Tent City Revisited : 20 Years Later, Vietnamese Return to Say Thanks Again

The woman in the wheelchair stared out the window of the bus, warm tears streaming down her face.

“This was how I got here 20 years ago,” Can Nguyen, 85, told her son softly in Vietnamese as the bus pulled into a parking lot. “The first time I stepped foot here, it was dark and cold and some people in uniform welcomed me to America.”

The bus came to a stop; the doors opened. Three U.S. Marines greeted the Vietnamese Americans who descended. Nguyen continued to cry through her tremulous smile.

Nguyen was one of 2,000 Vietnamese Americans who attended “Operation Homecoming” on Saturday at Camp Pendleton, which two decades ago was a way station where more than 50,000 Southeast Asian refugees who spent the first days, weeks or months of their lives in the United States.

The event was organized by the Union of Vietnamese Student Assn. of Southern California and the Camp Pendleton Marine base as part of a yearlong commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of South Vietnam.

Most of the former refugees spent the day wandering around the tents that were set up for the occasion and gathered near the CH-46 that base officials said was the last Marine helicopter to depart the besieged Saigon, since then renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

“Has 20 years really gone by?” asked Oanh Nguyen, 67, of Santa Ana. “It seems like just yesterday that, just as my world fell apart, I was given a chance to start over again.”

Organizers of Operation Homecoming said they want to use the opportunity to thank the people of their adopted land who welcomed and helped them rebuild their lives.

“The Vietnamese have a saying, ‘Remember the source of the water that you have drank,’ ” said Khanh Hoang, a coordinator of the event. “If we didn’t have Camp Pendleton, perhaps we never would have had a Little Saigon.”

Most of the older Vietnamese Americans who attended the reunion said they wanted the younger generation to see and appreciate the humble beginning of the refugees who fled Communist-conquered South Vietnam.

“I’ve always taught my grandchildren that they have much to thank this country for,” said Khuyen Le, 80, of Irvine, who returned to the camp with her daughter, son-in-law and their four children. “They probably will never understand how important this camp is to me and their mom and dad.”

Indeed, her 13-year-old granddaughter, Yvonne, took one look at a tent, grimaced, and said simply: “Yucky!”

“This is such a weird place to live in. How could you have done it?” she asked her mom, Christine Le. “This is not a house. It’s a tent. And it’s full of dirt.”

Duc and Xinh Vu came down from San Jose with their children to attend the reunion. While in their teens, the couple had met here at the camp and stayed in touch through letters. They were married several years later.

As they sat under a tent Saturday, they were trying to describe to their three children what their days in Camp Pendleton were like.

“In the morning, we stood in line to wait for food. Then, we went to English class. In the evening, we went to see a movie,” Duc Vu was saying, but his children wandered off.

“They can’t empathize with their parents,” Vu, 39, said ruefully. “They don’t understand our memories of this place.”

In 1975, Camp Pendleton was one of three processing centers in the U.S. where all refugees were sent before they were dispersed elsewhere. At its peak, the camp housed 18,500 men, women and children who lived in Quonset huts and thousands of military tents. The last family of refugees at Camp Pendleton left the base Nov. 4, 1975, six months and one week after the first of arrivals.

The total cost of the camp operation, then dubbed by the U.S. government as “Operation New Arrivals,” was $17 million, which included the cost of more than 7 million meals served to refugees, nearly 8,000 pairs of shoes handed out and the salaries of military and government civilian personnel who numbered more than 1,200 at the height of the operation.

As they did in 1975 to prepare for the arrival of the first wave of refugees, local Marines worked around the clock this week to pitch military tents and set up cots on the ground of Camp Talega to partially re-create the tent city as it was 20 years ago.

“For some reason, I remember the tents as being bigger, higher then,” said Thi Le, 50, as she and her husband sat on two of the cots lined under a tent. “Maybe the tents are different now, but the sadness that I’m feeling is the same sadness I felt then.”

Le and her husband, Kenny Tran, 58, drove from West Covina for the occasion. They spent most of the day under the tent, crying as they reminisced about the two months they spent in this makeshift city that was set against a backdrop of rolling hills.

“This gives me an opportunity to see it from the beginning,” said Tran. “I’m happy because not too many people get a chance to relive their past.”