The Vietnam War, 20 Years Later...

CHRISTINE NOU, Ontario Was 5 when the Khmer Rouge invaded Phnom Penh in April l975, and she was forced with the rest of the population to leave the city and work in the fields. Her father and older brother and sister were sent to one camp, while Nou, two younger sisters and a baby brother stayed with their mother.

In the mornings mother left to work all day in the fields. I was six and took care of the baby, Tony, who was very skinny. Each day I would take him to get one small bowl of very thin rice soup. People were starving. Before the Khmer Rouge invaded, my father had had the chance to escape. But he said no.

In 1979 the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and drove out the Khmer Rouge. Thousands of Khmer Rouge came through our village killing, raping and stealing. We began to walk back to Phnom Penh with thousands of other refugees. But the country was still in chaos and in 1980 we decided to try to escape into Thailand. My dad hid us children under rice in a cart, leaving behind my oldest sister and my mother, who had just had a baby.

We walked for days, starving and exhausted. Around us in the forest soldier bandits were robbing and raping and killing. In the confusion, we were separated near the border. My brother Alen was 11 and I was 10; we walked all night, very afraid, dragging 4- year- old Tony between us. We were too skinny and small to carry him. When Tony cried we covered his mouth so we would not be caught and killed.

Thai soldiers caught us and put us in a jail camp, where the other children escaped. But I was taken back to a Cambodian camp, crying and crying, when at last I saw my father. We escaped for Thailand again. After a month in Thai camp he left to go back for mother. For weeks I took care of the littler kids. We were very afraid and had almost nothing to eat. The camp gave us a half chicken; I would boil it to make soup, then hang it up to dry and boil it again the next day and the next. Our parents were gone so long we believed they were dead. Then one day they appeared and finally I could become a child again.

We came to America in 1982 and now I am a graduate student at Cal State Fullerton. I hope someday to be a lawyer. Four of us have graduated from college, one is in college, and Tony has just been accepted. We children share work at our donut shop and give what we earn to our family while we all study alot. In Cambodia we wouldn’t have been able to afford educations, we had no future like we do here.

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RANDY TUAN TRAN, Garden Grove.

21, son of a U.S. soldier and a Vietnamese woman, came to the United States in 1990 under the Amerasian Homecoming Act . He is a Vietnamese language pop singer, with a recent CD called “Randy Dadac Biet

I was raised in an orphan home in Vietnam, and learned to sing there. But when I was five I was adopted by a Vietnamese woman who wanted a boy to help her with heavy farm work. She was mean. I’ve never seen my real mother. And I’ve never seen my father--not even in my dreams.

When I was 13 my adopted mother sold me to another Vietnamese couple so they could come to the United States with me by claiming to be my relatives. This kind of thing happened fairly often. I’m not sure how much they paid, but it was a lot. We were on a waiting list for years and I went back and forth between the two families. The mother (who bought me) was not as mean as the first mother.

We arrived in l990 and I entered Alhambra high school. After a few months I began staying with friends. There was no relationship with the couple. They just needed me to get to the United States.

Right now I can only sing in Vietnamese but I hope to learn to sing in English too, even though I probably don’t have a chance. But I have to fight on.

Vietnam is my motherland, but I don’t miss it much. I like America better. In Vietnam people call at me Hey, black guy! and treat me bad. Still, I hope someday to go back to visit, look for my town and even for my adopted mother. Yes, she was mean. But I think sometimes people don’t want to treat you bad. Something in their life just keeps bothering and pushing them. And it’s good to forgive.

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BECKY HUYNH, Redondo Beach

15, a sophomore at Redondo Union High School. One of three children born in California to a South Vietnamese Navy veteran his wife, who own a small restaurant.

I’ve never been to Vietnam. But my parents say when I am a senior in high school they’ll take me and my brothers there. I want to see what it’s like, to meet my mom’s relatives, and see the culture.

My parents don’t talk much to me about the war but when refugees come from Vietnam my parents often try to help them, they let them stay at our house awhile, or work in our restaurant. My dad was an orphan and very poor growing up in Vietnam; recently a man who used to give him food when he was hungry arrived here and my dad wants to help him as much ashe can.

My parents work hard all the time, and send a lot of money back to Vietnam. Do I miss having that money? No, it’s good to help the people there.

I don’t speak much Vietnamese but I can understand a lot of it. I really don’t know much about the war; they haven’t taught about it in school.

