Helping Vietnamese Ex-Detainees Resettle : Aid: Some of the earlier participants in a State Department relocation program for former political prisoners are now assisting newcomers through an organization based in Westminster.

The Army veteran sat in the living room of his cramped apartment, sipping lotus-flowered tea and talking about his life after high school.

Upon graduation in 1954, the year his country split into North and South Vietnam, Nguyen Huu Tai got drafted into the latter’s army. Numerous firefights later, Tai was a lieutenant colonel when Communist forces overran Saigon in 1975.

“My whole life was the army,” Tai said.

The Communist victors sent Tai and thousands of others like him to harsh “re-education” camps, a punishment for having served the former regime. Tai spent 13 years in prison.

He and his family arrived in the United States in July under a State Department program that allows Vietnamese former political prisoners--many of them ex-soldiers--to resettle in the United States.

Since 1990, the former detainees have been arriving, with little notice to those outside the Vietnamese-American community. They are called the “H.O. people,” the acronym for Humanitarian Operation, the program that enabled them to immigrate.

As of Jan. 31, more than 61,000 ex-prisoners and their families have come to the United States, according to the State Department’s Bureau for Refugee Programs. Orange County is especially attractive for many of these newcomers, as more than 9,000 former political prisoners and their families have chosen to settle here.

Some earlier arrivals formed a group to help the newcomers. Organized in 1989 by mostly ex-detainees, the Vietnam Political Detainees Mutual Assn. seeks to help their colleagues. Operated solely by volunteers, the group depends on donations from businesses and individuals in Little Saigon. Its budget last year was $18,000, said association Chairman Hau Nguyen, himself a former prisoner.

The group conducts business from a donated office in a Bolsa Avenue shopping center in Westminster. The volunteers work with military efficiency. The group has sponsored more than 1,600 families from Vietnam, Nguyen said.

Volunteers do many tasks. They file documents necessary to bring the ex-detainees over. They pick up newcomers from the airport. They arrange housing. They help fill out paperwork. They accompany the new refugees to doctors’ appointments. They help with translation. They collect clothing and household goods for newcomers.

“They are one of the very few organizations that . . . does everything from A to Z,” said Van Nguyen, who works with another refugee-aid group. “There’s a definite common bond because the people who staff the office are former military people themselves. . . . They fully understand the need and the concerns of the refugees, the ex-prisoners who just recently came over.”

Perhaps most importantly, the volunteers provide a psychological boost for the strangers in new surroundings.

“To the newcomers, with no relatives here and strangers to a new land, having that first greeting at the airport is very important,” said Tai, who was picked up at the airport by the group volunteers in July. “It’s important to have someone show you around. There are a thousand things you don’t know. There are a thousand things you need to learn--how to work a drinking fountain, how to buy stamps, how to pump gas.”

In many ways, the newcomers have it tougher than their fellow refugees who had immigrated earlier. Most are in their 50s and 60s, ages at which it’s difficult to start anew. Many feel a sense of loss, having spent the prime years of their lives in prison, enduring hard labor, physical and mental torture and malnutrition. Some look at the success of their fellow refugees and feel ashamed. A few suffer from acute post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition well-documented in some returning American veterans.

The overriding concern for the newcomers, however, is jobs. They came to the United States at a time of economic difficulty, when jobs are hard to find and many public programs have been cut.

Upon arrival, they receive eight months of welfare. After that, they are on their own. Many can’t speak English and have no skills. The thing they know best--fighting war--has few marketable applications.

“I’m not sad about the years I was apart from my wife and my parents,” one former detainee lamented. “I’m not sad about the fact that I can’t have children anymore. I’m not sad about the 13 years in prison. But I’m sad that after 13 years, I have nothing for my family, and that I can’t do anything.”

Tai is more upbeat. The 58-year-old veteran has tried to find work, he said, but so far, no luck. His four children--ages 33 to 27--work minimum-wage jobs during the day to pay for expenses. They attend English classes at night.

The seven of them--Tai, his wife, their four children, and Tai’s mother--stay in a two-bedroom apartment for $700 a month.

Tai and his wife stay home, cleaning and cooking.

His life here, Tai said, is much better than in Vietnam.

He talked about the horrors of “re-education” camp. The prisoners were given meager rations of cassava roots, and occasionally, rice. The hungry detainees would eat anything they caught in the jungle: frogs, grasshoppers, any insect. “Centipedes don’t taste too bad,” Tai said.

One former chopper pilot lost so much weight that skin “dripped” from his face and body, Tai said.

Some died from food poisoning. Some killed themselves.

The prisoners were forced to work all day, planting and building.

One prisoner, Tran Sinh, was forced to build a dam with no help from machines. “It was hell on Earth,” said the 65-year-old former labor leader, who spent 13 years in prison. “They didn’t kill us on the spot. But they killed us slowly and persistently. . . . My oldest daughter went to visit and she didn’t recognize me.”

Those who violated prison rules or tried to escape were put in solitary confinement and had their limbs shackled. The chains sometimes were so tight that they rotted the prisoners’ legs, Tai said.

These days, like many former prisoners, Tai is still haunted by memories of the camp.

“Sometimes, I go to sleep at night, I dream and I’m still in prison,” he said. “When I dream, it’s never about the U.S. It’s about Vietnam, in prison.”

But many newcomers are happy. Though they worry about getting a job, they enjoy the new freedom, they said. The United States represents “absolute freedom and democracy,” Sinh said.

“Everyone wants to come here,” he said. “We can sleep without fear at night.”