Homecoming : Paying a Poignant Visit to Refugees’ Way Station

The woman in a 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 hundreds of Vietnamese Americans who attended “Operation Homecoming” Saturday at Camp Pendleton, which two decades ago was a way station for more than 50,000 Southeast Asian refugees.

Most of the former refugees spent the day wandering around the tents that were set up for the occasion and gathered near a CH-46, the type of Marine helicopter that was the last to depart the besieged Saigon.

“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.”

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

Organizers said they want members of the younger Vietnamese American generation who came to the reunion to see and to appreciate the humble beginning of the refugees who fled Communist-conquered South Vietnam. They also want to use the opportunity to thank the people of their adopted land who welcomed them and helped them rebuild their lives.

“I’ve always taught my grandchildren that they have much to thank this country for,” said Khuyen Le, 80, of Irvine, who was holding a turquoise umbrella to shield her from the bright sun. “They probably will never understand how important this camp is to me and their mom and dad.”

In 1975, Camp Pendleton was one of three processing centers in the United States where all refugees were sent before being 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 the arrivals.

The total cost of the camp operation, then dubbed Operation New Arrivals, was $17 million.

As they did in 1975 to prepare for the arrival of the first wave of refugees, the Marines worked around the clock last week to pitch military tents and set up Army cots on the grounds of Camp Talega in their efforts 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 that were lined up 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,” Tran said. “I’m happy because not too many people get a chance to relive their past.”