The responses given in this interview have been translated from Vietnamese to English
The Beginning of the End to Prosperity, circa 1954
The two floors of the ship were crammed with people lining up every square inch of the vessel – side to side. The children were swaying and dry heaving from the motion sickness. The ship's trajectory held two goals: delivering the people away from the North and escaping from the Communist regime that was festering throughout the country. “I was only five years old when I boarded the ship,” Lac recalls. “[The ship] kept rising and falling and all I could do was throw up. It took three days to travel from Hai Phóng before we arrived in Saigon.” And so the earliest memories of Lac's childhood were that of him and his grandma boarding a ship to the South, oblivious to the imminent war that would leave the country of Vietnam destitute and irreparable.
Lac and his grandmother, Ngu Thi Phung, along with one million other Northern Vietnamese people were known as Bắc Kỳ 54, those who immigrated to the South through Operation Passage to Freedom between the beginning of 1954 until May 18, 1955 when the border between the North and the South was permanently sealed (The Journal of Military History). It would be twelve years before Americans settled a negation to send troops over to ‘Nam in 1965. Upon arriving on the dock of Saigon, Lac was instantly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the bustling crowd as he clasped tighter onto his grandmother’s hand. “At the time, all I could remember were Frenchmen handing out biscuits and canned beef to everyone getting off the ship, but I couldn’t stomach anything without sending it back up.”
About eight kilometers away from his mother’s home, in the Gò Váp District, lies the vast expanse of Don Bosco with its three-story stone edifice, two soccer fields, and three basketball courts. Accustomed to being away from home, Lac immediately developed a penchant towards the school. Five by three double decker beds lined the dilapidated room of Don Bosco's sleeping quarters. With two hundred boys and only a dozen priests to look after these boys, this would be Lac's new home for the next nine years until 1966. At Don Bosco’s, routine bred discipline – a crucial factor to cultivating a sense of purpose in these boys. Each day began at six o’clock in the morning with exercise, prayer, and school with subjects ranging from Vietnamese literature, math, and the sciences. Each night ended at the stroke of nine with more prayer and a bedtime story from the many literary heroes of Vietnam's finest scholars. In spite of the lack of a matriarch, each priest represented a unique framework of a paternal figure to Lac. “Father Smith was the most memorable,” Lac reminisces, “he was the first person to teach me English.” When reflecting on the best memories at Don Bosco, Lac is immediately drawn back to the fathers’ unconditional piety and instruction. “They could have gone anywhere else,” he starts, “but these fathers volunteered to come specifically to Vietnam, a poor country with a history of executing Catholic converts.” It was this sense of sacrifice and courage that was imbued in Lac at a young age that would silhouette his adolescent years and serve as the impetus for him to join the Vietnam War.
After nine years at Don Bosco, Lac, 17, transferred to a trade school, Truong Phuoc Tho, in Gò Váp, where he spent three years completing an education equivalent to that of a high school diploma before joining the army. “I was very fortunate to have been able to hone my skills at Phuoc Tho and received preparation before entering the war, all thanks to the fathers,” Lac recalls gratefully. “At the end of my schooling, I was officially enrolled in the army. It was October 14, 1969 and I had only turned 20.” Looking back to when he was just a teenager entering the war, Lac expressed incredulously, “Of course I was scared. Who isn’t afraid of losing an arm and a leg,” he chuckled, “but during wartime, you have no choice. Most people could not afford an education so fighting for the war was mandatory. It’s not the same like here in America.” Although Lac is certainly no warmonger, he believed it to be a man’s duty to fight for his country and protect its interests. In 1970, Lac was designated to Ordnance Corps in the South Vietnam Army and was stationed at Nha Trang. As a first lieutenant between 1973 and 1975, “my job was to oversee a platoon of 70 plus men who were all divided into sub-platoons with the task of supplying weapons, vehicles, and ammunition to the battlefield.”
