Dornan Departs for Hanoi With List of Viet Prisoners

Hours before Rep. Robert K. Dornan (D-Garden Grove) departed for Hanoi, members of Orange County’s Vietnamese community Tuesday presented the congressman with the names of more than 500 family members held prisoner or detained in Vietnam and asked him to seek their release.

Dornan is a member of a bipartisan congressional delegation visiting Hanoi to press Vietnamese government officials to account for 2,441 Americans still listed as missing in action. He took the list, along with the names of about 50 other constituents’ relatives being held in Vietnam, with him on the trip.

Van T. Hoang, chairwoman of the Assn. of Vietnamese Political Prisoners’ Families, said the list that she presented to Dornan contains names of parents, husbands, wives, daughters and sons. Her husband, Thuc Nguyen, is on the list, she said.

“I want him to ask them when they are going to release those prisoners. They already have kept them for almost 11 years,” Hoang said.

Dornan met Tuesday morning with Hoang, members of the Vietnamese press and the Vietnamese Congressional Advisory Board, a group that advises Dornan on the issues and needs of the Vietnamese in his district.

In a prepared statement, Dornan pledged to press for the prisoners’ release.

“These brave Vietnamese men and women, by their past loyal association with the United States and South Vietnamese government, have been condemned to an ungodly hell in so-called ‘re-education camps’--read that ‘concentration camps.’ They were allies and are our friends. We cannot forget them either.”

About half of the names presented to Dornan by Hoang represent prisoners in Vietnamese camps, while the remainder are Vietnamese awaiting permission to be reunited with their families in America, according to Patricia Fanelli, an aide to Dornan.

One American on List

One case on Dornan’s list involves the request of a dying elderly man in Orange County who wants to see his daughter and wife, who remain in Vietnam, Fanelli said.

Another concerns a woman in the district who believes her husband, shot down over North Vietnam in September, 1966, is still alive, Fanelli said. The woman’s husband is the only American on Dornan’s list, she said.

The Vietnamese community has “been looking forward to this (Dornan’s trip) for a long time,” Fanelli said. “They’re all quite anxious about their loved ones.”

Hoang said the Vietnamese community is taking heart in the congressman’s visit. “We just hope he can mention it (the plight of prisoners) to the government,” she said.

Hoang and her four children were able to flee Saigon in 1975, but her husband, who had been a pilot stationed about 200 miles away, was taken prisoner, she said. She receives letters from him through her sister in Saigon only about once a year. She said prisoners are being deprived of proper food, medicine and housing.

“I just hope the United States will discuss it (the fate of relatives and prisoners in Vietnam). Something has to change,” she said.