Interfaith Meeting with Michigan Attorney General Nessel at First Congregational Church, St Joseph

 Interfaith Colleagues:

My sincere apologies for letting my emotions get the better of me yesterday.  Obviously, my father's "stiff upper lip" British genes did not filter down to me.

When Attorney General Nessel mentioned veterans, I must admit it got to me.   This is why:

First, to clarify, I ain't no war hero.  In 1975, I was a Navy journalist fresh out of Great Lakes Boot Camp and all services journalism school in Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indianapolis.  I was assigned in January to a destroyer with the Seventh Fleet. We escorted the Navy carrier the USS Midway.  I was the TV station manager on the ship.  I entertained the crew and provided them with daily news (when the ship's telegraph was able to receive AP reports.)  We received movies and TV shows on 16 MM film and precursors to Beta or VHS tapes.  Special sporting events, such as the Super Bowl or the Baseball game of the Week, were normally played a week after the event in the States having been packaged and flown overseas.

This month is the 50th Anniversary of the fall of Saigon.  In early April, maybe a little earlier, it became apparent that the North Vietnamese army and Viet Cong would overrun the South.  At first, it was the "boat people" escaping the South in a variety of sea worthy, or not, vessels.  It was the ships of the Seventh Fleet who pulled these people out of the water if their vessels were not seaworthy to get them to Guam or the Philippines. 

In late April, Saigon was surrounded.  Mostly on April 29 and 30th helicopters left the compound of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon filled with military personnel, journalists, and some Vietnamese.  The embassy was abandoned April 30th. 

The helicopters arriving overwhelmed the crews of the Midway and our sister ship the USS Worden and other vessels of the fleet. News reports at the time showed men on the decks of the Midway pushing helicopters overboard to make room for more helicopters and refugees arriving. 

Our destroyer did not have a helicopter deck. As far as I know, we were the only Seventh Fleet vessel to stay behind closer to Japan and Okinawa to protect those areas in case the Soviets, Chinese, or North Koreans took advantage of the chaos. 

A few weeks later, we arrived in Guam.  Refugees had been transported there and were housed in thousands of tents on Point Orote, a former WWII Army Airstrip.

I was 20 years old and with a young Navy Lieutenant took a Navy pickup truck through the refugee camp to retrieve movies and the game of the week for the crew.  The Marines guarding the camp did not stop an officer driving a Navy grey truck.  But a Vietnamese woman did.  She showed us a picture of her U.S. military boyfriend/husband, father of her child. She asked if we knew him. Her entreaty is vivid to me today.

I am sorry I did not have my little Kodak camera with me.  But the conditions in the camp are here briefly described by the U.S. Army Nurse Corps:

"With the massive waves of refugees threatening to overwhelm the housing and quarters of the Guam's naval base by mid-April 1975, military officials decided to build a huge camp on an abandoned World War II airstrip. Navy SeaBee crews bulldozed and cleared 500 acres of brush and prepared "pads" to accommodate 2,500-3,000 tents on Orote Point. During the next 60 days, this camp, commonly called Tent City," reached a peak population of 39,000, and processed more than 90,000, or two out of every three refugees who left Southeast Asia.²

To provide health care for the refugees in Tent City, Army medical leaders tasked the 1st Medical Group from Fort Sam Houston, Texas. By the time the organization was operational, on 30 April 1975, Orote Point already was sheltering more than 16,000 evacuees³ and was growing each day. Along with Lieutenant Colonel Jeanne Hoppe, the Chief Nurse, were assigned eight Army nurses to handle the mission. The majority of the nurses worked in field dispensaries or small ambulatory hospitals that handled both outpatient and inpatient care. These tent facilities were positioned in separate locations to be readily available for evacuees. Their medical caseload was significantly higher than medical units at other staging centers. The majority of their cases were children under the age of 16 years.⁴

Perhaps the biggest worry for medical personnel was the primitive nature of camp life, where refugees stood in the sun and suffered from the flies and mosquitoes while they waited in long lines to eat, to receive additional clothing, to be processed by immigration, or to be assigned to sponsoring organizations. These people, moreover, were packed 30 to 40 people in hot tents, using outdoor toilets that were generally clogged and unsanitary, a problem that was never resolved despite the Herculean efforts of the Preventive Medicine people.⁵ How could two Community Health Nurses, Lieutenant Colonel Anna Frederico and Captain Mary Criswell, handle public health issues of such a mammoth camp? Their chief, Colonel Hoppe, reached out to the Guam Red Cross⁶, which identified volunteers from the community and the local university. As a result, each day volunteer nurses, including religious missionary nuns, Australian and local nurses, college instructors and students, came to assist with the massive effort."

The Navy SeaBees and the Military nurses and doctors on Guam were the heroes. 

We got our boxes of movies and the game of the week.  We proceeded next to Woleai Atoll, in the State of Yap, Micronesia where the atoll had been attacked and the native islanders sexually and otherwise assaulted by persons a century or two ago who might have been labeled as pirates.

 

Spring 1975.