Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9505010052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Lt. Col. Do Mai was there at the end: He was in South Vietnam's Defense Department as the communist tanks rumbled into Saigon and word went out on the radio for the American-backed government soldiers to lay down their weapons.
"There was nothing I could do," Mai said recently at his apartment in Martinsville. "I felt like I was at a dead end - there was no way out."
April 30, 1975: It was a day of infamy in the military history of the United States, a nation that rarely has suffered defeat.
Soon after the last American helicopter rose off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon - taking the final few lucky refugees who could get out - Soviet-made T54s crashed through the gates of South Vietnam's presidential palace.
For America, the withdrawal from the war in Vietnam brought peace but also prompted two decades of bitter debate. For Mai and others who were left behind, the end of the war was the beginning of a new era of repression and suffering.
The morning of the fall, Mai simply went home and waited for the communists to come get him. A few weeks later, Mai was told to report to a "re-education camp" - a prison where he endured eight years of brainwashing and starvation.
In 1990, he immigrated to the United States, settling in Martinsville, a town of rolling green hills that remind him of those that surrounded the village where he was born. He is one of about 2,000 Vietnamese immigrants and their children who live today in Western Virginia. Many are clustered around Roanoke and Martinsville.
After all he's been through, Mai said he does not hate the communists - because they are now opening up to the West and trying to heal old wounds.
Nor is he bitter about the U.S. role in the war that ravaged his homeland.
"I always believed what America did was right," Mai said a few days before today's 20th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. He waited years for a chance to come to the United States. "I had plenty of hope to come here. I never lost faith in America. We knew that America was trying to deliver us from there. But we had to be patient."
Mai is a soft-spoken man just short of his 67th birthday. He still has the trim, precise bearing of a soldier.
He has followed the current controversy over former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's book, which argues that U.S. policy in Vietnam was a terrible mistake. But Mai says: "I really don't want to have any comment, because I think of him as my superior officer. He was, and I still think of him that way. I am a soldier, and I am in no position to comment."
Mai was born outside Hanoi. His mother and father both taught school.
The family was swept up in the currents of World War II and its aftermath - bombings, Japanese occupation, then the Communists' struggle against French rule.
With the country in turmoil, Mai recalls, "My father decided to help me marry. The revolutionary movement was so powerful at the time that he was afraid he would lose me." So in 1946, his father arranged a marriage. Mai Mai was 18.
"And that's it," Mai said. "If you are married, your wife and children tie you down."
He joined the Vietnamese Army and was trained as a combat engineer. The French pulled out in 1955, and the Vietnamese government they left behind was battered by a "war of movement" from revolutionary guerrillas. "In one single night - they'd blow up 30, 40 bridges," Mai remembers.
When the guerrillas would dynamite a bridge, Mai's unit would move in and build a new one.
America entered the war, first with advisers, then with hundreds of thousands of troops.
In 1966, Mai was sent to the United States to study for two years at Indiana University. "I wanted an American degree to show people I was an expert in my field," Mai says. He earned a master's degree in teaching with a major in applied linguistics.
He returned home and was named chairman of the foreign language department at South Vietnam's military academy.
He transferred to South Vietnam's Department of Defense in Saigon near the end of the war.
After the tanks rolled into Saigon, Mai changed into civilian clothes. He rode a moped through the city, weaving through traffic jams, riding behind a tank covered with young Viet Cong soldiers and just taking in the eerie scene. Alone. "I didn't want to see my friends, because they have their own worries. And we don't want to meet each other, because they may be monitoring us."
There was nothing to do but wait. After six weeks, the Communist government ordered him to report to the re-education camp. It was supposed to be just for a few months, but Mai knew "once you get in - it's very hard to get out."
Mai said he and other political prisoners were never beaten. They were told: "Whether you come home or not depends on you."
"What they meant," Mai said, "was we were going to incriminate our superiors, our friends, our family, even ourselves. None of us would do that."
The brainwashing sessions seemed endless. They were harangued "about the crimes committed by the 'American imperialists' against the people of Vietnam, crimes of the 'puppet government' and its army - and of course, the victory of the 'People's War.'''
They worked long days clearing land and planting trees and crops. They were given little to eat, mostly cow corn and salt - which was diluted in water so the inmates wouldn't hoard it and take it with them in an escape attempt.
Another prisoner, whose father was a minister in America, asked if Mai would hold a copy of the New Testament for him. He was afraid the guards would search him, find it and throw him in solitary confinement.
Mai decided to read it, to help keep his English sharp. "I learned by heart the prayers."
Prisoners called in for interrogation by a "political commissar" usually were frightened, but that changed for Mai after he found Christianity. "I would say some prayers, and I would just face him like I'm facing you now," he recalls.
He was freed after eight years. He moved back with his family, but still had to report regularly to the authorities.
It took another six years before his family finally got permission to immigrate to the United States.
Today, he is a teacher and aide at Ridgeway Elementary School, working with a Vietnamese kindergartner who is just learning English - and with other children, too.
He misses his mother and his grandchildren who are still in Vietnam. His seven children are spread over the world - in Vietnam, Australia, Illinois, California, Texas. They include teachers, an engineer and a nurse. His wife lives in California, because she couldn't take Virginia's pollen - or living in a place where few people speak Vietnamese.
"So our family - instead of being reunited - is disunited," Mai muses. But his children had to go where the jobs were - that's the American way. "It's impossible to keep them together here. You can't."
He is now a U.S. citizen. But he's thinking about returning to Vietnam to live, at least for part of each year.
The world is different now. The Communists are opening Vietnam to the world. "They've unrolled the red carpet for American investors," Mai said. "I don't think I have any hate against them, because they've changed."
Even if he returns to Vietnam, part of his life will always be in America.
"What I wanted when I was in the camp - I believed in the Lord. What I asked him was to let me live three days in the United States, to let me breathe freedom. And he has responded to my wish - and he gave me more than three days."
by CNB