COLUMN ONE : Wounded by War--and Peace : Hoping for a better life in the U.S. after years in prison camps, thousands of former Vietnamese military officers find a bleak future. As Cao Doan says, ‘My second chance came too late.’

In the crowded and chilly common area of the Asian Garden Mall in Little Saigon, Cao Doan sits alone, absent-mindedly sipping cafe au lait from a plastic cup and smoking his umpteenth cigarette. His dark brown eyes stare languidly into the window of the past as he recalls his life in Vietnam, an era upon which he usually prefers not to dwell.

Doan dedicated 12 years to the air force of the Republic of Vietnam, rising through the ranks to become a major just before Saigon fell on April 30, 1975. Like countless others, he cried and raged that unforgettable day when the Communists crushed his government.

And for the next 13 years, as a political prisoner, he toiled in a “re-education camp” in the sweltering jungle, cultivating rock-hard soil and planting and harvesting sweet potatoes under the relentless jeers of his guards.

“I try not to think about those years, not because I’m ashamed of them,” Doan, 50, said between slow drags on his cigarette. “But when I think about the past, I inevitably think about the present and the future. And there’s really not much in my present or future.”

He is not being melodramatic. Or pessimistic. Or even blase.

Doan is like many of the 25,000 Vietnamese refugees, euphemistically labeled “political detainees,” who were released from prison and immigrated to the United States, where their dreams of starting over have turned into dejection and disenchantment.

At an average age of 55, many detainees find themselves too old and set in their ways to learn a new language, assimilate into a new society or find steady work.

Many subsist on the kindness of strangers, living hand to mouth. Others suffer poor health from years of neglect in prison. And some die, broken in spirit, alone in a country that had once held so much promise for them.

“These people are nowhere men,” said Nghia Tran, executive director of the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., which provides services to refugees. “They’ve fallen through the very system that allowed them to leave Vietnam in the first place.”

The detainees and about 98,000 accompanying relatives have immigrated since a 1989 agreement between Washington and Hanoi, according to the State Department Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

Most have settled in Orange County, home to the nation’s largest Vietnamese expatriate community, where they are referred to as the “H.O. people,” an acronym for Humanitarian Operation, the program that allowed them to come.

Here, in the land where many of their countrymen have become relatively successful in the two decades after the war, these newcomers--most of them former military officers--are battling insurmountable obstacles.

“Compared to the rest of the Vietnamese refugees, these political detainees are having the toughest time,” said Dai Pham, a counselor with Vietnamese Community of Orange County. “How does one bring back a decade of lost years? How, at 50, 55 or 60 years of age, can someone--in this case, thousands of them--start over successfully?”

For detainees, their new start began auspiciously enough. Although they arrived in the United States virtually empty-handed, the refugees had what their fellow emigres before them did not: a firmly entrenched Vietnamese community to buffer them from the starkness of a foreign land.

Soon, however, reality shattered the illusion.

The community, undergoing its own economic problems, could not provide much more than psychological support for newcomers who needed jobs, transportation, shelter and medical care.

“The Vietnamese refugees who came before them are very sympathetic of these war heroes,” said Khuc Minh Tho, president of Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Assn., a support group based in Arlington, Va. “But sympathy doesn’t get you a regular paycheck, it doesn’t get you a car to look for work and, to put it bluntly, it doesn’t get you very far.”

Further, their health is deteriorating. And social and medical assistance, once generous to Southeast Asian refugees, has decreased dramatically.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, public assistance for refugees lasted up to four years. Today, because of government cutbacks in services, it ends after the eighth month.

“So this is the first thing they face,” Tran said. “In eight months, you’re supposed to learn English, get job training, acculturate and become successful.

“How much easier could it get?” he added sarcastically.

Making matters worse, every day as the detainees behold the successes of those who emigrated a decade before them and who opened the myriad of coffee shops, restaurants and business centers of Little Saigon, they are reminded of their own unending struggles, their faded hopes, their lost homeland.

Once, they were proud people, highly educated and with military status. Now, many feel like outsiders, even among their own.

“Predictably, these men, who wear their years in prison like a badge of honor, have developed an inferiority complex,” Tran said. “They come over here and they see lower-ranking people make money, live in big houses and have businesses, and every day, they are mindful that they have lost 20 years of their life. The whole world is turned upside down for them once again.”

The loss is reflected in the wistfulness in their eyes. Each morning, in the Asian Garden Mall in the center of the Vietnamese business district, dozens of former detainees gather in clusters in front of food stalls to drink coffee, smoke and watch passersby.

As the curling cigarette smoke thickens the air, conversations invariably turn toward their plight.

“My second chance came too late. I’ve accepted that,” Cao Doan tells a stranger over coffee. “But sometimes, I can’t help feeling lost and frustrated as I bike from sweatshop to sweatshop, looking to see if people have any clothes for me to iron that day.”

