Very few of us have had the opportunity to be a hero, let alone to save the life of a fellow human being. My father-in-law, Cuong Tran, was one such hero you would never expect. This story is written from his perspective.
My good friend, Joe,[1] experienced terrible hardship during the Vietnam War. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the Americans pulled out their troops and left the South Vietnamese to fend for themselves. Some tried to escape the country in fishing boats, while others went into hiding. To draw them out, the Communists promised South Vietnamese soldiers that they would only need to undergo three days of re-education if they surrendered willingly. This was a trick because the Communists would not keep their promise. As a low-ranking Air Force officer, Joe was not required to go, but many of his compatriots were captured and sent to concentration camps.
As a naïve twenty-year old, Joe then joined the underground rebellion. Yet this rebellion was also a Communist ploy to remove pockets of resistance. The Communists even convinced a Catholic priest to gather the rebels at the Vinh Sơn Catholic Church so they could spring a trap. Over one hundred rebels were captured whom the Communists beat and tortured to extract more names. Joe had gone to that church meeting, but left early when the priest did not get up to speak. He sensed something was wrong and had not been captured with the rest. His name, however, was one of those exposed through torture. So the Communists came to his home the next day and turned everything upside-down. They even examined every page of his mother’s Bible to see if they could find evidence to use against him.
The Communists took Joe captive and kept him in a prison cell deep below the ground. He did not see daylight for an entire year. His captors tortured him and knocked out every one of his teeth. Yet he could not give up any names because he had joined the rebellion on his own. So after a year of torture, they finally sent him to the concentration camp. There he saw people dying every day, especially the very old. They ate only vegetables and were forced to do hard labor. They hauled lumber from the forest, built the camp itself, and grew the vegetables they ate. They even had to defecate in a specified location so their excrement could be used as compost. Joe buried many of his fellow prisoners and, each time, would apologize for taking their clothes. He felt ashamed for having to bury them naked, but it got very cold at night and the prisoners still living needed clothes to wear.
I experienced only a small portion of Joe’s pain as the Communists imprisoned me in the camp for one and a half years before releasing me willingly. I should have stayed there much longer for someone of my military rank, but my family had connections inside the party as some of my relatives had even joined the Việt Cộng.
Every day, my mother would walk by one of the guards and ask him, “When will you release my son?”
The guard could only reply, “We are waiting for him to have good behavior. Just wait and see.”
He could not give an outright, “No” to my mother because she used to feed him from her own kitchen when he was one of the poor Communists rebelling against the French occupation. My mother’s past kindnesses to strangers eventually led to my release.
Joe, however, endured more than three years in the concentration camp until he decided to escape. He had grown tired of watching people die every day and the meaningless existence in the camps. So he and two fellow officers formed a plan. One had served in the Navy like myself, but the other was Army Special Forces and well-trained in jungle tactics. They knew they were risking their lives, since there had already been three failed escape attempts from the camp. When those escapees were captured, they were cruelly executed in front of the other prisoners. Joe realized his chance to escape was very small, but he preferred a quick death to languishing in the camp.
The night before they attempted their escape, the Catholic priest sleeping next to Joe woke him up and asked, “Are you leaving tomorrow?”
Joe answered with surprise, “No, of course not. Where would I go?” The priest was a trusted friend, but Joe did not want to incriminate him in case they were caught.
The priest answered, “That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me anything, but good luck to you all the same. Let me say a prayer for you.”
Joe did not believe in God before that day, but after that he became a man of faith. He still prays that prayer every day before he goes to work and remembers that priest with fondness.
The three men made their escape in the middle of the night. They cut through the fence and sprinted blindly through the jungle. The guards shot at them, but none of them were hit by a single bullet. Joe’s Army Special Forces friend was moving too quickly for Joe and his Navy friend to keep up, so they straggled behind and navigated the forest together. Both contracted malaria along the way, causing their bodies to convulse violently. Yet thankfully, each man was ill when the other was not, so they took turns carrying one another. They walked for seven days, stricken with malaria, until they made it to Saigon. Along the way, many fearful people refused to help them, but a few kind strangers offered them aid.
When Joe arrived in Saigon, his home was still surrounded by Communists. So he secretly sent a messenger to contact his father, myself, and some of his friends to tell us he had escaped. We agreed together that we had to leave Vietnam and went about it in a semi-legal way. At that time, if you tried to escape without the government’s knowledge and were caught, you would be thrown in prison. Yet the Communists in our village of Cà Mau were very corrupt, so they looked the other way if you bribed them with gold or signed away your property rights. Sometimes they even helped you get on a boat.
My family was in charge of collecting the gold and composing the list of the boat’s passengers. Unfortunately, we could not place Joe on the list since he was a fugitive from a concentration camp. No one would dare help him for fear of retribution, so I hid him in our family home until the day of departure. I then stood beside the local Communist officer as he held the list I had composed and read off the names of each family. As the passengers came forward, he counted the number of heads in each family. Finally, I heard my name called, “Trần Quốc Cường, family of three.” That was only my paper name which I had used to falsify my age with the Navy. No one else, not even the local officer reading the list, knew that was my real name. They all simply knew me as Tài.
