After 25 Years, Relatives Persist in Hunt for Vietnam’s Missing

Phu Dang, 75, has traveled nearly every year for a decade from her Irvine home to a small Vietnamese village near the Cambodian border to search for her son Ho.

The villagers tell her to give up. He’s dead, they say, shot nearly 25 years ago by Communists who forced him into a reeducation camp because he had been in the South Vietnamese army.

But Dang doesn’t know for sure--an uncertainty that haunts her and the relatives of as many as 60,000 Vietnamese who disappeared in the camps.

“Some say he’s missing, others say he’s dead,” said Dang, who still weeps at the memory of her son. “There was never good news. I just want to know where my son is. I don’t know what to do and I don’t know what to think.”

Her cause is among those championed by a Virginia-based organization called Boat People SOS. The group is leading an effort by Vietnamese American families to pressure the Communist government of Vietnam for details on the fates of missing relatives.

They have had little success.

“It should be very easy to locate the bodies and allow these people to properly bury the remains,” said Thang Dinh Nguyen, executive director of the all-volunteer nonprofit group. “Not confirming their deaths brings more suffering and anxiety for many families.”

Although some families still in Vietnam hope to confirm the deaths of relatives who disappeared in reeducation camps so they can qualify for a humanitarian immigration program run by the United States, those already in this country are simply looking for closure.

The U.S. government spends about $55 million each year searching for American servicemen missing in Vietnam; the remains of more than 500 have been recovered, and nearly 2,100 are still being sought.

But, “No one remembers the people who fought for the South Vietnamese government,” Nguyen said.

Nguyen’s agency, which has offices in the Philippines and across the nation, including one in Westminster, helps Dang and others write letters to Congress and the U.S. State Department to raise the issue with the Vietnamese government. Although U.S. officials have twice raised the concern without results, Nguyen won’t give up.

People are having a difficult time, he said, because the Vietnamese government “doesn’t want to admit that they killed so many people who were in their custody.”

Officials at the Vietnamese Consulate in San Francisco and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hanoi have not responded to The Times’ request for comment.

Nguyen’s office has yet to successfully conclude a case, but his hopes remain high because many people who know about missing prisoners are still alive in Vietnam. In a case that didn’t involve his agency, Nguyen said, relatives of a Maryland family bribed a prison guard at a camp near Hanoi to reveal the location of the body of their son, missing since 1978. His remains were dug up and taken to his home village for a proper burial.

Dang wants that for Ho, too.

“My other children are grown,” she said. “They have good families and nice homes. But I can’t go on in peace because of my missing son.”

After the end of the Vietnam War, Dang’s son told her to escape to the United States with his five siblings. He said he’d catch up with them later, after he finished 10 days in a reeducation camp.

Dang escaped by boat with five of her children. Her parents, who lived in Can Tho, south of Saigon, became Ho’s legal guardians. They lost contact with him in July 1977, after he sent a letter saying that he’d return to take care of his frail grandparents.

“Both of his grandparents have died and we still haven’t seen him,” Dang said.

The only thing Dang has left is her son’s birth certificate and a photo taken before he was drafted at 18.

“He was such a happy child,” Dang said, wiping away her tears. “I always think of him.”

She took her first trip to Vietnam in 1990 to look for her son. Villagers said Ho was among several prisoners who ran for safety during skirmishes between Vietnamese and Cambodian troops after Americans had pulled out of the country. The prisoners ran into a nearby jungle, where they were found by government soldiers the next morning and shot. The Vietnamese government sent a letter to his grandparents in Vietnam and told them only that Ho was missing.

“When they tell us that my son is missing, it still gives me hope that he’s alive somewhere,” Dang said.