Following the Paris Peace Accords that officially ended American involvement in the Vietnam War on January 27, 1973, all troops deployed to Vietnam were withdrawn and all shipments of ammunition and weapons were cancelled. (Ending the Vietnam War: 1969-1973). “I never could have imagined that South Vietnam would lose – it was such a mystery to me at the time to hear the news.” Embittered by the betrayal, Lac recalls, “When America decided to withdraw its troops, it never ceased to end. Instead of receiving $700 million dollars a year to fight the war, as was the initial agreement, Congress slashed the budget to $300 million, and then one day, nothing,” his tone flat and apathetic. “Without guns and bullets, how were we supposed to fight the war?”
Lac continued, his tone despondent, “I still remember the biased propaganda in American television. They didn’t want their sons in Vietnam so all they showed and kept showing were the dead 55,000 Americans and replaying the Tet Offense. The truth was, Vietnam didn’t want Americans on her soil either. Americans are arrogant and act as saviors – any tactical knowledge from Vietnamese advisors were repudiated because Americans viewed themselves as superior, simply because they had the means to fund the war.”
“I remember our president at the time, Ngo Dinh Diem, who firmly refused American soldiers and stated, ‘We can only repay the debt of weapons and ammunition supplied by allies, but we cannot repay the blood of Americans on Vietnam’s soil’.”
“Very few of them actually understood guerrilla warfare and even fewer understood the geography of Vietnam,” Lac scoffs at this statement. “They all believed that the Communists would adhere to to the Geneva Accords and wear uniforms indicating their allegiance. The truth was, you could not detect who was a Communist and who wasn’t. They were Communists in the heart and you only knew their true self when they pointed their guns at you and killed you.”
As Lac shakes his head defeatedly and clicks his tongue, he lets out a sigh, “Till this day, Vietnamese soldiers are still portrayed as lazy and contributing little, if nothing, to the war efforts, but if you just take a walk in the Bolsa or Westminster area of Little Saigon, you will see men who have lost an arm, a leg, an eye defending Vietnam.”
Despite never entering the war zone, Lac would witness the true horrors of the Vietnam War following the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. “At the time, I thought to myself, it couldn’t be that bad to live under communism. After all, we were the same people.” Following the fall of Saigon, the Communists implemented a mandatory re-education program to lure and capture former military officials. As many as 200,000 people entered these re-education programs at the beginning of 1975 (The Vietnam War). Those in the higher tier of the army such as generals, political advisors, and strategists as well as public figures ranging form journalists, writers, and religious leaders who opposed the Communist regime, were imprisoned in the capital of Hanoi for up to decades (Re-education in Vietnam).
“All privates and foot soldiers only reported to three days of the re-education program. To people who had rank in the army, they instructed us to bring ten days worth of supplies. So naturally, we thought that we would only attend ten days of re-education camp.” Little did Lac know that him and thousands of others would be relocated to camps where they were starved to the bone coupled with backbreaking labor.
“It was around May 15, 1975 when thousands of us were rounded up in the middle of night and shoved into large army trucks lined with tarp,” Lac recalls. “No one knew where we going and they drove us all through the night. We had simply vanished overnight and our family was prohibited from knowing our whereabouts for over a year.” The tinge of sadness in his tone is barely palpable as Lac continues, “By dawn, we had arrived at Tay Ninh which was ninety kilometers from Saigon and previously, the 25th battalion of the South Vietnamese Army.”
“I stayed at Tay Ninh for exactly 42 days. During the day, we kept to menial tasks. Some of us would plant potatoes and chew the leaves that would come up first; others were tasked with chopping up firewood and bringing it back to the camps before nightfall.”
“After several weeks at Tay Ninh, many of us began to question when we would start our re-education program. ‘I thought you said the re-education program was only ten days!’, we exclaimed. ‘Who says re-education camp was only ten days? We told you to bring ten days worth of supplies,’ the Communist officers sneered in reply.” By then, Lac knew that him and so many others would be detained indefinitely – the purpose of the camp was to isolate them from Communist indoctrination on the outside world while forcing grueling labor upon the prisoners. “Most of the Communists were backwoods savages without a 4th grade level education, how could they teach us?! The language they used alone was a slew of English, French, and Vietnamese.”
