A Daughter's Journey: Part 1

SAIGON, April 29, 1975.
It is 1 p.m., an uneasy afternoon in Saigon, when Lt. Col Le Van Me realizes he is about to lose his country.

Me has spent two days and nights at the army's airborne division headquarters, directing counterattacks against Viet Cong troops advancing toward the city. Exhausted and hungry, he calls his wife at their house, half a mile away, to see what there is to eat.

As he leaves the army building, he meets a frantic colonel. "What are you still doing here?" the colonel yells. "Go! Get your family! Everybody's left!"

"Where?" Me asks. He is unaware of what has happened while he was in his bunker, fighting his part of the war.


Phuong Le reflects on a projected photograph of her parents, Le Van Me and Sen Le, taken in 1973. Paul Joseph Brown

Me is barking orders as he reaches the front door: "Go! Go! Go! We've got to leave."

The panic in his voice sends his pregnant wife, Sen, scurrying. She grabs a red suitcase and throws in clothes, papers and bundles of Vietnamese currency -- in case they return, she says.

Me's family scrambles into his jeep -- his wife, son, two daughters, brother and sister-in-law.

His parents and four sisters anxiously surround the jeep. They have been living with him for the past month, since the North Vietnamese army overran Hue -- the family's home for five generations.

"We don't know. Just get out of here. People are gone and I don't think we can stay here any longer. Will you go?"

The streets are chaos as Me's driver maneuvers the jeep toward the harbor. Everywhere, people are running, running, panic keeping them in motion, running with no place to go. Some run with a child in one arm, a messy suitcase in another. A few grab hold of Me's jeep, sensing purpose in the moving military vehicle.

The loud whack of Marine helicopters punctuates the air. The United States has begun airlifting thousands of Americans and Vietnamese from the rooftop of the American Embassy.

With a CAR-15 automatic rifle at his shoulder, a pistol at his hip and a rocket launcher in the back seat, Me intends to commandeer a ship to flee the country. But no ships are left at the public harbor.

As night falls and explosions light the sky, they race to the headquarters of the Vietnamese navy. One broken ship, docked for repair, offers a way out. Desperate wriggling bodies jam the gates to reach it. "I am army," Me shouts above the din and squeezes his family through.

Naval and army officers and their families rush vessel No. 502. Dozens crawl aboard, using a fishing net someone has thrown over the ship's side.

Sen and her sister-in-law, Mach -- both pregnant -- crawl 15 feet up the side of the ship, pawing in the darkness for the next bit of rope to hook their feet onto. Sen tries to block out the loud screams and splashes made by people who drop into the water.

Like a spider traipsing a web, Me piggybacks his 6-year-old son Vu to the deck. He does the same with his daughters, 4-year-old Quyen and 3-year-old Phuong.

The ship's engine putters but does not start. Naval officers frantically work to repair it.

Helicopters buzz above. Gunfire and bombs thunder nearby, fraying nerves and adding to fears.

Me shuttles his family to the ship's lower decks. They huddle on the greasy, cold floor. Vu whimpers for his dog Jackie. Others say nothing.

Around them, Me sees the dim lights of dozens of other vessels, from tiny fishing boats to cruise ships, all making their way to the South China Sea, where the U.S. 7th Fleet waits.

Me stays awake, listening for the sound of artillery fire as he has so many nights in the jungle. The noisy helicopter airlift ends just after dawn; the last flight, at 7:58 a.m., carries 11 U.S. Marines out of Vietnam.

At 10:20 a.m. April 30, 1975, the voice of South Vietnamese President Duong Van Minh crackles over several radios aboard vessel 502.

"Big" Minh announces the surrender of South Vietnam, ending 35 years of fighting in the country. He tells his soldiers to lay down their weapons. Pistols, grenades and uniforms of the South Vietnamese army would clutter the streets of Saigon as soldiers rushed to shed their military identities.

Thirty minutes later, a Viet Cong tank rolls through the Presidential Palace. Communists erupt in cheers.

SAIGON, FEBRUARY, 2000.

The woman fanning herself across the street barks at me: "What do you want?"

