From: mdo@socrates.umd.edu ("Mike T. Do")
Newsgroups: soc.culture.vietnamese
Subject: [SOC] THE TWO WARS OF DUONG NGUYEN (I)
Date: 11 Nov 92 22:44:41 GMT
Article-I.D.: socrates.Pine.3.05.9211111729.A6787-d102000
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FROM WASHINGTON POST (11/11/92)
POST WITHOUT PERMISSION
ALL TYPOS ARE MINE.


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FROM WASHINGTON POST (11/11/92)
BY PHIL MCCOMBS
WASHINGTON POST STAFF WRITER

    That soup, you never forget it.  His wife, Huong, brings us bowls of it,
pho, steaming and aromatic with herbs, rice noodles and thin slices of beef
browning in broth, its rising warmth redolent of the feverish heat of Vietnam,
scorched dust, monsoon rains pounding on thatch.
    But this is a quiet Sunday afternoon in Northern Virginia, and Col. Duong
Nguyen is relaxing at home.  There's a bowl of persimmons on the table.  He's
wearing a white turtleneck and loafers.  Usually he's impressively crisp in
his U.S. Army uniform, but today he seems smaller, more simply human - just
as I remember him, 17 years ago, running like hell across the tarmac at Tan
Son Nhut in Saigon.
    Now he's been through two wars, two armies, two medical trainings, two
countries, two lives.
    A double vet.
    When he went down to the Wall last month, he says, "I went there as a
veteran, to think, to share the feelings of these veterans.  And these GIs
looked at me with what felt like antagonism.  I looked at their faces, and
they were not welcoming, they were not opening their arms to their comrade.
But I am a veteran also.
    Painful as it was, he understood.
    "Looking at me," he says, "they see a Vietnamese face and get a vivid
feeloing of their own suffering.  I don't take it personally....I feel sorry
for them, because the war didn't have a good outcome, and they suffered when
they returned-not at all like the gulf war returnees.  My hospital commander
in Germany, he was in Vietnam.  He said they spit on him and called him 'baby
killer' when he returned."
    He shakes his head. His smile fades.
    It's hard for Duong to cry, he says, because Vietnamese men are raised to
be stoic, to hide their emotions.  So instead, he tends to laugh and smile,
even at the worst things.  At first it's unnerving, the laughs and smiles,
but when I learn to read them as tears, it all make sense.
    "We lost," he remembers, "because of the culture corruption in Vietnam -
President Thieu and his generals.  The American soldiers were fighting a
deadly battle, but they looked at Saigon not far away where the Vietnamese
people were enjoying their lives with all that good food and good music."
    He laughs.
    "I experienced something of that same thing in the gulf war, and I
suffered too.  I left for the gulf from Germany,and there was no send-off.
It was the holiday season, all these lights and Christmas trees and
decorations and music in the air-"Silent Night"-and here you are, going off
into the unknow.  And the German were going around with signs, 'No Blood for
Oil."  It was a lonely feeling."
                                (to be continue)

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The Path to America


    Duong's younger daughter, Diem, who doesn't have any problem expressing
emotion, went berserk when her dad was sent to the Persian Gulf.
    "She'd call home screaming and crying," remembers her mother, Huong.  "I
was really upset," says Diem, now in premed at University of Virginia.  "There
was this big hype about the Iraqi army, so I freaked out big time.  After a
while my dad started calling me, so I felf a lot better about it."
    She's gorfeous now-like her older sister, Hong, who's at Harvard's dental
school-with that special combination of physical delicacy and inner steel that
Vietnamese women seem to hold the paten on.  Their brother, Phi, between
college and law school, is a lanky young man who wears his baseball cap back-
ward.
    When I first saw those kids, at Tan Son Nhut that day, Diem was only 3,
and her father clutched her in his arms as he sprinted across the airfield,
pressing his face agaist her tiny body so the Vietnamese MPs wouldn't
recognize him-a South Vietnamese air force officer.  His wife's sister
happened to be a secretary for The Washington Post in Saigon, wher I was a
correspondent, and in those days when you helped one person get out, you tried
to help the whole family (in this case numbering 23 souls; all I had to do was
put them on the American Embassy's airlift list).  That morning I drove Huong
out from downtown past the jittery gate guards with their M-16 rifles.  She'd
followed her husband at a more dignified pace, with little Hong, 7, and Phi,
6.  They all made it to the plane, and America.  Three days later-on April 30,
1975-the North Vietnamese army took Saigon.
    "I remember walking to the plane," Hong says now, "and my dad being very
tense about it.  Then I remember realizing it was a dangerous thing.  I
realized that if they caught my fater, it would be all over.  That was the
scariest walk."  Now that she's studied the Vietnam War at the University of
Maryland, and currently with Jamese Webb at the Kenedy School at Harvard,
Hong says she knows that if her dad hadn't made it past the MPs that day, he
would have ended up in a communist "reeducation" camp.
    One of Duong's brothers, in fact, was five years in a camp.  "He's got no
job," marvels Phi, who visited him in California, "he's in a different
country, he can't speak the language, and he's the happiest person in the
world!In American terms, he doesn't have anything, but in his own mind he has
everything he needs-three meals a day, and he's not afraid to go outside the
door."
    The old war blends into the new as Hong continues:  "I remember getting
on the plane with tons of people, there were no seats, people were just
packed inside.  It was like a game almost.  I didn't understand that we were
never coming home again.  Then I remember during the gulf war I had a dream:
I was little, it was sunrise and I woke up, roosters were crowing.  I went
out on the balcony and my grandfather was standing there, smoking.  We just
stood there and watched the sunrise, and we could hear the gunfire, and the
rooster crowing."
    Her grandfather-Pham Xuan Nguyen-died of a stroke a few years after
arriving in the United States.  He'd been a colonel in the South Vietnamese
army, and had served the French during the First Indochina War.  I used to
drop by and interview him, especially toward the end.  "SAIGON, March 21 -
There is despair, fear and outrage here," went one dispatch.  "...'When my
dad heard about the abandonment of the highlands, he broke down weeping,"
said a secretary.  'He told me the lalst time he wept was when the country
was partitioned in 1954.'"
    That secretary was Pham Le Thuy-Duong's sister-in-law-who now runs her
own mortgage company in Northern Virginia.  She and her family had been first
on the list, and they got out first.
    Less than a week later, Duong, his wife and kids were airlifted first to
Guam, then to a refugee camp in Arkansas.  They had only their clothes, a few
hundred dollars and one another.

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