A Long and Lonely Struggle With Bitterness : War: Veterans of South Vietnamese army have few outlets to express the pain of their crushing defeat 20 years ago. ‘What did we fight for?’ one wonders.

Two decades later, there is no black granite memorial wall where Ho Anh Tuan can touch the past and no annual Veterans Day parade to honor his service to a country that no longer exists.

There is only the searing memory of April 30, 1975, when triumphant North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops captured Saigon, bringing a shattering end to the long Vietnam War. Ho, taken prisoner the day before, spent nearly a year in a tiny isolation cell.

“All I could do was think about death,” said Ho, 55, a former first lieutenant in the beaten South Vietnamese army. “I wanted to scream, but who would listen? We were the ones who lost the war.”

Few are listening even now to the vanquished Vietnamese veterans who in war fought for peace, and in peace are paying the price of war.

For the thousands of survivors of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam who live as refugees in Westminster’s Little Saigon, there is no Department of Veterans Affairs to hear their medical complaints and heal their old wounds.

And rarely is any counselor told of their emotional anguish, the flashbacks and terrifying dreams, for these veterans are culturally more familiar with the stoicism and silence of a soldier.

Often, their children, many of them born in America, aren’t interested in knowing their stories of a lost cause in a distant land. Seldom do they even share their common experiences with the American veterans who were once their allies and sometimes their friends.

The aging Vietnamese veterans are mostly forgotten, except by one another, as they struggle with bitterness and a gnawing need to understand what went so tragically wrong 20 years ago.

“Why did we lose? All the Vietnamese and U.S. soldiers who died in the war, what did they die for? What did we fight for?” asked 40-year-old Nguyen Duc Nam, laboring to check his emotions as he remembers the day of surrender.

It was the day the sun set on their world.

“What I remember was that after my uniform came off, I felt like I had shed my identity also,” said Tran Van Sang, 47, a soldier from 1968 to 1975. “Now when I think of April 30, that’s what I think of, that feeling of utter loss.”

American casualties in Vietnam totaled 58,196, while about 3 million Vietnamese from both sides--soldiers and civilians--were killed in the war. The Vietnamese dead included an estimated 300,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 600,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops.

For the United States, the involvement in the war, and the agonizingly slow years leading to its conclusion, were the most turbulent and divisive since the Civil War a century before.

With domestic protests growing ever louder--and violent--the Nixon Administration “de-Americanized” the war in 1970 by launching the so-called Vietnamization program that gradually transferred the responsibility for prosecuting the war to the South Vietnamese.

While Vietnamization was under way, national security adviser Henry Kissinger began secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese on Feb. 21, 1970, without the knowledge of the South Vietnamese government. The secret negotiations led to the signing of a peace treaty with North Vietnam on Jan. 27, 1973, and a complete withdrawal of U.S. troops months later.

Incredibly, the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and its armed forces took only six weeks, beginning with the final North Vietnamese offensive launched March 10, 1975. Entire South Vietnamese army divisions broke and ran as the North Vietnamese juggernaut swept over the country.

Although the United States continued funneling money and equipment to South Vietnam until the end, some South Vietnamese soldiers feel they were abandoned as the hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops withdrew.

“That’s what our American friends did, they left us,” said Nguyen Van Hung. “And we couldn’t recover from it.”

Former Gen. Tran Van Nhut, 59, said, “Our troops felt that the United States betrayed Vietnam; not the American GIs or the American people, but the U.S. government and politicians.”

But Tran, a professional soldier decorated four times for bravery by the U.S. Army, understands America’s reluctance to continue the war.

“The war lasted so long and there were so many U.S. troops killed and wounded,” he remembered. “America spent billions on the war and after a while the (U.S.) government said, ‘Enough.’ ”

Vietnamese veterans also condemn the corruption that permeated all ranks of the South Vietnamese government and military. Toward the end of the war, some senior officers were stealing their units’ payroll, the veterans say, and some army supply units were selling equipment and ammunition to troops in the field.

Nguyen Duc Nam, who was 17 when he was drafted into the army, also has harsh words for the wealthy of South Vietnam.

“The rich businessmen . . . succeeded in keeping their sons out of the war. These men didn’t have to serve or fight. It was very unfair,” he said. “The soldiers I fought with were poor but honest. They ended up dying for nothing.”

For all their differences, many U.S. and Vietnamese veterans are bound by having passed through the same crucible. Both still fight psychological battles left from nightmarish combat; both are isolated by their families’ disinterest in the war and their ordeal.

Ngo Hong Ha, a 44-year-old Tustin resident, has talked to his three children, ages 8 to 16, about the war. But they are thoroughly assimilated into American culture and have little curiosity about a conflict they never experienced, he said.

Once, he tried to tell his 16-year-old son about his life as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese, but gave up when it became obvious that the teen-ager “was only listening to be polite.”

“I want them to understand, but I don’t know how to make them understand. So I end up not saying much,” he said. “They are too young and they weren’t there.”

The Vietnamese veterans said they would like to sit down with their former U.S. allies and talk about the war, but language is a barrier for many. So they find some comfort around one another.

While they do not have broad-based organizations like the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion, they do have well-organized groups formed around the various branches of the South Vietnamese military.

In addition to providing moral support, the groups serve as networking committees that help members find jobs and assist veterans newly arrived in the United States.

When it comes to medical care for wounded veterans, there are no government benefits such as those received by American service personnel. The Vietnamese must see their own physicians for that.

For emotional problems stemming from the war, once again, the veterans must rely on their own resources.

Post-traumatic stress disorder has emerged as one of the most controversial legacies of the Vietnam War. Thousands of American veterans who say they suffer from the disorder, which has been recognized as a war-related disability by the VA, are still receiving counseling more than 20 years after returning from Vietnam.

Some South Vietnamese veterans say they are persecuted by enemy ghosts from the past.

Tran Van Sang spends sleepless nights alone in the living room of his Santa Ana home, ready to protect his family from Viet Cong guerrillas he thinks are coming to break down the door.

“It’s a result of the war, that’s all. Nothing unusual,” said the former first lieutenant in a South Vietnamese infantry battalion. “I don’t think I need a counselor. Besides, it’s not as bad as it used to be.”

Pham Gia Dai, a veterans counselor at the Vietnamese Community of Orange County Inc., said many Vietnamese veterans suffer from psychological problems stemming from the war.

“How could they not?” Pham said. “But there are no programs to address such problems. (Besides) it’s not something that they’ll discuss with strangers. So, even if there were counselors to deal with this, I’m not sure they can be helped.”

Not everybody believes that stress disorders are a significant problem.

Tran Van Nhut, the general who served in the South Vietnamese army for 23 years, said Vietnamese veterans are too busy getting on with life to fret with emotional difficulties resulting from the war.

“Our men have enough trouble as it is looking for jobs to support their families,” he said. “They deal with the other problems as best they can.”

Yet clearly there is a sense among Vietnamese veterans that they, like the Americans who fought, must at the same time find ways to heal and respect the past.

While American dead are commemorated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the black granite wall where thousands pass in somber reverence every day, there is no monument to the South Vietnamese fallen.

Tran Van Nhut said Vietnamese veterans are trying to raise funds to build their own memorial honoring both U.S. and Vietnamese dead. The monument, for which organizers seek to raise $1 million, would be erected in Westminster.

If there is any reason for these veterans to rejoice 20 years after defeat, it is that the Vietnamese are no longer at war against themselves, said Nguyen Duc Nam, whose family fled to the south from the Communist north when the country was divided in 1954.

“April 30, 1975, was a very sad day for my country, but it is also the day that the Vietnamese from the north and south stopped killing each other,” he said.