Ex-Prisoners Still Shackled to Memory of Vietnam Jails

Prison camp memories fade slowly. Choat Dinh Quach best remembers the “iron boxes.” Ten years later, the memory still terrifies him.

The steel boxes measured about 4 feet by 4 feet--not enough room for a prisoner to stand or to lie down. The boxes sat in the tropical sun. Inside, even the toughest officers usually lasted only about a month, Quach said. Then they went mad or died. Some killed themselves.

“I don’t have nightmares,” said the former South Vietnamese naval lieutenant, who arrived in Southern California last week. “But when I think about it, I am still afraid.”

The steel “connex” boxes--short for “container for export”--were discarded shipping containers that once held U.S. military materiel.

According to human-rights workers, they were used to torture prisoners in hundreds of Vietnamese jungle gulags to which the United States’ former allies and other undesirables were sent for “re-education” after the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in 1975.

Quach and several dozen other political detainees--including high-ranking former military officers and two Protestant ministers jailed in 1980 for “counterrevolutionary propaganda”--are the first to arrive in the United States under a new accord between Hanoi and Washington on political prisoners.

The prisoners’ stories are of occasional terror and routine degradation in the camps, and of extreme poverty and harassment after release. Human-rights workers and scholars said the harsh treatment former prisoners described was widespread in Vietnamese prisons between 1975 and 1980, although they differ on how common torture was in the camps.

“In some camps the yearly death rate because of illness, some executions, attempted escape, etc., was as high as 10 to 15% in the first five years (from 1975 to 1980). Then it decreased,” said Ginetta Sagan, a human-rights activist who has interviewed more than 800 Vietnamese prison camp survivors.

Sagan, officials at Amnesty International and former prisoners interviewed in Orange County last week described severe malnutrition, beatings, and the shackling of prisoners for days or months at a time.

State Department officials said 700 former prisoners and their families will arrive in the United States this month under the new accord, and 7,000 are expected to be resettled by September. Roughly half are expected to rejoin relatives in California.

Under the accord, up to 100,000 people would be allowed to leave Vietnam, but U.S. officials said they expect to be able to process only 1,000 applications per month. Vietnamese-American community leaders said they hope the departures will be speeded.

On Tuesday, Nuong Le, 31, of Anaheim went to the airport to greet her brother-in-law, an army captain who had spent six years in re-education camps and another year under house arrest in Ho Chi Minh City.

“I tried to prepare myself, how I would feel, what I would do,” Le said, standing on the curb with the arriving family’s scant luggage. “But the feeling is just so new and happy--like some storm coming over me, a storm of happiness.” Tears spilled over. “Just to see the familiar faces again.”

The former prisoners themselves appeared dazed by jet lag, culture shock and the sudden “cold” of the Southern California winter. Their children, however, were mesmerized by the luxury of Western homes.

“The kids like telephones, and they are amazed that there is one in each room,” reported Chu La, whose brother and family arrived in Westminster on Tuesday.

“In Vietnam, if you carpet the living room, that’s luxury. Here they have it everywhere, even in the kitchen,” said Hung Duc Ho, the 20-year-old son of the Rev. Ha Hieu Ho, who was staying with a fellow pastor in Santa Ana.

“The abundance here saddens me when I remember how Vietnam lacks so much,” said his father, who was imprisoned in 1983 because his Ho Chi Minh City church had attracted such a following that officials began to view him as a threat. “There is so much freedom here. You can do whatever you want.”

For some families, the joy of reunion was tempered by hearing for the first time the details of their relatives’ ordeals.

“I was shocked,” said Bich Pham Quach, 31, after listening to her brother-in-law tell reporters about his three-year prison stint and subsequent house arrest. “We realized he had been through a lot. But luckily, he is still alive.”

Another former prisoner who arrived last week, an engaging man with an excellent command of English, sat chatting about his camp experiences in a suburban apartment filled with Catholic icons. He even joked about his five years in three different camps, telling how starving guards had stolen relief packages from their captives, and then were brazen enough to try to sell them back.

“The communist soldiers were not educated persons,” he said. “They did everything depending on sentiment. So (conditions in) each camp depended on the commander. . . .

“If the commander of a camp was born in North Vietnam, especially in Thanh Hoa (the birthplace of Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh), the commander was so bad, anxious to kill as much as possible. But if the commander was born in South Vietnam, before he became a communist, they treat us not so bad.”

One camp near the Cambodian border was the worst, he said, and those who tried to flee ran straight into the arms--or the land mines--of the Khmer Rouge, the feared Cambodian regime.

“Many of my friends tried to escape, but most of them never returned,” he said. “Some died from the mines. Some were captured. Some of them were put in iron boxes. Others, they tied their hands behind their backs and hauled them up, and hung them (from their bound hands) for one or two days. And then they fainted.”

Inside the iron boxes, the man said, “Some killed themselves because they were so depressed.”