I did not move from my position beside the officer and watched nervously as Joe stepped forward, holding my wife’s hand, and carrying my infant daughter, Tam. No one stopped him as he stepped onto the boat, pretending to be me. Then as the officer finished reading the list, I turned and nonchalantly walked onto the boat myself.
Suddenly, the security officer spoke, “Wait!”
I froze, then turned around slowly as my heart pounded in my chest.
“Have a good trip, Tài. Farewell.”
“Thank you,” I replied, as I strode confidently to the front of the boat. I did not need to be on the passenger list because I also happened to be the pilot of the boat due to my training in the Navy.
Once our boat entered international waters, we could no longer be detained by the Communists. We were free, approximately two hours from Malaysian waters. I celebrated by breaking out a bottle of wine which I had smuggled aboard. The other passengers were only permitted to bring the clothes on their backs, but what kind of escape would it be without a bottle of wine?
I was about to pour a round of drinks, when suddenly, we saw a large boat sailing toward us at high speed. It turns out that we were sailing past Côn Sơn Island, occupied at the time by the Việt Cộng. On the island was a prison similar to Alcatraz in the San Francisco Bay. The large boat stopped us and directed us to dock at the island. Since the local officials in Côn Sơn claimed no relationship with the province of Cà Mau, they did not authorize our safe passage. Clearly, they simply wanted a cut of the profits. So they illegally towed us out of international waters and took our passengers captive on Côn Sơn to determine if we were travelling legally. I protested that they had no authorization to seize our ship, but the officers on Côn Sơn would not listen. They insisted that their comrades in Cà Mau must confirm the names of all the people on the boat before we could continue our journey. So the next day, they contacted Cà Mau to telegram the list of people who were authorized to be on the boat. With typical government efficiency, the answer would not arrive for another month and a half. So we spent that time as prisoners on the island and quickly realized that there was no way of escape. We were allowed to walk about freely as we performed hard labor. The guards did not need to watch us because there was nowhere we could go. They even left our prison cells open at night.
Then after weeks of waiting, the anticipated telegram finally came through. All of the passengers were impatient to leave the island and get back on the boat, but Joe knew he would be found out. I slipped into his cell late that night and apologized, “I’m sorry, there is nothing more I can do.” I could not say much else, but Joe understood. One of us would have to remain a prisoner on the island. If this was Cà Mau, I might have been able to pull some strings with my connections. Yet we were stranded on Côn Sơn, a bleak island with Communist officers who neither knew nor cared about my standing. I handed Joe two of my precious gold bars and wished him luck, believing I would never see my friend again. Joe accepted that he would die in that island prison. His only request, if I made to America, was that I inform his mother how her son had died. I gave him my word that I would convey his message.
That night, however, another miracle happened as Joe prayed. I now recount his story just as he told it to me. The sky was dark and cold as Joe walked to the edge of his cell. Suddenly, he saw a very dim light in the distance and realized it was a boat, bobbing up and down on the waves. He prayed again and realized it was our boat that would be carrying the refugees to freedom the next morning. It was still anchored beyond the harbor with no one guarding it. In that moment, Joe realized he must get onto that boat, whichever way possible. The waters surrounding Côn Sơn Island were so shallow that only flatbed boats could enter the harbor without dashing their hulls upon the rocks. This shallow depth made it possible, however, to walk along these rocks for quite some distance. So Joe walked out of his doorless cell, across the sandy beach, and into the ice-cold waters. He walked for what seemed like hours, feeling for the rocky ledge beneath his feet, yet the water never rose above his neck for most of the way.
Then, without warning, the ledge dropped off and he plunged beneath the water. He swam with all his might and eventually pulled himself over the side of the boat. Once he caught his breath, he scrambled beneath the deck and buried himself under the luggage at the bottom of the boat. He lay there, unable to sleep and holding his breath until he heard the sound of the engine the next morning. Even as the boat motored out of the harbor and into the open sea, he continued to hide for hours because he could not tell when they had once again entered international waters.
I remember standing on deck when I saw Joe emerge from the baggage hold. He looked to me like a man resurrected from the grave and I wept as I embraced him because I thought he had been left behind on the island prison. That morning, we had all stood on the beach, waiting for our names to be called again. Once more, a Communist officer read the passenger list as each family boarded the boat. This time, however, I took my place beside my wife and daughter. Since Joe was not on the list, I thought he was hiding somewhere on the island so that no one would see he was a fugitive. Thus, every name on the list was accounted for and no one got on the boat who shouldn’t have, except for one.
[1] Name changed for anonymity. Joe would work as an engineer for Boeing Aircraft and raise his family in America.