She hollers again: "What do you want with that house?"

I lie.

My friend used to live here, I say. She wanted me to take a picture.

When the Communists North Vietnamese overthrew the government of South Vietnam in 1975 they seized homes and property, including the Le family home in Ho Chi Minh City. After a brief, tense visit with the new owners, Phuong Le closes the gate. Paul Joseph Brown

The truth is this is my old home in Saigon, the one the communists took over in '75. The one my father, Me, and my mother, Sen, left behind when they ran for their lives in a jeep, carrying one red suitcase, three children, and plenty of sorrows.

It is the house I was raised in until I was 3-1/2.

I am 28 now, yet I loiter like a timid child outside the rusted pale-green iron gates of this house, located at the edge of a city whose official name, Ho Chi Minh City, I seldom use.

From inside the gate, three well-fed dogs bark at me. A young woman emerges from the house minutes later and opens the doors. Though far from friendly, she appears curious enough to allow me a peek.

This is my house! I want to yell. Your family took my family's home.

Instead, we smile awkwardly, each hiding our suspicions.

I have come to this two-story concrete house to piece together my past, drawing from a reservoir of stories my parents have been telling for 25 years. My parents are the prism through which I see this history, and as I stand here, I am hungry for more and more of their stories. I silently curse myself for disregarding their tales as the ranting of immigrants longing for the old days and the old country.

I am also annoyed for not remembering anything -- not the school next door, not the way the road feels under my feet. An amnesiac, I clutch the iron gates and imagine how my grandfather closed them the afternoon of April 29. I imagine my grandmother carrying me into the jeep, a cloth bag slung over my shoulder holding a little food, money and my birth certificate.

Inside the house, I walk the white tile floors and gape at the antlered head and stuffed birds hanging above the lacquered sofa. They bother me. Yellow and blue caged birds chirp. Someone is banging pots and pans in the detached kitchen behind the house.

The country's modern flag -- red with one yellow star -- flying from the top of this house makes me nervous. Just being in communist Vietnam makes me nervous. The flag ingrained in my consciousness is the old flag of South Vietnam, yellow with three horizontal red stripes, modeled from the petal of a distinctive orchid.

So I walk through the neighborhood feeling more worried than nostalgic. What if they figure out who I am? I know I should chat with neighborhood folks; that's what people do when they return to the place where they grew up, isn't it?

So my return to Saigon to retrace my family's flight from the country begins lukewarm.

This journey into my history will take me from Saigon to Guam, then to Arkansas, Missouri and California.

Like the young woman who allowed me inside the old house, I, too, am Vietnamese, born in Saigon. But I have also spent 25 years of my life in the United States, mostly in San Jose, Calif.

My English is better than my Vietnamese. I can play "The Star-Spangled Banner" on a plastic kazoo, but don't know the words to the Vietnamese national anthem. Like immigrant children before me, I try to strike a balance between the two cultures.

I want to have the right answer when people ask, "What are you?" or "Where do you come from?"

I have been called a "banana," (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) for not speaking Vietnamese, for assimilating too easily into American culture, for dating a white guy in college. Other times, I have been called a "gook," told to go back to my country, asked why I don't have an American name. Now I am an intruder in my old house, trying to answer those questions for myself.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographer Paul Brown and I hop into a taxi and ride to the harbor where I boarded vessel 502 on my father's back. It takes 30 overwhelming minutes in morning traffic, through a city that assaults the senses.

We pass young teenagers flipping cell phones on the back of mopeds; children in blue-and-white uniforms on their way to school; and families of four squeezed onto a scooter for one.

Dust mixes with sweat, the sour smell of the prickly durian fruit, and an occasional whiff of oranges.

Heading slowly along the same route my family took to escape, I wonder how much of the city has changed. I sheepishly peek into my Vietnam tour book, seeking answers.

I am overwhelmed by scenes of poverty but equally stirred by scenes of life.

A woman with leather skin squats along the road, slurping rice noodles from a bowl cupped in her palm. Another woman, about my age, hawks packs of green Wrigley's chewing gum and Zippo lighters.

She could be me. I could be her if my parents had stayed.

