A Chance to Escape ‘a Mental Hell’ : Immigration: L.A. County will use a $90,000 federal grant to provide support for Vietnamese survivors of Communist ‘re-education camps.’

Sometimes, they did the tango, and it looked as though they could dance forever.

South Vietnamese Army Col. Liem Cong Duong and his wife threw open their Saigon villa for parties every month, and their American, French and Vietnamese friends came to dance around the bonsai trees in the Japanese garden, nab homemade egg rolls off servants’ trays and gather around the piano to sing.

When Saigon collapsed in 1975, that way of life did, too. The Communists threw Duong and other high-ranking officials into prison for “re-education,” an attempted mass brainwashing so they would accept the new government.

Seventeen years later and 50 pounds lighter, Duong--now a Highland Park resident--made it to America, only to find a new kind of deprivation. He had no friends and no job. Duong, his wife and three of his four children--one daughter remained in Vietnam with her husband--lived off welfare and hand-me-down furniture and clothes from a Catholic charity. In December, 1990, after three months, he found a job--assembling parts for a manufacturer in Santa Ana.

Hundreds of Vietnamese released from the Communist prisons called “re-education camps” have been finding new lives in Southern California over the last two years. That means--for Duong and others--learning to fall from the privileged life of a military officer to the struggling life of a manual laborer and wrestling with communist demons that some say they can’t shake.

In 1990, 7,700 former prisoners and their families began arriving in the United States under an agreement reached with the Vietnamese government. The Los Angeles County Refugee Assistance Program tracks more than 1,600 re-education camp survivors, most of whom live in the San Gabriel Valley or Long Beach. In 1993, as many as 400 are expected to arrive in the county.

Until now, there has been no county program to help them. But next month, they will be able to join special new support groups to help them adjust to life in America. The county will use a $90,000 federal grant to provide counselors and support groups for re-education camp survivors, many of whom, said Duong, face “a mental hell.”

County officials propose setting up 160 peer-support guidance groups. The groups, each consisting of no more than five people, will be formed through the refugee office at 709 N. Hill St. in Los Angeles. (The telephone number is (213) 680-1060.)

Former political detainees say they could have used that kind of help when they came to America.

“Very alone,” said Duong, 60, about his early days.

“I wept many times,” said his wife, 58-year-old Banah Tran.

The county’s refugee program helps former prisoners find jobs and study English, said Joan Pinchuk, director of the Refugee Assistance Office. After that, they’re on their own, like any other refugee.

But re-education camp survivors tend to be different from most refugees. They usually are older, speak little English, have high-ranking government experience and suffer emotional or physical scars from jungle prisons where Communists detained them after the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in 1975. Some work as busboys or janitors.

“That, of course, is very crushing to them, especially since many were captains, lieutenants, generals, etc., in the army,” Pinchuk said. “To come here and have nothing and be told they should consider a $4.25-an-hour job is rather excruciating.”

The refugees worry about their age and their bad English, said Joe Le, a director for Catholic Charities, which runs refugee assistance offices in Los Angeles and Rosemead. Le, a Vietnamese refugee who came to the United States in 1975, organizes unofficial support groups for new re-education camp refugees on weekends.

“They have to adjust to the new life,” he said. “They have to forget their high-ranking position in Vietnam. They had better forget it. We tell them, ‘No. 1, you have freedom and responsibility.’ ”

They must swallow their pride, said Duong, the former colonel and university graduate who now rents a room in his nephew’s Highland Park condominium.

“Very hard,” said Duong, his hand over his heart. Now, he is a project manager for the Economic and Employment Development Center in Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that contracts with the county to help refugees.

“Before I’m like this,” Duong said, indicating a level above his head. “Now, I’m like this,” he added, dropping his hand toward the floor.

He accepts his circumstance without apparent bitterness.

“I tell my children it’s the first page of my life to start, so you start from the bottom.”

Duong and his wife, Tran, have no hopes that the future will be any different. They don’t make enough money to dream about buying a home; they are just happy to be on their feet again.

“Sometimes, I feel very sad, but I think for the future of my children,” Tran said quietly, her hands folded in her lap. She stared straight ahead, into the distance. “I accept everything that happened to me. I live all to have freedom for my children and family.”

Hai Son Pham also thinks only of his children’s future. Pham, 42, was a colonel in the Vietnamese army and spent six years in a prison camp. He rents one bedroom in a two-bedroom Rosemead house for himself, his wife, three daughters--ages 11, 5 and 2 months--and a niece. He is on welfare and learning English through the county refugee program so he can get a job.

Visitors to Pham’s house enter through a side door because end-to-end cots are propped against the front door, which opens to a cramped living room. The eldest daughter sleeps on a mattress on the floor of her parents’ drafty bedroom, which is lit from above by a single bare bulb.

Pham is shy and embarrassed about his beginner’s English. The fact that he does not have a job gnaws at him, the same way that his prison memories do. He worries that his wife speaks no English and that his children have no room in which to study. He worries that his body never bounced back from the rigors of prison camp and about the scars on his face and arms he received from Communist shrapnel during a gunboat battle in Namcan.

“In Vietnam,” he said, running his fingers through his black hair, which is streaked with silver. “I had a little white hair. Now, I have a lot.”

At night, Pham still jerks awake from nightmares of prison guards shooting him or forcing him to do back-breaking labor in the fields. Pham was in a prison camp from 1975 to 1981, a period that he survived by furtively catching snakes, mice or frogs and boiling them in tin cans for protein. He still can recite the words of praise for legendary Communist leader Ho Chi Minh that he was forced to say in the daily “re-education” sessions.

But the daily self-betrayal of repeating Communist propaganda took its toll. The Communists hammered away at him so much that the incessant droning on and on about Marxism and Leninism still reverberates through his brain.

In America, it’s something Pham prefers not to talk about as he tries to put the mental torture behind him.

“We call it a crisis in our minds,” he said. “I hope it is past.”

Meanwhile, he doesn’t know how to find a job, let alone find counseling or make friends. Another former prisoner, 50-year-old Dung Ta, remembers that stranger-in-a-strange-land feeling. He came to America in 1990, first to visit his brother in Houston.

“When I first came,” he said, “I was totally depressed . . . I felt very lonely. Everything was strange to me--the way of life, everything.”

Ta tries to look forward, but he can’t escape his past.

“Here, sometimes during nighttime, I suddenly thought of the life in the camp. You know, I still think it is nightmare for me.”

Before the fall of Saigon, Ta was a deputy director for press and protocol in the office of Vietnam’s vice president. He was in prison from 1975 to 1982.

Now, he shares a five-bedroom house in Rosemead with eight other people and works as a counselor for other refugees through the Catholic Charities’ assistance program. His wife works in San Jose because she cannot find a job in Southern California, but someday they hope to open a small dry cleaning or tailor’s shop.

He dreams of going back to a free Vietnam someday.

“I will only go back when there are no Communists there,” Ta said.

“The most precious thing for me is freedom.”