Prisoners No Longer : Vietnamese: The first of thousands of political prisoners expected to immigrate to the United States this year are to arrive in Los Angeles today.

Ten days ago, the two Protestant ministers were cellmates in a Ho Chi Minh City prison, serving an eight-year sentence for “counterrevolutionary propaganda.”

On Friday, the Revs. Cuong Hu Nguyen and Ha Hieu Ho and their families stood in a postmodern beige-and-cream waiting room at Tokyo International Airport here, staring at the digital watches in the gift shop and leafing through glossy Japanese magazines.

“It’s so elegant. In 100 years, Vietnam wouldn’t be able to achieve this,” said Hung Duc Ho, 20, Ha Hieu Ho’s son.

“Now that we’re outside, we see how poor Vietnam is,” said the young man’s mother, Phuong-Lan Thi Le, 39.

The two families, due to arrive at Los Angeles International Airport today, are the first of thousands of Vietnamese political prisoners expected to immigrate to the United States this year under an accord signed by Washington and Hanoi last July.

The ministers, like the other refugees, have suffered deprivation, prison and long separation from their loved ones. All that will end when Nguyen joins his brother, Tuoi Nguyen, to settle in Oceanside, and Ha Hieu Ho resettles in Santa Ana.

The accord that ended their suffering took seven years to negotiate and is expected to bring 700 detainees, including former high-ranking South Vietnamese military officials and their families, to the United States this month.

“We hope this first group will be followed by many more,” said Robert Funseth, senior deputy assistant secretary of state. “We hope with the cooperation of the Vietnamese to resettle 7,000 people by the end of September.” Roughly half are expected to settle in California.

The first 300 left Ho Chi Minh City for Bangkok last week, almost 15 years after the fall of Saigon. But mechanical problems grounded their Tokyo-bound plane in Bangkok late Thursday, delaying most of them.

However, the two ministers and their families, along with eight other Vietnamese emigres entering the United States under the Orderly Departure Program, managed to catch a flight to Tokyo and will arrive in Los Angeles this morning.

“At the last minute, we thought we weren’t allowed to go to America,” said Huynh Thi Nguyen, wife of minister Ho. Ho, his wife and their two children will be met and resettled through the Vietnamese Alliance Church in Santa Ana.

The others will begin arriving in California and Seattle on Saturday, United Airlines officials said.

Minister Nguyen said he was arrested in 1983 for preaching the Christian gospel. Ho was arrested six months later. Unlike four other clergy who were rounded up at about the same time but released after three years or less in prison, Ho and Nguyen stood trial before a three-judge panel and were sentenced to eight years in political “re-education camps.”

Ho’s wife, Le, said the arrest left her and their children without the official documents needed to rent an apartment. They spent more than six years shuffling from home to home, renting rooms from sympathetic families and living entirely on donations from the congregation of about 3,000 people, she said.

The two pastors were sent to a labor camp in Dong Hoa, near the Cambodian border, where they were put to growing vegetables and tending cattle.

“They call it re-education center, but actually it’s a forced labor camp,” Nguyen said.

A year ago, they were transferred to the prison in Ho Chi Minh City, where they slept on a bare floor until their families managed to get them blankets. Their diet was two bowls of rice and one bowl of soup each day, they said. The harsh prison life made it easier to find Christian converts. Although they were not permitted to have Bibles, Nguyen said, they did manage to convert about 200 fellow prisoners.

“The Communists actually have helped the church grow,” said Nguyen, who graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1972. “So many people have become Christians since 1975--and it’s easier to convert them. . . . Capitalism and communism, people are disillusioned with both.”

Hung Ho, the minister’s son, said he wants to enter the seminary in the United States and eventually make his way back to Vietnam with his father.

The two ministers said that even though they suffered greatly in Vietnam, their feelings about leaving were mixed.

“As pastors, it’s sad for us to have to leave the country because we have to leave our flock behind,” said Nguyen, 50, a pastor in the Evangelical Church of Vietnam. “If the government ever allows us to go back, we’ll go back.”

Meanwhile, in Oceanside on Thursday, the butterflies in the stomach of Nguyen’s brother Tuoi came not just from the thought of seeing the brother he last knew as a young man, but also from the anticipation of seeing how the re-education camps have affected him.

“When I first heard my brother was in prison, I was certain that they were going to kill him, “ said Tuoi, 57, who had been a chaplain in the South Vietnamese Air Force.

While the first of the detainees were waiting for the last leg of their journey at the Narita airport, the families of those delayed in Bangkok anxiously awaited word on when their separation would end.

“Even after 15 years, one day is still a lot,” said Kim-Nhung Tran, who runs a dressmaking shop in Westminster. Tran, who escaped Vietnam in a fishing boat and landed safely in Thailand, has not seen her brother, Quang-Hoi Tran, 43, since he was forced into a Communist re-education camp after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.

Tran’s brother was a colonel in the South Vietnamese army. When the war ended, he and thousands of other former South Vietnamese military and government officials were forced into the camps.

Times staff writers Jim Newton in Orange County and Jonathan Gaw in San Diego contributed to this story.