The man said he had been caged this way for two days. His box was large enough in which to stand, but not long enough to sit or lie in. He had to crouch.

“Daytime it’s hot and nighttime it’s cold,” he said. “My friends brought food for me.”

Suddenly, the man became agitated, and said he did not want to talk about his own experiences. He cut the interview short, then asked not to be identified.

A relative, however, showed a letter the man had written from Ho Chi Minh City to the United States in 1984, several years after his release from prison. The man reported that police had again burst into his home at midnight to interrogate and harass him. He said he had been diagnosed with a heart condition and feared for his sanity.

“In truth, there have been many times I have horrified my family by my strange actions,” he wrote. He noted the large number of “boat people” fleeing Vietnam in desperation. “They knew they might be attacked, raped, robbed, killed, might lose their spouses, be parted from their children, see their parents thrown to the fishes to eat, be jailed, beaten, heads shaven until bald, would lose their homes, become penniless, drift from shore to shore.

“Yet still they went! Why?

“When you can answer that question,” the man wrote, “you will understand how crazy I am becoming.”

“He lost lots of weight,” the man’s relative said. “When he got out he looked 10 or 20 years older. They beat him up, they broke his nose. Very bad malnutrition. He changed a lot. . . .

“It changed him from a friendly person to more of an aggressive person, kind of hostile,” the relative said. But, she said, in recent years the man rediscovered Catholicism, and seemed to be getting better.

“That helped him keep his faith in us,” said the relative, who bombarded U.S. authorities with letters, pleas and evidence that the man’s life and health were in danger. “It helped him keep faith that someday he can get out.”

Quy Mau Nguyen, who spent seven years in prison camp and is now president of a Westminster-based Vietnamese association of former prisoners, said many are tormented by their memories.

“I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night not knowing where I am,” he said. “For former prisoners older than 45, who spent more than five years in these prisons, it will be very hard for them to adapt. They may improve with time but they will never normalize.”

Nguyen said memory loss and feelings of alienation, even from their loved ones, are common among survivors. Amnesty International officials said other reactions include listlessness and chronic depression.

But human-rights workers marveled at the number of Vietnamese prisoners who emerge psychologically sound and spiritually strengthened.

“It’s amazing how many of them come through almost purified,” said Laolo Hironaka, Vietnam coordinator for Amnesty USA. Many of those who suffer mental anguish immediately after their release later recover, she added.

There are no reliable statistics about how many people were sent to re-education camps. According to a new report by Sagan, published by the Aurora Foundation, a Bay Area-based human-rights group she founded, estimates range from 50,000 to 800,000 in the first several years after the communist victory. Sagan puts the number of inmates being held today at roughly 10,000.

Human rights activists and academics also differ on the incidence of torture.

“My guess is that 95 or 98% of the people in those camps were never in a connex box,” said Douglas Pike, director of Indochina studies at UC Berkeley. “I’m not sure every camp had one.

“I don’t think the case for institutional torture stands up, particularly as far as Hanoi policy goes,” Pike added, noting however that individual camp commanders may have committed abuses.

“The number of torturers was small, but what they do is so abominable that they terrorize the whole camp,” Sagan said.

“Torture was not systematic on all prisoners,” she added. “However, it was widely practiced against any prisoner who broke, even in the smallest way, any rule.”

Sagan said she has documented and confirmed, through interviews with prisoners now in the United States, the Philippines and France, cases in which prisoners were hanged upside down and beaten, shackled until their limbs developed gangrene and were amputated without anesthetic, and had soapy water forced up their nostrils while people jumped on their stomachs.

According to Quach, members of the military police and those who had held policy-making jobs in the South Vietnamese army or government were singled out for abuse.

“They were beaten up, tortured and killed,” Quach said. “The communists called it ‘discipline.’ ”

Former navy Lt. Quach, 46, said his boat and its crew of seven were captured four miles off the coast by communist forces on April 30, 1975, along with 10 other Vietnamese navy cutters that were attempting to flee to Singapore.

Quach was first sent to an old provincial jail in Rach Gia, on the southwest coast of Vietnam, then inland to a camp in Can Tho. As in every camp, prisoners were required to write and rewrite detailed biographies, including details about the activities of everyone they knew. Those who omitted something, or whose friends’ accounts contradicted their own, were punished.

UC Berkeley’s Pike said that prisoners were theoretically to be ranked and sentenced according to a complex formula based primarily on their class background. But the ideological guidelines were frequently applied by former guerrillas with fourth-grade educations.

“They had some 21 categories of ‘enemies of the people,’ ” Pike said. “But if you’re the guy on the ground who’s applying this, you have 50 people in front of you . . . it’s fairly capricious. If you like the guy you put him in one category, if he’s a tough guy, maybe you put him into another.”