I think, naively, would it be so awful? Third World conditions notwithstanding, life appears rich and full in a way that most U.S. cities cannot touch.

The energy, especially in the outdoor markets, already makes me dread the sterile stores in Seattle and other American cities.

At Cho Lon market, in the Chinatown quarter of Saigon, the odor of fish heads and the aroma of barbecued lemon-grass chicken confuse my nose.

Large round baskets overflowing with basil, cilantro, lotus stems and shiny bok choy crowd the narrow mud walkways. Brown paper bags cradle red chili powder and curry the color of bright egg yolks. Nearby, a woman chops the legs off a chicken and stacks its two scaly feet into a neat pile in front of her.

Give me the vibrancy of this market over the cold, boxed aisles of Safeway, I think, knowing full well I romanticize this hard life. Would I say this if I lived here, peddling chicken feet?

When we arrive at the harbor, I envision my family's frantic search for a ship, and my mother's words echo in my mind.

"Every Vietnamese family, the story is the same," she told me before I left. "Don't make us outstanding. The only difference is, we have a writer in the family."

Saigon, which was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1975 in honor of the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, is at 6 million the largest, most westernized city in Vietnam. While a boom in foreign investment in the early 1990s began to create the trappings of modernity, HCMC remains a poor Third World city. Paul Joseph Brown/P-I

Her words have been expanding in my brain since I arrived in Saigon two days ago. They force me to look beyond my own experience.

I notice at the airport, for example, that dozens of Vietnamese Americans are returning to Vietnam for the Lunar New Year.

They carry bundles wrapped with brown paper and twine, and enormous bulging suitcases, likely stuffed with clothes, medicines and other gifts. I know, because I carry my own duffel bag of toys, Tootsie Pops, vitamins, ginseng and other things my parents and uncle have sent. In a tan money belt around my waist, I stash $1,500 in cash, the pooled gift from relatives in San Jose to relatives in Vietnam. I wonder how much cash others carry.

"Our stories are the same," my mother said.

We are not special for what we went through in 1975. We are all immigrants, forced from our homeland to another country and now making the best of it. Only the quirky details differ.

Two million Vietnamese people share our story, leaving since the war. Only 130,000 left in 1975 when my family did. Thousands more escaped in the late 1970s and 1980s, on rickety fishing boats, braving brutal attacks from pirates, risking jail time if the police caught them.

Still more have emigrated to the United States, Australia, France and other countries, sponsored by relatives already situated there.

My mother's parents and four siblings have slowly immigrated to the United States in the last decade.

"Who knows whose life is better?" my mom had said.

Who knows whose life is better, I think, as I step from the taxi to the harbor.

SOUTH CHINA SEA, APRIL 30, 1975.
Aboard vessel 502, the afternoon of the surrender, Sen shifts uncomfortably on the cold, oily deck. She readjusts the weight of her unborn baby, kicking without mercy at seven months.

The last 24 hours have left Sen numb, her 34-year-old body aching. She dreams of her two-story house: its shiny tile floors, modern air-conditioning unit, the detached kitchen out back.

She huddles next to her children, husband, and brother- and sisters-in-law. Her 3-year-old daughter, Phuong, scrounges for crumbs fallen from someone's bag of dry noodles. Her 6-year-old son, Vu, dreams of the simple act of opening a refrigerator and taking a slurp of whatever is cold inside.

She never said goodbye to her parents, her three younger sisters or her brother.


	Huge neon billboards illuminate the Saigon River, the route refugees took from Saigon to the South China Sea. Paul Joseph Brown/P-I

All those people running last night, cramming into sampans, fishing boats, rafts -- anything that moved -- to get out of her beloved Saigon. Already she misses the city, its seductive dance, wrapping her in a dizzy embrace.

How tenuous the threads binding lives and relationships. A difference of moments separates husbands from wives, parents from children, brothers from sisters.

Their friend the army doctor, on vessel 502 with them, couldn't find his wife anywhere yesterday though they had arranged to meet at home at a specific hour.

