War Stirs Dark Memories for Vietnamese Fleeing Battered Iraq : Refugees: Road construction workers break their contracts to get out. ‘Forget the money,’ one declares.

Once, many of these men were America’s enemies. Many among them had actually fought and killed Americans for more than a decade in the jungles of their homeland, Vietnam.

Yet, here in a Jordanian refugee camp where they had spent eight days since fleeing war-torn Iraq, they offered reassurances about something that millions of Americans can only hope for:

“This not another Vietnam, that’s for sure,” said Vu Duy Thanh, who worked for more than a decade as a barge pilot, ferrying ammunition and supplies from Haiphong to North Vietnamese army regulars at the front during the Vietnam War.

Bui Quoc Viet, who was a youngster on the other side, in South Vietnam, agreed.

“I remember the war. And the war in Vietnam was much more terrible than now in Iraq, because the destruction in Iraq is not so much as in Vietnam.

“And I remember when the VC (Viet Cong) came to liberate Saigon. It was very easy for them. There was no real fighting. The Americans were gone by then. There was no resistance.”

Viet was asked if he thought it would be as easy for the Americans to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. He laughed nervously, looked around to his fellow refugees and then replied: “It will be easy. Not so easy as Saigon. But easy, yes.”

Tran Ba Dinh, 40, nodded his head enthusiastically and shouted a wholehearted agreement in Vietnamese. Dinh’s knowledge of “the liberation of Saigon” is even deeper than Viet’s. He was there in Saigon, but on the other side, as a “liberator,” a 15-year veteran of the North Vietnamese army.

There is an irony in these new-found friendships among the Vietnamese.

“He (Viet) is from south,” Thanh explained, translating for his fellow northerners. “We could have been fighting each other 15 years ago. Now we’re sleeping together as colleagues, as refugees.”

During several interviews at Jordan’s Azraq Camp for Gulf War refugees, Thanh and his colleagues, part of a group of 106 contract road construction workers from Vietnam, mused about the war in general and about what they had seen in Iraq before they fled after almost three weeks of war.

They avoided any questions about the politics involved in America’s latest war--”There are still 2,000 Vietnamese in Iraq. We want that they should not be hurt,” Thanh explained--but they mused about the odd way that war seems to be following them through their lives.

“War, it seems, is a law of human nature,” Thanh observed with a pained smile Monday as he stuffed a small tin trunk, handmade from scrap metal and packed with his few possessions, onto a bus that would carry him and his fellow Vietnamese on the first stage of their long journey home.

Indeed, their nation’s long history of war--French colonization, American domination and seemingly endless civil strife--that has turned so many of their countrymen into refugees in so many other nations, was reflected even in the headgear of these Vietnamese.

Some wore baseball caps, others French berets. There were yellow hard hats, golf caps, motorcycle crash helmets, jungle pith helmets in camouflage green.

And then, there was Viet’s hat, a prized hand-me-down from his father.

Viet, 32, is from Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon and the capital of what was once South Vietnam. His father had worked his entire life for an American construction company in Saigon, and it was with sheepish pride that Viet took off his polished silver hard hat to show a visiting American journalist the “Made in America” inscription inside.

Talking about their experiences in Iraq, Thanh and the others remarked on the Iraqi mind-set, a psyche, like their own, forged in many years of war. But they mentioned a unique quality that they said made the Iraqis difficult to comprehend, even by the war-hardened Vietnamese.

“After the Vietnam War, you know, we became friends with the United States, but the Iraqi mind is very different,” said Thanh, who worked in Iraq for 13 months before he fled the fighting.

“Before the war started, I said to my company boss, ‘Maybe we should make a bomb shelter.’

“The boss, he asked if I was afraid. I said, ‘No, but we should be prepared for good reason.’

“He said, ‘No, there’s no need to make a shelter because Iraq is very strong.’

“But, after two of days of attacks, boss came and asked me how to build a shelter.

“They do everything according to the teachings of their God. I asked him once, how can he hear his God. He said he had read the book (the Koran), and they would have victory. So it’s very difficult to argue with them.”

In the ensuing bombing, Thanh said, there were no injuries at his work camp, in the town of Shanawa, 50 miles north of the strategic southern city of Basra. But they did witness B-52 strikes destroying a key road bridge connecting Baghdad with Basra, which serves as the logistics and command center for Iraq’s occupation troops in Kuwait. And they saw several refineries blown up after they left their camp for Baghdad and ultimate safety in Jordan. When they reached the Iraqi capital, Thanh and the others said they saw several civilian buildings that had been hit by air strikes, but they insisted the damage did not appear to be systematic, again stressing, “Nothing like Vietnam.”

Still, it was the persistence of the bombing, and clearly the dark memories it stirred in most of them, that made Thanh and his colleagues desperate to leave Iraq--so desperate, in fact, that they broke their work contracts to do so.

The decision to flee was not an easy one. All of the Vietnamese, whose socialist nation was among Iraq’s closest allies, were working on two-year contracts between their government and Baghdad. The contracts provided them with a meager living allowance and a salary of only $780 for the entire period, to be paid in traveler’s checks back in Vietnam only at the end of their contract period.

By breaking their contract, Thanh and the others will be paid nothing when they get home. And yet, having experienced war before, they don’t regret the decision.

“Same like bomb shelter,” Thanh explained. “After war started, we asked company boss for quick arrangements to get out of Iraq. Again he said we were afraid. But we said no, our duty was not fighting and there was no work for us anymore. And after that, he can’t understand us anymore. He said we must be brave and stay, but finally they let us go.

“You see, most of us were soldiers in the Vietnam War--different kind of war, it’s true. But still, we know the best thing now is just go away from the war, any war. . . . Forget the money.”