He Helps Those Left Behind : Refugees: Hau Nguyen, freed from a Vietnamese re-education camp, finally made it here and was surprised to find that the Vietnamese community had forgotten those left behind. He decided to do something about it.

For four years, Hau Nguyen was imprisoned in Vietnamese re-education camps.

On a diet of only three ears of corn a day, the former South Vietnamese army captain was forced to hike 10 miles into the jungle, chop trees into 14-foot sections and drag them back to be sold by the Communists for firewood.

When four of his left ribs were broken in a work accident, prisons officials decided in 1979 that the malnourished Nguyen was virtually useless, so they sent him back to his family in Ho Chi Minh City.

In 1981, Nguyen built a boat and fled across the Pacific with his family and 26 others. On Friday, the 61-year-old refugee now living in Garden Grove recalled those years as 300 former prisoners and their families arrived in Bangkok, the result of a long-awaited accord between Vietnam and the United States.

He said he had always assumed that his countrymen in America had been working to free him and other political prisoners. But when he gained freedom, he found out that most of the Vietnamese refugees struggling to survive in a new land had forgotten the political and military detainees left behind.

So Nguyen rallied the support of the Southern California Vietnamese communities and in 1985 founded the General Assn. of Former Political Prisoners of Vietnamese Communists.

The group, with about 200 members in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties, is credited with pressing for an agreement, reached last July between Washington and Hanoi, that led this week to the release of the 300 prisoners and family members.

“I saw that nothing was getting done if the political prisoners relied on those who had gone ahead,” Nguyen said, sitting on what used to be his back porch but now serves as headquarters of his association.

Nguyen, a machine operator before being laid off three years ago, now is supported by his five children as he devotes all his time to helping a seemingly endless list of families work to have their loved ones brought to freedom. He has written thousands of letters to political figures, attended international conferences on the plight of the detainees and lobbied everyone who he thought could lend a hand.

His desk and the shelves around the room are filled with manila folders containing the stories of thousands of detainees. On the walls are framed petitions and resolutions from state and federal officials applauding his efforts and pledging their assistance.

Also framed and hanging on a wall is an invitation to President Bush’s inauguration. He says he wanted to attend but did not have the money to go to Washington.

“I and others in my group are only volunteers, after all,” Nguyen said. “We (will be) repaid when all of the Vietnamese political prisoners are released.”

That process began Friday, when the first group of freed detainees arrived at the Bangkok airport.

The former prisoners included high-ranking former South Vietnamese miliary officers, bureaucrats and soldiers who spent years in the Vietnamese gulags. More than half are reportedly bound for California. Resettlement officials in Southern California confirmed that at least 70 people were headed for Los Angeles County and that 63 or so are planning to join relatives who have settled in Orange County. A State Department spokesman in Bangkok said the first emigres could arrive as early as next Friday.

More than 100,000 former detainees and their families have applied to the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok for permission to emigrate, according to Robert Funseth, senior deputy assistant secretary of state. He said the United States expects 700 people to leave Vietnam this month and up to 7,000 to be resettled here by September.

Nguyen said that it is crucial for his group to encourage Washington to continue pressuring Hanoi for the speedy release of the approximately 200,000 people still being held in about 183 re-education camps. “It has already been nearly 15 years and we need to get them out,” he stressed.

“By leaving us behind, I think the American government mistreated its brothers in arms, but I also believe that mistreatment has been compensated somewhat through the July accord.”