixed feelings for him as well.

“It was a time when my country was lost, and I left behind relatives,” he said. “But it was a chance to enjoy total freedom and have contact with American people. They have let me taste freedom. Now, I am proud of being part of America.”

Paul Graham spent 31 years in the Marine Corps, retiring in 1975 as a brigadier general and the commanding officer of Camp Pendleton.

In all his military service, he said, he never saw anything that could compare to the construction and operation of the tent city. No overseas battle, no command decision, no tour of duty holds the same place in his memory as the transformation of Camp Pendleton from a training and staging area for 32,000 U.S. Marines to a home for 50,000 Southeast Asian refugees.

“I was confident we could do it, or I never would have agreed to undertake it,” said Graham. “And I think there is a great deal of satisfaction that the refugees were able to get out of here and into the community to be assimilated as Americans.”

Graham said the logistics of the tent city did not concern him as much as the future of the refugees in this country.

“Would they be accepted into the communities where they were going? Would there be enough sponsors for them? They were in a very difficult position, and I don’t know if anyone other than a Vietnamese could understand it.

“They left their homes and walked away from every possession they had. They left their pictures, their jobs, their friends, and suddenly found themselves in an airplane flying somewhere they couldn’t quite grasp, and stepping off that airplane into an entirely different culture where they couldn’t speak the language and make their needs known.

“That’s what concerned me. How would these people manage? Would they ever be able to?”

The incredible construction in less than a week of the tent city was a military operation like few others in the history of the armed forces. It began with an innocuous phone call late on a Saturday afternoon--April 26, 1975. There was a “remote possibility,” officials in Washington said, that Camp Pendleton would be used as a refugee processing center because it had space and because its climate was somewhat similar to Vietnam’s.

In South Vietnam, Saigon was on the brink of collapse, and thousands of Vietnamese, fearful of their fate under the Communist takeover, were being airlifted out of the capital by American transport airplanes, heading initially for U.S. bases in the Philippines, Guam and Wake Island. But space on those islands was getting scarce.

Graham, just four days shy of retiring from the Marine Corps, was relaxing at his home in Oceanside when the call came in. He immediately called a staff meeting. A potential site on the northern part of the huge base, known as Camp Cristianitos, was chosen for its size. Engineers figured there was enough space to handle upward of 18,000 refugees--if sewage, water, food and electricity could be provided. The area was barren and undeveloped.

The “remote possibility” turned into reality Monday morning. Graham got a call from Washington: refugees would be arriving within 24 hours, he was told, and as many as 18,000 refugees could be expected within the week.

“Under normal conditions, that kind of project would take 90 days and still be considered a quick job,” Maj. Ted Bahry, a Marine Corps historian, reflected later. “But to prepare for refugees in 24 hours? That was mind boggling.”

A subsequent, internal analysis by the Marine Corps of the construction of the tent city noted that there was no precedence for such an operation. “There was no reference material or documentation of any sort on the subject available,” the report said. “With less than 18 hours before the arrival of the first planeload of refugees, and facing myriad other problems, there was no time for research, lengthy discussion or the normal staffing usually associated with a peacetime problem.”

But thrown into the brink, the base met the challenge. Working around the clock, the Marines erected 140 Quonset huts and 1,040 squad-size tents with plywood floors, put up 200 telephone poles, strung 20 miles of power lines and 36 miles of communications cable, installed 35,000 feet of water lines and built 22 shower huts.

The Marines had to tap special wartime supply warehouses as far away as Colorado for tents and jackets. Camp Pendleton’s supply of Marine Corps sweat shirts was exhausted.

With construction work still continuing, the refugees began arriving at Camp Pendleton on Tuesday morning, after having been flown from the Far East to the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro in Orange County. By the end of the week, planes were landing at El Toro hourly, feeding a steady stream of southbound buses that took the displaced Vietnamese to their strange new homes of canvas at Camp Pendleton.

Marines set up recreation activities for children, and classes for adults in “survival English” and “Orientation to American Life.” There were special programs in vocational counseling, how to use a telephone and an explanation of the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Over the course of the next six months, more than 7 million meals were served, nearly 8,000 pairs of shoes were issued and 60,000 blankets were handed out.

Eight refugees died at Camp Pendleton. And 165 babies were born.

Tao Ngo and his wife, Mai, drove to Camp Pendleton all the way from Phoenix to participate in Saturday’s reunion. Their three children--each born in this country, the oldest at the camp--enjoyed ice cream cones as their father related a tale of escape hours before Saigon fell to the Communists.

Mai Ngo worked for ITT Corp. and Tau Ngo was with the South Vietnam army’s signal corps. They were admitted inside the U.S. Embassy at 8 a.m. on April 29, to be helicoptered off the roof and onto a ship of the U.S. 7th Fleet.

Their helicopter evacuation did not come until 1 a.m. April 30; the couple were among the last of the South Vietnamese to be evacuated by the United States before the embassy itself was abandoned a few hours later.

“We waited all day and all night, in the embassy stairwell, to get out,” Tao Ngo said. “When we finally left, I could not hold back my tears. I knew it would be the last time I would see my country.”

The couple returned to Camp Pendleton on Saturday “because I want to show the children that we lived in tents, not in a house. I hope they can appreciate that,” he said.

It was Andrew who first saw America from Camp Pendleton, where he was born. He was named Andrew, for the USS Andrew, the 7th Fleet ship that helped deliver his parents to freedom.

In one of the vendor tents, a Vietnamese picture book entitled “The Long Life” was selling for $2 a copy. It depicts the fall of Saigon “and the day we lost our country,” said Le Quy An, a Westminster store owner who brought some of his wares to Camp Pendleton.

“Everything today is half-price,” he pitched. Why? “Because this is special day.”

Around him, children scampered about holding bumper stickers that read, “I Camp Pendleton.”

The sign beneath the speaker’s podium read, in its marred grammar, “Pendleton Welcome You.”

And at the entrance of the camp, family after family patiently took turns posing in front of a 12-foot-high sculpture entitled “Hand of Hope,” crafted 10 years earlier by a Vietnamese artist with the help of two Marines. As the day wore on, the palm of the hand was brimming with cut flowers, deposited there by former refugees.

Among the U.S. Marines attending the commemoration were Lance Cpl. Ngo Long, who lived in the tent city as a 10-year-old, and Lance Cpl. Bui Huy, who escaped South Vietnam in 1978 by boat.

Huy, 23, left his family in what is now Ho Chi Minh City because as a 17-year-old he was old enough to be drafted into the Communist army. “My family did not want me to be a sacrifice,” he said. “When you go into the army, you do not plan on coming back.”

Long said he was too young, at 10, to fully comprehend what was happening to his life as a refugee in 1975. But now, he says, he has a clearer understanding of his life--and of why he became a U.S. Marine.

“This may sound silly,” Long said, “but I wanted to be trained because maybe someday I will go back to Vietnam and fight against Communism.”