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XIONG SUE, Long Beach An ethnic Hmong, he was forced into military service at age 14 in 1968, went to Thailand for U.S. military training, kept fighting after U.S. withdrawal. In late 1978 Xiong entered a Thai refugee camp and came to the U.S. in 1980.

I have no idea if the war was a mistake. When I fought there I was still young. I never knew politics, just did what I was told. There, only the high- ranking people knew what was going on. Here, everything is open and I know much more now.

The U.S. had a program that if you fought with the CIA you could come to America. In Laos A CIA guy always told our officers what to do, where to fight. In the camp in Thailand I had to prove I really fought for the Americans.

Many Hmong who fought with America are still ther, some in re-education camps. But some like my brother, who is a commando, are still fighting. He called me to et him out of Laos but I have no idea how. I don’t know who to talk to.

I think about the war every day, because we lost our country, are family is torn apart, and I feel very depressed about that. My mother, my sister, two brothers are still in Laos. In l991 I went back to see them but the fighting is still going on and I was not able to travel to my village and could not see my mother. Now I have nine children here. I need many children because I lost so many relatives in the war. *

KATHRYN MCMAHON, Venice

Her friend and brother-in-law, Timothy, was killed in Vietnam in 1966.

I was raised in a little mill town in Washington state where the police gave kids picked up for minor offenses the choice of jail or joining the Army. That’s how my 18-year-old brother- in-law, Timothy, who had a few cans of beer in his car, ended up as a medic in Vietnam.

I was two years older. We’d all grown up together, so Timothy was really like my brother. He didn’t have a girlfriend and couldn’t talk to his mom about what was happening in Vietnam, so I became his confidante and we wrote each other almost every week. He went there in 1966 and was killed a few months later, shot in the chest.

We’d moved to California and I didn’t go back for the funeral because I was quite pregnant. But two days later I got a last letter from Timothy. He wrote that if he were to do what he’d have to do to survive, he would become someone I wouldn’t know and someone he wouldn’t want me to know. And he asked me to name my baby after him if it was a boy. It was a goodbye letter, and I’ve always believed he allowed himself to be killed. He was 19. And I did name my son after him.

I became an anti-war activist. A few years later I got divorced, went to college and joined anti-war demonstrations.

I’ve stayed involved. In l992 I led a women’s delegation to Vietnam. I was talking to Vietnamese women at the Women’s Archives there and I told them my story. The women started to cry, sad and sorry. They had lost loved ones, too.

I still think about Timothy, what a kind and sensitive young man he was. His death really broke his parents. His father died two years later, and his mother, who went to her son’s grave every week, died a year after that.

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STEPHEN SAULENAS, Torrance

15, son of a Vietnam veteran

So far I haven’t been taught anything in school about Vietnam, but I’ve seen some of the movies and read some books about it--I’ve just started “Medal of Honor,” about the Green Berets. When I was little my dad didn’t like to talk about the war, but it wasn’t until he got counseling in 1985 that he really began to tell us things. My dad says he was against the war.

Recently he’s been in a veterans’ group where the counselor encourages everyone to share with their families what happened to them in Vietnam, and he’s told us even more. I’m glad, because hearing these things has made me feel close to him. I think by now he’s dealt with most of his feelings about the war, although it took a long time. I know the average soldier’s age then was 19, four years older than me. All these things I’ve learned have made me against war in general.

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JIM LEMON, Los Angeles

Served as a fighter-bomber pilot and air controller in Vietnam and Laos, spent 23 years in the Air Force. Now project manager for an aircraft company

Mr. (Robert) McNamara, (the former defense secretary,) is saying the war was a mistake all along. I say the mistake was vacillating U.S. political leaders, Mr. McNamara in particular. In 1968, the United States saw the willingness of the North Vietnamese to sacrifice their own people to bring the South under their control, and we should have cut the two rail supply lines at China and mounted an absolute boycott of Haiphong Harbor by mining it. Those two actions would have been the easiest, most sterile military operations imaginable, with the least bloodshed.

But instead under McNamara we kept changing policy. First, bomb everything. Then, set safety zones where we wouldn’t bomb. Then bomb again. Then pull back. It was nothing but political gimmickry, as if the war were some sort of labor dispute.

Since the war I’ve never been back, although I’ve flown commercially over both Vietnam and Laos on business trips. They were beautiful countries.