“After those 42 days, the whole lot of us were relocated once again in the dead of night to Long Khanh.”
“Here,” Lac smiles wanly, “was the most relaxed period of our detainment. The labor was light-hearted. We practically picked up where we left off at Tay Ninh, except the weather was much better at Long Khanh and the soil was more fertile when we planted sweet potatoes and yucca throughout the camp.”
Ironically enough, the idleness of Long Khanh gave way to numerous suicides. “Some men didn’t know if the worst was yet to come or where they were going. This uncertainty drove some people insane.” Without the will to live, many were determined to die either by drowning their head in a bucket of water or tightening a noose around their neck until it cracked. The physically taxing work at camp tempered with the restraint on freedom was destroying the moral fiber of these men and so, many sought liberation through death.
“I continued to stay at Long Khanh from August of 1975 until early February of 1977.” Lac’s tone is suddenly tempered with a somberness as he recalls the events of April 25, 1976. “I escaped death merely out of luck. In the afternoon of that day, around 1 or 2 pm, there was huge explosion in the ammunition warehouse.” Lac motioned with his hands as he recalls the bullets raining down from the skies. “There were three of us who ducked for cover in a pigsty near our sleeping quarters. We thought we were safe, but the bullets pierced right through the roof like a knife to silk.”
Doubting the safety of the pigsty, Lac grabbed ahold of his friend, Hoa, and left the third man behind. “We quickly scaled down a well. Our bodies were flat against the concrete structure and our arms stretched around the rocky circumference of the well as some of the bullets impaled the water between us.”
“By around dusk that night, the explosion had abated and we finally emerged out of the well. When we came up, the third man near the pigsty was lying flat on his side with a bullet impaled through his right temple.” A sense of grief punctuates Lac’s narrative. “Those who witnessed that man’s death said he was calling out his wife’s name just moments before he was killed.”
“No one knew his name.”
By early spring of 1977, Lac was relocated for the third and final time to the forests of Phuoc Long. In the jungles of the deep South, Lac and so many others reached the nadir of their suffering in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
“From the beginning, we were separated into units to build our dwellings out of lemon branches and roofs thatched together by straw and dirt. Our beds were woven out of bamboo shoots and held together by strips of rattan.”
“Sometimes at night, snakes would slither into our sleeping quarters – some were venomous, some were harmless. The water moccasins, with the triangle-shaped heads and speckled bodies, were the deadly ones. Any man bitten by one was as sure as dead. There was no medication to soothe the body.”
“Our mornings began at the first light of dawn when the Communists marched through the camps banging on a cow bell, ‘Keng, keng, keng!’, Lac says, the ringing still echoing in his memory. “The food in prison was certainly one of the worst parts – the rice was clumped together like yarn and laced with chicken feces and dirt, but we had no choice other than to wash the rice and boil it. All of us were so gassed up by the time we finished our meal,” he manages to laugh as he continued, “Our labor truly began in the forests of Phuoc Long which was about a half an hour walk from our camp.”
“We were given a quota to chop down twenty giant bamboo trees a day – each bamboo stalk was at least twenty meters tall. It was always a two-man job.” Ingrained with the disciplined routine of Don Bosco, Lac was quickly attuned to the labor at Phuoc Long. However, those who were absent-minded and novices often fell prey to tragedy. “If you have ever seen how bamboo grows, it’s not always straight, it’s diagonal. Some men chopped the bamboo at sporadic angles which impaled them and killed them instantly,” Lac shakes his head, letting out a tiny breath.
“Once we chopped down the trees, some of us were directed to deliver the bamboo to a nearby camp where GMC trucks would take the bamboo into the city and sell our day’s labour. Other men were designated to bring the bamboo downstream. Whenever we got into the streams, leeches would attach themselves to us, sucking the blood from our already frail bodies. Sometimes, our bodies were so fatigued, we wouldn’t even notice the leeches on our body.”