Later, they would learn that she had panicked and gone to the harbor, but could not find a boat. It would be more than a decade before she was able to leave Vietnam and find her husband. By then, he was remarried.

Sen knew she and her husband made the right choice. If they stayed, he would have been killed. They would not spare a lieutenant colonel of the South Vietnamese airborne division, not someone who had killed so many of their men.

Sen's father warned her not to marry Me, a bright military officer from a farming family too poor to afford college. Her father, a poet who lived in Paris, wanted her to marry a high school teacher, a man from a wealthy, good family who didn't march daily into combat. But she wanted Me.

At 5 feet 10 inches tall, Me towered above many Vietnamese men. A graduate from the Da Lat Vietnamese Military Academy, Vietnam's version of West Point, Me was brash and jovial and could electrify the room with his smile as quickly as he could silence it with his temper.

He liked cognac, women and, in many ways, the fighting. For 14 years, he was in the thick of it, advancing from captain to major to Vietnamese airborne division G3 officer.

He had taken that last officer's job to be closer to his family in Saigon, the right move if he wanted to become general one day. In six months, if the war had not ended, he was to report to Fort Leavenworth, Kan., for training.

The day Sen first saw him, she had planned to accept the teacher's marriage proposal. The family intermediary was waiting for an answer the next morning.

Her father arranged for the marriage to the teacher, who talked too much and enjoyed riding her scooter around town.

"I'll think about it," she said before taking off for a week's vacation to talk it over with her cousins and girlfriends.

Then she returned from that trip and saw Me playing cards with her younger sister and a male cousin.

Me and her cousin, who had been classmates, had stopped in Saigon for a day, after an eight-week jungle training camp in Malaysia.

Me had orders to report to My Tho in the Mekong Delta. She would keep him there for another two weeks, after the two met and talked the next morning. Later, Me hung around her office and waited for her; their first date was dinner at the floating restaurant. He later paid the price for ignoring orders, but it was worth it. Her eyes gave him a punch, he said.


Me and Sen at their wedding in 1968.

When the family matchmaker came around, Sen turned down the offer.

"I didn't want to marry someone I don't love," she said. Her father wasn't happy.

Sen warned herself: "My life is really going to be rough from now on. This is my disaster. If I marry this guy, I know my life will be up and down."

They wrote long, loving letters to each other, sent along with ammunition and gauze delivered from Saigon to wherever Me was fighting -- Hue during the Tet offensive, Khe Sanh, the Central Highlands.

They met clandestinely when he had short breaks. She flew to see him on a moment's notice, once to a place called Happy Valley, tagging along the red vanity suitcase she now carried with her out of Vietnam.

Me and Sen found time between war and death to live and marry and raise a family.

Theirs was a simple ceremony, a month after the Tet offensive, made glamorous by the rare addition of ice and a case of cognac courtesy of an American adviser, Mike Smith.

The worst came in April 1972, when the North Vietnamese radio reported that they had captured and killed Me.

The battle at Fire Base Charlie in Kontum Province became famous after Phan Nhat Nam published a book called "Mua He Lua Do," or "The Red Flames of Summer."

Nam, then press officer at Ranger headquarters, had tape-recorded the eyewitness accounts as the soldiers returning from Charlie were treated at the hospital.

He later assembled the recordings into the book, which won the 1972 South Vietnamese National Literature Award.

Voice of Vietnam Radio, Army Radio in Saigon and local radio stations transmitted the story throughout South Vietnam. A popular song called "Nguoi o lai Charlie" or "The men stayed at Charlie," followed.

On April 12, Me's 11th Airborne Battalion was sent to defend Fire Support Base Charlie, on a mountain pass at 960 meters, with 470 officers and a gutsy American adviser named John Duffy, a Green Beret on his third of four tours in Vietnam.

The North Vietnamese army wanted to set up a road through the mountains to Route 14, capture Kontum, and link up with its coastal forces. Fire Base Charlie was in their path.

The elite 320th Division, the legendary unit that helped defeat the French at Dien Bien Phu, launched an assault on Charlie that wiped out three of four bunkers within minutes. Me's commander was killed, and Me assumed command of the 11th battalion.