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STEVE FARRELL, N. Hollywood

Joined infantry in 1968 and spent a year in Vietnam, where he was wounded twice. Now an actor.

Coming back to the States from Vietnam was really weird. I’d spent a year walking around swamps, carrying a weapon in my hand at all times, shooting people and getting shot at, getting wounded, and then in two days suddenly I was home in Texas.

People seemed different. I was different. My first night home I was still feeling scared, but outside my house lights were on, people were driving by as if nothing had happened. My family was spooked--they didn’t know how to handle me.

So I left, thinking I’d stay in the Army. But after four years I quit, went to college, got a degree in theater. It took till 1985 before my memories of the war--there are no good ones--got less constant. Nowadays they come and go, but I don’t think about the war that often.

I draw a small disability pension now for my injuries and for post-traumatic stress disorder. Guys who’ve been through ground combat don’t adjust well afterward.

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GALEN BEERY, La Verne

Beery, whose family were Church of the Brethren missionaries, registered as a conscientious objector and did alternative service in rural Laos. Later he assisted Hmong and Laotian refugees.

I came back to the U.S. in 1972 because too many Laotians and Americans I knew were getting killed. It’s strange, but when I was in Laos helping peasants and later refugees on a daily basis, I never saw the stuff Americans at home were watching on TV.

Soon after I came back, I was at a family gathering and saw the U.S. military burning hooches and dropping bombs on villages. I said, “How can they show something like this, especially with kids watching?”

The war was terrible. You could get despondent over what-ifs, but on a daily basis you must deal as best you can with what has occurred. For 15 years, whenever I went to a party I would disassociate, feeling miserable thinking of those who died and weren’t with us.

The refugees have been affected in different ways. Problems keep arising. Like recently I went to a Social Security hearing to interpret for a 35-year-old Lao woman they thought was malingering, and she told me about the Pathet Lao in 1976 cutting the throats of 10 people in front of her and she just hasn’t gotten over it.

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TONY RUSSO, Santa Monica

Helped take, copy and publicize, with Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers, a collection of top-secret government memos on the war.

Ellsberg was on the (Robert) McNamara Task Force and it compiled the Pentagon Papers. I told him he should leak that information so the American people could know the truth and around October, 1969, he told me he had decided to do that. I persuaded a friend with a Xerox machine to let us begin copying Ellsberg’s set of the papers, one of only three in existence.

Ellsberg spent months trying to get various newspapers to print them--most were scared--but finally on June 13, 1971, the New York Times did. President Nixon tried to get the U.S. Supreme Court to stop their publication, but it refused. The government harassed and pressured us; for example, they broke into and stole documents from Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

Those who opposed the Vietnam War have been called troublemakers, but the real troublemakers in the world are decision-makers at the top who will do anything to keep elites in power. The anti-war movement was the shining light of America, the heart of America, the redemption of America, because it ended an evil war.

The salt rubbed in the wound of that war is what has happened since April 30, 1975. It includes the U.S. collaboration with China against Vietnam; the U.S. rescue of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot after he killed more than a million Cambodians and was driven out by the Vietnamese Army in 1979; the U.S. covert actions against Vietnam; the psychological warfare against the American people, such as the cruel farce about MIAs and POWs still being held.

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Thuyet Nguyen, Fullerton

Conscripted into South Vietnamese mili-Communist troops, attended re-education classes and eventually escaped by boat.

In 1979, after some of us spent a year building a 30-foot boat, 69 of my friends and relatives met at 1 a.m. We drugged the small children so they would make no sound. A Communist patrol boat saw and chased us for more than a day, but we escaped and in four days reached Malaysian waters. There a Malaysian patrol boat made us get onto their boat, towed our s back to Vietnamese waters and told us to get back on it. The women cried and refused so the Malaysins took a small boy and said they would throw him into the sea if we didn’t. So we did. Once they were out of sight we headed back to Malaysia and on the beach we destroyed our boat so we could not be sent out again. After being in refugee camps I came to the United States in 1980.

We believed we were fighting for our country and that it was right, but fighting always results in one winner, and the Communists won-we just have to forget. Someday the older people in charge will die and I hope the younger generation will bring changes.

For 10 years I had nightmares about the war, but living here, taking care of my business and family, my mind is busy with other thoughts and I don’t remember much about it now.