“By the time we returned to our sleeping quarters at dusk, our bodies were merely a corpse,” Lac’s tone is exasperated as he recalls the monotony of his days. “Yet we couldn’t sleep until after the Communist leaders gathered a conference to remind us of the sense of community brought together by hard work. They would proceed to tell us who did a good job and who needed improvement. The meeting was then adjourned with a song praising Ho Chi Minh.”
As the hours in Lac’s day wore on to weeks, the monochromatic slate to his indefinite sentence was broken in the summer of 1977. Lac had contracted malaria in the forests of Phuoc Long. “It started with the chills as my temperature fluctuated with the onset of a fever. I could feel my body weakening each day and by the end of the week, my body was rendered incapacitated and I could barely move out of my stiff bed. My headaches were debilitating and never abating. At the time, my body was already so starved, my thighs were the width of my arms.”
“However, the Communists are always very skeptical when anyone claims to be sick, so they left me to rot in my bed for an entire week to ensure that my symptoms were in fact worsening before transferring me to an infirmary. The setting [of the infirmary] was exactly like our sleeping quarters. Leave-thatched roofs with bamboo beds held together by strips of rattan and matted with a thin blanket.”
“There were a few spare lamps for artificial light and a cabinet of expired penicillin – the fluid was a pale yellow when they injected it into me,” Lac’s fingers instinctively moved up his arm. “Our lives meant nothing to them and our bodies were used as a tester for their decrepit medication.”
“In my moments of consciousness, which were rare, I prayed.” A grief-stricken tone punctuates his narrative as Lac relives the darkest day of his life. “When you contract malaria, your consciousness still reveals to you that you’re alive, but beyond that, you’re oblivious to the world.”
“In my state of drifting back and forth between reality and delusion, I slit my wrists,” he shakes his head. “Religion has always been in the back of my mind, but in that moment, I wanted to die.” Rubbing the tendons of his left wrist where the scar remains, Lac continues, “Fortunately, a physician by the name of Lam Xi Hao saved me. Till this day, I cannot repay this debt. He bandaged up my wrists and watched over me diligently until I recovered a little over a month later.”
On May 7, 1978, Lac was released from prison camp. While Lac was fortunate enough to survive his years in POW camp, thousands of others did not share the same fate. An estimated 165,000 Vietnamese prisoners died in captivity (Vietnamese Re-Education Camps). Grateful for a second chance at life, Lac would make it his resolve to leave the states in search of freedom in America.
On September 23, 1980, Lac engaged in a secret tunnel to escape Vietnam through Phùoc Tinh via the port at Vung Tàu. “I spent two days out in the ocean before the ship, Cap Anamur, delivered me to the refugee camp in the Philippines.” Lac would spend sixteen months in Palawan and six more months in Batan, Philippines.
On July 13, 1982, Lac was granted citizenship on American soil and has resided in California for nearly forty years.
As Lac ponders on life over forty years ago, his views on communism have remained consistent, “They’re liars,” he states, his tone flat and apathetic. “But I pity them,” he sighs, “You don’t hate the soldier for carrying out his task, you hate the man who directed the task.” With that being said, Lac inhales sharply before continuing, “You see your hand? Even the fingers on them are uneven, there’s a long one, there’s a short one, so how can Communists declare that every man is equal in strength or intellect as the man next to him?” Lac exhales, his tone despondent, “The majority of Vietnam’s people were rural, simple folk with a limited education and most were still stuck in the 19th century of French colonization. They were easily brainwashed into believing that Americans would enslave, rape, and pillage our country just like the Europeans.”
While Lac still mourns for the lost of Vietnam, Lac remains optimistic that one day, his native homeland will be restored to its former glory and he will alas have his homecoming when the people of Vietnam resurge and topple its communist regime.