The bombardment continued but the paratroopers held their positions. The American, Duffy, aggressively worked the perimeter, targeting enemy guns and formations. Enemy fire followed him wherever he went. He was wounded several times, but kept calling air strikes.

The men at Charlie held ground for three days. But on April 15 the North Vietnamese surrounded the base and the paratroopers of the 11th battalion were fighting only with grenades, knives and empty rifles as clubs.

"They were thirsty, hungry and full of grime and the blood of battle," Nam wrote in his book. "The mood among the commanders was grim and determined. They would not give up Charlie."

Me and Duffy were at the forefront, commanding the battle. Me ordered three counterattacks. Duffy targeted the strikes against enemy guns.

By nightfall, many paratroopers were killed or wounded. They fought until they ran out of food, water and ammunition. Now they needed to fight their way out.

At last, Me ordered a withdrawal and Duffy stayed to cover them. Me ordered Capt. Hai, the operations officer, to take command of the withdrawal while he and Duffy covered the breakout.


	Me Le and John J. Duffy, retired US Army major, fought together in Kontum Province in 1972. Reunited in California in 1978, they have gathered yearly at Duffy's Santa Cruz home to celebrate Fourth of July. Paul Joseph Brown/P-I

By the morning of April 16, after a night ambush in which Duffy and Me were wounded, they gathered the remaining paratroopers, one-fourth of what they started with, and began to withdraw.

With a CAR-15 in hand, Duffy, wounded four times in five days of fighting, led them through the jungles under heavy gunfire.

At one point, from the thickness of the jungle, the North Vietnamese called Me, Hai and Duffy by their first names and yelled: "Surrender, you'll survive! Fight back, you'll die!"

Me looked at Duffy, who had patched up Me's sucking chest wound, and said, "No surrender, we fight."

Duffy summoned Cobra gunships to evacuate him and the 36 remaining paratroopers. He took the last lift, telling his Vietnamese counterparts, "If I leave on the first lift, the helicopter might not want to return."

With North Vietnamese troops firing automatic weapons at them, Me, Hai, Duffy and another man scrambled aboard. Duffy gave the thumbs-up signal to leave.

The North Vietnamese riddled the chopper with bullets; Duffy and Me pulled Hai aboard after he was shot in the foot. The door gunner was hit and later died.

Hai learned later that the gunner had finished his tour of duty in Vietnam and was to return to America the next day; the soldier had volunteered for that last mission.

"Me, you stuck with me," Duffy would tell him later. "We stayed together. We were a team."

Sen would hear that story told and retold by the two men years later, late into the night, always with affection and the best cognac.

Me won several Vietnamese medals and the U.S. Silver Star for directing three counterattacks in the face of North Vietnamese attacks that sent "over 2,000 rounds into the positions (his) battalion was defending on Fire Base Charlie."

Now, as the broken vessel crawls out of Saigon, Sen can tell that Me is very sad.

"I felt very shameful that we had to give up that quick," he would say later, the years reducing little of the moment's intensity. "That's not what we intended to do."

Sen frets about Me. A pragmatist, she thinks she can handle the displacement better than her husband.

She wonders if America will be like "The Wild, Wild West," shows on the GI Channel or Audrey Hepburn movies?

In two days, when they hit international waters in the South China Sea, the U.S. Navy supplies their ship, and a convoy of two dozen Navy vessels, with food and water.

During the supplying, Me jokes with some American naval officers. He trades his hat, the red beret of the airborne division, for a Zippo lighter.

Eight days later, they reach Subic Bay in the Philippines. The U.S. authorities ask the naval officers, paratroopers and other men in uniform to surrender their weapons and military clothing.

Me turns over his arsenal of weapons, including the CAR-15 gun that his Green Beret friend, John Duffy, gave him after Firebase Charlie. He hates to give it up.

Before vessel 502 docks, with Subic Bay in the distance, the Vietnamese men aboard strip out of their camouflage uniforms and put on regular clothes.

"We felt like we lost our country," Me said later. "We didn't know who was responsible, but we felt like we were responsible, too. Most of the men had tears in their eyes."

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