My Journey

By: Don Thu Nguyen

When the communists took over South Vietnam I had just graduated from the military officer training school. Because I had not served in the military I was spared from going to re-education camp, but my background meant I had no chance of securing a job. Being male and twenty-seven years of age, the only certainty about my future was that I would be drafted to fight in Cambodia. Many of my friends had gone there and not come back.

I was like a breathing corpse. If I went to Cambodia I would die on the battlefield; if I left by boat I might die on the South China Sea. But if I survived that journey I would have a life worth living. So I decided I had to leave my country. For nearly four years I tried just about every possible escape route from South Vietnam and failed. There were times I was even cheated by friends and relatives. Of course I kept my mouth shut: trying to escape was a serious crime, and if caught I could have been jailed for five years.

In May 1979 I took my last chance and adopted a Chinese identity. The government didn’t want Chinese people to stay in the country, so they did not have to sneak out as the Vietnamese did. However, the cost could be as much as double. My family spent their last savings on my fare, a fake birth certificate and a counterfeit Chinese National identification. My new name was Huynh Khai Tu.

Packed with hundreds of people, our boat left Vietnam in the early evening. An hour later a violent storm came that had everyone throwing up all over each other. At dawn, when we came into the gulf of Thailand, a large Thai boat approached ours. They tied our boat to theirs, ordered all the women to get onto their boat, and then towed ours out to sea.

At first, we thought we were being rescued, and they were towing us to a refugee camp. However, they kept going around in circles until nightfall, when they ordered the men to board their boat. I saw a large straw basket in a corner away from the crowd, and in the darkness and general chaos, I was able to leap over and hide inside it without being observed.

The Thai men then boarded our boat, but we couldn’t see what they were doing. I was exhausted and quickly dozed off in the basket. I woke up to the sound of a gunshot, followed by lots of shouting. I raised my head and looked out. There were bright lights shining on the Vietnamese people, who were now sitting on the deck. It felt as if I was a spectator watching a play on stage under spotlights. I wished that I was still asleep and having a nightmare.

The Thai men were yelling and waving guns, cleavers, machetes and hammers at the crowd. They ordered everyone, including the children, to take off their clothes. They grabbed jewellery and pouches of valuables that people wore on their bodies. The image of hundreds of naked people standing on the deck and being pushed and pulled by Thai pirates with the bright light shining on them will probably stay with me until I die.

When everyone had put their clothes back on I got out of the basket and walked toward the crowd. One of the pirates realised I had not been with the group during the search, and he grabbed me and hit me on the head with a hard object, then told me to take off my clothes. He eyed my naked body, then stopped at my hand and demanded my watch and the gold ring my mother had given me before I left. Then he signalled that I should put my clothes on again and join the others. When I started to do so he yanked the jacket from my arms. He probably took it because he thought it might fit him, not because he somehow knew my mother had hidden US$300 in its hem. I hoped he would never find the money. From that point on, all I possessed was a pair of cut-off jeans and a T-shirt.

It was dark and the two boats were being rocked by waves. The pirates now told us to go back to our boat, by which they meant jump in the water and swim to it. The children, the old people and the women were too afraid to jump, and they cried out desperately. The pirates continued to yell and started pushing people into the water. A few of us men jumped onto our boat and helped lift on to it the children and other people in difficulties.

When all of us were back on our boat the pirates sailed off the light from their boat slowly fading to nothing as they moved further away. We were left in darkness – and total silence. Shocked by the attack, we were too tired to do anything, even though no-one had had any food or water since the night before. Children were too exhausted even to cry.

We had no difficulty in discovering what the pirates had been up to while we were on their boat and they were on ours. They had ransacked our vessel very thoroughly and taken everything of value, leaving a big mess behind.

In silence, we waited for the night to pass. About an hour later, another pirate boat came along and repeated the whole procedure. Except that this time, since we did not have any jewellery on our bodies, they made a thorough search of our private parts, which yielded them quite a bit of loot.

One after another, five more groups found us. In the space of ten hours we were attacked by pirates seven times. We became more and more resigned to what had become a familiar routine. The later groups of pirates were more violent because they were angry that we had nothing left for them to take.

We continued our journey and prayed harder. Eventually, we reached Malaysia. But a few shots fired at our boat by a Malaysian military boat stopped us from coming closer; then they towed us back out to sea. When we could see the light from an oilrig, they cut the rope and took off. We approached the oilrig, where the people kindly gave us food and water and pointed us toward Indonesia.

Just as some islands were coming into view, an old woman on our boat died. Her children wanted to wait until we arrived to bury her, but others were concerned that we might not be accepted on the island if they knew we had a dead body with us. We urged the children to give their mother a water burial, and eventually they agreed. I wrapped the body in a military poncho and tossed her overboard.

A few minutes later the woman’s body came to the surface and was dragged along in the wake of our boat. Her children rushed to the side of the boat, crying out hysterically that their mother did not want to leave them. I and some of the other men struggled to pull the body up and then tied heavy objects to it so that it could no longer float.

Some hours later we arrived at a small fishing village called Keramus. The people there allowed us to disembark and set foot on their land. From that moment I truly believed I would live.

Jack-of-all-trades

After a day and a half on Keramus, we were transferred to Letung for a few days, and then to Kuku. I was always hungry. We did not receive any food supplies and I did not have any money to buy food. I do not remember what I ate or how I got it. Funny how the mind has its own mind: there are things I wish I could remember and other things I just cannot erase from my memory.

But there is one food story I remember very well. It was late in the evening and raining very hard when we arrived on Kuku. I was sitting under a bush, soaking wet and shivering, when out of the blue I heard a female voice. I looked over to my right and saw a woman waving at me from a crude tent. I came over and she invited me to shelter inside her tiny tent, which was made out of a poncho. She was quite young, and alone there with her small child.

The woman gave the little girl some condensed milk from a small can, then put the can aside and fell asleep holding her child. I could not take my eyes off the can of milk. I’d had nothing to eat for a couple of days, but I tried to fight my hunger. In the end it got the better of me: I gave in and took a big sip of milk from the can. Once I had a little bit of energy in me, I fully realised what I had done. I felt so ashamed: this woman had been kind to me and I stole milk from her little child. I left the tent quietly, disgusted with myself.

I decided I would take any job, do anything anyone asked, so I do not have to steal or beg for food. I cut down trees and built huts; I fetched drinking water from the forest; I carried supplies from the ship to the warehouse; I helped build a public toilet, a helicopter pad, a jetty …

And I buried dead bodies. At first, bodies were buried near the creek upstream from where we all drank – in shallow graves because we lacked tools. Eventually it became gruesomely evident that this had not been a wise decision, and it was necessary to move the graves. No one was willing to do it, so I took the job.

In such ways, I survived the experience of refugee camps, and eventually I was accepted for resettlement in Australia.

Don lives in Sydney with wife and son.  He manages his own 24-hour Radio Station, servicing Vietnamese people throughout Australia.

Don Thu Nguyen

This story excerpted from the book "Boat People, personal stories from the Vietnamese exodus 1975 -1996" edited by Carina Hoang