The system of “re-education” was varied and chaotic, Pike said. Some villagers were ordered only to attend four mandatory lectures in the town square, while career military men from upper-class backgrounds would be sentenced to five years in camp, he said. In practice, however, the system broke down, and while some generals were released after five or six years, some rank-and-file soldiers were detained for a decade.

To those in the camps, the behavior of the guards was incomprehensible.

Quach sat motionless as he told of the life and death of his old friend from the military academy. Thanh Duoc Quach (no relation) taught military strategy and policy in the war college in Da Lat. By chance, the two friends met in the camp at Can Tho. But Thanh Duoc had already been targeted for abuse, Quach said.

He was badly beaten, then shackled in a spread-eagled position for four days, Quach said. His chains were removed once a day so he could eat.

He was then freed, but undercover agents were sent to follow him around the prison camp. They were to report on his conversations with other prisoners and determine whether his anti-communist stance had changed, Quach said.

“It didn’t matter what he said,” Quach explained in Vietnamese, while his sister-in-law translated. “They wanted to make an example of him. . . . They had put him under torture for a few days, but he was still singing songs about the old (South) Vietnamese government.”

Thanh Duoc was put in an iron box and his meager rations were further cut, Quach said.

“He was in that box for three months,” Quach said. “They would just open the box and give him food. Every day they let him get outside the box for a few minutes to go to the toilet. Then they put him back in.”

Every day, Quach walked past the 14 connex boxes at the Can Tho camp, which he said were kept in full view as a warning to the other prisoners. But he was not allowed to speak to his friend.

Then, Quach was transferred to another camp, under what prisoners and academics said was a policy of frequent moves aimed at preventing prisoners from organizing.

Quach never saw his friend again. But later, another prisoner who was also transferred to the new camp told him that Thanh Duoc had been taken out of the box after three months and shot.

Former Col. Thu Dinh Duong, 59, a former political prisoner who was reunited with his family in San Clemente in December, also confirmed that there was widespread use of connex boxes, shackling and beatings in the camps where he was imprisoned.

In the old regime, Duong had represented South Vietnam at the secret Paris peace talks and was responsible for negotiating the release of 262 U.S. prisoners of war in 1973. This distinction earned him repeated interrogations by his communist captors. They released him in 1979, he said, only because he was so ill they believed he would die.

Duong said he was never physically abused, though he suffered acute malnutrition.

“I was never in one of those (boxes) because I was quiet and made myself invisible,” he said. “But the connex boxes were everywhere in the south. There weren’t any in the north. They would just hole you up in a cave.”

Duong’s wife, Nhan Thi Nguyen, and nine children fled just before the U.S. pullout in 1975. He remained behind, he said, because to run would be desertion.

Once an upper-class matron, Nguyen worked as a seamstress to put her children through school and finance her husband’s many failed escape attempts. Now, Duong proudly tells visitors, he has two children who are doctors, one a dentist, two computer engineers, one nurse, one child in optometry school, one in high school and one at UC San Diego.

“This country has benefited from the children of the boat people,” Sagan said. “They are going to make a tremendous contribution. But the people who have been in these camps, they need our support, our care, and they, too, will make a contribution to this country.”

Sagan said many of the prisoners are reluctant to tell of their experiences because, despite an overall improvement in the human rights situation in Vietnam, they still fear reprisals against friends or family. Some fear they won’t be believed.

However, Sagan said, “Most of them really want their story to be told, just like any other prisoner. The hope that they place in having the world know what has happened--and do something about it--is unbelievable.”

“Psychologically, they still need a lot of support,” Sagan added. “And Americans have to recognize this. Many of these people were imprisoned because they were allies of the United States. This is the least we can do for them.”

Released Under New Accord with Hanoi: Thu Dinh Duong Born in Hanoi. Age 59. South Vietnamese army colonel. Negotiated the release of U.S. prisoners of war held by Hanoi. Spent four years in four prison camps. Reunited with wife and nine children in San Clemente. Choat Dinh Quach Born in North Vietnam. Age 46. Navy lieutenant. Captured on his ship, 1975. Spent nearly three years in three prison camps, four years under house arrest. Reunited with family in Huntington Beach and Irvine. Ha Hieu Ho Minister, Evangelical Church of Vietnam. Age 48. Took over a deserted foreign church in Ho Chi Minh City, built a congregation of 2,000. Arrested in 1983 with three other ministers. Released Jan. 2. Staying with fellow Vietnamese clergy in Santa Ana. Source: Interviews with former prisoners and human rights workers. Re-Education Camps in Vietnam After the fall of the U.S. backed government in 1975, hundreds of thousands of former South Vietnamese military officers, as well as judges, legislators, writers, artists, lawyers, religious leaders and other “enemies of the people” were imprisoned in “re-education” camps. Most were released by the early 1980 s, although about 10,000 prisoners remain. The map shows only the camps where three of the prisoners, now in Orange County, were detained.