Doan shares a rented garage with another former political prisoner. He makes $300 to $400 a month. He is one of the lucky ones.

Only about 20% of these former prisoners have found employment--menial jobs that usually are fly-by-night, said Loc Ba Nguyen with Vietnamese Community of Orange County.

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Hoang Nguyen, a former infantry captain, and his family immigrated to California in November. He has applied for work at more places than he can remember. A couple of months ago, the 61-year-old Santa Ana resident found a job as an electronic product assembler. After three weeks, he was let go.

“They told me I was too old,” Nguyen said. “I couldn’t really argue with that.”

Ky Nguyen, who is not related to Hoang, has also combed the streets of Little Saigon looking for work. “I applied for everything,” said Nguyen, 53. “They told me to go home and wait for them to call me. I went home and waited but the calls never came.”

But he and his family are able to make ends meet. The combined salaries of Nguyen’s three adult children are enough for his family to pay the $700 rent on their two-bedroom Westminster apartment.

Survival would be practically impossible if they did not rent out the upstairs bedroom to another H.O. family. As it is, Nguyen and his wife share their bedroom with two of their children. Another son sleeps on a twin-sized bed in the living room.

In the hope of earning a little money to help support his oldest son, who is in Vietnam, Nguyen is learning to sew. Every day for several hours, the former police lieutenant gets behind a sewing machine set up in a kitchen corner and practices on faded fabrics.

He doesn’t know if his newly acquired skills will be marketable, Nguyen said, because “I can only sew single stitches and nothing complicated.”

Many of his friends are sewing material on consignment from local Vietnamese-owned sweatshops. These men who had devoted their lives to fighting for their country say they are not too proud to take such jobs which, in another time, would have been “beneath” them.

Now, Nguyen says, the $5- or $10-a-day work “is good if you can get it.”

As difficult as their lives are, many detainees say the first group of H.O. people who arrived immediately after the 1989 agreement had a worse time adjusting.

At least two former military officers committed suicide within the first few months, telling their loved ones they could no longer cope with the loneliness and problems of their new home.

According to Hau Nguyen, president of Vietnam Political Detainees Mutual Assn., an Orange County support group for Vietnamese former prisoners of war, one of the suicide victims had been in Orange County for only a month before killing himself by bicycling onto the San Diego Freeway one night.

“He saw that his future didn’t have any light,” Nguyen said. “His spirit was tired.”

Then, there are the stories of those who die, months after reaching the United States, from illnesses left untreated during their years in the prison camps.

“Some got here and didn’t even get a chance to know what Little Saigon is,” said Kieu My Duyen, a financial consultant whose freelance work in local Vietnamese newspapers highlights the predicament of former political prisoners. “They go from the airport to apartment to hospital to cemetery.”

But even in death, Duyen and others say, the problems of political prisoners do not end. Many of the families do not have the money to pay for a decent burial.

The Vietnamese community has rallied around these families. Hau Nguyen’s group this year set up a political detainee funeral fund. Vietnamese newspaper reporters, such as Duyen, write articles asking for donations to help pay funeral costs. And Little Saigon Radio regularly broadcasts corresponding pleas.

As grim as their future may seem, detainees generally do not give in entirely to hopelessness and self-pity. They have families to think of.

In interview after interview at job training centers, restaurants, coffee shops and their homes, these survivors of war and the political victims of peace recite a similar mantra: They are focusing on the future--not their own, but their children’s.

“There are two beliefs I and my brothers (fellow political prisoners) live by,” said Cung Pham, 59, a former major. “The first is that we willingly left Vietnam because we could not live with the Communist regime. The second is that our youth and usefulness have already passed us by; we now have to live for our children. We came here so that our children could have the chance the war took from us.”

But Pham and others also say their homeland is always in their hearts, and they yearn to one day return to live in the country they left behind. Only a handful, who decided they could not adapt to the United States, have done so, according to social services workers.

Detainees who want to go home have but one requirement--they would return only if the Communist government is no longer in control, a wish many in the community say is flatly unrealistic.

As the Vietnamese American community this month marks the 20th year on foreign soil, many view the detainees through the eyes of those who have endured their own experiences as refugees.

Nghia Tran with the Vietnamese Community of Orange County summed it up:

“They’re resilient people. These people survived a war; they survived imprisonment. They came here. Is this going to kill them? No. Is this what they expected? No. Is this what they hoped for? No.

“But they’re refugees and refugees always survive.”

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VOICES

* Hai Vu, 47, Westminster: “I knew life here was going to be hard . . . but I also knew we would be able to survive as long we are not under the control of communism.”

* Dat Nguyen, 64, Santa Ana: “Every once in a while, I come to this mall to see my friends. We use this time to talk of Vietnam, of our common experience, of the war.”

* Qui Nguyen, 43, Garden Grove: “Even though I don’t have a job now, I still can go to school to learn English. In Vietnam, I didn’t have the opportunity to try and better myself.”