In late April 1975, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong armies overran Saigon. The U.S. Embassy was hastily abandoned. Thousands of South Vietnamese refugees fled the country. At the time, I was a sailor serving on the USS Parsons with the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet. It was the USS Midway, our sister ship the USS Worden, and other Navy vessels which rescued refugees from Saigon. I certainly remember TV images of American helicopters arriving with refugees from Vietnam and after landing refugees disembarking helicopters which were pushed overboard to make room for more incoming helicopters.
The Parsons remained near Japan. We were told our duty was to protect Japan in case the North Koreans, Soviets, or Chinese took advantage of the fleet being occupied with Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of South Vietnam.
A few weeks later, the Parsons arrived in Guam on a cruise to Sydney, Australia for joint exercises with our Australian and New Zealand allies. Thousands of refugees from South Vietnam had been transported to Guam. The island was largely a tent city. The young, the old, men and women were sheltered there. I remember one young Vietnamese woman in particular.
Riding in a Navy pickup truck, a young officer and I went to get movies and videos to entertain the crew on the ship’s closed circuit TV station. As we drove through the refugee camp, a twenty-something woman dressed in a traditional Vietnamese white dress and conical hat stopped us. A young child was near her. I assumed it was her child. She held up a picture to the officer and asked us if we knew the American serviceman in the picture. I presumed that it was her significant other and likely the father of the nearby child.
In the chaos of the evacuation of Saigon, she had apparently been separated from her serviceman. She was now a refugee on a remote island hundreds of miles from her home. Her future was very uncertain. Over the decades, I have frequently thought about that young woman and the child and wondered if she ever found her serviceman. I hope their later life was better than the life of refugees living in a tent at the end of the war.
Today, in many parts of the world, refugees are fleeing war, famine, extreme poverty, and violence. Tens of thousands, maybe millions, are living in refugee camps. Unlike the Vietnamese refugee camp on Guam in 1975, many of these camps do not have adequate food, shelter, or sanitation to accommodate refugees. Some have been in their refugee camp for months, others years. Some arrive in the United States seeking asylum or temporary protected status having escaped the turbulence of their homelands.
I presume that the Vietnamese woman we encountered on Guam in spring 1975 resides to this day somewhere in the continental United States. I wonder if she has empathy for the refugees who have arrived in the United States after fleeing violence, famine, war, or poverty in their home countries. I wonder what she would think about politicians who are critical of refugees, calling them names, implying that they are criminals or somehow subhuman. I wonder if she ever thinks about her childhood home in Vietnam. I suspect that refugees here now long for a time when they felt safe in their home country.
My maternal grandfather died before I was born. He left a small village in Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic to come to America in 1906. His wife, my grandmother and an uncle, arrived six years later in 1912. I assume it was poverty in their small, farming village which brought them to America. It may also have been the turmoil of the soon to collapse Austrian Empire. Grandfather farmed for six years in Michigan to save enough funds for my grandmother’s and uncle’s passage to America. My mother was their first child who survived birth in America. Grandmother died when I was a toddler. I am told she barely spoke English at the time of her death. I sometimes wonder what my grandparents’ small village was like in their day and what it is like to this day.
I believe that most refugees just want to live in peace and have enough resources to safely raise their families just like the rest of us. Please, can we not debate immigration policy respectfully without denigrating those who have been forced to flee troubled homelands?
Sample traditional Viet dress and hat:
No comments:
Post a Comment